My student Ge Zhenghua shared with me an incident that occurred in his village of Jizhou. It is a unique incident that resists classification because it does not fit what is presently known about the behavior of spirits. It begins like this:

Several merchants were leading their mules through the mountains via a main road when they heard someone call out. They turned to see a man in a black robe and a palm-leaf hat—the typical dress of a Taoist monk. The man was standing on a faint path that branched off the main road and led deep into the woods. "Hey," the man said, approaching all of them, but speaking to one merchant in particular. "What's your name? Where are you from?"

After the merchant surrendered this information, the Taoist smiled. "Yes, indeed. It is you! But I see that you're still confused so let me explain. You have lived your whole life thinking you are like everyone else. But this is not so. You are actually an immortal who was exiled to the human world as punishment for breaking a divine law. However, your sentence has now been completed. As your former mentor, I have been charged to lead you back to the heaven realms. Come. We must hurry."    

The merchant did not hurry, though. As his companions gaped, he thought over what the Taoist had said. There was something off about his claim. While not particularly deep or reflective, the merchant nevertheless had a strong sense of who he was. And he was stubborn, slow-thinking, unschooled, and much more interested in the next meal than beauty or poetry. In other words, there was nothing about him that indicated he was an immortal in disguise. Therefore, the Taoist monk was mistaken. What's more, even if he had believed the monk's claim, he still wouldn't have gone with him. His elderly parents needed him far more than some far-off heaven realms.

After being refused by the one merchant, the monk turned his attention to the other merchants, who had listened to the whole exchange with mute amazement, feeling as if they'd found themselves in the middle of the kind of thing you read about in the ancient tales. Now, they became even more amazed because the monk loudly proclaimed, "My friends, it's your lucky day! A balance must be maintained between the heavens and the earth. Your companion's decision means there's still an empty spot among the immortals that needs to be filled. One of you is destined to fill it. This may have been the real reason that I was directed to meet with your band today. Which of you is going to ascend with me?"

But no one spoke up to accept the offer. Nor did they give into the monk's follow-up attempts to persuade them. Eventually, the monk insulted the men for their stupidity and angrily slunk away.

That night, the merchants stopped at an inn and told everyone there about the incident. Some guests thought they were idiots for blowing a chance to join the immortals. Others were convinced the Taoist monk was a demon impersonating a man. All the guests, however, were deeply struck by the tale and curious about what was really going on.

The next day, one of the more curious guests, the nosy sort who likes getting involved in the business of others, retraced the merchants' steps and found the side-path. He then circled the area, hunting for clues, and gradually moved up the mountain. Eventually, he reached a grisly slope.

The slope was black with rotting blood, covered in tiger hair, and decorated with the remains of people in various states of decay. These bodies had obviously been fed upon by tigers.  Frightened, the guest fled the grim scene and ran to make a report to the authorities.

How does one make sense of such a story? Perhaps the Taoist monk was actually the ghost of one of the tigers' early victims whom the tigers had found some means of binding to their service after his death. Perhaps he was something else entirely. It is hard to understand such a person. But there is a lesson here that is clear. Good luck that seems to come out of nowhere makes the stupid joyous but the wise wary. The merchant who refused to accompany the monk considered himself a simple man, and certainly he was the rough sort. However, because he knew his own nature, he was in fact very wise.

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Ji Yun (1724-1805) was an acclaimed Chinese writer, scholar, and politician, who also served as chief editor for the Qing dynasty imperial library. As such, he was charged with censoring texts at odds with the emperor's intellectual sensibilities. In his later years, he quietly rebelled against this role by writing the five-volume collection: Notes on the Subtle and the Strange. This 1200-piece collection includes Ji Yun's "zhiguai"— 'strange tales' that he felt revealed deep truths about the nature of reality.

John Yu Branscum and Yi Izzy Yu teach at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Their co-translations of Ji Yun are in or coming from 3:AM, Cincinnati Review, and Samovar.

Detail of hanging scroll: self portrait by Ren Xiong (1823-1857), from the Palace Museum, Beijing.

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