My sister’s husband’s grandfather was a man of Yimen named Song Tao, a government scholar of his county. One day he lay ill in bed, and a clerk came in holding a summons and leading a white-blazed horse. “You are required at the examination,” said the clerk.
“The commissioner has not arrived,” said Song. “How can there be an examination?”
The clerk said nothing, only hurried him. Sick as he was, Song mounted and followed. The road was completely unfamiliar. They came to a walled city such as kings live in, and went in, and in the hall were many dignitaries — among them, as it happened, one he recognised: the deified general Guan Yu.
Two desks and two stools had been set out under the eaves, and a young scholar already sat at the far one. Song took the seat beside him. Brush and paper were on each desk. Presently the examination paper fluttered down. It read — in eight characters — One person, two people; with intent, without intent.
Song thought for a while and wrote his essay, and the heart of it was this: that a man who intends good is rewarded for the good intention even if the good is never accomplished, and a man who intends evil is punished for the intention even if the evil never comes about. Heaven weighs the will; the world weighs the outcome, and the world is wrong.
The examiners read it, and passed it from hand to hand, and one of them said aloud: “This man will do. Let him be City God of Henan.”
Then Song understood everything, and he wept, and he spoke to the examiners through his tears.
“Sirs, I am overwhelmed by the honour. But my mother is seventy years old, and if I die now she will have nobody to bury her or feed her. I beg you: let me serve my mother out her life, and I will come and take the post when she is gone.”
One of the Examiners — the oldest of them, whose name the tale will not give — looked at the register and said: “Your term with your mother is nine years.” And to the young scholar sitting beside him he said: “You, Zhang, go on ahead and take up the post.”
So Song rode home and woke in his bed, and the family had already carried his coffin into the house, for he had been dead three days. His mother heard him speak and would not believe it until she had touched his face.
Nine years to the day, his mother died. Song finished the burial, dressed himself clean, and lay down. He died in his room, and at the same hour, a hundred li away in Henan, the people of the district saw a great procession come down out of the sky with banners and horses and a new City God arriving to take his seat — and the man in the palanquin was the scholar who had argued that heaven measures the intention.
The tale is the first in Pu Songling’s collection, and he placed it there deliberately. Before the ghosts and the foxes and the heartbreak, he wanted the reader to know the rules of the institution: that the other world is a government, that its offices are filled by examination, and that what it tests is not cleverness but the direction of your heart.