Behind the back gate of the Desheng Convent at West Lake more than a thousand coffins were stored, heaped up like a mountain.
I went to stay there and asked the monks: “Has anything ever been haunted here?”
They said: “These are all rich ghosts. It is peaceful all the year round.”
I said: “In the city, how could there be so many rich people? How could there be so many rich ghosts? And after being kept so long unburied, they are plainly not rich.”
The monk said: “What we call rich is not their condition in life. Any ghost that after death has food and wine offered to it and paper money burned for it we call a rich ghost. These thousand-odd coffins, though they have been kept long unburied, have four seasonal offerings from the monks every year, an Ullambana assembly, and ten million in paper money burned, and the ghosts are all drunk and full, so no wicked thought arises in them.
“Have you not seen that in the world the robbery and fraud are all born of cold and hunger? Among the things sick people say and see, are there any ghosts in fine clothes and handsome with fat faces? Those who haunt and demand offerings are for the most part ghosts with matted hair and bad teeth, ragged and penniless.”
I thought his view very sound, and lived there over a month, and though I had menservants and maids, on the cloudy nights none of them ever heard a ghost cry.
