When Dragon Well in Hangzhou was first opened for tea planting, a merchant named Ye was in charge of the work, and a certain Ni chose the auspicious date for the breaking of ground.
Ten years later Ye died, and Ni suddenly fell violently ill. A host of ghosts possessed him, their voices all unlike one another, crying: “Give us back our bones! Give us back our bones!” — a chirping clamor in which the accents of Chu and Yue, Wu and Lu were all mingled together.
Last came one who called himself General Fu of the Chen dynasty. “I helped Xiao Mohe in his campaigns south and north,” he said, “and I have been buried here a thousand years. How dare you and Ye injure my bones on your own authority?”
The family gathered round and pleaded: “This was ordered by the authorities; our master had no power to resist. General, can you not forgive him?”
“Public business cannot be disobeyed — that is true,” said the general. “But you and Ye were bound in duty to report the digging up of bones and exposure of coffins to the authorities. Had they refused to listen, you would have been without guilt. Instead you never informed the officials at all, but threw the bones of our several dozen company together at random — men wearing women’s skulls, the old joined to young feet — scattered and broken as we are to this day. How is a ghost to rest?”
The family begged to redeem the matter with Buddhist rites.
“Buddha can do nothing,” said the general. “Only the Taoists have the rite of whole bones. Go and ask them.”
So the Ye family sought out the Dipper votaries Shi Liunan and Wan Jinpeng, went and besought them, and an altar was set up at Dragon Well.
For seven days they performed the rite. Then the spirit-lamps were seen blazing over West Lake, scattered across the water — now stacking high into a pagoda, now lining out like a file of wild geese, now gathering into a great cartwheel, now scattering into ten thousand drifting fireflies.
In a moment the Mother of the Dipper descended, rosy-clouded and jeweled, so severe in her adornment that none could look at her closely. She dragged in two prisoners — Ye himself, and Ni — and both knelt before the steps. The several dozen ghosts crowded forward to beat them, and the Mother of the Dipper rebuked them.
“This too was your allotted doom. No more vengeance. I shall order the envoys of the Nine Shades to gather up every broken bone and make them whole for you.”
In a little while the dozens of skulls were each wreathed in white vapor, spinning and rolling into balls, and their broken places were made whole.
The general, over ten feet tall in golden armor, led his company of ghosts in bowing thanks to the Mother of the Dipper. Ye too was unbound, and bowed with folded palms, and departed. And Ni’s sickness was healed at once.
Wan Jinpeng told me this himself.
