The Disciple Who Wanted to Walk Through Walls / 劳山道士

A young man climbs a mountain to learn Daoist magic. He lasts about two months — and goes home with the one party trick that breaks the moment he tries to brag with it

From Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (聊斋志异), Volume I, Tale 16 — by Pu Songling (蒲松龄, 1640–1715) · Translated with annotations

A young man climbs Mount Lao to become a Daoist immortal. After two months of cutting firewood, he begs his master for one little party trick. The trick works perfectly — until he gets home and tries to show his wife.

The Story

In our county there was a man surnamed Wang (Wang the Seventh, by birth order in his family — a spoiled young scion of an old gentry household). From boyhood he had been fascinated by Daoism. When he heard that Mount Lao on the Shandong coast was full of immortals, he shouldered his book-bag and set off.

He climbed up to one of the peaks and found a temple, very quiet. A dàoshi (a Daoist priest — one of those mountain hermits who study the Way and are rumored to live for centuries) sat on a pútuán (a round meditation mat woven from rushes). His white hair fell to his shoulders, and his face had that bright, distant look you see in old monks who have stopped caring about the world below.

Wang knocked, and they talked. The priest's reasoning was deep and strange. Wang asked to become his student.

The priest looked at him. "I'm afraid you're too pampered to take the hardship."

"I can," Wang said.

There were a lot of disciples already. By dusk they had all come in. Wang bowed to each of them and was allowed to stay.

At dawn the priest called him over, handed him an axe, and told him to go cut firewood with the others. Wang accepted, respectfully.

A month passed. His hands and feet were thick with calluses. The work was unbearable, and secretly he was thinking about going home.

One evening he came back to find two guests sitting with his master, drinking. It was already dark, but no one had lit a lamp. The priest cut a circle of paper, the size of a mirror, and stuck it on the wall. A moment later — moonlight, flooding the room. You could see the fine hairs on someone's arm.

The disciples crowded around to listen and serve. One of the guests said, "On a fine night like this we should share the pleasure." He took the wine jar from the table and started pouring rounds for the disciples, urging them to drink themselves drunk.

Wang thought to himself: Seven or eight of us, one jar of wine — how can it possibly go around? So they all found bowls and cups and competed to drain theirs first, terrified the wine would run out. But however many times they poured, the jar never grew lighter. He marveled at it.

After a while, a second guest said, "We have the kind blessing of the moon, but we're drinking too quietly. Why not call Cháng'é (the moon goddess of Chinese myth, the woman exiled to the lunar palace for stealing the elixir of immortality from her husband)^{[1]Cháng'é (嫦娥) — In Chinese myth Cháng'é stole or accidentally drank the elixir of immortality belonging to her husband Hou Yi, the great archer who shot down nine of the ten suns. She floated up to the moon and has lived there ever since, alone except for a jade rabbit and an osmanthus tree. The "cold lunar palace" (Guǎnghán, 广寒) in the song is her exile. By Pu Songling's time she was already a stock figure for unreachable beauty in classical poetry; calling her down to a wine party is the kind of audacious mythic joke that runs through Liaozhai.} down to join us?"

He took a chopstick and tossed it into the moon on the wall.

A beautiful woman stepped out of the light. At first she was less than a foot tall; by the time she reached the floor she was full-sized. Slim-waisted, slender-necked, she danced the Nícháng Dance (the "Rainbow Skirt and Feather Dress" — a Tang court dance said to imitate the immortals' robes; in Pu Songling's day already the most famous lost dance in Chinese history). Then she sang:

Spirits, spirits — am I to go back? Are you keeping me captive in the cold lunar palace?

Her voice was clear and high, piercing as a flute.

When the song ended she spun upward, leapt onto the table — and in the moment the disciples turned to look, she was a chopstick again. The three of them roared with laughter.

A third guest said, "Tonight has been the best, but I can't drink any more. Won't you see me off at the moon palace?" The three of them moved their cushions and slowly walked into the moon. The disciples watched all three of them sitting up there, drinking — every hair of their beards and brows visible, as if reflected in a bright mirror.

After a while the moon dimmed. The disciples brought candles in. The priest was sitting alone. The guests were gone. The food on the table was still there. The moon on the wall was a paper circle, like a mirror.

"Have you all had enough to drink?" the priest asked.

"Enough."

"Then go to sleep early. Don't be late to the firewood at dawn."

The disciples agreed and withdrew. Wang was secretly thrilled — full of admiration. His thoughts of going home faded.

But another month passed. The hardship became unbearable, and still the priest had taught him not a single technique. He could not wait any longer, and went to take his leave:

"Master, I came hundreds of li to learn from you. Even if I cannot have the secret of immortality, even a small trick would comfort me for my trouble. Two or three months have gone by, and all I do is cut firewood from morning till evening. At home I never knew this kind of suffering."

The priest laughed. "I told you you couldn't take the hardship. And so it is. I'll send you off tomorrow."

"Master, I've worked for many days. Show me one small skill, and I won't have come for nothing."

"What skill do you want?"

"Wherever I see you walk, walls do not stop you. That's the one I want."

The priest laughed and agreed. He taught him a spell, made him recite it, and then said: "Walk in."

Wang faced the wall and didn't dare.

"Try."

Wang stepped forward calmly and was stopped by the wall.

"Lower your head and charge through. Don't hesitate."

So Wang backed off several paces, ran at the wall — and as he reached it, it became as if there was nothing there. He turned to look. He was outside the wall.

He was overjoyed, bowed in thanks. The priest said: "Go home and live cleanly with this. Otherwise it will not work."

He gave him provisions and sent him off.

When Wang got home, he boasted that he had met an immortal, and now no solid wall could keep him out. His wife did not believe him.

Wang copied the master's move: he backed off several feet from a wall, lowered his head, and charged.

His head smashed into the hard wall. He keeled over.

His wife helped him up and looked at him. A lump had risen on his forehead, the size of a goose egg. She mocked him. Wang flushed with shame and anger — and could only curse the old priest as a fraud.

A Note from the Strange Historian

The Strange Historian remarks: There is no one who hears this story and does not laugh. But the people who behave like Wang are not so few in our world. Today we have a certain kind of coarse fellow who loves rich poisonous food and is terrified of bitter medicine. So there are always sycophants — the kind who would lick another man's boils and suck his hemorrhoids — ready to offer him techniques of bullying and brute force, dressed up to suit his taste. "Take this method," they tell him, "and you can walk through the world with no obstacles." The first few times he tries it, it seems to work a little. So he convinces himself the whole world is wide enough for this — and he keeps going, until the moment he runs his head into the hard wall and falls flat. He won't stop until then.

Translator's Reflection

I went into this story expecting a charming Daoist fable and came out laughing harder than I expected to. The wall trick is the punchline — but the real reason it lands is everything Pu Songling sets up before it.

Wang doesn't fail because the magic is fake. The magic is clearly real. The chopstick really does turn into Cháng'é. Three grown men really do walk into the moon on the wall and sit there drinking, beards visible. The priest is the real thing. What Wang fails at is the part nobody warned him about — the firewood months. Mount Lao isn't gatekeeping magic with secret passwords. It's gatekeeping it with calluses.

The bit I keep coming back to is "lower your head and charge — don't hesitate." That's clearly not a wall-walking instruction. That's a posture instruction. The technique only works when you commit, when there's no part of you still asking but what if it doesn't work. The moment Wang gets home and decides to use the trick to impress his wife, the doubt is built in. He's not testing the wall, he's testing himself in front of someone. And selves under audit don't pass through anything.

Pu Songling's tag at the end — the Strange Historian's note about flatterers and bullies — feels almost too on-the-nose, like he's worried the reader won't catch it. He didn't need to worry. Anyone who's ever watched a person collect a few easy wins from bad advice and then ride that confidence straight into the brick wall of reality has read this story already, in real life. The lump on Wang's forehead is the same lump on every overconfident résumé, every leveraged trade made on a hot tip, every "I can manage this with one hand" project taken on at the wrong moment.

It is, in the end, a very kind story. The priest is not cruel. The wall is not vindictive. The world simply has a structure — and the people who refuse to do the firewood months get the goose egg, eventually, on their head.

Next tale: The Pillow That Dreamed a Lifetime in a Bowl of Millet — a penniless scholar borrows a magic pillow and lives an entire glittering career inside it. The millet is still cooking when he wakes up. → [Coming soon]