The Scholar Whose Ghost Kept Asking the Ancients One Question / 刘羽冲死读古书

A Qing scholar, two ancient manuals, and a question he could not stop asking even after death

From Notes from the Thatched Study (阅微草堂笔记), Volume III — Luanyang Summer Records III

By Ji Yun (纪昀, 1724–1805) · Translated with annotations

A scholar in Cangzhou got hold of an ancient military manual, studied it for a year, and was certain he could command a hundred thousand troops. He raised a militia, marched out against the local bandits, and watched his entire force collapse around him. Then he got hold of an ancient water-engineering manual, studied it for a year, and was certain he could turn a thousand miles of dry land into rich farmland. The villagers nearly drowned. He died not long after. On clear bright nights, his ghost was seen pacing his own grave, shaking his head and muttering the same six words.

The Story

In the town of Cangzhou (沧州, on the canal-flat plains of what is now Hebei province) there once lived a scholar named Liu Yuchong (刘羽冲, a man whose given name our family records have lost). My great-great-grandfather, the gentleman known in our line as Houzhai-gong (厚斋公, "the Master of the Thick-Walled Studio"),^{[1]Houzhai-gong (厚斋公) — Ji Yun's great-great-grandfather, Ji Tan (纪坦, courtesy name Houzhai 厚斋, meaning "thick-walled" in the studio-name tradition where Confucian scholars often took architectural metaphors as their literary identities). Ji Yun's habit of referring to senior ancestors by studio name rather than personal name is standard practice in Qing literati prose — it preserves filial respect while letting the reader know the source of the anecdote.} used to exchange poems with him.^{[2]Cangzhou (沧州) was Ji Yun's home prefecture, on the Grand Canal in what is now southeast Hebei. Many of the stories in Yuewei — and especially in the Luanyang Summer Records (滦阳消夏录), the first six volumes — are drawn from his own family's network of scholars, retainers, and neighbors there. The reader should imagine the events of this tale as taking place within walking distance of the Ji family compound, and within memory of the people Ji Yun grew up with.}

Liu was, by temperament, a recluse. He liked to talk about the institutions of antiquity — how the ancient kings governed, how the ancient generals fought, how the ancient engineers ordered the rivers — and he was fond of arguing that everything done in those days could be done again. The trouble was that his proposals, when one looked at them carefully, were yū kuò bù kě xíng (迂阔不可行) — wide of the mark and unworkable.

He once asked the painter Dong Tianshi (董天士, a respected literati artist of the early Qing) to do a series of paintings for him, then asked Houzhai-gong to write inscriptions for them. One of the paintings was titled Reading in an Autumn Forest. Houzhai-gong wrote on it:

Sitting alone at the foot of an autumn tree, a solitary lump with no companions. I cannot tell what book he is reading — only that the eyebrows above it look ancient. My only worry is that the volume in his hands might be a manual on the Well-Field System.^{[3]Well-Field System (井田 jǐngtián, literally "well-shaped fields") — an idealized land-tenure system attributed to the early Zhou dynasty (c. 1000 BCE), in which a single square of farmland was divided into a 3×3 grid like the character jǐng (井, "well"), with the central plot worked communally for the lord and the surrounding eight worked privately by eight families. By the late imperial period, jǐngtián had become the classic emblem of "ancient institutions every reformer wants to revive and no one can actually implement." Houzhai-gong's joke — I'm afraid the book in his hands is a manual on the Well-Field System — would have hit a Qing reader as a precise diagnosis of Liu Yuchong's whole personality.}

It was, in the polite language of the time, a friend warning him.

Liu did not take the warning.

One year, he came across an ancient military manual. He sat down with it and read it for a full year, locked away in his study. When he emerged, he announced that he could now lead an army of a hundred thousand men. As it happened, a band of local bandits had begun raiding the villages near Cangzhou. Liu raised a militia from his own neighborhood, drilled them in formations he had reconstructed from the manual, and marched them out to engage the bandits.

His entire force was routed. He himself was very nearly captured. The men who survived limped home and would not look him in the eye.

He shut himself up again. This time he had found an ancient manual on water control. He read it for another full year. When he emerged again, he announced that he could turn a thousand miles of dry land into rich paddy. He drew up diagrams, wrote out a memorial of arguments, and presented the whole package to the prefect of the district.

The prefect was an obliging man with a taste for unusual projects. He gave Liu one village to experiment on. The peasants of that village were instructed to dig a network of irrigation channels exactly to Liu's specifications. The channels were just finished when the autumn rains came down hard.

The water rose, found the new channels, and poured straight through the village along Liu's freshly engineered routes. The villagers nearly drowned in their own homes.

After this, Liu was not the same. He grew quiet, then withdrawn, then darkly distracted. Every day at the same hour, he would walk slowly back and forth across his courtyard steps, shaking his head and muttering, in a low voice, six words to himself:

Gǔrén qǐ qī wǒ zāi.

Surely the ancients did not lie to me.

He said it a hundred times. He said it a thousand times. He said only those six words.

Not long after, he fell ill and died.

On clear, bright nights — the nights when the moon was full and the wind was high — people walking near his grave would see his ghost. He stood under the pines and cypresses at the head of the grave, shaking his head, pacing alone, just as he had paced his own courtyard in life. If you crept close and listened, you could hear what he was reciting.

It was still the same six words.

If anyone laughed at him, the figure flickered out at once. The next night, if you came back to look, he would be there again.

To be a slave to antiquity is to be a fool — but how can a man be fool enough to come to this?

Postscript by Ji Yun

My old teacher A Wenqin-gong (阿文勤公, "the Lord of Cultivated Diligence" — a senior court official of the Qianlong reign and one of my early mentors)^{[4]A Wenqin-gong (阿文勤公) — the posthumous title of Akedun (阿克敦, 1685–1756), a senior Manchu official who served the Yongzheng and Qianlong courts and was Ji Yun's examiner and early patron during his rise through the imperial examination system. The two sayings A Wenqin-gong quotes at the end — "to make something divine and bring it to light depends on the man" (神而明之，存乎其人) and "you can give a man the compass and the square; you cannot give him the skill" (能与人规矩，不能使人巧) — are both classical lines, the first from the Yijing (Great Treatise) and the second from Mencius (孟子·尽心下).} once instructed me on this point. He said:

"To have a belly full of books can be ruinous. To have a belly without a single book in it can also be ruinous.

The master player of weiqi never abandons the old game manuals — but he is never enslaved to them. The master physician never clings stubbornly to the ancient prescriptions — but he never strays far from them either.

This is what is meant by the saying: 'To make something divine and bring it to light depends on the man.' And the other saying: 'You can give a man the compass and the square. You cannot give him the skill.'"

Translator's Reflection

I have been Liu Yuchong. Not as badly as he had it — I have never gotten anyone drowned — but I know the loop he is stuck in.

You read a book carefully. You believe the people who wrote it were smart. You apply what they said. It does not work. Instead of asking what you missed, you go back and read it again, more carefully, in case the answer is in there and you just didn't see it. That is what the ghost is doing. He is still going through the manuals.

What surprised me on the second pass is that Ji Yun does not actually treat Liu as a comic figure. The closing line — how can a man be fool enough to come to this? — is not contemptuous. It is the tone of a senior scholar who has seen this happen many times and is genuinely sad about it. Ji Yun was the chief editor of the Siku Quanshu, the largest book-collection project in pre-modern China. He spent his career trying to preserve the ancients. He was not telling people to stop reading old books. He was telling people that reading them rigidly is a different and worse mistake than not reading them at all.

A Wenqin-gong's two proverbs at the end took me a while to track down. The first — to make something divine and bring it to light depends on the man — comes from the Great Treatise of the Yijing. The second — you can give a man the compass and the square, you cannot give him the skill — is from Mencius. Both proverbs are about the gap between rules and judgment. Ji Yun's whole story is about a man who never crossed that gap.

The image I keep coming back to is the muttered six words. Surely the ancients did not lie to me. He says it a hundred times in life. He says it from the grave. The ghost is not haunting Cangzhou. The ghost is haunting his own question.

Next tale: To be announced — drawn from one of six classical Chinese collections in rotation. → Coming next week.