The Spendthrift Who Almost Became an Immortal / 杜子春

A translation of Niu Sengru's tale of a young man who conquered fear, pain, and death — and lost to a single cry for a child

From Xuanguai Lu (玄怪録 · Records of the Mysterious and Strange), a Tang collection of the marvellous — By Niu Sengru (牛僧孺, 780–848) · Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales

In the last years of the Northern Zhou or the first years of the Sui — the manuscript is not certain which — there lived in the western capital a young man named Du Zichun.

His family had been respected once. Officials, landowners, some of them decorated. Du Zichun inherited the last of the estate before he was twenty, and by twenty-five he had spent it. He drank. He gambled. He kept women who were kept by other men also. He borrowed from cousins who stopped answering the door. He was, by the standards of the Tang capital, an entirely predictable kind of ruin — the kind the city produced by the thousand, and the kind the city let starve when the money was finally gone.

By the winter of the story's opening he had nothing. No robe warm enough for the wind that came down out of the mountains west of Chang'an. No relative who would take him. His stomach had been empty for two days. He stood at the east gate of the Western Market, in front of the door of a Persian moneylender, and looked up at a grey sky, and cursed it aloud.

An old man was walking past.

The old man had a long staff. His hair was white. His robe was white also, the plain white of a scholar who has stopped bothering with dye. He stopped, and he studied Du Zichun for a long moment, and he said —

"Young sir, why are you shouting at heaven?"

Du Zichun told him. He was not even proud enough to lie. He said he was starving, that no one would lend to him, that he was going to die in this doorway before the market closed, and that heaven, so far as he could see, had done nothing to help.

The old man nodded, as if this were a reasonable complaint. Then he said, calmly: "How much money would be enough?"

Du Zichun laughed at him. "Thirty thousand cash and I might survive the winter."

"That is not enough. Say more."

"Three hundred thousand, then, and I could live like a man again."

The old man shook his head. "Still too little."

"A million."

"More."

Du Zichun, who was not used to being pressed upward by strangers, finally said, half in defiance: "Three million cash and I would want for nothing my whole life."

The old man reached into his sleeve. He drew out a single strip of paper on which he had already written an address in the West Market. "Tomorrow at noon. Come there." And he walked on.

The Second Fortune, and the Third

The next day, at noon, Du Zichun went to the address on the strip of paper. It was a locked storehouse behind a silk merchant's counting-hall. The old man was inside. Piled to the beams, in bags of hemp and lacquered chests, was three million cash.

The old man did not stay to be thanked. He said only: "Spend it. When it is gone, come back."

And Du Zichun did spend it. He bought a mansion in the eastern quarter and filled it with lacquered furniture and a wife and two concubines and a private cook from Yangzhou. He gave banquets three nights a week for men who had spat on him in the year of his poverty. He kept horses. He kept a small orchestra. He bought silk from Sogdian merchants at three times the market price because it pleased him to overpay. And in a little under two years the three million cash was gone. The mansion was sold. The concubines went home to their villages. He was back at the east gate of the West Market, in a robe not much better than the one he had worn before.

The old man walked past. Same staff. Same white hair.

"Ah, young sir. Still poor?"

Du Zichun could not meet his eye.

"How much this time?"

"...Ten million," Du Zichun whispered.

Ten million was waiting in the storehouse the next day. Same instructions. Same silence when it was handed over. This time Du Zichun tried, for the first month, to be prudent. Then he remembered how it had felt to be free with money, and by the end of the second year the ten million was gone in the same way. Banquets. Horses. Silks he did not wear. Kindnesses to men who forgot them by the next morning.

The third time the old man appeared at the West Market gate, Du Zichun could not lift his face at all. He was so ashamed that he asked for nothing. He stood shivering with his eyes on the paving stones.

The old man said, without any hardness in his voice: "You are a slow student. But you are not a hopeless one. This time — thirty million."

Thirty million was a sum that could feed three counties for a season.

The old man added, and this was new: "When you have finished with it, come and find me. I have a use for you."

What Du Zichun Did with the Third Fortune

It was the sentence at the end — I have a use for you — that seems to have broken something loose in Du Zichun's mind. For the first time he understood, standing there, that whatever this old man was, he was not simply a wealthy eccentric handing out silver to amuse himself. He had purpose. And Du Zichun, having been ruined twice by his own hand, was suddenly ashamed of what he had been ruined for.

He took the thirty million and he did not buy a mansion.

He rode instead to Yangzhou, where he had once refused to bury a cousin because the funeral would have interrupted a party. He paid for the burial now — a proper one, with rites, with mourners, with the stone. He rode to a village outside Luoyang where an uncle's widow was living on charity. He built her a house and settled a stipend on her for life. He rode to the market towns of Shu and bought back the bond-servants his family had sold in the year of the ruin, and set them free with silver enough to start again.

He gave dowries to poor kinswomen. He gave loans to men who had once refused him. He gave rice to monasteries whose walls his father had let rot. In eighteen months the thirty million was gone — but this time nothing of it had been eaten by his own mouth. He was as poor as ever. And for the first time he did not mind.

Then he went to find the old man.

The Alchemist's Bargain

They met, as agreed, at a lodge on the flank of Mount Yuntai — the Cloud Terrace mountain, in the Zhongnan range south of Chang'an, where the Taoist adepts had built retreats since the Han.

The old man was waiting on a stone platform, and beside him was a great furnace of nine cauldrons, plated in gold, tall as a man. Colored smoke rose from it. Around it were painted characters that Du Zichun did not recognise. The lodge was empty of all other people. There was only the old man, and the fire, and the mountain wind.

"I am an alchemist," the old man said. He spoke, at last, as an equal. "I have been searching, for more than three hundred years, for one person of correct disposition to help me complete an elixir. The elixir is finished except for the last step. The last step requires a companion who can sit through one night without speaking — no matter what he sees.

"You have been generous with money that was not yours. You have shown me you can renounce comfort. You have shown me you can renounce reputation. Tonight I will ask you to renounce speech itself. Everything you see, from this evening until sunrise, will be illusion. It is not real. But it will feel real. If you speak — one word, one cry — my elixir will fail, and I will have to begin the three-hundred-year search again. Are you willing?"

Du Zichun bowed low. "I owe you my life three times over. Not a sound will pass my lips. I swear it on the graves I have paid for."

The old man gave him a cup of clear water to drink and told him to sit facing the west wall of the lodge, on a mat of tiger skin. Then he took up a sword, and walked around the furnace three times, and said: "Whatever you see, remember: none of it can truly harm you. But you must not speak." And he stepped through a curtain, and was gone.

The Night of Illusions

The wind picked up.

The lodge, which had been open only to the mountain, was suddenly ringed by a hundred armoured men. They were generals of a kind Du Zichun did not know — foreign faces, foreign helmets. They rode horses so tall the horses' breath fogged the beams of the ceiling. The tallest general — a bearded man with a golden mask — swung down from his saddle, pointed a curved sword at Du Zichun's throat, and demanded to know his name and his business on the mountain.

Du Zichun did not speak.

The general threatened him with beheading. Then, when he still did not speak, the general threatened his family — the family long dead — with beheading. Then the soldiers behind the general began to draw arrows. Du Zichun sat on the tiger skin and did not move his mouth.

They loosed a hundred arrows into him.

He watched them enter his body, one after another, and felt nothing. When the last had struck, the soldiers and the general dissolved into smoke.

Then came the beasts. Tigers with green eyes, boars with tusks the size of a man's arm, a serpent thick as a rice barrel that reared up in front of him and struck at his face. Its fangs closed on his throat. He felt them close, and felt the throat begin to bleed, and did not open his mouth to cry.

The beasts dissolved.

Then came the storm — thunder that shook the mountain, lightning that split the roof of the lodge, rain like knives. The floor beneath him rose into a boiling flood. He was carried up on it, spun, thrown against beams, held under. He drowned three times in that hour. Each time he waited for the water to leave his lungs, and each time it did, and each time he did not open his mouth.

Then, when the water was gone, came the yamen of hell.

The gates of the ninth court opened in front of him. He was seized by ox-headed and horse-faced runners and dragged before King Yama. He was accused of crimes he had not committed. He was hung upside down and boiled in oil. He was cut in two at the waist. He was fed to iron dogs that took him apart piece by piece. He watched all of it and did not speak.

Yama, in the end, grew angry. Yama pronounced the sentence at the ninth court: "This one is too stubborn for a man's body. Send him back as a woman."

The Woman Who Could Not Speak

He was reborn.

He was born again into the household of a scholar-official named Wang, in the city of Song. His body this time was a girl's — small, dark-eyed, delicate. From the moment the midwife lifted her from the birthing bed the mother remarked, with some alarm: the child does not cry.

She did not cry as an infant. She did not speak as a toddler. Her parents took her to physicians, to shamans, to a Buddhist nun with a reputation for healing muteness. Nothing worked. But the girl was in every other way bright — quick with a brush, quick with a needle, quick with numbers — and she grew into a young woman so beautiful that suitors came from four provinces.

She was married, in her sixteenth year, to a young scholar of Fanyang named Lu Gui.

Lu Gui had been warned that his bride was mute. He said he did not mind. He said her face and her hand at the qin were enough. And through the first years of the marriage he seemed to mean it. He spoke to her. She replied with the flutter of a sleeve, a nod, the writing of a character on paper. It was a marriage of one voice and one silence, and for a while there was gentleness in it.

She bore him a son.

The son was beautiful. The son learned quickly. By his second year he could walk, and by his second year and a half he was already saying his father's name and reaching up for his mother's face and calling, in the crooked syllables of a small child, for her to speak back. And she — because she had promised, on a mountain, three lives ago, that no sound would pass her lips — did not.

Lu Gui's patience turned by degrees. First puzzlement. Then hurt. Then a quiet, bitter conclusion: my wife does not love me. She loves no one. Her silence is not affliction. It is contempt.

One evening — the manuscripts vary on the exact provocation — he stood in front of her in the inner court, holding their two-year-old son by both feet, upside down, over the stone of the well head. He said, in a voice she had never heard from him before:

"If you will not speak for me, at least speak for the child. Or I will kill him."

She did not speak.

He said it again, and she saw in his eyes that he meant it, and that he was already beyond persuasion. And still — because the alchemist's furnace was burning, because three hundred years of another man's patience were at stake, because she had faced armies and hells and had not opened her mouth — she did not speak.

Lu Gui swung the child by the ankles and dashed its head against the stone.

The small skull broke. The brains sprayed across the courtyard. The child's body slid onto the paving stones and did not move.

And out of her throat, before her mind could catch it, came a single sound — not a word, but half of a word, the beginning of a name.

"Ai —"

The One Sound That Failed

She was sitting on the tiger skin.

The lodge was on fire.

Colored smoke was pouring out of the furnace, but it was not the correct color. It was black, and thick, and it curled toward the ceiling like something dying. The nine cauldrons had cracked down their sides. Molten metal ran across the floor in rivers.

The alchemist walked out of the smoke.

He was not angry. He was tired.

He looked at Du Zichun the way a father looks at a son who has been given three chances and used them all.

"Fear, pain, and death," the alchemist said, quietly, "you defeated all of them. Anger did not move you. Terror did not move you. Sorrow did not move you. Even the hells did not move you. There was only one thing left in you that I could not scour out — and it was love. Love for a child that was not yours, in a life that was not yours, in a body that was not yours. And because of that one word, my three hundred years are wasted. My elixir is broken. I cannot begin again in this generation.

"Go home, Du Zichun. The world needs a man like you more than the Dao does."

Du Zichun tried to speak. He fell to his knees in the ash. He begged to be given another chance. The alchemist only shook his head, and pointed, and the mountain path opened before Du Zichun and led him downward. When Du Zichun turned to look back, the lodge was empty. There was no furnace. There was no old man. There were only pine trees and the sound of the wind on the peak of Yuntai.

He walked back down to Chang'an.

He lived, the manuscript says, a long life afterward. He never again spent money on himself. He gave the rest of what he had, and what came to him after, to the burial of paupers and the education of orphans. Some accounts say he tried, once, to climb Yuntai again in his old age, hoping to find the alchemist and beg. He did not find him. The mountain was empty. He was never seen by any man to weep, in his old age, except when he passed a mother holding a small child at the market gate.

Translator's Note

The tale of Du Zichun is one of the most famous of the Tang chuanqi — the short "marvellous accounts" that Chinese scholars wrote for one another in the ninth century as a kind of parallel to the Tang poem. It survives in the Xuanguai Lu (玄怪录), a collection attributed to the statesman-poet Niu Sengru, and it has been retold in China more or less continuously for eleven hundred years. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke rewrote it in 1920 as a moral fable for Japanese schoolchildren, softening the ending; the Chinese original does not soften. In the original the child dies. In the original the elixir fails. In the original the alchemist walks away.

What the Tang reader would have recognised, and the modern reader sometimes misses, is that the story is not really about immortality. It is about which of the human bonds is hardest to sever.

Daoist inner alchemy taught that a person becomes a sage by working through the "seven passions" — joy, anger, grief, fear, love, hate, and desire — until none of them can move the practitioner. Du Zichun's night on Mount Yuntai is a ritual walk through six of the seven. Fear (the armies), anger (the false accusations), grief (his own death), hate (the tortures of hell), desire (the beauty of his rebirth), even the fear of pain — all conquered. The one the Tang author reserves for the ending, and for failure, is love. And not love of a lover. Not love of a spouse. Love of a child.

Later Chinese moral commentary sometimes read this as a rebuke of Daoist practice — as if to say: any doctrine which asks a mother to watch her child die and stay silent has already lost. Other commentators, closer to the Daoist camp, took it in reverse: the alchemist knew this was the failure point all along, and Du Zichun's inability to renounce is not a personal weakness but proof that the human world is, in the end, kept alive by the one attachment the sages cannot break.

Either way, the tale is a warning against a certain kind of transcendence. Whatever you gain by silence in the face of an armoured general or a boiling cauldron, you will lose it again the first time a child cries and you are the only one who could answer.

Everyone alive has had, at least once, the feeling that speaking was going to cost something — a job, a friendship, a place at a table. What Du Zichun's story quietly asks is the harder question underneath that: what is the one voice you would still use, even if you knew it would break everything?

For most of us, it would be exactly the one Du Zichun used.

The Chinese Original (excerpt, closing scene)

尚有一子，才二岁，甚可爱。卢生抱之欲抛砖上，曰："妻既不我爱，此子何用！"复以其首碎之。血溅数步。子春爱生于心，忽忘其约，不觉失声云："噫。"噫声未息，身坐故处，道士者亦在其前。

"There remained a single son, only two years old, exceedingly dear. Lu Gui took him up and would dash him against the paving-stones, saying: 'If my wife will not love me, what use is this child?' And he broke the child's head. The blood ran several paces. Love was born in Du Zichun's heart, and he forgot the pact; before he knew it, a sound escaped him: 'Ai.' The sound had not yet died before he was sitting again in his old place, and the Daoist stood before him."

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