The Three Tricks Every Ghost Has / 鬼有三技过此鬼道乃穷
And the scholar who saw through all of them at dusk
From What the Master Would Not Discuss (子不语), Volume IV
By Yuan Mei (袁枚, 1716–1798) · Translated with annotations
Hook: A Qing dynasty scholar walking home at dusk crossed paths with a woman in heavy makeup, running barefoot with a rope. He picked up the rope she dropped, smelled it, and knew exactly what she was. By the time she screamed and turned monstrous, he was already counting tricks.
The Story
Cai Weigong (蔡魏公, a xiàolián[1]A xiàolián (孝廉) was, by the Qing dynasty, a successful candidate at the provincial-level examination — equivalent to a jǔrén (举人) — eligible for low-to-middle official appointments. The term comes from the much older Han dynasty recommendation system for "filial and incorrupt" candidates. degree-holder of the Qing) used to say: Ghosts only have three tricks. Confuse, block, terrify. After that, they're done.
When asked what he meant, he would tell the story of his cousin.
The cousin was a man named Lü (吕某, a stipended licentiate from Songjiang prefecture). He was loud and a little reckless. He liked his nickname so much he printed it on his calling cards: Mr. Open-Hearted (豁达先生 Huòdá Xiānshēng).
One evening Lü was crossing the western shore of Mao Lake (泖湖, a marshy lake west of Songjiang). The light was failing. He saw a woman ahead of him on the road — face heavily powdered, eyebrows painted dark — running with no destination, holding a rope. The moment she saw him she turned and hid behind a big tree. The rope slipped from her hand and dropped in the dirt.
Lü walked over and picked it up.
It was a thin braided length of dried grass. He held it close to his face and sniffed. There was a cold smell on it — the kind of damp, mossy smell that comes off a closed grave. A hanged ghost (缢死鬼 yìsǐguǐ — a húnpò (魂魄, a soul) that died by hanging and walks the world looking for a substitute to replace her so she can be reborn)[2]The yìsǐguǐ (缢死鬼, "hanged ghost") is a fixture of Chinese folk demonology. In the most common version of the belief, a person who dies by hanging cannot be reincarnated until they convince another living person to hang themselves in their place. The hanged ghost is therefore drawn to households where someone is despairing, and is said to whisper encouragement until the substitute kills themselves and the cycle continues. This is the belief Lü's parody mantra refuses., he thought. He put the rope inside his robe and kept walking.
The woman stepped out from behind the tree and came toward him.
When Lü turned left, she blocked him on the left. When he turned right, she blocked him on the right. He recognized this — country folk called it guǐdǎqiáng (鬼打墙, "the ghost wall," when a traveler can't seem to make any progress on a road they know well)[3]Guǐdǎqiáng (鬼打墙, "ghost-built wall") describes the experience of becoming inexplicably lost on a road one knows well, often at twilight. In folk explanation, a ghost is creating an invisible barrier that turns the traveler back upon themselves. The modern Chinese phrase still means a frustrating loop — going in circles without making progress. — and he simply walked through her.
She let out a long howl. Her face changed. Her hair came down in a black tangle. Blood began to trickle from her mouth and ears. Her tongue stretched out a foot long and she leapt at him, jumping back and forth in front of him.
Lü stopped. He looked her over.
The painted face and the powder, he said, that was you trying to confuse me. Standing in my path was you trying to block me. This — this hideous business — is you trying to terrify me. That's three tricks. I'm not afraid of any of them. I think you've used everything you have. You do know I'm called Mr. Open-Hearted, don't you?
The ghost dropped to her knees. Her face went back to what it had been before — a tired young woman with too much makeup. She kowtowed.
I am a Shi family woman from the city, she said. I quarreled with my husband and hanged myself in a moment of folly. I heard there is a wife in the eastern Mao district whose marriage is also unhappy. I was on my way to take her place so I could be reborn. You blocked me, and you've taken my rope. Sir — I have no tricks left. I beg you. Help me cross over.
How would I help? Lü asked.
Tell the Shi family in town. Have them hold a Buddhist service. Have them invite a high monk and chant the Wǎngshēng Zhòu (往生咒, the Rebirth Mantra — a short Pure Land Buddhist incantation chanted to release a wandering soul to rebirth in the Western Paradise)[4]The Wǎngshēng Zhòu (往生咒) — formally the Bá Yī Qiè Yè Zhàng Gēnběn Dé Shēng Jìngtǔ Shénzhòu — is a short Sanskrit-derived dhāraṇī chanted in Pure Land Buddhism to deliver the recently dead, or trapped souls, to the Western Paradise of Amitābha Buddha. Pre-modern Chinese funerals across nearly all schools incorporated some version of it. Lü's parody mantra in this story keeps the rhythm of the real chant but replaces the Buddhist content with a flat folk refusal of substitution. many times. Then I can be reborn.
Lü laughed.
I am a high monk. I have my own Wangsheng Zhou. Listen carefully.
He raised his voice and chanted, in the rhythm of an actual Buddhist gatha:
What a vast world this is —
Nothing in it blocks anything.
Going down, coming back —
Why does anyone need a substitute?
If you want to leave, just leave.
Isn't that a relief?
The ghost listened to the end. Something moved in her face. She prostrated herself twice and then ran away into the dark.
Locals later said that stretch of road had been bad for years. After Mr. Open-Hearted passed through, no one was ever troubled there again.
Translator's Reflection
I expected this story to be funnier than it ended up being.
The setup is a comedy bit. A scholar with a self-aggrandizing nickname meets a textbook hanged ghost in a textbook haunted spot, and instead of running he stops and counts her tricks like a teacher grading a paper. That was your confusion phase. That was your blocking phase. That was your terror phase. Anything else? It's a routine. It works because Yuan Mei was a wit, and he loved scholars who could keep their nerve.
But then the ghost stops fighting and asks for help.
She doesn't need to be exorcised. She doesn't need to be defeated. She is a young married woman who killed herself in a fight, and she has been wandering for who knows how long looking for someone unhappy enough to take her place so she can finally rest. The folk theology is grim: a hanged ghost can't pass on alone; another hanging has to happen first. The story takes that for granted as the rule of the universe she lives in.
What Lü gives her isn't a Pure Land mantra. It's a flat refusal of the rule. No one needs a replacement. The world is big. If you want to go, go. He just dismisses the whole substitute economy out loud, in front of her, and the dismissal works.
That's the part that surprised me. The story isn't really about a brave man scaring off a monster. It's about the substitution rule itself being a bad idea, and a bored Qing scholar being the only one in the village willing to say so.
What Yuan Mei is up to here, I think, is sneaking a piece of moral argument into a ghost story. He was famous for refusing the worst pieces of received Confucian morality — he supported widow remarriage, he taught female students, he wrote poems with women he wasn't married to. The substitution rule for hanged ghosts maps directly onto a real social pressure: when a young wife was unhappy enough to end her own life, the village around her tended to mourn her as a virtuous victim, which made the next unhappy young wife a little more likely to follow. Why does anyone need a substitute, Lü asks. The answer in the story is no one.
I keep coming back to her last gesture. She doesn't argue with him. She doesn't try one more trick. She bows twice and runs into the dark — and because she runs, the road is safe afterwards.
Next tale: The Soul That Walked Out the Door — a Tang dynasty love story where a girl's soul leaves her sickbed to follow her cousin a thousand miles, and her body waits. → [Coming soon]
📜 Original Text in Classical Chinese · 文言原文
蔡魏公孝廉常言：「鬼有三技：一迷二遮三吓。」或问：「三技云何？」曰：「我表弟吕某，松江廪生，性豪放，自号豁达先生。尝过泖湖西乡，天渐黑，见妇人面施粉黛，贸贸然持绳索而奔。望见吕，走避大树下，而所持绳则遗坠地上。吕取观，乃一条草索，嗅之，有阴霾之气。心知为缢死鬼，取藏怀中，径向前行。其女出树中，往前遮拦，左行则左拦，右行则右拦。吕心知俗所称『鬼打墙』是也，直冲而行。鬼无奈何，长啸一声，变作披发流血状，伸舌尺许，向之跳跃。吕曰：『汝前之涂眉画粉，迷我也；向前阻拒，遮我也；今作此恶状，吓我也。三技毕矣，我总不怕，想无他技可施。尔亦知我素名豁达先生乎？』
鬼仍复原形，跪地曰：『我城中施姓女子，与夫口角，一时短见自缢。今闻泖东某家妇亦与其夫不睦，故我往取替代。不料半路被先生截住，又将我绳夺去。我实在计穷，只求先生超生。』吕问：『作何超法？』曰：『替我告知城中施家，作道场，请高僧，多念《往生咒》，我便可托生。』吕笑曰：『我即高僧也。我有《往生咒》，为汝一诵。』即高唱曰：『好大世界，无遮无碍。死去生来，有何替代？要走便走，岂不爽快！』鬼听毕，恍然大悟，伏地再拜，奔趋而去。
后土人云：「此处向不平静，自豁达先生过后，永无为祟者。」
Source: 《子不语·卷四·鬼有三技过此鬼道乃穷》— 清·袁枚. Public domain. Full text via 汉典古籍 zdic.net.
🏛️ Historical Context · 历史背景
Yuan Mei and Zibuyu. Yuan Mei (袁枚, 1716–1798) was one of the brightest literary stars of mid-Qing Jiangnan — a poet, food writer, garden designer, and unrepentant social provocateur. He retired in his thirties to his garden estate Suiyuan (随园) outside Nanjing, taught women students openly (a scandal at the time), advocated widow remarriage, and refused most of the official career path he had been groomed for. Zibuyu (子不语, What the Master Would Not Discuss) — a title taken from the Analects line "the Master did not discuss strange things, feats of strength, disorder, or spirits" — is his collection of supernatural tales. The title itself is a wink: he is writing precisely what Confucius would not write.
The "fearless of ghosts" tradition. This story belongs to a recognized subgenre in Chinese supernatural fiction — the bù pà guǐ (不怕鬼, "not afraid of ghosts") tale. The genre runs from Ruan Zhan in the Liexian Zhuan through the Soushen Ji and continues vigorously into the Qing. Its rhetorical move is always the same: a clear-eyed scholar names what he is seeing, and the act of naming dissolves the threat. In the 1960s, Mao's PRC government commissioned a famous anthology titled Stories of Not Being Afraid of Ghosts (不怕鬼的故事, He Qifang ed., 1961) that drew heavily on tales like this one — repurposed as political metaphor for resisting "imperialist ghosts." Yuan Mei would have found that funny.
The substitution rule for hanged ghosts. The folk belief that a hanged person cannot be reincarnated without finding a substitute is well-documented in Qing-era ethnographic writing and persisted into the twentieth century. Anthropologists working in rural Jiangnan in the 1920s–40s recorded it as a live belief, often associated with specific haunted trees or stretches of road. The substitution rule fed back into actual social behavior: families would attempt to remove ropes, beams, and even doors used in past suicides, on the theory that the hanged ghost remained attached to the implement. This is the folk system Yuan Mei's protagonist breaks open by simply singing it down.
Mao Lake and the Songjiang setting. Mao Lake (泖湖, also written 泖湾) was a wetlands area west of the city of Songjiang, in what is now the Qingpu district of greater Shanghai. In the Qing it was a sparsely populated area of paddies, fish ponds, and willow groves — exactly the kind of liminal, foggy landscape that produced ghost stories. Yuan Mei's cousin Lü was a lǐnshēng (廪生), a stipended government student at the prefectural school in Songjiang, which would have placed him on real, walkable ground for this story.
A xiàolián (孝廉) was, by the Qing dynasty, a successful candidate at the provincial-level examination — equivalent to a jǔrén (举人) — eligible for low-to-middle official appointments. The term comes from the much older Han dynasty recommendation system for "filial and incorrupt" candidates. ↩
The yìsǐguǐ (缢死鬼, "hanged ghost") is a fixture of Chinese folk demonology. In the most common version of the belief, a person who dies by hanging cannot be reincarnated until they convince another living person to hang themselves in their place. The hanged ghost is therefore drawn to households where someone is despairing, and is said to whisper encouragement until the substitute kills themselves and the cycle continues. This is the belief Lü's parody mantra refuses. ↩
Guǐdǎqiáng (鬼打墙, "ghost-built wall") describes the experience of becoming inexplicably lost on a road one knows well, often at twilight. In folk explanation, a ghost is creating an invisible barrier that turns the traveler back upon themselves. The modern Chinese phrase still means a frustrating loop — going in circles without making progress. ↩
The Wǎngshēng Zhòu (往生咒) — formally the Bá Yī Qiè Yè Zhàng Gēnběn Dé Shēng Jìngtǔ Shénzhòu — is a short Sanskrit-derived dhāraṇī chanted in Pure Land Buddhism to deliver the recently dead, or trapped souls, to the Western Paradise of Amitābha Buddha. Pre-modern Chinese funerals across nearly all schools incorporated some version of it. Lü's parody mantra in this story keeps the rhythm of the real chant but replaces the Buddhist content with a flat folk refusal of substitution. ↩