The Young Monk Who Could Not Forget the Tiger / 沙弥思老虎
A boy raised on a mountain. A first trip down. And one creature his master could not bring himself to name.
From Further Records of What the Master Would Not Discuss (续子不语 / 续新齐谐) — by Yuan Mei (袁枚, 1716–1798) · Translated by Cathay Tales
A three-year-old boy raised on a mountain in total seclusion from the world finally came down at sixteen. His master pointed out the cow, the horse, the rooster, the dog. Then a young woman walked past, and the master had to think fast.
The Story
On Mount Wutai (五台山, one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains of China, in the rugged north of Shanxi province — a network of high stone peaks where monasteries have clung to the rocks for over a thousand years) there lived a Chan master (禅师, a Buddhist meditation teacher of the Chan school, the Chinese branch of what the Japanese later called Zen).
This master had taken in a small boy as his disciple. The boy was three years old when he arrived. The mountain was high and the master kept the two of them at its very summit, in a hut above the cloud line, where they meditated together and saw no one and went nowhere. The boy grew up there. Year after year, the master did not bring him down.
After more than ten years had passed, when the disciple was perhaps sixteen, the master finally decided it was time. They walked down the mountain together.
The boy had never seen a cow. He had never seen a horse. He had never seen a rooster or a dog. Everything moved and everything was strange. He pointed and asked, and his master answered patiently as they went.
Master: "That one is called a cow. People use them to plow the fields."
Disciple: "I see."
Master: "That one is a horse. People ride them when they travel."
Disciple: "I see."
Master: "Those are a rooster and a dog. The rooster calls the dawn. The dog watches the gate."
Disciple: "I see."
He nodded along at each one. He committed each one to memory.
A short while later, a young woman happened to pass them on the road. She was young, perhaps the boy's own age, walking somewhere on some ordinary errand. The disciple stopped and stared.
Disciple: "And what is this one?"
The master worried. He was afraid that if he gave his disciple any honest answer at all, his disciple's mind might stir — and a stirred mind, in the Chan view, was the beginning of every kind of trouble. So he composed his face and spoke very seriously:
Master: "That one is called a tiger. Anyone who goes near it will be bitten to death. Not even the bones will be left."
The disciple bowed his head.
Disciple: "I see."
That evening, back at the hut on the summit, the master sat down across from his disciple and asked him a teacher's question.
Master: "Today you saw many things at the foot of the mountain. Is there any one of them that you find your mind has been thinking about?"
The disciple answered without hesitation.
Disciple: "There is nothing else I am thinking about. I just keep thinking about the tiger that eats men. There is something about her I cannot let go of."
Translator's Reflection
The first time I read this I thought it was a joke at the master's expense. The whole carefully constructed apparatus of mountain seclusion — sixteen years of it, raising a child away from the world like a monastery laboratory experiment — undone in a single afternoon by one passing stranger and a thirteen-word fib about tigers.
But the more I read it, the less it seems like a joke about the master. It seems like a joke about the assumption underneath the master's whole project: that desire is something you can simply not show a person, and then they will not have it.
Yuan Mei was a Qing dynasty literatus who was famously, almost programmatically opposed to the Neo-Confucian moralism of his time. He believed that human nature included appetite and feeling, and that pretending otherwise produced not virtue but absurdity. This story is, in eighty-two characters of classical Chinese, the cleanest possible demonstration of his point. The disciple does not even know what he is feeling. He doesn't have the vocabulary. The master gave him only one new word that afternoon — tiger — and so he uses that word to name what is happening inside him. I just keep thinking about the tiger. The longing is real before any language is available for it.
There is also a quieter joke. The master tries to make the woman frightening, and what he produces instead is interesting. A creature so dangerous that one approach means total annihilation — bones and all — is, to a sixteen-year-old who has spent his entire life on a mountain doing breathing exercises, the single most exciting thing that has ever happened to him. The framing backfired immediately. The boy is not afraid of the tiger. He is fascinated by it.
I read somewhere that the modern Chinese pop song Women Are Tigers (《女人是老虎》) comes from this same story. I believe it. The line — at the foot of the mountain there are tigers, child, you must avoid them — is exactly the master's voice. And every kid who ever heard the song laughed for the same reason the disciple's answer is funny: the warning instructed him.
Next tale: The Tiger Tale's Italian Twin — Boccaccio wrote almost the exact same story four hundred years before Yuan Mei. The puzzle of how the tale crossed a continent. → [Coming soon]
📜 Original Text in Classical Chinese · 文言原文
五台山某禅师，收一沙弥，年甫三岁。五台山最高，师徒在山顶修行，从不一下山。后十余年，禅师同弟子下山。沙弥见牛马鸡犬，皆不识也。师因指而告之曰：「此牛也，可以耕田；此马也，可以骑；此鸡犬也，可以报晓，可以守门。」沙弥唯唯。
少顷，一少年女子走过，沙弥惊问：「此又是何物？」师虑其动心，正色告之曰：「此名老虎，人近之，必遭咬死，尸骨无存。」沙弥唯唯。
晚间上山，师问：「汝今日在山下所见之物，可有心上思想他的否？」曰：「一切物我都不想，只想那吃人的老虎，心上总觉舍他不得。」
Source: 《续子不语》（又名《续新齐谐》）— 袁枚（清）. Public domain. 可可诗词网 kekeshici.com.
🏛️ Historical Context · 历史背景
Yuan Mei (袁枚, 1716–1798) was a major poet, essayist, and gastronome of the High Qing period. He retired from official life in his thirties to live at his famous garden estate, Sui Yuan (随园 — "the Garden of Accommodating Whatever Comes"), outside Nanjing, where he wrote prolifically and entertained constantly. He was a vocal critic of Neo-Confucian asceticism, championed the legitimacy of female intellectual life, and collected ghost stories partly because the orthodox Confucian establishment of his day disapproved of them — a fact he found delightful.
Yuan Mei's main supernatural collection is Zibuyu (子不语 — "What the Master Would Not Discuss," a wry allusion to a line from the Analects about topics Confucius declined to speak of: the strange, feats of strength, disorder, and spirits). The collection's later sequel — Xu Zibuyu (续子不语), also known as Xu Xin Qi Xie (续新齐谐) — contains stories Yuan Mei gathered in the later decades of his life, including this one. The two collections together run to over a thousand stories.
This particular tale has a remarkable cross-cultural twin. The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), in his Decameron (Day Four, introduction), tells the story of Filippo Balducci and the goslings: a man who raises his son in total isolation from women, brings the boy down to Florence at eighteen, and tries to pass off a group of young women as "geese." The boy promptly asks his father to bring one of the geese home. The plot is so close to Yuan Mei's that the modern essayist Wang Zengqi (汪曾祺) speculated the story must have traveled from Italy to Qing dynasty China through some now-lost route — perhaps Jesuit missionaries, perhaps Silk Road merchants. The actual chain of transmission has never been proven. But the parallel is too exact to be coincidence, and the parallel itself is, perhaps, the more revealing observation: across four hundred years and ten thousand kilometers, the joke worked the same way, because the joke is on the same kind of attempt.