The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons: A Seventeenth-Century Novel

INTRODUCTION

MARK EDWARD LEWIS AND BRIGITTE BAPTANDIER

The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons (Linshui pingyao) recounts the life, great deeds, and divinization of Chen Jinggu, Lady of Linshui, one of the major goddesses still venerated in Fujian, Taiwan, and other places in Southeast Asia to which the cult has emigrated. She is worshipped at the center of the triad of the Three Ladies (Sannai) as the protector goddess of women during pregnancy and childbirth, and of children passing through the major diseases that mark the road to adulthood. Her story can be read as a dramatic narrative, as a rich source for religious history, and as a meditation on the position of women in the society of late imperial China.

On the Nature of the Text

The Ruicheng Shuju edition, on which this translation is based, classifies The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons as an old vernacular novel (guben tongsu xiaoshuo). There is no mention of the author’s name, and it is not in fact a novel, in the conventional sense of an artfully composed, relatively long prose narrative. Rather, it compiles the mythic episodes that were created over a substantial period in the process of establishing and developing the Lady of Linshui’s cult and of elaborating the rituals of the Mount Lü sect of Daoism. The text thus resembles similar books that trace the great deeds of other divinities such as the Buddhist goddess Guanyin in The Complete History of Guanyin of the South Seas (Nanhai Guanyin quan zhuan) or Mazu in The Biography of the Celestial Imperial Mother (Tianfei Niangma zhuan). Written in vernacular prose, such works first appeared around the sixteenth century and became a significant feature of many cults dedicated to major deities.

The stories compiled in this manner usually came from hagiographic texts containing liturgy and homilies, the traditions of performers who told stories of the divinities, and plays dramatizing the deities’ myths suitable for performance during their festivals. It is likely that oral versions of the legend circulated widely, until the episodes were finally written down and printed first as manuscripts and lithographs, and then as extended narratives. Judging from references to names of political units and titles, several of which do not occur until the beginning of the Qing dynasty, the currently available editions appear to date, in their definitive versions, to the seventeenth century.¹ While the editors of these works may have added some degree of artistic expression and structural unity, they never entirely escaped the episodic nature produced by the process of their creation.

The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons thus appears as a juxtaposition of stories that seem to have no relation to one another, or at the very least could stand independently. It skips from one story to another with no preliminary transition, except for telling the reader that one topic has ended and another will now be addressed. In this apparent incoherence, however, readers can recognize the authenticity of the text as a product entangled in the foundation and development of the cult, whose members were both the intended audience and, to some degree, the collective authors of this story. The work also offers exciting narratives in both its overall story and individual episodes, and a set of themes that provide considerable insight into both the nature of religion and the social position of women in late imperial China.

Overview of the Story

The story takes place at the time of the kingdom of Min (909–45), blending the account of Chen Jinggu (who other sources say was born in 766–67) with the legendary history of this state.² The episodes trace her miraculous birth from a drop of blood of the goddess Guanyin; her divinely assisted flight from her home to avoid marriage; the life-threatening beating inflicted on her parents as part of that flight; her education in Daoist arts at Mount Lü; her departure from the mountain after refusing to learn the arts associated with childbirth; her healing of her parents with pieces of her own flesh; her forced marriage; her career pacifying the demons of Min, in the process of which she created a cultic community of women followers; her participation in the conflicts of the kingdom; her death in the course of removing a fetus (tuotai) from her own womb—a mythic form of an abortion—in order to perform a ritual for rain to benefit the country; and finally her consequent divinization as the Lady of Linshui (Linshui Furen).³

The Parallel Lives of Chen Jinggu and the White Snake

Within the profusion of events hinted at above, the text achieves an underlying structure by presenting Chen Jinggu as simultaneously the alter ego and archrival of the White Snake Demon. It recounts their combat from their twin births as emanations of the body of Guanyin—a drop of blood and a strand of white hair—up to their reunion in the death and divinization of Chen Jinggu, when the White Snake becomes both her mount and the demon guardian of her temple. The rivalry of Chen Jinggu and the White Snake takes the form of two complementary lives converging at the pivotal moments that defined the classical career of a woman in Chinese society: birth, marriage, childbirth, and death. One additional episode in their combat is tied to Chen Jinggu’s public role in a battle to preserve the fertility of the kingdom of Min. At each moment of crisis the two figures are opposed as embodiments of two fundamental roles of women: the wife and mother versus the passionate lover. However, as will be discussed below, both were also imperfect versions of their roles.

A Twin Birth

The joint birth of Chen Jinggu and the White Snake from the body of Guanyin resulted from the latter’s helping the prefect of Quanzhou, Cai Xiang, construct Luoyang Bridge.⁴ Guanyin stood in a boat, promising to marry whoever succeeded in striking her with a coin, and all the coins that were hurled filled the empty coffers of the prefect. A man named Wang Xiao’er managed to strike her with the help of Lü Dongbin, a celebrated prankster and one of the Eight Immortals, but Guanyin immediately disappeared, and Wang drowned himself out of frustration. Chen Jinggu was born of a drop of Guanyin’s blood that she sent to be incarnated to honor her promise of marriage. Despite her vows to not marry and to devote herself to Buddhism, Chen Jinggu was finally forced to marry Liu Qi, the reincarnation of Wang Xiao’er, to redeem Guanyin’s pledge. The White Snake was the strand of white hair of the bodhisattva touched by the coin thrown by Wang. Having fallen into the river, the hair turned into a white female python, the manifestation of an embittered desire and a betrayed promise. Thus the nature of their births dictated that one become an unwilling wife and mother and the other a creature of constant, unfulfilled passions.

Battle over a Shared Husband

Refusing her family’s efforts to force her into the predestined marriage to Liu Qi, Chen Jinggu fled to Mount Lü to study Daoist arts, leaving her parents suffering torments from a beating inflicted by a spirit who helped her escape.⁵ After three years of study, she learned of her parents’ agony and decided to go home. Before departing, she refused to learn the ultimate ritual art that would have allowed her to penetrate the secrets of pregnancy, protect expecting women, and preside over birth. As she departed, her master, Xu Zhenjun, warned her that she would not be able to defy her parents, and when pregnant at the age of twenty-four, she would no longer be able to practice the ritual arts to protect herself. After returning home and healing her parents with her own flesh (gegu), she devoted herself to exorcising the country of Min and, in so doing, gathered a community of sworn sisters consisting both of those who assisted her and of conquered demons.⁶

Her fiancé, Liu Qi, was kidnapped and delivered to the White Snake, who, in the guise of a beautiful young woman, welcomed him. When he proved faithful to his engagement and his karmic destiny, the White Snake attempted to consume his vital essence. However, she was immediately struck by a great pain due to her own karmic tie to Liu Qi / Wang Xiao’er, and thus could not harm him. Chen Jinggu subsequently rescued him with the help of the shamanic arts she had learned at Mount Lü, and after healing Liu Qi with herbal potions and restoring him with the help of talismans she finally had to consent to be married.

Hacking Up the White Snake on the Emperor’s Bed and Reviving the Fertility of Min

The White Snake then resolved to kidnap the empress of Min and assume her form. Taking advantage of her new position, she consumed the thirty-six royal consorts (Pojie), who were responsible for the fertility of the state. To forestall any interference, she feigned an illness and demanded to consume Chen Jinggu’s heart, which could cure her since they were of the same nature. However, Chen Jinggu used her magical powers to cause the White Snake to resume her true form and then cut her into three pieces on the king’s bed, thus transforming the bed into a sacrificial altar. Still, the White Snake did not die, and the three segments of her body were imprisoned by Chen Jinggu.

Using talismans and a ritual of salvation through refinement or transmutation (liandu), Chen Jinggu revived the thirty-six consorts from the piles of their bones, although they could only remain alive through her ongoing magical intervention.⁷ The king offered the consorts to her as disciples, to whom she taught the ritual arts of Mount Lü, and they became her loyal followers in life and standard figures in her later cult.

Chen Jinggu’s Aborted Pregnancy and Death

When Chen Jinggu had reached the critical age of twenty-four and become pregnant, just as her master had predicted, the ritual pollution of her pregnancy meant that she could not practice ritual arts. However, a great drought afflicted Min, and the king threatened to burn the Daoist masters alive if they failed to bring rain. Chen Jinggu’s cousin, Chen Shouyuan, who was the chief of the state’s Daoist officials, begged her to save him and his fellows.⁸ She agreed to disregard the warnings of her master to save the kingdom, thus putting her own life and that of her fetus at risk by carrying out a ritual dance to bring rain. At her mother’s house, she removed the fetus from her womb and hid it by making it invisible under a lake of lotuses. However, the ruse was penetrated by the White Snake’s servant, the Ravine Demon, who stole the fetus and fed it to his mistress. Thus the fetus passed from Chen Jinggu’s body into that of the White Snake, a perversion of pregnancy and the birth process in which the fetus died.

The Ravine Demon and the White Snake then went to the Min River to kill Chen Jinggu, who was dancing on the stars of the Northern Dipper, magically visible on a mat floating on the water.⁹ Torrential rain fell while Chen Jinggu hemorrhaged due to the death of her aborted fetus, and she was pulled into the river by the two demons. Xu Zhenjun rescued his rebellious disciple and cleansed her of the impurity of the blood she had shed, but he could only temporarily forestall her death.

The Posthumous Inclusion of the White Snake in Chen Jinggu’s Cult

Temporarily preserved by her master, Chen Jinggu pursued the head of the White Snake, whose incomplete body (a frequent trait of demons) reduced her mobility, thereby making it impossible for her to escape. Chen Jinggu climbed astride the head and used her own magic to bring both the snake and herself to Linshui Palace in Gutian, where they died reunited in this chimerical form. After her death, Chen Jinggu returned in spirit to Mount Lü to finally learn from her master the ritual arts of childbirth that she had disdained, and the lack of which was linked to her bloody death. Her body was laid out in majesty, mummified and lacquered by a famous artist in Linshui Palace, which became her temple.¹⁰ She thus assumed her protective role as goddess, with the head of the White Snake enclosed in a small cavity that can still be seen under Chen Jinggu’s seat. The goddess and the demon were thus indissolubly joined in the cultic image.

Major Themes

The pairing of the goddess and the demon is not merely a function of the narrative of The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons, but also deeply embedded in the structures of late imperial Chinese religion and society. Most divinities in this period were not transcendent beings, but humans who had suffered a violent, premature death that blocked their routine incorporation into the normative role of ancestor. As a consequence, they were spirits that could become malevolent, demonic powers unless they were domesticated through being offered sacrifices in a temple cult. In the case of Chen Jinggu, this threat was intensified by the fact that her death ultimately resulted from her lifelong attempts to avoid marriage and then the pollution of childbirth, which were the defining roles of women in this society.

This parallel of the divine and the demonic is carried forward in numerous aspects of the story. Thus the sworn sisterhood gathered by Chen Jinggu is composed of repentant demons and human women who ultimately joined in her pantheon through suicide. As her pantheon they trace out the dangers of childbirth and the diseases and crises of childhood that menace the conventional life path. Again, the emergence of her cult narrated in the novel creates a sacred geography of Fujian marked out by the taming and incorporation of demonic powers. Finally, the story also hints at an alchemical reading in which the female body, as a cosmic mandala and microcosm of the universe, transforms the threatening powers of ritual pollution into the fertility of lineage and state.

The Bad Death

People who died violently before the end of their allotted life spans remained bound to the world and, depending on how they were treated, could become demons or deities. Because she received sacrifice from communities in Fujian, Chen Jinggu became a goddess—specifically, the protector of women in the process of pregnancy and childbirth, even though she had adamantly refused marriage and motherhood. This seeming paradox is tied to the nature of a bad death that leads to divinization: one is made a deity for the failure that brought about one’s death, one’s sin as defined by social orthodoxy.¹¹ Chen Jinggu’s behavior had entailed defying her Daoist master, who tried to teach her the secrets of maternity, and rebelling against the precepts of filial piety to her own parents and to the lineage of the man she was finally forced to marry.

The deviant aspect of her nature is symbolized in the establishment of her temple, the Linshui Palace at Gutian (Song dynasty), on the site of the White Snake’s grotto, where previously the demon had demanded an annual offering of children.¹² This spatial doubling of the goddess with the White Snake, and the veiled absorption of a cult of child sacrifice into one of child protection, shows how Chen Jinggu’s story follows the pattern of rebellious Chinese women mystics and warriors who were marginalized in a society where their only proper position was that of wife and mother, and who could be incorporated only through becoming goddesses.¹³

Goddesses, Demons, and the Roles of Women

This doubling of the goddess and the demon in both narrative and cult also expresses how the two of them escaped the normative roles assigned to women in late imperial China. In The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons, as in other celebrated accounts of the White Snake—such as The Precious Scroll of Thunder Peak (Leifeng baojuan)—she is characterized as being devoted to passionate love, even loving the victims she ultimately destroys. In pursuing her passions, this femme fatale destroys families, regions, and nearly the state before finally being eliminated.¹⁴ In the Record of a Journey to the Sea (Hai you ji), Guanyin stops Chen Jinggu from killing the White Snake, instead holding the demon prisoner in a punishment that echoes the immuring of Madame Bai—the White Snake’s human form—under Thunder Peak in the precious scroll cited above. In Chen Jinggu’s cult, the demon is symbolically interred beneath the goddess’s temple. Thus the savage, female sexuality embodied by the demon is ritually mastered by both the family and the state to incorporate its fertile energies.

Erring in the opposite direction, Chen Jinggu sought to devote her life to ritual asceticism and self-refinement, which required refusing the standard female roles of marriage and maternity. This led to her ruin and to her condemnation by orthodox society, whose rules concerning the place of women she had flouted. Thus, the ritual play The Biography of the Nurturess (Nainiang zhuan) depicts her case before the king of hell, Yanluo Wang, who—despite her master’s intercession on her behalf—condemns her betrayals of him and her family.¹⁵ As a marriage resister and self-abortionist, she could be co-opted by proper society only after her bad death, when she became a goddess who employed the arts she had refused in life to uphold the role of motherhood she had similarly sought to escape. The story thus dramatizes the tensions in the nature of women in a patrilineal society, which could be resolved only in mythic narrative and temple ritual—where social deviance could be mobilized to defend orthodoxy, and the bloody consequences of an abortion gone wrong could generate magic powers in defense of childbirth.

The Gathering of Her Sworn Sisters and Preservation of the State

The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons is also the story of the gathering of a community of women whom Chen Jinggu receives as her sworn sisters during her exorcisms in the kingdom of Min. These women themselves become masters of ritual magic, which they are taught by Chen Jinggu in her Linshui Palace. They are shamans (wu) and warriors (wu) who link maternity and ritual war under the guise of exorcisms. The two most important are Lin Jiuniang, the magician of the trigrams and the nine palaces, who captures the Ravine Demon under the Bridge of a Hundred Flowers; and Li Sanniang, who with the help of Chen Jinggu saves her father from the mirage of the Pure Land, which in reality was a carnivorous clam.

Along with Chen Jinggu, Lin Jiuniang and Li Sanniang form the triad of the Three Ladies, namesakes of a ritual tradition that served as a local version of the Mount Lü sect. This sect of the Three Ladies, whose statues sit in all her temples, was syncretically forged by grafting borrowings from different branches of Daoism and esoteric Buddhism onto a local shamanic or spirit medium substrate.¹⁶ The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons preserves embedded in its episodes many rituals of this sect still practiced today.

Other women accepted by Chen Jinggu were orphans or widows who wished to receive her teaching, or daughters of local officials of the kingdom of Min who preferred to join this ritual community of women rather than the royal harem. Each has a role as protector of an aspect of maternity or childhood, and above all as healers of childhood diseases. A major example is Miss Jiang (also called Tigress Jiang or Tiger Courage Jiang because of her demonic tiger nature), who protects against smallpox and other eruptive illnesses of childhood that before the age of seven expel the poisons of the womb (taidu).¹⁷ The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons describes the relationship of these sworn sisters in detail, as well as the ritual, comparable to a marriage rite, that joins them.¹⁸ This swearing of elective sisterhood is particularly significant in the case of Miss Jiang, since the ritual links not only Chen Jinggu and Miss Jiang, but also their two ritual traditions: the Mount Lü and the Mount Li sects.¹⁹

This community also received repentant demons, such as the Rock Press Women (Shijia Furen), originally a rock on Blackstone Mountain at Fuzhou split by lightning into two pieces. Absorbing the vital energies of the goddess of the moon, they cultivated their life (yangsheng) to take on human form. However, lacking a master to guide them, they engaged in deviant practices, pressing to death those who entered their grotto, until Chen Jinggu made them her disciples. Later they were deified, and until recently a temple was dedicated to them at Blackstone Mountain, where people entrusted their children to them for protection. These and other demons incorporated into Chen Jinggu’s ritual community and temple reiterate the theme of pairing the goddess and the demon snake that was discussed above. Of course, there were also demons who were incapable of repentance, and hence consigned to destruction at the hands of Chen Jinggu and her followers.²⁰

The thirty-six royal consorts given to Chen Jinggu by the king also formed part of her community, and they figure in her temple as statues surrounded by children. Each is identified by a tablet with her name and place of origin. Together, they make visible a map of the cult of Chen Jinggu as the religious structure of the kingdom of Min. The other sworn sisters who made up Chen Jinggu’s ritual community are also situated in space, and are thereby instrumental in creating a sacred landscape.²¹

Ritually Taming the Landscape of Min

The text’s version of forging this sacred landscape differs from other accounts of the goddess. Thus while the Hai you ji dramatizes her elimination of the old cults of Min, especially those involving snakes, The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons portrays her expulsion of vampiric demons who nourished their lives in a deviant manner, such as the Rock Press Women discussed above. Quelling these demons entailed taming a female sexuality that challenged motherhood and the lineage, so Chen Jinggu’s battles with demons pitted the maternal role against the erotic female driven by her sexual urges, as in the case of the White Snake. This taming of aberrant sexuality also targets male demons, as in the castration of a monkey demon and the aforementioned sacrifice of the Ravine Demon at the Bridge of a Hundred Flowers. This link between taming demons and domesticating landscape is also indicated by the fact that most of the battles take place in the mountains or on the waters that mark the limits of civilization.

The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons is also unique among accounts of Chen Jinggu in that its ritual landscape dramatizes both sharing among the diverse ritual traditions of the region and conflicts between them. The Mount Lü (or Three Ladies) sect is under the mastery of Xu Zhenjun, who transmits to Chen Jinggu the rituals of Mount Lü, especially those of the Five Thunders and the dance on the stars of the Northern Dipper, with which she performs the ritual for rain. She also leads the spirit army of the Five Thunders, of which Xu Zhenjun is again the master. This ritual technique is also carried out, in its alchemical mode, within the body. At various points people solemnize an oath by swearing it on the Five Thunders. Moreover, some episodes evoke the aforementioned mandala of the womb, which figured both in tantric Buddhism and in rites of the Northern Dipper.²²

Relations between ritual traditions are also dramatized by introducing characters from rival traditions. Thus in The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons Chen Jinggu is the cousin of the historically attested Daoist master Chen Shouyuan. He was in the Zhengyi tradition of the celestial masters, which was close to the tradition of the Heart of Heaven (Tianxin Zhengfa).²³ Chen Jinggu’s links to this tradition are demonstrated by the fact that she heals and exorcises by means of talismans, herbal potions, and magic formulas, all in the manner of the Heart of Heaven. She also performs rites of salvation through refinement or transmutation (liandu): for her child; for a Madame Yao who died in childbirth; and for a Madame Shen, a suicide, whose soul she tried to recover (huanhun). This is likewise a familiar practice in the tradition of the Heart of Heaven.

In contrast, Chen Jinggu is the sworn enemy of Yuan Guangzhi, an adept of the sinister way, the tradition of Mount Mao.²⁴ Significantly, in the Hai you ji it is the White Snake Demon who is admitted to Mount Mao.²⁵ Yuan Guangzhi, returning from his apprenticeship at Mount Mao, falls into the lascivious trap of Mengyü, the Butterfly Demon, born of a painting by the prince of Teng. Chen Jinggu fights against them in a battle of magic, with Chen Jinggu surrounded by all her sworn sisters, who have been transformed into female soldiers. This battle thus dramatizes the rivalry between their respective ritual traditions.

Throughout the text there is also a slippage between Daoism of all traditions and forms of Buddhism. Chen Jinggu, as a drop of Guanyin’s blood, is an emanation of the bodhisattva, and thus linked to the diverse Buddhist traditions that invoked the patronage of this figure. But as noted above, she is also the disciple of Xu Zhenjun and the Mount Lü sect. Moreover, the presence in her temple of the Lady of the Birth Register links her to the ritual practices of the Old Mother of Mount Li (i.e., the teacher of Miss Jiang), and through this woman to the ancient goddess Xi Wangmu (Queen Mother of the West), who dates back to the preimperial era and had become a high divinity of Daoism.

The Female Body as Cosmic Mandala

There is also an alchemical reading of Chen Jinggu’s story, in which the female, maternal body becomes a cosmic mandala of the trigrams.²⁶ These figure at the origin of the Yijing (give birth to the ten thousand created things) and are inscribed on the womb of every woman. The birth chamber in Chen Jinggu’s disguised home became the entire universe, covered by a lake of lotuses, the Buddhist symbol of purity and enlightenment. This image of the birth chamber as a realm of purity contradicts the customary representation in Buddhism and Chinese popular religion of the birth process, with its profusion of blood, as a deeply polluting event that required extensive cleansing through rituals. However, in The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons, the master of Mount Lü, Xu Zhenjun, sees in these polluting forces a marvelous benefit. This expresses an idea shared by popular Buddhism and a version of filial piety articulated in the Canon of Women (Nüren jing), which was composed through spirit medium writing and claimed to transmit the instructions of Guanyin to her followers.²⁷ The relation between the maternal matrix of the womb and the cosmic matrix, the Northern Dipper, is clearly established when Chen Jinggu performs the ritual of activating the constellation (xing beidou). At different points in the text she dances on the stars of the Dipper to carry out the ritual for rain, to combat an evil monk in a struggle over arranging the same trigrams that figured in the womb, and to lead the spirit soldiers of the Five Camps arranged in a snake formation, which again represented the arrayed trigrams.

The Ravine Demon called himself brother Kui when he stole Chen Jinggu’s fetus, thereby invoking the demon of this cosmic matrix, the Northern Dipper, whose name is also Kui.²⁸ He was finally captured by Lin Jiuniang, the magician of the trigrams who mastered the heavenly web (tianluo), represented in the story by her long hair. Following a trial by Chen Jinggu after her death, he was sacrificed and dismembered for his crimes on the Bridge of a Hundred Flowers, the place of every birth that she oversees in her role as a goddess. The thirty-six consorts are projected on this same cosmic cloth, becoming masters of the time of pregnancy who, in the rituals of Chen Jinggu’s temple, can untie children’s embryonic knots (jiejie) that embody predestined childhood diseases, thereby helping children get through the passes (guan) that mark the dangerous moments in the process of maturation.²⁹ These consorts also correspond to the thirty-six stars (gang) that surround the Big Dipper and are responsible for activating the cosmic matrix.

The Emergence of the Cult and Its Canonization

In the classical manner, the cult of the Lady of Linshui was consecrated after Chen Jinggu’s bad death, when her son was aborted and then devoured during her ritual dance. This emergence of a cult from a bad death depends on the existence of a community that recognizes the merits of the deceased, to whom it will make offerings that sustain the recipient as a divinity. Here, the community comprised women and children. The pantheon surrounding the goddess also consisted of women, having been formed by the post-death reunion of the sworn sisters who killed themselves upon learning of Chen Jinggu’s death so that their souls could rejoin her and the royal consorts in the world of the dead.

As the base for the cult, Linshui Temple was built over the grotto of the White Snake. The White Snake thereby became the demon foundation of this temple, sacrificed on the domain of a new cult in the investiture of the demon (mingmo). Thus, at the central location of the new cult, the overlapping themes of domesticating women and mastering the landscape converged in the erection of a building where both the demon and the goddess found their place in the service of the society they had defied in life.

The state canonization of the cult—which in The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons is depicted as resulting from the initiative of the king of Min—was actually made official through inscription in the imperial Register of Sacrifices (between 1241 and 1253), as attested in the memoir of the scholar Zhang Yining.³⁰ As noted above, Chen Jinggu received many official titles, and up to the present day her cult continues to flourish in Fujian and Taiwan. It is also found in Zhejiang (Chen Shisi qizhuan), Hunan (Hai you ji), and even Vietnam, where it has been carried on by the Yao people and the San Diu (Shan You).³¹

Other Literature Featuring Chen Jinggu

The history of Chen Jinggu gave rise to different genres of stories. First are the novels (xiaoshuo), such as the Hai you ji (Ming dynasty), set in Hunan. Its text includes a masked theatrical Nuo ritual to exorcise the worn-out energies of the completed year.³² Second are the strange stories, such as The Strange Story of Chen Shisi (Chen Shisi qizhuan) set in Zhejiang, or certain chapters of the vast mythological canvas of The Legendary Records of the Capital of Min (Mindu bieji; Qing dynasty). In this work the history of Chen Jinggu merges with other histories of the present-day maritime province of Fujian, located in southeastern China.³³ Third are the retellings of local legends, such as those Shi Hongbao recounts in his Miscellaneous Notes on Min (Min zaji; 19th c.).³⁴ There are also plays for actors or puppets, staged during local festivals by the ritual masters (shigong or kuilei shi), which are punctuated by actual ritual sequences and are themselves considered to be rituals. They take place on the square in front of a temple, sometimes over the course of several days, and enact the powers of the goddess Chen Jinggu, in her role as the principal adept of the Mount Lü sect.³⁵ There are also sutras, such as The Sutra of the Three Nurturesses (Sannai jing) and The True Sutra of How Yulin Shunyi Aids in Giving Birth (Yulin shunyi dutuochan ruozhenjing), originating at the Gutian temple; and morality books (shanshu) that circulate among the believers. Finally, as in every local cult, the steles erected in front of the temples contain tales and images of the goddess and her cultic community provided by local histories and collections of the divinities’ stories.³⁶ Also employing a visual medium, the ritual masters (fashi) of the Mount Lü sect possess ritual paintings that show the whole pantheon and its relation to birth, death, and the initiation of adepts.³⁷

This teeming diversification of genres and texts, much like the episodic narration of The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons, vividly testifies to the vitality and protean nature of Chen Jinggu’s cult over the centuries. However, while it articulates basic characteristics of the society and religion that produced it, The Lady of Linshui Pacifies Demons remains a gripping narrative full of high drama and emotions. Most evident is the excitement produced by the repeated battles with demons. Similarly, twisting through the narrative are titillating accounts of the sexual passions that motivate so many of the actions of demons and humans alike. At the same time, the text contains many humorous accounts, primarily of domestic affairs, as in the tales of Chen Jinggu’s thwarted wedding, the deluded follies of the elderly relatives who will fall prey to the Clam Fiend, or the series of blunders by Chen Jinggu’s mother that strip away all the illusions guarding her daughter’s fetus. Finally, one of the most prominent emotions is the pathos elicited by the central event—Chen Jinggu’s final dance to the death atop the water—and more broadly all the accounts of brutal childbirths and of violent deaths that serve to define the human condition. Ultimately this richness of incidents and passions creates a text that should best be read as a novel.

CHAPTER 1

Wang Yanbin Builds Luoyang Bridge / Duanming Scholar Cai Completes the Work and Returns to the West

It is said that in the Tang dynasty, at the time that the Huang Chao rebellion threw everything into chaos, the ruler of Min, in Fuzhou, was a man surnamed Wang, whose given name was Shenzhi. His second son, Wang Yanbin, came to take up the office of prefect of Quanzhou Prefecture in Fujian. In his territory, at a distance of twenty-five li from the East Gate, there was a river called the Luoyang.¹ In The Ji Commandery Chronicle (Jijun zhi) there is a legend that when the High God of the Dark Heaven of the Northern Bourne (Beiji Xuantian Shangdi) attained incarnation as a buddha, he cut open his belly and threw his entrails into this river. His entrails turned into two monsters, a turtle and a snake; the turtle turned into a ferryboat and the snake its steersman.² All the time, under the pretext of ferrying passengers across the river, they carried them to the middle of the river, overturned the boat, and devoured all the traveling merchants. When Prefect Wang Yanbin heard of this, he was so troubled that he wanted to build a bridge as a way to save people. But Luoyang River was so deep as to be bottomless, and the tidal current was swift, making it difficult to bring the work to completion; the ends of the bridge were always washed away, so that it could not be completed. Time and again the gold and silver in the state treasury were exhausted, to the tune of a hundred million thousand cash. He was at his wits’ end.

At that time the Dragon King of the Four Seas went to wish Guanyin, the Buddha of the South Sea, a long life. She was sitting on a lotus pedestal in the Purple Bamboo Grove.³ Gazing into the distance with her eye of wisdom she saw a trail of demonic vapor rising into the clouds.⁴ She asked, What is this called?

The Dragon King replied, It is a demonic vapor.

Before he had finished speaking, there was a flash, and the Dragon King of the South Seas, Aolian, reported to the Buddha, Now, on Luoyang River, there are two monsters: a turtle and a snake. On the river they have harmed many living beings. Prefect Wang Yanbin wants to find a way to save travelers, and he is supervising the construction of Luoyang Bridge in order to benefit the coming and going of merchants, so that they can avoid being harmed by these two monsters. But the tidal current is turbulent, and the violent waves are difficult to hold back, so that the bases of the pillars never reach solid ground. The amount of labor has been colossal, and considerable wealth has been spent.

Guanyin said, approvingly, "It’s wonderful that even in the mortal world there is this sort of good person who desires a way to save the common people! As Prefect Wang is an ordinary mortal, how could he achieve