Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies (Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library) (10 page)

A farmer came from the country to sell his pears in the market. They were juicy and fragrant, and his sales were booming, when a Taoist priest wearing tattered scarves and coarse cotton clothes appeared at the wagon and begged for some fruit. The farmer shooed him away, but he refused to leave. The farmer’s voice rose until he was screaming and cursing.

“Your wagon holds hundreds of pears,” said the priest, “and I ask for only one. That’s no great loss, sir; why get so angry?”

The crowd tried to persuade the farmer to part with a bruised pear and be rid of the man, but the farmer indignantly refused. At last a market guard saw that the uproar was getting out of hand and put up a few coins for a piece of fruit to throw to the priest.

Hands clasped above his head, the priest thanked the guard. Then he turned to the crowd and said, “We who have left the world find man’s greed hard to understand. Let me offer some choice pears to all you good customers.”

“Now that you have your pear,” someone said, “why don’t you eat it yourself?”

“All I needed was a seed for planting,” replied the priest. And holding the fruit in both hands, he gobbled it up. Then he took the little shovel that he carried on his back and dug several inches into the ground. He placed the seed in the hole and covered it with earth.

The priest called for hot water, and a bystander with a taste for
mischief fetched some from a nearby shop. The priest poured the water over the seed he had planted. Every eye was now on him.

Behold! a tiny shoot appeared. Steadily it increased in size until it became a full-grown tree, with twigs and leaves in unruly profusion. In a flash it burst into bloom and then into fruit. Masses of large, luscious pears filled its branches.

The priest turned to the tree, plucked the pears, and began presenting them to the onlookers. In a short while the fruit was gone. Then with his shovel the priest started to chop the tree. “Teng! Teng!” the blows rang out in the air until finally the tree fell. Taking the upper part of the tree onto his shoulders, the priest departed with a relaxed gait and untroubled air.

During all this the farmer had been part of the crowd, gaping with outstretched neck and forgetting his business. But when the priest departed the farmer noticed that his wagon was empty. And then the suspicion came to him that it was his own pears which had been presented to the crowd. Looking more carefully, he saw that a handle had been chopped off the wagon. In vexation he searched until he found it lying discarded at the foot of a wall. And now he realized that the pear tree he had seen cut down was the handle of his wagon.

Of the priest there was no sign at all, but the marketplace was in an uproar of laughter.

—
P’u Sung-ling

The temple named after Lady Wang is in a nook of the Hofu hills, which stand some ten miles to the west of my own county. When she lived is no longer known, but the elders have passed down the following story.

The old woman made her living brewing wine. Once when a Taoist priest stayed at her home, she served him freely—giving him as much to drink as he asked for. Eventually he drank several hundred jars without paying, but the old woman never mentioned it.

Then one day the priest said to the woman, “I have been drinking your wine without having the money to pay you, but allow me, if you would, to dig a well for you.” He set to and constructed the well, and a stream of the purest wine gushed forth. “This is to repay you,” said the priest. And he went his way.

After that Lady Wang no longer brewed wine; she simply took what flowed from the well to satisfy her customers. And since it was far finer than her previous brews, customers came in droves. Within three years she earned tens of thousands of coppers, and her household became wealthy.

Unexpectedly the Taoist priest returned. The old woman thanked him profoundly. “Was the wine satisfactory?” asked the priest. “Good enough,” replied the woman, “but it left no dregs to feed my pigs.” The priest smiled and wrote these lines on the wall:

Then he left, and the well ran dry.

—
Chiang Ying-k’e

Many, many years ago there was a man of the land of Ch’i who had a great passion for gold. One day at the crack of dawn he went to the market—straight to the gold dealers’ stalls, where he snatched some gold and ran. The market guards soon caught him. “With so many people around, how did you expect to get away with it?” a guard asked.

“When I took it,” he replied, “I saw only the gold, not the people.”

—
Lieh Tzu

A farmer of Sung saw a rabbit dash into a tree trunk standing in the middle of his field. The rabbit broke its neck and died. From that day, the farmer left his plowing and kept watch by the tree trunk in hopes of getting another rabbit. The farmer never got another rabbit, but he did become the laughingstock of Sung.

—
Han Fei Tzu

There was a man of Cheng who was going to buy himself shoes. First he measured his foot; then he put the measurements away. When he got to the market he discovered that he had left them behind. After he found the shoes he wanted, he went home to fetch the measurements; but the marketplace was closed when he returned, and he never got his shoes. Someone asked him, “Why didn’t you use your own foot?” “I trusted the measurements more than my foot,” he replied.

—
Han Fei Tzu

A man whose axe was missing suspected his neighbor’s son. The boy walked like a thief, looked like a thief, and spoke like a thief. But the man found his axe while he was digging in the valley, and the next time he saw his neighbor’s son, the boy walked, looked, and spoke like any other child.

—
Lieh Tzu

A man of Ch’u in charge of sacrifices to the gods gave his assistants a goblet of wine. One apprentice said to the others, “This isn’t enough for all of us. Let’s each draw a snake in the dirt, and the one who finishes first can drink the wine.” They agreed and began drawing. The first to finish his snake reached for the goblet and was about to drink. But as he held the wine in his left hand, his right hand kept on drawing. “I can make feet for it,” he said. Before he was done, another man finished drawing and snatched the goblet, saying, “No snake has feet.” And he drank up the wine.

—
Chan Kuo Ts’e