“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”
W. H. Auden
THE great Buddhist divinities of China have marked an austere passage through history. Arhats of immense dignity—severe gods of wisdom—left sacred texts; patriarchs founded grand temple complexes so that their doctrines might live; and martyred men and women sacrificed their own limbs as signs of devotion. These lions of the faith are the saints of Buddhism, famed for their miracle tales. But Ji Gong—the saint in this book—is not that saint; and that is not his story. Ji Gong is a god of the streets—a drinker, a trickster, a city magician who lives among shopkeepers and traveling merchants, among the impoverished scholars, street hustlers and courtesan-prostitutes, all with survival tales and hard-luck stories. He is their exorcist, their avenger; he is a streetwise hero, the common man’s patron saint.
Ji Gong was born in Hangzhou, perhaps in the year 1130, during the Song Dynasty (960–1279). However, only one Song Dynasty biographer, Chan Master Jujian, found him worthy of mention, and the Master’s account is mercifully short.1 Lord Ji studied at the great Lingyin Monastery, an immense temple compound that still ranges solemnly up the steep hills above Hangzhou. The Chan masters of the temple instructed him in the infamously harsh practices of their sect, but failed; the young monk, following in the steps of other great ne’er-do-wells and holy fools of Chinese religions, managed the one distinct accomplishment revealed in this account: he got himself fired. He left the monastery, became a wanderer with hardly a proper jacket to wear, and achieved renown—not in the temples, but in the wine shops.
If this were the only version of this monk’s life, he would have vanished, as did the thousands, perhaps millions, of other lowly disciples; but Ji Gong’s story was hijacked. It was claimed by generations of city dwellers—900 years of entertainers and the entertained—who seized on this tale of defiance and trickster humor among the Hangzhou taverns, giving the simple account both life and bulk. Indeed, the full might and weight of the storyteller profession—its multiple clans and guilds, its steely membership practices, and its decades of training starting in childhood—was thrown behind the lore of Ji Gong. This ignominious monk assumed center stage in the cycle of accounts; accounts that multiplied and expanded as city life in China expanded. Later chroniclers gave him many names: Ji of the Dao, the Living Buddha, the Hidden Recluse of the Qiantang Lake, the Chan Master, The Drunken Arhat, Elder Brother Square Circle, Abbot Ji, and his most familiar and suitable rubric: Crazy Ji.
The author of our version, Guo Xiaoting, lived in the late 1800s and into the twentieth century, coming happily to the tales almost a millennium after Ji Gong lived. Guo Xiaoting wrote The Complete Tales of Lord Ji in the 1890s, editing the raft of material from popular performances, mimicking in some measure the storyteller’s gimmicks and voice. Nor was Guo Xiaoting embarrassed about his lowly sources. For another of his works, he bragged that the long performances of storytellers—two-month stagings were not unusual—were his source.2 And although many of these sorts of claims are specious—an attempt by intellectuals to evade the charge of producing frothy literatures—this one seems to have been true. Ji Gong does, in fact, reveal the world of the Beijing storyteller as the century changed in 1900: where restaurants and theaters offered the tales, and where Guo Xiaoting—in retirement—earned a living.
Thus, though the original tale and early versions of Ji Gong tell of Hangzhou life, where the famous Lingyin Monastery presides, the 900-years-later version—our version—though set in Hangzhou, has the look, smells, and—above all—sounds of Beijing. Within Guo Xiaoting’s tale and John Shaw’s translation, not only does the monk Ji Gong emerge, but so also do the lives and places of Guo Xiaoting’s own world. We see the alleyways and temple grounds, the lowlife and high ambitions of the men and women of China of the late 1800s and early 1900s, a curbside capsule of the late Qing Dynasty as it teetered on the brink of collapse.
Six years after Guo Xiaoting published a second installment of the Ji Gong tales, the Outer City District Police for the city of Beijing compiled a survey.3 In 1906 the “First Statistical Survey of the Security Administration” (Jingshi waicheng xunjing zongting diyici tongjishu 京師 外城 巡警 總廳 第一次統計書) reported that there were 347 restaurants, 308 courtesan-entertainer halls, 301 inns, 246 teahouses (where operas were performed), and 699 opium dens: all in a single district of Beijing. These were not the only place where people gathered. Temple complexes housed thousands of religious clerics and disciples and offered holiday fairs and popular performances. Grand compounds served the thousands of visiting merchants; they used the extensive banking institutions4 to monitor their investments. Businesses of all levels dominated the streets of Beijing; at the turn of the century, when Ji Gong was published, there were over 25,000 commercial establishments.5 Of course, the poor numbered in the thousands: soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and programs for temporary employment helped some.6 The police did not simply observe this activity; Beijing was the most policed city in the world. A network of officers supervised the city through the night in a series of watchmen’s contacts. “The beating of drums, bells, and bamboo boards enabled policemen to be part of a sweep through the streets and lanes … part of an elaborate choreographed system … that kept officers always within earshot of each other.”7 Members of the British Macartney mission in 1793 complained of being kept awake by the continual clapping and clopping.8
This was a city of size and scale. Foreigners were astounded; Father Pierre-Martial Cibot thought Beijing “the most peopled in the universe.”9 The estimates varied from one to three million inhabitants, depending on the inclusion of the extensive suburbs. The inns and restaurants, so carefully recorded by security officials, reflected this scale. One restaurant, a “publick house” visited by the Scotsman John Bell, was “the largest of that sort I ever saw; and could easily contain six or eight hundred people. The roof was supported by two rows of wooden pillars … the great part was filled with long tables, having benches, on each side, for the accommodation of the company.”10 Traders, artisans, factory workers, bosses and laborers, and the institutions—from temple compounds to marketplaces, big and small—shaped the nature of Beijing. This was a city with a city ecology: a city that had its own order and rhythm, with thriving subcultures of interlocking occupations. To be sure, the Manchu dominated the capital—laws were becoming increasingly strict on separation of races—but city patterns held the contours of life in Beijing.
Thus for Guo Xiaoting’s audience, The Complete Tales of Lord Ji presents a tour of the places, sounds, and customs of Beijing on the brink of the twentieth century. Readers would have been quick to hear the Beijing slang; shopkeepers lived and worked in and among the neighborhood hutong (the Beijing term for alley); a sly Daoist monk would be likely to yuan (Beijing slang for “cheat,” a word that is at the heart of many plot twists). Red fruit (hongguo)—sweetened hawthorn fruit—was a Beijing snack available in the novel; and Beijing buildings, not the palaces or temples, but the sihefang—courtyard homes—sheltered the novel’s residents.11 If the city sights and sounds matched the Beijing cityscape, so did the characters. Some were generic city dwellers, but some were clearly northerners familiar to a nineteenth-century reader. Pipe smokers greeted one another in teahouses; pipe smoking was a popular diversion never seen in Hangzhou of the Song Dynasty.12 A typical Beijing entertainer—the pingshu performer—makes his appearance in the novel. This artist was a typical northern “clapper-style” teller of rough-and-tumble tales of heroes and bandits.13 And if the citizens of The Complete Tales were northerners, they were also plain people. A few rich and mighty sit on the narrative outskirts—usually to threaten, occasionally to reward; but workaday Beijing is the setting, and Beijing citizens the cast.
Beijing is clearly the common man’s city. Though great walled compounds dominated old Beijing,
