The Monkey Spirit

West of Qingtang Village stood the abandoned Lin clan hall, lent by the villagers for a village school. The teacher, Zhou Jingzhi, a failed old examinee, drilled seven or eight schoolboys through the Thousand-Character Classic. Outside leaned an ancient banyan, its roots dangling, where macaques often roosted. Among them was an old one, white-furred on the brow, whom the boys called White-Brow.

White-Brow came at first only for the peanuts and dried persimmons on the altar. Then he noticed the boys sitting upright, swaying their heads in recitation, and found it amusing; he took to crouching by the window-lattice to listen. Spring passed into autumn, and more than three years went by. The boys' voices he heard clear; when they practiced their characters, he took a twig and traced them in the dirt, stroke by stroke, until they came out seven or eight parts in ten true.

Master Zhou did not know at first. One day after dismissal, a boy named A-shuan left his writing exercise on the desk — he had written the character 休 (rest) wrong, as 体 (body). The next morning the paper lay neat by the inkstone, the mistake corrected in pale ink: the stroke was crooked, like a child's hand, yet not A-shuan's. Zhou suspected a scholar had visited by night, and watched in secret.

What he saw was White-Brow lowering himself tail-first from the beam, taking A-shuan's forgotten brush, dipping it in the leftover ink, and wobbling out the three characters "White-Brow knows" on a scrap of paper — then, afraid of being seen, seizing the brush and bolting up the banyan. Zhou was startled, then laughed, and from then on kept an extra bowl of water and a brush under the window.

After that White-Brow helped in small ways. East of the village lived blind old Widow Wang; her son had gone to the county seat to learn the sauce-shop trade, and sent a letter home every half-year. The widow could not see, and must ask others to read it. White-Brow would often squat on her stone mortar, and when the letter-carrier had finished reading, he would go to the hall for a brush and write the letter's gist in the sand — "Your son is well, do not worry" — so she could feel the strokes and know. She would run her fingers over them and smile. "This monkey," she said, "is tenderer than men."

The next year, in the sixth month, the rains came without end. White-Brow stopped coming to the hall, and was seen instead running along the cliff-edge, clawing at bark, sniffing the stone cracks. The back hill was a slanting wall, soaked through, already showing fine fissures. White-Brow returned to the village, found Master Zhou's door ajar, slipped inside, and dipped a brush deep in thick ink to write two characters on the door-panel — "Flee." The ink ran; the monkey's claw-marks were still there.

Zhou saw the characters and was terrified; he called the villagers together and pointed to the crack on the cliff. The people half-doubted, yet the ink characters were plain enough, and they helped the old and young into the hall. At the second watch that night came a great crash: half the cliff-face fell, square on the old houses at the village mouth. No one was hurt.

When the rain stopped, White-Brow came again, and took his old place at the window to listen. The villagers set out a plate of fresh peaches and a new brush before the hall. Zhou sighed: "A beast masters letters and knows to use what it learned to save men; of those who read yet cannot save, there are many."

The Chronicler says: White-Brow's wonder lies not in speech but in use. Men receive the sages' books and stand by when peril comes — to what end their literacy? The monkey knew that the two characters "Flee" were worth a whole village's lives; the scholar reads ten thousand scrolls and at the crisis is blank — is that not a shame?