The Bamboo Spirit

A young scholar named Lin Jizhi, a native of Kuaiji, had been poor since his father's death and could not support himself; with no means to lodge in town for the provincial examinations, he rented the western ruin of a fallen estate. The gardens had belonged to some official family, laid waste by war; the pavilions leaned and rotted, moss crept over the stone paths, and pine sprouted from the broken eaves. Only in the western corner stood a clump of old bamboo, ancient beyond telling, every stalk still green, unwithered by frost, its roots and nodes knotted and tangled like the sinews of an old man. When Lin first came, the weeds stood taller than a man, and only the wind through the bamboo tips answered him with a cool, ringing sound like human speech. He wondered at it, but having nowhere else to go, he made his peace with the place.

Lin took three small rooms, barely keeping out the rain. A ragged curtain hung for a door; worn floss served for a pillow. Each night he lit a lamp and copied his books, his brush thickening in the cold, working often until the third watch. In the garden the insects ticked; the bamboo cast its shadow through the moon, and on his window made a sound like shattered jade. Being poor, he had no charcoal, and on winter nights the inkstone froze again and again; he breathed on his hands to warm them, his ten fingers red, yet would not stop. The only coat he owned was patched seven or eight times; on cold nights he sat hugging the bamboo, and laughed to himself: "This gentleman cannot speak, but he is better company than the bowing and scraping of the world."

The strangeness began on the sixteenth of the ninth month. Lin woke to find his desk cleared of dust, and the unfinished pages someone had continued in a neat, clear hand — not his own. At first he thought some neighbor's boy at mischief, yet the place was desolate, and no one lived near. Three days later it happened again: the inkstone freshly wiped, the brush racked in order, and the tea upon the table still warm. That night he feigned sleep, and through a sleeve watched the candle's dim light.

At the second watch a rustling came from among the bamboo. Presently a woman stepped from the stalks, dressed all in green, the color of a new shoot breaking its sheath; her face was calm, but her brows held a kind of frost. She came to the desk without a word, took a worn broom and swept the dust from him, then sat by the lamp and went on copying his unfinished volume with his brush. Her wrist was light; the spacing fell as if long practiced. Lin held his breath. The room grew cool — not wind, not dew, but the breath of bamboo, stealing into him, and washing clean the fret of his heart. From then on she came every night, to sweep, to trim the lamp, to finish his copying; when done she stood beneath the bamboo and watched him read, a look of pity in her eyes, yet never a word.

One night Lin was trapped by a knotty passage in the Spring and Autumn Annals, sitting vainly until the cock crowed, his vermilion brush circling and blotting the page until the paper wore thin. The woman suddenly touched one spot on the scroll with a finger, then sat by the lamp and copied that passage out again beside it in tiny, fine script, adding a few notes drawn from books Lin had never read. Lin read them and the puzzle dissolved like ice. He began to suspect that in some former life she had been a learned soul, who, rooted now in bamboo and stone, had buried her gifts in silence. Yet he dared not ask, lest the asking send her away and cast away this bond between them.

So it went for more than a month. When he ventured to speak to her, she only smiled and would not answer. One day, having little rice, Lin cooked but a single bowl and set half of it on the stone at the bamboo's root. In the morning the bowl was empty, and on the leaves beside the stone hung dew, round as strung pearls. He tasted it: faintly sweet, unlike ordinary dew. He thought to himself: this is the spirit of the bamboo, pitying my cold and coming to my aid, and repaying my one bowl of rice with clear dew. After that he always set aside his portion, and dared not forget.

When winter ended, the examinations drew near, and Lin must pack and leave. In his bundle were but one chest of worn clothes and a few old books; he could not but say farewell. On the eve before, through a fine drifting snow, the woman came to the lamp of her own will, no longer hiding. From her sleeve she drew a thing — a single joint of bamboo flute, the color of aged jade, its nodes traced with fine markings, naturally formed into seal-script lines, that rang cool when struck. She laid it on the desk and tapped it with a nail; a clear, piercing note rang out, and all the bamboo in the room answered, rustling as if in speech. She opened her lips and spoke for the first time: "You go now. Keep this flute. When the wind passes the old garden, perhaps you will hear the old sound."

Lin started, and asked her name and home. She only shook her head, pointed to the bamboo without, then to her heart, and said no more. Lin took the flute and bowed: "You kept me alive in my poverty — how can I repay you?" She smiled and swept her sleeve across the lamp; the flame wavered but did not go out, and she faded quietly into the bamboo, leaving only a faint scent of bamboo that lingered through the night.

At dawn the garden lay heavy in mist. Lin left, looking back three times at the clump; there was no trace of her, only the rice bowl of the night before, upturned on the stone, and beside it a single new shoot, barely an inch, breaking from the earth — like a bow of farewell. Lin wept, and loosened his collar to wrap the shoot and take it home.

After the examinations Lin did not pass. On his way home he detoured to the ruined garden. The pavilions had fallen further, but the bamboo stood unharmed, denser than before. When the wind passed, stalk rubbed against stalk, as if keeping a measure. Lin took out the flute and blew; at first no tune came, then the wind answered the flute, and the whole garden filled with a clear music, plaintive and yearning, now seeming to continue, now to cease. He stood beneath the bamboo and understood at last: the one who had finished his copying by lamplight, who had repaid his rice upon the stone — it was this lord of the bamboo. He lingered in sorrow; the flute fell silent and the wind too, yet the dew still hung at the leaf-tips, like a tear that would not fall.

Ever after, on clear and windy days, those who passed the garden often heard a flute among the bamboo, and seeking its source found nothing. The villagers said: after Lin left, the bamboo too became a spirit, and nightly blew for the far-traveling man. The sound was not sad, and yet those who heard it were moved to grief. Once a boy broke off a shoot; that night the wind rose like a storm and the flute split the stone, and the boy fell into fits — and after that none dared harm the bamboo.

The Chronicler remarks: A bamboo keeps its node as a gentleman keeps his integrity. Lin was a poor man's son, who did not pity himself in his want, and the lord of bamboo pitied him, brushing away the dust and copying his books, making no distinction of kind between man and spirit. The flute at parting was no gift, but a kept sound, to keep the traveller company. The friends of this world drink together in fortune and flee in trouble; who is like this speechless bamboo, that still sounds the old note when the wind passes? Alas — those who feel need not take a form, and those who take a form may feel nothing at all.