The Inkstone's Servant

Fang Shouzhuo was a poor scholar of the Wu region. Orphaned young and without means, he nonetheless loved all things old. He would wander the cold stalls of the marketplace, picking through rags and rubble for broken steles, torn scrolls, and worn inkstones; though his purse was empty, he would pawn his clothes to buy them. An old neighbor woman laughed at him: "Foolish boy, starvation is at your door, and still you fiddle with such useless things!" Shouzhuo only smiled and said nothing.

In the autumn of the year Yimao, the rains fell for ten days without cease. Shouzhuo lodged in a ruined temple west of the city; the window paper was half torn, and the wind whistled through like a cry. When the firewood gave out he roasted taro; when the rice ran dry he drank water—yet with a worn brush in hand he went on chanting his poems. One evening in the marketplace he found a broken inkstone abandoned beneath an eave, its stone the color of a purple liver, with a few golden flecks hidden on its back, and when struck it rang clear. The peddler asked ten coppers; Shouzhuo pawned his old cloak and carried the stone home.

Back home he washed the stone and ground ink by the lamp. The ink gave off a cold, secluded fragrance, like the last smoke of a pine fire; the stone was warm and smooth to the hand, with a faint heat unlike common inkstones. Shouzhuo took it to heart and sat with it night after night, as with a true friend.

That night the guttering candle was nearly spent, and Shouzhuo sat down to compose a letter to the prefect. He poured cold water and began to grind his ink. As the ink-stick entered the well, he felt a faint warmth rise from the stone's heart; the pool rippled and slowly gathered into the shape of a small child—clad in black, no taller than a foot, with a thin, refined face, standing upon the ink yet never wet. The child bowed and said: "I am the ink-spirit lodged within this stone. My surname is Xuan, my name Nu. Seeing that you love the old and are poor, and that your brush has a backbone, I have come to follow you." Shouzhuo stared in wonder; in the sputtering candlelight, faint pine-soot patterns seemed to move upon the child's robe. Asked why he had chosen him, the spirit answered: "The spirit of ink is born of a man's sincerity. Those who wield the brush today trade their writing for rice and their words for rank; their pens crawl with flattery, and I am ashamed to serve them. You, in ragged clothes and an empty belly, yet write without the least carelessness—you are a true talent, and so I stay."

After that, whenever Shouzhuo shaped a thought, Xuan Nu would float upon the inkstone and lay out the essay's scaffold in characters of ink; Shouzhuo's brush took them up, and the writing seemed composed long beforehand. One night, puzzling over the river works with no thread to follow, Xuan Nu suddenly wrote upon the pool the four characters 'to dredge is less than to guide,' glowing like stars. Shouzhuo woke as if from a dream and poured forth his method of dividing the flow and easing the flood—thousands of words finished in a single night. He sent in his prefectural exam discourse on taming the river; the examiner, unfolding the scroll, struck the table in admiration and said, "Here is a man in a mean lane!" and placed him first. Shouzhuo rejoiced and poured clear water as a toast to Xuan Nu. The spirit drew in his sleeves and said: "What delights you today is fame; what will delight you tomorrow, I fear, will not be fame." Shouzhuo did not grasp his meaning.

The next spring, recommended for office, Shouzhuo was made a constable in the west of Zhejiang. At first, in his post, he still wore cloth and ate plainly, working at his cases by night as he had once under the lamp. But in time he saw his superiors ride in painted carriages, resplendent, while subordinates scurried and bowed, and his heart secretly coveted it. First he learned to read their faces and please them; then he began to sell what was right and bend the law: in a dispute over irrigation fields he ruled for the rich against the villagers; when a grain escort sought a fault, he flogged the innocent to curry favor. For a superior's birthday he penned a paired, ornamental ode, gilded and garish, and sold his writing for dozens of strings of cash. Again and again Xuan Nu rose upon the pool, his face wan, and warned: "Your old writing had blood in every stroke; your new writing has a price on every stroke. Ink will not be the coin for flattered tombs, nor will this stone suffer to be a sycophant's field." Shouzhuo flew into a rage: "What does a rotten pedant know of the world!" From then on, as he ground his ink, the color grew pale, and the image in the pool changed too: where once it mirrored a poor student by a single lamp, now it mirrored a man in full official dress, a greasy complacency floating about his brows.

More than a year passed. When his superior was promoted inward, Shouzhuo set about drafting a congratulatory letter. He ground his ink in haste—but the well was dry as water, leaving not a trace. He called Xuan Nu; there was only silence. In anger Shouzhuo poured on boiling water, and from the stone came a faint voice, like weeping: "You now wear rank and cap; you are no longer the poor student of old. In the stone's face I find not a thread of true spirit left. I stay here only to soil brush and ink. I take my leave." With that, a wisp of ink-vapor rose from the pool, threaded through the broken window, and dissolved into the eaves' rain—gone in an instant.

Without Xuan Nu, Shouzhuo's thoughts turned sluggish. The congratulatory letter he produced was commonplace and dull; the superior read it, smiled coldly, and laid it away in a chest. Several years later he was dismissed for a minor offense and returned home, his purse as empty as ever, lodging once more beneath the old temple window. He stroked the withered stone; its color was unchanged, yet the ink would not live again. Often, in the still of night, he seemed to hear within the stone the faint sound of ink being ground—but when he trimmed the lamp and looked, the pool was empty. It is said that in his later years Shouzhuo grew poorer still and thought to sell the stone again; but when he lifted the lid, fine cracks had spread across its face, crisscrossed like the tracks of tears. In the end he could not bear to part with it, and died with it in the ruined temple.

The Chronicler of the Strange would say: An inkstone is but dead stone, yet it gains a spirit through its owner; writing is a thing without a mind, yet it becomes true through sincerity. When Shouzhuo was unhonored, he pawned a cloak for a stone and poured out his heart by a cold lamp, and the ink-spirit was glad to serve him; once he trailed his robe at the gates of the powerful and sold favor at the tip of his brush, the stone remained, but its spirit had fled. Alas—that a man of talent should lose his original heart: is it only an inkstone that is lost? The ink-spirit who chose his master among coarse greens and left him amid fat and finery—he, too, is a sorrowful thing.