The Lotus Spirit

The lakes of Linghu are threaded with water; the town itself seems half afloat. There lived a youth named Shen Yan, orphaned young and with no fields to plough, who leased a neglected pond at the lake's edge and made his living by growing lotus. He was a quiet soul, with few friends; his waterside cottage had but three rooms, its windows facing clear water, and on his table only an earthen teapot and a plain zither. By day he rowed a small boat to thin the weeds; by night he lay listening to the frogs and the scent of lotus, and counted it his greatest joy.

Among Yan's plants grew one cluster in the deep heart of the pond that, every high summer, bore a single twin-flowered stem—two blooms of jade-white petals and a clean fragrance that carried far. The townsfolk called it the twin birth and, finding it strange, kept their distance. Yan too thought it uncanny, yet he pitied its lonely purity and never cut it; instead he set out an extra cup in his boat, as if to share his tea.

One year, on the night of the full moon in the sixth month, the moonlight was like washed silk and the air above the water turned cool. Yan could not sleep; he opened the window to the stream. Beneath the twin lotus, in the clear green water, there seemed to stand a woman in robes of lotus leaves, fresh buds at her hair, her face gentle and unlike any mortal's. Yan started up and gazed long. She turned her eyes to him and smiled faintly; a wind passed through the stalks and she dissolved into the flower-shadows, leaving only a clean scent on his sleeve that would not fade.

After that, on every moonlit night, Yan would brew a cup of tea and play one song upon his zither, facing the heart of the pond. At first there was no answer, yet when the wind moved the lotus it rang with a cool, clear tone, as if in reply. Neighbours who heard the music laughed at his folly; Yan paid them no mind. So three years passed, and the man and the lotus seemed to forget one another in the wide world while truly keeping each other close.

In the year of Gengzi a great drought came; the lakebed cracked, and every pond for a hundred li ran dry. The water in Yan's leased pond sank day by day until the twin cluster's roots lay bare in the mud, its leaves curling as if burned. Yan was stricken. Daily he carried wooden buckets back and forth from the stream to pour water upon it, until his fingers split and blood stained the soil. An old neighbour urged him: 'It is but a flower—let it wither. Why wear yourself to nothing for it?' Yan answered gravely: 'A living thing has its own feeling. I have kept its company three years, sharing its moonlit nights; how could I sit and watch it perish? And if a man keeps no constancy, how shall he face even a single bloom?'

One night, with the moon dark and the stars sunk, Yan sat desolate on the pond's bank, sighing before the withered stalks. Suddenly a soft voice came over the water, cool as jade struck against jade: 'For your three years of pure devotion, I cannot bear to fail you.' He looked—and from the mud at the pond's heart a new spring welled up, bubbling without cease, undiminished even in the great drought. The twin blooms, amid the scorched earth of the dry pond, grew only more vivid, their scent reaching ten li. Yan knew he had witnessed something strange; he bowed toward the water and spoke no word of it.

When the autumn rains came the pond filled again. The woman appeared once more and placed a twin seed-pod in his hand. 'These are lotus seeds,' she said. 'Plant them each year, and the clean fragrance will never end. Your nature is clear—keep yourself thus, and let no worldly murk stain you.' With that she became a single drop of clear dew upon his palm, and was gone. Yan did as she bade, gathering and planting the seeds himself, never selling them.

In later years the twin lotus of his pond surpassed all others in fragrance, and the townsfolk named it Shen's Clear Lotus. Yan never married, and kept the pond until he grew old. When he died he was buried at its edge, and each year a single stem rose from his grave, standing clean above the water and never withering through the winter—which people took as the lotus spirit's answer to him.

The Chronicler of the Strange would say: Plants have their own native heart, and ask not to be plucked by a fair hand. Yet the lotus's reward to Yan was not given that she might be plucked, but because he could keep her purity. The world's profit-chasers plant at dawn and look for harvest by dusk; before the bud has opened the axe is already raised—how could they ever earn the twin bloom's return? I look upon Yan and his lotus: the clear meeting the clear, faint yet enduring, and set beside the many noisy ties of humankind, those seem the shallower. Therefore it is said: where the water is clear the lotus lives, and where the man is clear the bond lasts.