The Lotus-Root Spirit

In the watery villages south of the river, the country is thick with ponds. An old man surnamed Shen lived on the southern bank of one such pond and made his living by planting lotus roots; folk called him Old Shen of the Lotus. The pond was said to hold an ancient root, thick as a man's arm, coiled for many feet, which broke whenever one dug it and grew back each year, its age unknown to anyone.

Old Shen had no son, and leaned only on his granddaughter, a lively girl of twelve named A-Ling, who loved to play along the bank. One summer the waters rose and the pond overflowed; A-Ling slipped and fell, and the old man could not reach her in time. The girl was lost. Grief broke him, and from then on he would not set foot in the water, but sat each day by the bank calling her name. The lotus bloomed year after year, and to him it was as if he saw her face.

Years passed; the old man aged, his strength failed, and the pond fell to ruin. Then one night he heard a voice from the water, faint as two strands of lotus silk drawn taut. He opened his door and stepped out. The moon was white, the wind clear; beneath the lotus stood a young woman in white edged with green, her face like A-Ling's, yet her body was faintly translucent and her feet left no mark upon the mud. "Who are you?" he cried. She smiled. "Do not fear, sir. I am the spirit of the ancient root. I felt your mercy through decades in which you never harmed my body, and I pitied your longing for your girl, and so I came to keep you company."

After that she came each night, tending the wild pond, mending broken leaves, or setting a bowl of lotus-flour porridge at his bedside. When he fell ill she fed him fresh root-juice and he mended at once. He asked her name. "I was a wisp of clear breath born in the old root; I have no name. If you are kind to me, sir, call me A-Ou." He wept. "A-Ou, A-Ou—my daughter was A-Ling. That you have come is heaven's comfort to an old man."

The villagers began to notice a light upon the pond at night and whispered of a haunting. A wicked youth, wishing to fill the pond for farmland, came by night with a crowd to dig. The spirit showed herself, standing in the wind, tall as a man, her root-fibers like serpents that coiled about their hoes; the men fled in terror. Yet from that night her form grew thinner. When the old man wept and asked why, she said, "I spent a thread of my breath to guard the pond; spent, it scatters. Your own years are nearly done, and I must return to my root. Care for yourself, sir, and do not grieve on my account."

The next autumn the old man died quietly in his sleep. The villagers buried him by the bank. The spring after, the ancient root sent up a new shoot, and beside it a second stem bore a flower of twin blooms, one red and one white, as if two figures leaned together. The folk marvelled and named the pond the Maid-of-the-Lotus Pond, and through the years they offered sacrifice there without cease.

The Chronicler remarks: From grass, tree, bird, or beast, that which gathers the pure essence of heaven and earth may become a spirit. Old Shen, by the mercy of decades in which he never harmed a single root, won one companion for his withered age; and A-Ou, by a single wisp of clear soul, repaid a single thought of kindness. Worldly men quarrel over fields and land and haggle over trifles, and cannot match even a lotus root in the knowledge of gratitude. Yet the bond between spirit and man is like duckweed on the water—it gathers and parts in its own season, and cannot be forced. Look upon the twin blooms of this pond, red and white, leaning one to the other, unwithered through cold and heat: is this not love, which, though it cross kinds, comes home to the same place?