The Judge
A grasping official dreams himself before the Judge of the Dead, who weighs his heart and shows him the life to come.
Magistrate Li of Fenyang held the county treasury, and by cunning and by stealth he swallowed much; in ten years he amassed a great fortune, while the people sold their daughters to meet the taxes — and Li sat untroubled. One evening, drunk, he came home and laid his head down and slept; there came two clerks in black who locked a chain about his neck and said, 'We are messengers of the underworld, come to fetch you.' Li was seized with terror, and in a breath his body stood within a tribunal, its vermilion gates ranged in solemn row, and a board above read 'The Office that Weighs Offences.' Upon the bench sat the Judge, his face like iron, pen in hand above the record; to either side hung a scale and a ledger. The Judge turned the ledger of Li's life and counted, point by point — such a month he seized Old Wang's fields, such a day he drove the widowed woman to her rope — and said: 'With ink you swallowed blood; with the scale you made light of the people's bones. Now weigh yourself.' He bade a clerk weigh Li's heart; the beam sank heavy, and the mark read 'One catty and three mace — all the people's fat.' Then he unrolled a scroll, and there the starved dead choked the road, every one of them Li's doing. Li fell to the ground and pleaded. The Judge said: 'The laws of the sun may leak, but the register of the shade does not lie. I grant you a glimpse of the reckoning to come: your next life, a calf, to repay what you devoured.' His words unfinished, Li saw his own body grown hooves and horns, kneeling at the butcher's block. He started awake in a cold sweat; the sky was already paling. Thereafter Li dispersed all his private wealth, made good the treasury's deficit, and gave aid to every poor man he met. Asked the reason, he would only say, 'It was a dream.' Yet the scale of that dream he dared not forget to his life's end. The Chronicler of the Strange remarks: What men fear in the underworld is not the ghosts, but their own hearts that cannot be deceived. Magistrate Li mended his ways for a single dream — must the waking world wait for dreams to mend? Yet many walk awake and choose blindness; and for them, even dreams are in vain.