The Legend of the Condor Heroes Chapter 30 – Part 7

The farmer and the fisherman returned to the room. Huang Rong said, “But who can Shibo’s enemy be? And what is this jade ring that was sent?”

The scholar said, “It is not that I refuse to tell you, but we ourselves do not know. We only know that our shifu’s becoming a monk is closely connected to this person.”

Huang Rong was about to ask more when the farmer suddenly jumped up and cried, “Aiya, that was a close call!”

The fisherman asked, “What is?”

The farmer pointed at the scholar and said, “He told them everything, how Shifu used up his neili¹ healing her, without hiding a thing. If these two had meant harm and the four of us could not stop them, would Shifu still be alive?”

The woodcutter said, “Minister Zhu is a master strategist. If he could not calculate even this much, how could he serve as the prime minister of Dali? He knew all along that these two were friends, not enemies. When he fought them just now, it was first to try the skill of our two young friends, and second so that you would be convinced.”

The scholar smiled faintly. The farmer and the fisherman glanced at him, half admiration, half reproach.

Just then, footsteps sounded outside the door. The young novice walked in, pressed his palms together, and said, “Shifu says the four shixiongs² are to see the guests out.”

Everyone stood up at once.

Guo Jing said, “With an enemy coming for Shibo, how can we just walk away? It is not that I overrate myself, but I would like to go with you four shixiongs and deal with this enemy first.”

The fisherman, woodcutter, farmer, and scholar exchanged glances, each showing delight. The scholar said, “Let me ask Shifu.” The four went inside together and did not come out for a long time.

Seeing the expressions on their faces, Guo Jing and Huang Rong knew that Great Master Yideng³ had not agreed.

Sure enough, the scholar said, “Our shifu thanks you both, but he says each must settle his own karma, and others cannot interfere.”

Huang Rong said, “Jing gege, let us go and talk to Shibo ourselves.” The two walked to the door of Great Master Yideng’s meditation chamber, but the wooden door was tightly shut. Guo Jing knocked for a long time, but there was no response. Though the door would topple with a single push, how could he dare use force?

The woodcutter said sadly, “Our shifu will not receive you two. The mountains are high and the waters long. We shall meet again.”

Guo Jing was deeply grateful to Great Master Yideng. Hot blood surged in his chest, and he could not contain himself. He said, “Rong-er, whether Shibo allows it or not, let’s go down the mountain, and if we find anyone making trouble at the bottom, we’ll thrash them soundly first and see about the rest later.”

Huang Rong said, “A splendid plan. If Shibo’s enemy is very formidable, someone like Ouyang Feng, say, we’ll wear down his neili as much as we can first, and then die at his hands. That would still repay Shibo’s kindness.”

Guo Jing’s words had burst forth without thought, but Huang Rong deliberately raised her voice so that Great Master Yideng might hear.

The two had just turned around when the wooden door suddenly opened with a creak. An old monk said in a sharp voice, “The Great Master invites you in.”

Guo Jing was both startled and delighted. He entered side by side with Huang Rong and saw Yideng and the Sindhu monk still sitting cross-legged on their cushions. The two of them knelt and bowed to the ground. When they raised their heads, they saw that Yideng’s face had turned a sallow yellow, nothing like the hale and vigorous man they had first met. Grateful and grieved at once, they did not know what to say.

Great Master Yideng said to his four disciples at the door, “All of you come in. I have something to say.”

The fisherman, woodcutter, farmer, and scholar entered the meditation chamber and bowed respectfully to their shifu and their shishu.⁴ The Sindhu monk nodded, then lowered his brows in contemplation, paying no further attention to anyone.

Great Master Yideng gazed absently at the wisps of incense smoke curling upward, toying with a round ring of white mutton-fat jade in his hand.

Huang Rong thought, This is clearly a woman’s jade bracelet. I wonder what the Great Master’s enemy means by sending it.

After a long while, Great Master Yideng sighed and said to Guo Jing and Huang Rong, “This aged monk is grateful in his heart for your kind intentions. But if I do not tell you the causes behind all this, I fear someone on one side or the other may come to harm because of it, and that is the last thing I want. Do you know who I was before?”

Huang Rong said, “Uncle, you were the Emperor of the Kingdom of Dali in Yunnan, the one Emperor of the South. Who under heaven has not heard of your mighty fame?”

Great Master Yideng smiled faintly and said, “The emperor was false, this aged monk is false, and ‘mighty fame’ is more false still. Even you, little girl, are false.”

Huang Rong did not grasp the Chan meaning in his words. She opened her clear, bright eyes wide and stared at him blankly.

Great Master Yideng said slowly, “Our Kingdom of Dali was founded by our first ancestor, the Sacred Civil and Martial Emperor, in the dingyou year, twenty-three years before Emperor Taizu of Song, the Zhao emperor, led his army’s mutiny at Chenqiao and had the yellow robe thrown over his shoulders. Our Sacred Civil-and-Martial Emperor passed through seven generations to Emperor Bingyi, who reigned for four years, then left the throne to become a monk, passing the imperial position to his nephew Emperor Shengde. Later Emperors Shengde, Xingzong-Xiaode, Baoding, Xianzong-Xuanren, and my imperial father Jingzong-Zhengkang, all abdicated and became monks. From our first ancestor to myself, eighteen generations of emperors, and seven have become monks.”

The fisherman, woodcutter, farmer, and scholar were all from the Dali Kingdom and naturally knew the history of previous reigns. But Guo Jing and Huang Rong found it extremely strange. They thought, It was astonishing enough that Shibo Yideng gave up being emperor to be a monk, and now it turns out many of his ancestors did the same. Can being a monk really be better than being emperor?

Great Master Yideng continued, “By a turn of fate, we of the Duan clan, petty officials of a border land, came to usurp the throne. Every generation weighed its own virtue and strength and knew it was not truly equal to so great a charge, and so we lived in fear and trembling, never daring the slightest lapse. Yet an emperor eats without ploughing and dresses without weaving. He rides out in carriages and lives in palaces, and all of it is the blood and sweat of the common people. So in old age each of them could not help repenting. Looking back on a lifetime’s merits and sins, he always found the good done for the people little and the evil done great, and so, time and again, they abdicated and became monks.”

Here he raised his head and looked outside, a faint smile at the corners of his mouth, but grief between his brows.

The six people listened quietly, not daring to interrupt. Great Master Yideng raised his left index finger, slipped the jade ring onto it, turned it several times, and said, “But for myself, I did not become a monk for this reason. The cause, if I speak of it, is still connected to the Huashan Sword Summit and the struggle for the true manual. That year Chongyang the Perfected One,⁵ the Quanzhen Order Leader, won the true manual. The following year he came to Dali himself to visit me and taught me the Innate Skill.⁶ He stayed in my palace for half a month, and the two of us tested our arts on each other and got on famously. But his shidi Zhou Botong, bored to distraction those ten-odd days, wandered all over my palace, and he stirred up trouble.”

Huang Rong thought, If this Old Wild Child does not cause trouble, that would be strange indeed.

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Author’s note:

Huang Rong’s exchanges with Zhu Ziliu (the scholar among the Fisherman, Woodcutter, Farmer, and Scholar) on the stone beam at Taoyuan, including quotations from the Analects and Mencius, riddles and couplets, are drawn largely from the Ming dynasty collection Gujin Tandai compiled by Feng Menglong.

The content of ancient Chinese jottings mostly recorded anecdotes, interesting stories, famous sayings, and witty remarks across dynasties. Among these, the Six Dynasties period’s Shishuo Xinyu (A New Account of the Tales of the World) stands as a remarkable example. What Gujin Tandai records is mostly elegant and clever sayings, collecting the wisdom of ancients and contemporaries alike. These were not created by Feng Menglong himself. None of them are copyrighted, nor is it known who first created them. If one were to say that these riddles, couplets and the like were created by Huang Yaoshi and passed on by Huang Rong, handed down to later ages, heard and recorded by Feng Menglong and retold in turn by Jin Yong, that too would be hard to disprove.

The imperial lineage of the Dali Kingdom, the year of its founding, and such matters have historical records to verify them and cannot be written about arbitrarily. As for lantern riddles, jokes, and witty responses, these mostly draw from folk wisdom and are difficult to trace to their original authors. The Suzhou pingtan storytelling of Tang Bohu Courts Qiuxiang, for instance, is full of jokes, couplets and twisted readings of the classics, all taken from folk wisdom. This is the tradition of Chinese fiction.

Footnotes

1. 内力 — nèilì. Literally internal force. The kinetic manifestation of cultivated qi. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 师兄 — shīxiōng. Male senior. Both apprenticed to the same shifu. Shī means teacher. Xiōng means older brother. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

3. 一灯大师 — Yīdēng Dàshī. Literally Great Master One Lamp. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 师叔 — shīshū. Junior lineage uncle. The shidi or shimei of one’s shifu. Shī means teacher. Shū means father’s younger brother. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 真人 — zhēnrén. Literally true person. An honorific title for a Daoist master who has attained a high level of cultivation. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 先天功 — Xiāntiān Gōng. Literally skill of the primordial. A neigong method. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩