The Supernatural
The Supernatural
Heaven 天
Heaven 天
Heaven is a force that can determine human fate as a logical consequence of individual moral behaviour (tiandao 天道). Heaven can also be more directly involved and actively interferes with human action, or at least it is believed that he does. As for example, when he warns or even kills persons by disastrous storms, through dragons, or by lightening. Further on, heaven punishes or rewards humans through descendants or a material win or lose. He protects people from having accidents or saves them miraculously from emergency situations. He also employs ghosts and gods, guishen 鬼神, to take care of individual retribution, bao 報.
Heaven is described as an all-embracing moral authority and often it is unclear to the protagonist when and how he will interfere with human life. Therefore, inexplicable occurrences, like unnatural or sudden deaths and strange illnesses are often interpreted as heavenly punishment. In over 60 stories about the direct effect of heaven on human lives in the collection, punishment of bad deeds is described more than twice as often as the rewarding of good ones.
Less than 20 per cent of the protagonists into whose life heaven directly interferes, are from the upper classes. These individuals are always rewarded or punished in socially relevant matters, as in the following story:
In the Ministry of Justice there are many court records on cases in which a man had died after a fight. As a rule, the family of the culprit has to care for the person whom he has beaten up. If the victim dies during a certain period of time in the wrongdoer's family, then, according to law, the culprit will receive the death penalty. Because of this, the Minister for Ceremonials [taichang 太常], Lü Hanhui 呂含暉,[1] once publicly made known a secret prescription he knew of: One takes catmint, yellow bee wax and a fish bladder, of which the latter should be fried until it has a yellow colour. All three ingredients should each weigh five qian 錢 [about 190 grams], and be put into a bowl together, adding three leaves of mugwort, but no ash or alcohol. For as long as a stick of incense needs to burn down, one boils the ingredients in water. The injured person then has to drink the mixture as long as it is still hot. If he starts sweating, it will have a healing effect. He should not eat chicken meat and stay inside the house for 100 days.
Later, during the fifteenth year of the Qianlong reign [1750] Lü Hanhui's son, Lü Mutang 呂慕堂, passed the provincial examination. Everyone knew that this was the reward [bao 報] for the publication of the prescription (HX: 102).
Next to rewarding men who selflessly do good, Heaven also punishes deceitful servants with death, as is the case in the following entry:
The Compiler of the Hanlin Academy, Cai Jishi 蔡季實 [Cai Yitai 蔡以台] had a servant who, like himself, also came from Peking. Since the man was skilled and adaptable, Cai Jishi was very pleased with him. One day, both of the servant's young sons died of unnatural death, after which his wife strangled herself. Since one could not find out the cause, the matter was buried together with the bodies.
Later, however, the old domestic help of the servant told the following: "His wife had an affair and schemed to poison her husband, so that she could marry her lover and take the children with her. She secretly bought arsenic, baked a cake, into which she put the poison and waited for her husband to return home. Contrary to her expectations the children ate some of the cake behind her back. When they died of the poison, the wife was so distressed, that she committed suicide." The old domestic help knew this, because she had hidden behind the window and secretly overheard the discussion of the plan of action. Even though she could understand what was said, she could not find out who the lover of the wife was. Thereafter it was not long before the servant became ill and died (LX I.43).
At this point, the occurrence is still considered strange, until another servant reveals, how the dead man had taken advantage of Mr. Cai’s confidence in him and had deceived him. In the commentary to the story it is thus said: 'His family suffered great misfortune, but does not the reason lie in these matters?' Thus the servant had determined his own fate and accordingly that of his family by his bad deeds. Next to the topic that attendants do not escape their just fate, people who mistreat servants are also punished by heaven. The penalty includes the kidnapping of the wrongdoer's daughter, who is then tormented similarly to the victim, and the fatal mysterious illness of a man, who had murdered his servant.
In conclusion, heaven is part of a system that modifies human life and fate as a logical consequence of a person’s character and certain deeds. The omnipotence of heaven reveals itself by his apparently arbitrary interference into an individual's life. Since the otherworldly interference is not always explained, the reader is at times required to find the meaning and connection between cause and effect.
The direct interference of heaven is not often happening, but when it happens, it is momentous. Seemingly small offences are comparably harshly punished and might even lead to a supernatural death penalty. Here, the protagonists are rarely persons of the elite, as they are represented as rather searching for an intellectual approach to their individual destiny by way of fortune-telling. The members of the other social classes do more frequently experience an unexpected otherworldly involvement into their life. Stress is laid on the harsher punishment of scholars, since they should be more refined and disguise themselves more cleverly. Nevertheless, about 70 per cent of the persons of the middle class receive the death penalty in the stories about heaven and nearly half of those of the lower stratum. More than half of the women have to account for unsuitable behaviour, or punished for a quarrelsome character. Contrary to the penalties, heaven's rewards are according to the social class of the protagonist. For example, the few persons of the educated elite are recompensed by their offspring passing the civil examinations, the ones of the lower stratum gain a financial profit, and women are rescued from an emergency situation.
NOTES
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[1] Lü Hanhui 呂含暉 and his son Lü Mutang 呂慕堂 could not be further identified
Examples
槐西雜志 (HX)
HX II.26 Heaven rewards good deed and Lü Hanhui's 呂含暉 son is passing the provincial examination.
灤陽續錄 (LX)
LX II.14 Heaven punishes deceitful servant of Cai Yitai 蔡以台 (fl. 1757), who first loses his family, then becomes ill and dies.