SOURCE: Cohen, Alvin P. “Avenging Ghosts and Moral Judgement in Ancient Chinese Historiography: Three Examples from Shih-chi.” In Legend, Lore, and Religion in China: Essays in Honor of Wolfram Eberhard on His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Sarah Allan and Alvin P. Cohen, pp. 97-108. San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1979.

[In the following essay, Cohen analyzes three instances of the avenging ghost motif in the Shih chi, positing that these episodes show the historian's desire for justice.]

The compilation of the Spring and Autumn Annals in the fifth century b.c.e. changed the motivations for writing history in ancient China through the development of an important new concern. Besides such matters as the desire to make an accurate account of past events or to record the great deeds of men, there arose a strong impulse to compose a record of events that would be instructive to posterity, a record that would guide later generations in the correct way to administer the state and in the proper way to act in their personal relationships with their fellow men. Consequently, subsequent Chinese historical texts were purposely written to be somewhat didactic and moralistic. This does not mean, however, that Chinese histories were simply moralistic propaganda. The Chinese historians were concerned with fulfilling the requirements of their craft with as much honesty and objectivity as possible. Nevertheless, this did not prevent them from witnessing historical events in such a way as to justify their assumptions that history contained a kind of “moral dynamic” which ultimately requited good acts with just rewards and success, and evil deeds with punishment and failure.¹ Indeed, it was the historian's task to unravel and elucidate the moral patterns that were assumed to underlie the course of history. Until the spread of the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation in China, however, reward or punishment for a personal act was conceived of as taking place either within the individual's own life or among his or her posterity—posterity being regarded as an extension of the individual. Sometimes the deities might intervene in the person's life in order to alter events in accordance with the moral quality of his deeds, but even then the final accounting and retribution for one's acts took place within the mortal world rather than in the supernatural.

Because of the necessity for maximum objectivity (a difficult goal in any historical tradition), the historian usually confined his overtly personal observations and judgements to a summary or preface set off from the body of the text itself. However, the rewards of good and evil might still be made evident through the cause and effect relationships of events within the narrative. In his summary, the historian would often emphasize or clarify the moral dynamics for the course of the events in question. For example, he might emphasize that a cruel ruler suffered the destruction of his state, or a man who gained his position through assassination died by assassination, and so forth.²

Unfortunately, historical events are not always amenable to such simple interpretations. Often a murderer could not be reached by the law because of his high and powerful position or the secrecy of his crime. Thus he might live on without calamity, or perhaps eventually even die an unseemly death—but without there being any obvious relationship between his death and his villainous deed. But there was another way to set things aright: there was an ancient belief that the “soul” of a person who had been unjustly killed could return as an avenging ghost and take revenge on the murderer.³ This belief is clearly stated in the Tso-chuan of the third century b.c.e. long before Buddhism reached China.⁴

This belief was apparently adhered to by all classes in China, even though it has usually been regarded by modern scholars, both Chinese and foreign, as a motif of fiction or of lower-class superstition and dismissed as “fictionalizing” when found in serious historical texts.⁵ The early Chinese historians, who were writing for a very limited audience of erudite people, could not afford to outrage their readers by recording events that went beyond their readers' bounds of credulity.⁶ If they did exceed these bounds, they might be accused of writing fiction on the one extreme or propaganda on the other. However, these highly educated people usually displayed skepticism, but not disbelief, about avenging ghosts,⁷ which suggests that they were still regarded as plausible, even though for a small number of people this belief verged on the far limits of their credulity. Historians could not make frequent appeals to this belief without risking their readers' adverse reactions.⁸

Consequently, avenging ghosts were only occasionally mentioned in orthodox histories, works that were predominantly concerned with the deeds of men within the human world. But when they were mentioned, their inclusion was purposeful and was done in order to provide a link within a series of events that would make possible a clear, although usually unstated, moralistic interpretation by the readers. Thus two events that were apparently only connected by coincidence could be shown to have a cause-and-effect relationship due to the presence of an avenging ghost. For example, if Mr. A murdered Mr. B and later on Mr. A died from some unexplicable sickness, we merely have two isolated events and can only remark on Mr. A's bad luck on becoming ill. If, however, with the addition of a few words, it is made clear that the avenging ghost of Mr. B caused Mr. A's sickness, then we can immediately see that Mr. A received his just deserts, and history has given us a pointed lesson.

We should, however, not assume that historians included avenging ghosts in their narratives as mere stylistic or historiographic gimmicks. As I will try to show below, the historian must have thought there was a reasonable probability of ghostly retribution within a series of events, a perception that was most likely shared as “common knowledge” by his readers. If a substantial number of potential readers believed that a ghost effected a certain person's death, the historian, partaking of the same belief, could easily include this historical “fact” within his account, especially if its inclusion resolved a moral dilemma.

From a secular and rationalistic point of view, avenging-ghost episodes in historical texts can easily be dismissed as fictionalizing. If we examine them from a historiographical point of view, however, bearing in mind that a serious historian would not want to outrage his readers by exceeding the limits of their credulity,⁹ we can gain some insight into the moral and social values of Chinese society and their influence on the writing of history.

Although accounts of avenging ghosts are very rare in the Dynastic Histories, there are still a sufficient number of such narratives to show that they are not random fictional episodes, but rather are expressions of a carefully and consciously used motif expressing both the moral judgement of the historian and the moral ideals of Chinese historiography.

I have studied the motif of the avenging ghost in the earlier Chinese Dynastic Histories,¹⁰ the most staid and orthodox historical texts in China, from the Shih-chi,¹¹ compiled about 86 b.c.e., through the Hsin T‘ang shu, compiled in 1060. Within these first seventeen Dynastic Histories, I found sixty-four distinct accounts of avenging ghosts.¹² Although I have not systematically investigated the later Dynastic Histories for this motif, I have also found many similar cases of avenging ghosts in all of them through the Ming shih.¹³ We should therefore note that even with the spread of Buddhist doctrines of punishment for sins, the native Chinese concept of retribution via avenging ghosts prevailed among the educated elite for whom and by whom the Dynastic Histories were compiled. As examples of avenging ghost narratives, I would like to briefly discuss three lively and very well-known episodes from the Shih-chi to show the way in which the motif was used, and also to further suggest that the inclusion of avenging ghosts in serious historical texts should be regarded as a conscious historiographical practice based on the belief in their reasonable probability.

The three episodes concern: 1. the ghost of the strongman P‘eng-sheng, in the form of a boar, that frightens Lord Hsiang of the State of Ch‘i during the Chou Dynasty¹⁴; 2. the ghost of the child Ju-yi, in the form of a grey dog that bites Empress Dowager Lü of the Han Dynasty¹⁵; 3. the ghosts of the two men, Tou Ying and Kuan Fu, that terrorize Prime Minister T‘ien Fen during the Han Dynasty.¹⁶ I will examine each episode in turn.

In 694 b.c.e., Lord Huan of the State of Lu and his wife, Wen-chiang, a younger sister of Lord Hsiang of the State of Ch‘i, went to Ch‘i to visit Lord Hsiang. Previously, Lord Hsiang and his sister secretly had sexual relations and, upon her arrival in Ch‘i, they again had sexual relations. However, this time her husband, Lord Huan, found out about it and reproached her. She became angry and told her brother who, conceiving a plan to dispose of his bothersome brother-in-law, invited him to a private drinking bout. After Lord Huan was quite drunk, Lord Hsiang summoned his own half-brother, a strongman or bodyguard named P‘eng-sheng, to carry the drunken man to his carriage and, at the same time, kill him. The people of Lu were outraged at the death of their prince, and therefore, in order to pacify them, Lord Hsiang declared P‘eng-sheng to be the murderer and executed him. One day eight years later, Lord Hsiang was out hunting when he saw a wild boar. His retainers all shouted “It is P‘eng-sheng!” Lord Hsiang became angry and shot it, whereupon the boar stood up like a man and screamed. Lord Hsiang became frightened, fell out of his carriage, and hurt his foot. After this, he returned to his palace to nurse the wounded foot. When a group of dissatisfied officers attacked him, he could not run away because of the wounded foot and was assassinated.

Thus, without knowing that the boar was really a form assumed by the ghost of P‘eng-sheng, we can only say that Lord Hsiang was hurt in a hunting accident—a stroke of bad luck. But by knowing the identity of the boar, we understand that the wound was intentional and well deserved—justice was done!

Ssu-ma Ch‘ien's inclusion of this story in his Shih-chi can also easily be explained away. In the first place, the episode occurred about six hundred years before Ssu-ma Ch‘ien's lifetime, and therefore he was dependent on very ancient records for his information. Secondly, the record he had to depend on was nothing less than the Tso-chuan, already a prestigeous document in Ssu-ma Ch‘ien's time. Thus, it could be argued that he had little choice but to accept the account of P‘eng-sheng and enter it into his own chronicles.

We now turn our attention to “modern history,” at least from Ssu-ma Ch‘ien's point of view. It must be remembered that Ssu-ma Ch‘ien did not write the Shih-chi entirely on his own. He inherited from his father, Ssu-ma T‘an (ca. 180-110 b.c.e.), both the position of chief archivist-astrologer in the imperial court and the notes and drafts that T‘an had been collecting in preparation for the compilation of a monumental work of history. Thus, when we turn to the case of Empress Dowager Lü, we should note that Ssu-ma T‘an was born in the same year that she died and undoubtedly heard the story of her life and death from his own father or from other men of his father's generation. Moreover, T‘an was not only contemporary with T‘ien Fen (the “villain” of the third episode) but already held the office of chief archivist-astrologer at the time of T‘ien Fen's death in 131 b.c.e. Undoubtedly Ssu-ma T‘an was personally acquainted with the principals in this last case, while Ssu-ma Ch‘ien himself was already a youth when T‘ien Fen died. In both the accounts, of Empress Dowager Lü and T‘ien Fen, we actually have contemporary chronicles that include avenging ghost episodes, but this time the inclusion of such episodes cannot be explained away on the basis of either their great antiquity or their inclusion in a canonical text.

Our first example of “modern history” concerns the demise of Empress Dowager Lü. After the death of Kao-tsu, the first emperor of the Han Dynasty, his wife, Empress Dowager Lü, retained the real power in the imperial court and controlled her young and weak son, Emperor Hui. Empress Dowager Lü was extremely jealous of one of her former husband's concubines, Lady Ch‘i, whose young son, Ju-yi, was a favorite of Emperor Hui. The young emperor, knowing of the Empress Dowager Lü's hatred for the child, personally protected him. However, in 193 b.c.e. she was finally able to imprison Lady Ch‘i and horribly mutilate and kill her. Then she had the child, Ju-yi, poisoned to death. One day, thirteen years later, Empress Dowager Lü was returning from performing a religious rite when a grey dog appeared, bit her in the armpit, and suddenly disappeared. Upon consulting a diviner, she discovered that the dog was the ghost of Ju-yi. A few months later she died of the dog bite.

Once again, without knowing that the dog was the ghost of Ju-yi, we might only remark on the Empress Dowager's bad luck at having been bitten by a dog. But after we know the dog's identity, the reason for her untimely demise becomes very clear. As previously indicated, Ssu-ma Ch‘ien's father was born in approximately the year of Empress Dowager Lü's death and very likely heard of her encounter with Ju-yi's ghost from the men of his father's generation.

There was also another potential source of information about Empress Dowager Lü's demise: the “common knowledge” of the elite and court circles, or perhaps we might simply say court gossip. As the most powerful woman in the Han empire, there was undoubtedly much gossip about her and especially about her more notorious activities. If that was the case, it is possible that the story of her death at the hands of the ghost of Ju-yi, in the form of a dog, circulated within court circles until it became “common knowledge.” Ssu-ma Ch‘ien could then have drawn on this “common knowledge” as a source for his history, recording what “everyone knew” to be a fact. The same may be said for the following account of the demise of T‘ien Fen—the historian apparently recorded the “facts” as he and everyone else knew them.

The following account of modern history might actually be viewed as “contemporary history” since the events occurred during Ssu-ma Ch‘ien's youth. Tou Ying was an honest and competent official who rose in office to eventually become Prime Minister. However, through the machinations of T‘ien Fen, a younger brother of the reigning empress, Tou Ying was forced to resign, and eventually T‘ien Fen became Prime Minister. Tou Ying then went into retirement and soon became intimate friends with Kuan Fu, a brave but tactless and short-tempered military officer. During the following years, T‘ien Fen did numerous things to harass and embarrass Tou Ying. Finally, on an occasion when Tou Ying was publicly humiliated by T‘ien Fen, Kuan Fu, who had been drinking heavily, thoroughly insulted various important persons as well as T‘ien Fen himself. This prompted T‘ien Fen to arrest Kuan Fu and institute capital charges against him. When Tou Ying tried to obtain Kuan Fu's release, he soon found himself framed with charges of perjury and of forging an imperial edict—a crime punishable by death. Therefore, in 131 b.c.e., Kuan Fu and Tou Ying were executed. About half a year later, T‘ien Fen became extremely sick and continuously cried out “I am guilty of the crime!” A medium was called in to investigate and found that the ghosts of Tou Ying and Kuan Fu were standing alongside T‘ien Fen and beating him to death.

Here again Ssu-ma Ch‘ien could merely have written that T‘ien Fen died of sickness and hallucinations, but because the cause of T‘ien Fen's suffering is recorded, we can see that the “villain” came to a bitter end because of his own evil deeds. This time the historian recorded events that occurred when he was a youth and when his father already held the position of imperial archivist-astrologer.

The long intervals between the death of the victims and the vengeance effected by the avenging ghosts in the first two episodes, eight years and thirteen years respectively, may suggest a very strained and forced effort to develop a cause-and-effect relationship between events. In fact, these are not typical time intervals, for in the majority of avenging-ghost accounts in the Dynastic Histories the intervals amount to a year or less—more nearly similar to the half-year interval of the third episode.¹⁷

To sum up: the insertion of an avenging ghost episode into a serious historical account cannot simply be passed off as the whim of a historian zealous to make the record show that the fruit of evil deeds cannot be avoided and that in the end justice, mundane or divine, will prevail. The historian was bound to be truthful to the best of his ability, otherwise his work could be brushed aside as little more than a prejudiced or dogmatic tract, or merely a fanciful tale. He could not arbitrarily insert fantastic ghostly episodes into his chronicles, particularly into accounts of events that took place within a generation or two of his own lifetime, without diminishing the reliability of his work, unless he and his intended readers retained beliefs that rendered avenging ghost episodes plausible. Just as it was widely believed in ancient China that Heaven¹⁸ intervened in worldly affairs in response to great national misdeeds, so, too, was it commonly accepted that the ghosts of the dead intervened in individual affairs in retribution for crimes specifically committed against them.

I therefore propose a possible explanation for the avenging ghost episodes in the Dynastic Histories, and especially for the two in the “modern history” accounts of the Shih-chi recounted above: the very human desire for justice and the requital of wrongs—a desire bolstered by a lingering belief in the potential for vengeance via the ghosts of the innocent dead, as well as by the existence of “common knowledge” about the course and cause of events. All of this fused into a source of historical “fact,” a source that was usually near the fringes of some members of the educated class's credulity and therefore treated with skepticism but not disbelief. In order to demonstrate the moral dynamics of history wherein good and evil deeds brought their appropriate rewards, the historian could draw upon this historical source when more reliable sources failed to illuminate the course of events. It is important to emphasize that avenging ghosts were not gimmicks that a historian could arbitrarily throw into his records just to make a good story or to satisfy some moralistic expectations. Rather they were aspects of a living belief in the just and moral workings of the world and, as such, illuminated the moral relationships of human affairs when mundane explanations failed to do so.

Thus we find episodes of avenging ghosts in the historical accounts of two villainous people who, without the intercession of ghostly beings, would have met their ends through mere accident. Attributing the death of a murderer to an accident or to bad luck would have been grievously unsatisfying to anyone witnessing history as a moral drama and would also have had little didactic value for readers of a historical text. But an account that clearly showed that a murderer's death was caused by the avenging ghost of the person harmed was a clear lesson to posterity about the consequences of murder and, hopefully, a lesson that would help preserve the moral order of society by inhibiting similar acts.

Notes

1. C. S. Gardner, Chinese Traditional Historiography (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1938; repr. 1961), pp. 13-17; W. G. Beasley and E. G. Pulleyblank, eds., Historians of China and Japan (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 2, 4-5; Wolfram Eberhard, “On Three Principles in Chinese Social Structure,” Chinese Culture, 11.1:24(1970).

   The work for this paper was part of my Ph.D. dissertation, “The Avenging Ghost: Moral Judgement in Chinese Historical Texts” (University of California, Berkeley, 1971). Professor Eberhard was a member of my dissertation committee. Besides much valuable constructive criticism, he also gave me many cogent ideas for developing a detailed analysis of the avenging ghost accounts. It is with deep gratitude that I dedicate this essay to him.

2. In a very unusual case from the beginning of the seventh century, the historian pointed out that a certain contender in a succession struggle lost because he did not heed his wife's advice (Chiu T‘ang shu [all references to the Dynastic Histories are to the Po-na edition], 54:10b-11).

3. Such avenging ghosts were called yüan-hun ‘souls with a grievance or grudge’ and were clearly distinguished from other ghosts, demons, or spirits. A very important distinction between avenging ghosts and other ghosts was the understanding, either explicitly or implicitly expressed, that they had received express permission from Heaven to carry out their vengeance as an act of justice—other ghosts were regarded as mere marauders or even pathetic creatures.

4. Tso-chuan, Chao 7 (Shih-san ching chu-su edition; repr. Taipei: Yee Wen, 1960), 44:11b-14b (pp. 763A-64B). This is also very tersely expressed by the Taoist thinker Chuang-tzu (fourth century b.c.e.); see Chuang-tzu chi-chieh, comp. Wang Hsien-ch‘ien (Hong Kong: Chung-hua, 1960), “Keng-sang Ch‘u”, p. 37.

5. For criticisms of such “fictionalizing” see, for example, M. C. Rogers, The Chronicle of Fu Chien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 87, n. 98, p. 97, n. 217; H. Bielenstein, “The Restoration of the Han Dynasty,” BMFEA [Bulletin. Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities] 26 (1954), 81, and 44-81 passim; C. S. Goodrich, “Two Chapters in the Life of an Empress of the Later Han,” HJAS 26 (1965-66), 191, 207, n. 47, and HJAS [Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies] 28 (1968), 209-210; Ch‘ien Ta-hsin (1728-1804), Nien-erh shih k‘ao-yi (Taipei: Lo-t‘ien, 1971), 21:6a (p. 761).

6. It seems to me that a person's credulity might be better understood as a sort of gradient or spectrum of believability rather than as a rigid part of the mind that provides a clear yes or no acceptance or rejection of a perception or idea. By such a gradient or spectrum, I mean the range of credulity or acceptability which comprises the clearly believable at its core but which tapers off and, with increasing skepticism, grows progressively more tenuous as one approaches the fringes of acceptance where things are highly suspect but not totally unbelievable. This extreme edge is also not a rigid line of demarcation since what is believable or unbelievable to an individual can change in accordance with one's experiences and personal development.

7. For several examples, see Cohen, “The Avenging Ghost,” pp. 88-90.

8. It is not reasonable to assume that educated people or “intellectuals,” whether in China or elsewhere, are ipso facto rational beings unaffected by religious beliefs or even “superstition.” This is especially vivid among the earlier European writers and various medieval writers—even many contemporary intellectuals retain (or even develop) strong beliefs in the irrational, or perhaps we should say arational. Being educated or an “intellectual” and holding religious or arational beliefs are not necessarily antithetical positions, and there is no reason to suppose that the Chinese were, or are, any different. Upon close examination it appears that adherence to religious or arational beliefs among the educated and uneducated classes in China really differed in degree rather than in kind—all classes partaking of the same basic store of religious or supernatural conceptions (see M. Granet, La Religion des Chinoise [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951], pp. 164-65; C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967], pp. 276-77). Gilbert Murray's remark about the great Greek historian Herodotus (fifth century b.c.e.) may also be pertinent to Chinese historians: “He also at times falls under the glamour of his own story and the normal beliefs of his age sufficiently to accept the providential and supernatural colouring from which at other times he carefully abstains” (“Prolegomena to the Study of Greek History,” in Greek Studies, by G. Murray [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946], p. 54).

9. With the rare exception of the cynical historian who purposely seeks to outrage his readers; see, for example, Gilbert Murray, “Theopompus, or the Cynic as Historian,” in Greek Studies, pp. 149-70.

10. Cohen, “The Avenging Ghost.” Part of this work will appear in my forthcoming monograph Tales of Vengeful Souls: A Sixth Century Collection of Chinese Avenging Ghost Stories (Taipei: Variétés Sinologiques).

11. Even though the Shih-chi (and some other histories) was originally written as private, rather than official, history, it was later regarded as the first of the Dynastic Histories and its compilers' critical standards served as models for later historians.

12. If duplicates are counted, there are ninety-seven cases. Besides these cases of ghostly vengeance for evil deeds, the Dynastic Histories also contain numerous accounts of requital for good deeds, either by the ghosts of the dead or by Heaven as the ultimate moral arbiter of the world (e.g., Chin shu 84:8a and 88:9a).

13. At first I was surprised to find avenging ghost accounts in the Dynastic Histories compiled after the twelfth century “Neo-Confucian” movement with its supposedly rationalistic emphasis. But then, Chu Hsi (1130-1200), the most prominent “Neo-Confucian” thinker, also believed in ghosts; see his chapter “Ghosts and Deities” in Chu-tzu yü-lei (Kyoto: Chūbun shuppansha, 1970), 3:1a-19b (pp. 51-88), where he argues for the existence of ghosts and deities—in spite of some scholars' attempts to turn them into abstractions (W. T. Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963], pp. 643-46; J. P. Bruce, Chu Hsi and His Masters [London: Probsthain, 1923], pp. 240-45; Ch‘ien Mu, “Chung-kuo ssu-hsiang shih chung chih kuei-shen kuan,” Hsin-ya hsüeh-pao, 1.1:1-43 (1955).

14. Shih-chi 32:5a-6b. The Shih-chi episode was based on the accounts in Tso-chuan, Chuang 8, 8:17a (p. 144A) and Huan 18, 7:25b-26a (p. 130A-B) and most likely also drew on the parallel account in the late fourth century b.c.e. work, Kuan-tzu (SPPY [Ssu-pu pai-yao] edition), sect. 18: “Ta-k‘uang,” 7:2b-3b.

15. Shih-chi 9:2a-9b. This account is also found in the “Treatise on the Five Phases” in Han shu 27BA:31b-32a, although it is omitted from Empress Dowager Lü's annals in Han shu 3.

16. Shih-chi 107:1a-13b. This account is also found in Han shu 52:1a-12b.

17. Cohen, “The Avenging Ghost,” pp. 96-99.

18. As a kind of “deified cosmos” and supreme deity of the state religion and of various religious philosophies, or as a personified deity that usually appears as the Heavenly Emperor in less pretentious historical works or in moralistic propaganda (see, for example, my Tales of Vengeful Souls).