Southern Song, the first years of the Shaoxing era. Li Maochun, a dismissed military governor in Tiantai who gives to every bridge, road and beggar, overhears people say that a truly good man would have a son. He and his wife fast and go to Guoqing Temple to pray. In the arhat hall a statue falls from its lotus seat, the abbot Xingkong congratulates them, and a boy is born amid red light. The abbot makes him a lay disciple and names him Li Xiuyuan.
The boy grows up to be Ji Gong, a monk with a dirty face and a ragged robe, always drunk, who eats dog meat and plays the fool. In Hangzhou, by West Lake, he meets a man about to hang himself and announces that he means to hang himself first. Most episodes start like this, with someone in trouble and a monk who looks like more trouble, and end in a rescue that only seems accidental.
The book is a string of such cases: sorcerers who scare villages, a haunted chancellor’s mansion, thieves and martial heroes, officials who need a lesson. The monk’s magic is real but his manner is a clown’s, and the story keeps asking who the fool in the room is.
