Monk Jin was a native of Zhucheng. His father was a scoundrel who sold him for a few hundred cash to the temple on Mount Wulian. As a boy Jin was stubborn and dull and could not take to the pure work of a monk. He herded pigs and went to market like a hired hand. Later his master died and left a little money. Jin rolled it up in his robe, left the temple and went off to be a peddler. At watering the sheep1 before the sale and climbing the high ground to corner the market, no one schemed better. Within a few years he was suddenly rich, and he bought land and houses in Shuipo village. His disciples were legion; the mouths he fed each day ran into the thousands. Around the village he owned hundreds upon hundreds of mu2 of rich fields. In the village he built dozens of mansions, all full of monks and no laymen; or if there were any, they were poor men with nothing of their own, who had brought their wives and children to rent his houses and farm his fields. Inside each gate, buildings ran unbroken round all four sides, and these people lived in them in rows. The monks lodged in the middle. In front was a hall whose beams and pillars, brackets and posts were painted in gold and blue-green that dazzled the eye; the tables and screens in it shone bright enough to see your face in. Behind that were the inner chambers, with red blinds and embroidered hangings, and the scent of orchid and musk so thick it gushed out at you. The bed was of carved sandalwood inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and the brocade quilts and mattresses on it were folded and piled more than a foot and a half thick. On the walls, famous paintings of beauties and landscapes were hung and pasted so close there was hardly a gap. At one long shout, dozens of men outside the gate answered with a roar like thunder. Men in fine-tasselled caps and leather boots flocked like crows and stood like herons; when they took his orders, they covered their mouths to speak and cocked their ears to listen. If guests arrived without warning, a dozen banquets could be laid in a breath, rich meats and sweet wine, steaming and fragrant, heaped up in confusion like a driving mist. Only he did not dare keep singing girls openly. But he had a dozen or more pretty boys, all clever and sly and skilled at pleasing, their heads wrapped in black gauze, who sang love songs and were not at all bad to see or hear. Whenever Jin went out, dozens of horsemen rode before and behind him, the bows and arrows at their waists clattering together. His servants all called him “Master.” Even the people of the county and the common folk called him “Grandfather” or “Uncle” — never “Teacher,” never “Reverend,” never by his name in religion. When his disciples went out they had somewhat less pomp than Jin, but with their wind-blown manes and cloud-like bridles they were much the same as the sons of great families. Jin also made friends far and wide, so that even a thousand li away his every breath could be felt. With this he held the faults of provincial officials over them; if his temper so much as brushed one of them, the man would shake with fear. As a man he was vulgar and unlettered, without a refined bone from his crown to his toes. In all his life he never kept a single sutra or recited a single spell. He never set foot in a temple, and never kept cymbals or drums in his rooms. His followers had never seen such things, nor even heard of them. As for those who rented his houses, their women were as gaudy as women in the capital, and their rouge and hair oil, their gold and powder, all came from the monks. The monks did not grudge it, and so there were hundreds of men in the village who were farmers without farming. Now and then some bad tenant would cut off a monk’s head and bury it under the bed. Even then there was no close inquiry; the man was only driven out. Such was the long-standing custom. Jin also bought a boy of another surname and privately made him his son. He hired a Confucian tutor to teach the boy the examination essay. The boy was clever and wrote well, so Jin had him enter the county school. Soon after, under the regulations3, he became a student of the Imperial Academy, and before long he went to the provincial examination in the capital and passed. From then on Jin was famous as “the Old Master.” Those who had called him “Master” now called him “Old Master,” and those who had knelt on the mat before him now stood with their hands at their sides and behaved like sons and grandsons. Before long the Old Master monk departed this life4. The provincial graduate, in sackcloth and hempen bands, lay on straw with a clod for a pillow, faced north and called himself the orphan. The disciples’ mourning staffs, laid aside, covered the couches and beds. But behind the curtain before the coffin, the only soft weeping came from one person: the graduate’s wife. The wives of the gentry all came in their finery and lifted the curtain to offer condolences; caps and canopies, carriages and horses blocked the roads. On the day of the funeral, mat sheds and pavilions stretched like banks of cloud, and banners and streamers blotted out the sun. The straw figures to be buried with him were decked in gold and silk: dozens of sedan chairs, canopies and processional insignia, a thousand horses, a hundred beauties with flowing sleeves, all as if alive. There were Fang Bi and Fang Xiang5, giants of paper shell in black kerchiefs and gold armour, hollow inside and braced with wooden crossbars, each with a live man inside carrying it along. Machinery inside turned so that their beards and eyebrows flew and danced and their eyes flashed as though they were about to roar. The onlookers were astonished, and small children who saw them from a distance ran off crying. The mansion for the underworld was as splendid as a palace: towers, halls, rooms and galleries walled in over dozens of mu, with a thousand gates and ten thousand doors, so that those who went in lost their way and could not get out. The offerings and effigies were mostly past naming. The mourners came canopy rubbing canopy. From the provincial officials on down, all came in bowing low, and rose and knelt as at a court audience. Those lower down — tribute students and Academy students, clerks and scribes — pressed their hands to the ground and knocked their heads, not daring to trouble the young master; they troubled his uncles in the faith instead. At that time the whole region turned out to gaze, and men and women, panting and sweating, filled the roads in an unbroken line. People with wives in tow and babies in swaddling called for brothers and hunted for sisters, and the noise boiled like a cauldron; mixed with the din of drums and music and the clang of a hundred shows, not a word anyone said could be heard. Of the onlookers nothing could be seen below the shoulders, only ten thousand heads jostling. A pregnant woman went into labour. Her women friends spread out their skirts as a tent and stood guard round her. They heard a baby cry. With no time to ask whether it was a boy or a girl, they tore off a strip of cloth and bound it to her breast, and some propping her up, some pulling her along, they hobbled away. What a spectacle! After the burial, the property Jin left was split like a melon in two: one half to the son, one half to the disciples. The provincial graduate got half, and to the south and north, east and west of his house, there was nothing but black-robed monks. But they all called each other brothers, and still shared each other’s aches and itches, so it is said.