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夏侯鬼語記

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Text ID
KR3l0148
Date
300–400
Dynasty
東晉

Xiàhóu guǐyǔ jì 夏侯鬼語記

Record of Xiàhóu’s Conversations with Ghosts by 闕名

About the work

A single-tale (in fact a small cluster of episodes) zhìguài 志怪 narrative, transmitted as an independently-titled “text” in modern Kanripo cataloguing but originally an excerpted Xiàhóu Hóng 夏侯弘 guǐyǔ (ghost-conversations) sequence. Xiàhóu Hóng is an Eastern-Jìn figure said to be able to see and converse with ghosts. The text knits together three episodes: (i) the Xiè Shàng dead-horse episode: the Zhènxī jiāngjūn 鎮西將軍 Xiè Shàng 謝尚’s prize horse drops dead; Xiàhóu Hóng goes away, returns, and reports that the temple-spirit (miàoshén) so loved the horse that he stole it, but will now restore it. As Xiè Shàng sits beside the corpse, the horse comes back through the gate and merges with the dead body, which at once revives. (ii) The Xiè Shàng childlessness episode: Xiè Shàng laments his lack of an heir; Xiàhóu Hóng, after seeing a small ghost too low-ranking to know, later intercepts a high-status ghost in a new ox-cart escorted by a dozen qīngsībù páo 青絲布袍 retainers — by gripping the ox’s nose — and asks. The cart’s occupant turns out to be Xiè Shàng’s late father, who reveals that as a young man Xiè Shàng had had a secret liaison with a household maid and sworn never to marry, but had broken the oath; the maid having since died, she has lodged a Heaven-court suit, which is the cause of Xiè Shàng’s sonlessness. (iii) The Jiāngling spear-rubbing ghost episode: at Jiānglíng Xiàhóu Hóng sees a large ghost with halberd-spear and small-ghost followers killing humans by piercing their chest-and-belly; he extracts from a captured small ghost the cure (rub the area with a black hen, wūjī 烏雞), and so saves “eight or nine out of ten” of the heart-belly-illness victims in Jīng and Yáng provinces. The text closes by attributing the medical practice of wūjī báo 烏雞薄 (black-chicken poultice) for zhòngè 中惡 to Xiàhóu Hóng.

Tiyao

Lost; no original 提要; fragments only.

Abstract

The composite is transmitted in (a) Gān Bǎo’s 干寶 Sōushén jì (KR3l0099) juàn 16 under the heading Xiàhóu Hóng, and in (b) Liú Yìqìng 劉義慶’s Yōumíng lù 幽明錄. The narrative is one of the earliest fully-developed Chinese jiànguǐ 見鬼 (ghost-seeing) sequences in which the ghost-seer is presented not as a haunted victim but as a de facto medium: Xiàhóu Hóng’s guǐyǔ (ghost-speech) is a clinical-investigative practice, deployed for medical diagnosis, for forensic moral inquiry (the Xiè Shàng infidelity-and-curse plot), and for veterinary recovery. He is thus an early prototype of the wū 巫 — fāngshì 方士 — Buddhist diagnostician figure that becomes a stock character of medieval narrative.

The present title “Xiàhóu guǐyǔ jì” is an editor’s title for the excerpted Xiàhóu Hóng cluster; no entry of this title appears in the Suí or LiǎngTáng catalogs. The author is anonymous and is recorded as 闕名; Xiàhóu Hóng is the protagonist, not the author.

The dating bracket adopted here (300–400) reflects the assumed compilation horizon. Xiàhóu Hóng’s narrative floruit is the early-to-mid 4th c. (Xiè Shàng, 308–356, is the most prominent dramatis persona); the Sōushén jì recension fixes the upper bound at c. 320 for the earliest stratum, with the Yōumíng lù reception (c. 440s) for the broader composite.

The wūjī báo 烏雞薄 detail is one of the rare cases in which a zhìguài text is the explicit aetiology for a folk-medicine practice still attested in the early-modern era: the application of a freshly killed black hen split open and laid hot against the chest-and-belly for sudden epigastric pain (zhòngè 中惡 in medical Classical Chinese) is recorded in Sòng and Míng yīshū medical compendia, and the Xiàhóu Hóng attribution as origin-myth is preserved in Lǐ Shízhēn’s Běncǎo gāngmù 本草綱目 (cf. juàn 48 qínbù 禽部 jī 雞). The black-thread qīngsībù páo 青絲布袍 of the senior ghost’s retinue is a sumptuary marker reproducing Eastern-Jìn aristocratic shìrén 士人 mourning dress.

Translations and research

  • DeWoskin, Kenneth J. and J. I. Crump, Jr., trans. In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record (Stanford 1996) — translates the Sōushén jì recension.
  • Campany, Robert Ford. Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (SUNY 1996), pp. 364ff.
  • Wáng Guóliáng 王國良. Sōushén jì yán-jiū (1984); Liù-cháo zhì-guài xiǎoshuō kǎo-lùn (1988).
  • Lǐ Jiànguó 李劍國. Táng-qián zhì-guài xiǎoshuō shǐ (rev. 2005), §6.
  • Lín Fù-shì 林富士. Hàn-dài de wū-zhě 漢代的巫者 (1988); Zhōng-guó zhōng-gǔ shí-qí de zōng-jiào yǔ yī-liáo 中國中古時期的宗教與醫療 (2008) — for the cultural anthropology of the jiàn-guǐ / medical-diviner figure.

Other points of interest

The “rub a black hen on the chest-and-belly to cure zhòngè” remedy that this tale aetiologises has a remarkably long subsequent life in Chinese folk medicine and is cross-attested in modern field ethnography (Lín Fùshì). The text is thus one of the rare zhìguài fragments whose practical fall-out is directly traceable into modern medical anthropology.

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