The planchette-spirit Lou Zichun announced himself as a friend of Wen Tianxiang, a doctor of the late Song. He said he had practised the art of shaping the body and had kept a teaching post for four hundred years in the house of the Messenger of the Nine Darknesses — whose master keeps the register of human life and death and ranks one grade below a prince. His predictions about mortal fortune and misfortune were very accurate.
Someone asked him about rebirth.
“Rebirth is not a thing to be settled in one sentence. There are several ways of dying, and several ways of being born.
“Those whose virtue is great become gods or buddhas. Those who have a prior cause but no sentence of guilt return to their former place. Those with neither virtue nor prior cause, whose qi has not yet dispersed, are put into human bodies at once. As for the rest, whose qi is entirely spent — they are born only to die, and die again into death.
“But small hun and little po, like the smoke from a brazier, are not consumed in an instant. Often they gather into one mass and drift in the haze. Sometimes the wind blows them to the foot of the Mountain of Shadows, where it is bitterly cold.
“Only at the winter solstice is there a single thread of sunlight that flows across the mountain. And then all the ghosts stir — stiffened things moving again — and climb the sunbeam, and reach China, and are put into human bodies again.
“And into one human body there commonly come a crowd of ghosts together, not a single soul. Those that fall off the line go back to the Mountain of Shadows and wait another year for the next solstice.”
Asked whether anyone is human for the first time, he said: “There are many such. It is like plants. The one that grows without an old root is a plant that is a plant for the first time. In the same way, one who did not come by entering a womb is a person who is a person for the first time.”
Asked whether ghosts turn into other things, he said: “Yes. Generally prostitutes become insects and butterflies, and wicked men become snakes and tigers.”
And those killed by lightning?
“They become earthworms.” The Book of Transformations says that a man struck dead by lightning can be revived by pounding earthworms and laying the pulp on his navel. So there is a source for that.