The Baoji Temple in Xianju county, Taizhou, was a small foundation, but its discipline had always been strict and exact. In the Shaoxing era the monk Yuanwu was in charge of the temple’s affairs.
A market gardener, Chen Jia, used to bring vegetables to sell there. Qingxiu, the lay brother on hall duty, stole one row of his plot. Chen’s wife, née Wang, knew about it but was in no position to contest it; she only looked up at the empty air and cursed:
“The vegetables I have lost are worth one string and two hundred cash. I count on you to pay me back as an animal!”
After that Qingxiu fell ill of typhoid. He sweated and lost his voice, and was spent and at the point of death. When they pressed him hard to say what ailed him he could not speak at all, and only wept. The monks had gruel poured into him by force. For the better part of a year he was at the last gasp.
Then suddenly he sat up sharply and said to them:
“It was wrong of me to take the Chen family’s vegetables, and I have met with her oath over it. I remember, when I was dumb with the illness, that a messenger came in a yellow coat and said the Elder Wang wants you; and he put a black garment on my body — the Elder Wang being née Wang’s elder brother — and I was driven off into their house. Seven or eight people were already there before me.
“After a month and more he took me out alone and brought me to the Chen family’s garden; and looking round at myself I had become a pig. I was desperate to go home, but I was tied, and they fed me on mash. When my flesh had grown fat and sleek after some months they sold me specially to butcher Zhang, and got for me exactly twelve hundred cash.
“The butcher drove the knife hard into my throat. The pain could not be borne. I gave one great cry — and it was suddenly like waking out of a dream.”
From that hour his illness was gone.
When they asked around about it afterwards, everyone’s account agreed. The records contain many cases of the dead repaying a debt; but that Qingxiu should have become a pig while still alive — that has never happened before.
The elder Qingke of Zigao saw it with his own eyes.
