There was an old man named Deng, whose surname is lost, who sold wine in the market at Handan.
One evening at dusk a servant with his hair in a tangle came with a gourd and asked for wine.
The old man stared at him. “We are close neighbours lately, and you do not know me?”
The old man let it go and asked nothing. The man came for a month or so, and then came no more.
Later Deng met him by the shrine of Lu Sheng, pressed him into the tavern, spoke of how long it had been, and drew a cup of pear-blossom spring from the mouth of the jar for him.
The tangled-haired servant jumped up and caught his arm, laughing.
“Do not keep mistaking me. I will tell you plainly: I am the Willow Immortal, of the seat of Pure Yang. Long ago, when I followed my master at Yueyang, I saw him drunk three times over, and my throat would itch. He is stingy, and would not spare me a drop. So I came daily to buy, to wet a thirsty mouth. Then my master went to the Hibiscus City to the flower-washing banquet and left me to watch the medicine furnace. It was bitterly lonely. I poured out the old vintage in the gourd and drank it, and became very drunk, and fell asleep beside the furnace. My master came back and blamed me for deserting my post. I pleaded drunkenness. He was angry. I said: ‘The master of the house is in the land of drunkenness all day — why lay a ban on wine for your servant alone?’”
And the master said: What I drink is wine. What you drink is not wine. It is disaster-water.
“Is there a difference?” said I.
And he said:
My wine takes grain from Yanzi’s field outside the wall; husks it in the mortar Liang Hong hired himself out to pound; measures it in the bushel of talent; carries it in the sack of wit; stores it for months in the book-casket of the Cao family; and then steeps it in the Spring of Integrity and the Water of Yielding, and puts it in the clean pot of the Fan household, and steams it over the far threefold fire, with good medicine for the yeast and straight-grained wood for the trough. When it is made, it is poured from Yao’s bell, from Confucius’s beaker, from Zhong You’s flask. And so, clear, it may be a sage; thick, it may be a worthy man.
But your wine is nothing but grain planted by the robber Zhi, drawn from a greedy man’s spring, warmed at a young lord’s stove, washed up by a fool. Drink it by mistake and the honest turn greedy and the careful turn mad; a man falls into a well and loses his life, a man insults the company and buys himself ruin; and as for suspecting adultery by the brazier and recognising a thief by the wine-jar, those are the trifles of it. And you, who have not learned to beware of that, still use your master as an excuse!
“I repented greatly. My master said: If the muddy root is not pulled up, I fear the old condition will sprout again. He drew his sword, opened my belly and bowels, scooped water through them and washed them clean, and put them back — and it did not hurt. Then he gave me the Golden Dish Dew of his own brewing to drink kneeling, and I was drunk for seven days. And since then, when I pass a wine-shop and see the brimming vats and the stacked jars, whatever strikes my nose I do not know what it is. That is why I have not come again.”
The old man was appalled, and threw himself on the ground and bowed.
“Since your master has a recipe for brewing, will he not bestow one cup of it on me?”
The Willow Immortal took out an embroidered bag, gave it to him, laughed aloud, and went. Deng opened it. Inside was one character written very large: water.
He got up and looked at the wine in his shop. All of it had turned to water.
So Deng gave up selling wine, and attached himself to the shrine of Lu Sheng, and was its keeper of incense.
The Duo comment: Grasping at the moon and hurting the living; slavering and losing one’s rank; and then to say when I am dead just bury me — what does that get you, even at your most free and easy? If only one could take the golden plough and the jade toad and wash them all clean in the water of the western river! Let this serve as one more essay on sobering up: from now on, the wine-sellers’ censers and jars may be stopped up and turned over.
