There was a man called Ye the Unshod. Nobody knew where he came from. He went bareheaded and barefoot, wore the same cotton robe winter and summer, and carried a bamboo mat.
Once he put up at an inn in Weiyang and complained that the other guests were noisy, and asked for somewhere clean. The innkeeper pointed at a room.
“That is the quietest. But it has a ghost. No one sleeps there.”
“No harm,” said Ye. And he swept it out himself and spread his mat on the floor.
At the third watch the door opened. A woman came in with silk tied round her neck, her eyeballs torn out and hanging down on her cheeks, her tongue several feet long, shuffling forward. Behind her came a headless ghost carrying its two heads. And behind that: one all over black, with the features blurred out; and one whose four limbs were yellow and swollen, with a belly bigger than a five-bushel gourd.
They said to one another in surprise: “There is a living smell in here. Let us all take him.”
They searched. They could not get near him.
“He is plainly here, and we cannot find him. What are we to do?”
The fat yellow one said: “The reason we can seize people is that their hearts terrify and their hun leaves the body first. This man must be a man of the Way. His heart does not terrify, his hun does not leave its body, and so he cannot be got at in a hurry.”
While the ghosts stood about looking helpless, Ye sat up on his mat, pointed at himself with his own hand, and said:
“I am here.”
The ghosts panicked and knelt all together. Ye questioned them one by one.
The woman pointed at the other three. “This one died in water. This one died in fire. This one murdered for gain and was executed. I am the one who hanged herself in this room.”
“Do you accept me?” said Ye.
They all said yes.
“Then each of you go and be reborn, and stop haunting this place.”
They bowed in a ring and went.
In the morning he told the innkeeper. The room was quiet after that.
