Chinese Literature

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and made her his mistress. Now that justice had prevailed and the criminal had confessed his guilt, she begged the magistrate to pass judgement and right the past wrong. After she had spoken she wept again.

Moved by her words, the magistrate sent men to arrest the bandit, and when he was tortured they found that his confession tallied in every point with her statement ; accordingly he was condemned to death. The case was reported to the imperial court and, when the usual sixty days had passed, the emperor decreed that since the bandit had committed robbery and murder and caused the ruin of innocent people, he should be executed on the spot according to the law; the former magistrate, who had passed a wrong sentence, should be dismissed from his post and struck off the official list; the families of Tsui Ning and the concubine who had died unjustly should receive pensions from the authorities; and since Mrs. Liu had been forced by the bandit to become his wife and had avenged her husband’s death, half of the bandit’s property should be confiscated but half should be left to her to live on.

Mrs. Liu went to the execution ground to watch the sentence being carried out; and when the bandit’s head had been cut off she took it and offered it as sacrifice before the shrines of her dead husband, the concubine and Tsui Ning. After lamenting bitterly over them, she gave the property she had received to a nunnery and became a nun, every morning and evening chanting Buddhist sutras for the souls of the dead until she herself died of old age. As the verse says:

Guilty or innocent, they died unblessed,

Their ruin caused by careless words in jest; Then learn to speak the truth while you are young; The root of every evil is the tongue!

THE JADE KUANYIN

I

’Tis not the wind and rain that banish spring,

For spring must vanish, though we know not why. Now fade the red cheeks of the tiny plum;

Their small beaks gold no more, young swallows fly; The cuckoo calls and blossoms drift away,

While silkworms glut themselves on mulberry leaves; And all alone beside the rainy stream,

As spring slips none knows where, the poet giieves.

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