Tu’er Shen, The Patron God Of “Oh, Not This Again!”
In 1788 Chinese author Yuan Mei wrote about an absurd and much older folktale that dealt with something natural, undoubtable and human that authorities still aren’t too happy about.
The pattering of young rabbits’ feet filled the air between the aisles in the Library of Found Things right before a weighty tome blocked the path. It was called What The Master Would Not Discuss and it contained a scandalous little absurdity about the rabbit god Tu’er Shen.
It was a long time ago by any measure. The Emperor presided over lands that were beyond reach of the imagination. Vertiginous cliffs, mountains that loomed over undulating hills and valleys like some ancient, silent gods; all of it was under the control of the Emperor but how could a single man govern lands he could barely imagine? He needed governors.
In that time, governors were extensions of the Emperor’s might and wisdom; far-stretching avatars of his holiness and they were treated as such by everybody. Carried upon a palanquin adorned with silk curtains and cushions soft enough for the Emperor himself to recline upon. Servants carried the envoy upon strong legs, supple as dancers’, cushioning every impact so adeptly that their burden could traverse any environment and not discern it from a still garden pool.
One such envoy - a censor - was a brilliant young man whom the Emperor had dispatched to a far off land himself to become its local governor. What the young man lacked in experience he more than made up for in academic skill. The imperial examination had posed no challenge to his monumental memory and understanding of complex gubernatorial procedure going back centuries. He was, the Emperor and all of his advisers believed, the perfect example of administration and governance.
When he arrived in that distant land, he presented himself to the local authorities. They bowed and exalted him as if he were the Emperor himself but there was one man, a mild-mannered local called Hu Tianbao, whose eyes flashed open first after each bow. As the new governor spoke, Hu Tianbao’s face would emerge from behind an onlooker like the moon from behind its veil. When the governor took to his palanqui again to tour the local area, Hu Tianbao’s face, like a young rabbit seeing moonlight glimmer off a rivulet for the first time, was in every crowd he greeted.
The young governor brushed the coincidence aside, dismissing Hu Tianbao as simply another bureaucrat eager to serve the State. The governor stayed in that distant land for some time, reducing waste and enacting laws that would serve the Emperor in his limitless need for taxes and dominion. Hu Tianbao was a faithful servant but, no matter what interaction he had with the governor, he looked upon the young man with a face filled with both admiration and pain.
One day, the governor had gone to the bathroom only to discover that Hu Tianbao was there already. The governor, ire rising up his neck from a sense of vulnerability and shame, beat Hu Tianbao mercilessly. He demanded to know why he looked at him in that strange way, why he followed his every word with attentiveness that went far beyond the protocols of hierarchy. Hu Tianbao raised his hands in surrender and took the beating valiantly until finally he decided honesty was more virtuous than silence.
“Ever since I first saw you,” Hu Tianbao said, “and saw how handsome you are, I haven’t been able to keep you out of my thoughts, my lord. Even though I know only too well that you are as beautiful as the jade cherry tree in Heaven no ordinary bird, like me, could ever alight your perfect limbs, my wild heart still leads me into impropriety.”
The governor had no formal training for such sentiment, there was no section of his exam that allowed for lightness of such thoughts, such veering away from proper administrative interaction. So, angry at his own ineptitude, the governor ordered Hu beaten to death under a decayed tree.
When Hu Tianbao arrived in the Underworld, heart broken and spirit doused in shame, he was confused to hear laughter trilling in the distance. He followed the sound and came to a clearing in which all of the Officials of the Underworld were sitting and chuckling. There was no malice in their laughter, it was the tittering of parents who delight in their child’s foolishness.
“Why do you laugh?” asked Hu Tianbao, “I deserved to die because I offended a nobleman with my deviant desires.”
One of the officials walked up to him, still laughing and asked if his desires felt deviant. After a moment, Hu Tianbao said ‘no’. They didn’t feel temporary, his love was earnest and he suffered to contain it out of a desire to do the object of his love no wrong.
Laughter erupted again and the Officials told him that he had done no wrong, then. They laughed at him as if he were an innocent rabbit. They gave him the title of “Rabbit God” and sent him back up to the world of the living in that form, into the dreams of a different local official in Fujian.
“I am called Tu’er Shen,” said the Rabbit God to the man in his dream, “and the Officials of the Underworld have sent me here so that you can build a temple for me, to offer incense to me so that I can watch over the matters relating to men who love men.”
The local official woke up. There was a custom throughout the province - if only quietly acknowledged - of men loving and living with men, and so he went to the locals and told them about his dream. He raised money for a temple and, once built, it attracted worshippers from all over the Empire. These visitors paid homage to Tu’er Shen and they remembered what happened to Hu Tianbao and, one wise visitor in particular once remarked, “The governor whom Hu Tianbao had not read the ancient book Springs and Autumns’ by Yanzi, which recommends that homosexual men not be executed, therefore the governor punished the man far too harshly.”
That reference to the “Springs And Autumns by Yanzi” is actually taken verbatim from the source of this week’s Pop Mythology, What The Master Would Not Discuss by Yuan Mei and it refers to a 5th Century BCE chronicle of every important matter in the State of Lu over a 242-year period.
Yuan Mei was writing 2200 years later and, clearly, the people in ‘Power’ still hadn’t got the message.
Yuan Mei’s What The Master Would Not Discuss, or Zibuyu, is a collection of 700 supernatural stories that are part of a genre known as “Tales Of The Weird”. Now, there’s something fascinating about this 200+ year old genre in that it has much in common with the 19th-Early-20th Century Western genre of “Gothic”.
As one scholar put it*, “The classic motifs are resurrection, communication with the dead and rectification of unjust death. But the context of the narrative discourse concerns episodes of everyday life, such as family relations and tensions, eroticism and sexual desire, sickness and natural disasters. Thus, strange phenomena, heroic enterprises, spirits and invisible powers (yinwei 陰威) break into ordinary existence, making us feel that such human passions and everyday experiences are often interwoven with obscure forces acting in the background of our human reality.”
In Yuan Mei (the term) ’strangeness’ refers to a provoking situation that shocks the reader, leading them to reflect on the apparent absurdity of reality. Yuan Mei was very critical of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy and social conventions and, in general, against the hierarchical order associated with any and all of these dogmatic religions and the States that profited from them. Throughout the book he makes fun of corrupt priests, evil magicians, and cruel administrators in equal measure. What’s most interesting about the Zibuyu, however, is that it criticises these conventions in a genre that was designed to be entertaining because that’s often how messages transmit best across distance and time.
One reason for this story, in particular, appearing in the Zibuyu is that laws under the Qing Dynasty - the one Yuan Mei lived under - were much stricter against homosexual activity compared to earlier, despite the fact that Taoist scriptures mention nothing against same-sex relationships. Nevertheless, thanks to officials like Zhu Ghui in 1765, there was a fervent push to “standardise the morality of the people” by rooting out “licentious cults” across China at this time and the cult of Tu’er Shen was right there at the top of these pedantic bureaucrats’ lists.
History doesn’t always rhyme; sometimes it repeats itself like a bad egg.
Once again, there is a disconnect between those who wish to control and those who just want to get on with their lives. It would appear that this is a plague that has ridden humanity like a mad hog wrangler in every culture, in every century for as long as people have wanted to control the behaviour of those around them.
You can bet your hat on it! Give it a try. Get together a small fraction of any society, declare that you are or even like something ever-so-slightly different to the majority - don’t worry, it doesn’t matter that, in every other aspect, your small ‘fringe’ group is perfectly similar to said majority - and just sit back and wait for somebody in control to start screaming to the rooftops about your degeneracy and how it threatens the very fabric of culture, society and life itself from the quantum level to how they wear their tie.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom.
In 2006 there was a Taoist priest called Lu Wei-ming who, after the legalisation of same-sex marriages in the country, founded a new temple to Tu’er Shen in New Taipei City in Taiwan. Since the opening of the temple it has been reported that over 9,000 pilgrims have been visiting each year to honour the god of not just ‘men who love men’ anymore but anyone, no matter their sexual orientation or gender, who wanted to declare their love in a way that would have made Hu Tianbao proud.
It may be the only temple of its kind today but it performs many “love ceremonies” for same sex couples and it is said that there is a new movement towards building individual altars to Tu’er Shen in people’s homes.
It would seem that - no matter the century or circumstances - there has always been a bureaucratic fervour to stamp out anything that veers even slightly from an ‘established norm’. This is, not in the least, bloody annoying. However, what we should take some solace in is that there are always people like Yuan Mei who use their skills to mock and ridicule the people in ‘Power’s’ incessant attempts at hindering nature.
Stay resilient, maintain ridicule and love whoever the fuck you want to.
*see What The Master Would Not Discuss edited by Paolo Santangelo & Yan Beiwen