Selections from Liao Zhai

Introduction:

For thousands of years, the existence of spirits has been always a controversial subject

Although mankind's inquiry into the supernatural has never produced substantial answers, every country abounds in ghost storied.

China is one of the oldest highly civilized nations in the world. There are countless supernatural tales told generation after generation. <<Liao zhai zhi yi>> by Pu Songling (1640-1715) from the Qing dynasty is unanimously acknowledged, both popularly and academically, as one of the most remarkable works of this sort in the canon of Chinese literature.

In the more than four handerd short stories in Liao zhai, ghosts and spirits were all vividly personified. They lived with humans in the human world, and also in their own world. They traveled from one world to the other easily and frequently. Although they had the advantage of supernatural powers, the spirits in the book still liked to show themselves in human form. They looked and acted like human beings when they lived in the human world. Thus in the stories pf the book, it is sometimes hard to distinguish which one was human and which was spirit. The ingenious revelation of that secret, therefore, often becomes the most exciting part of the story.

As fascinating as one may find the Chinese ghost stories, one may still return to the old controversial question: who has ever really seen a ghost?

Before answering the question, let me ask you a few questions first:

Every fall, how do millions of tiny monarch butterflies find their way to remote mountain forests, hundreds of miles away, where none of them have ever been before?

Every winter, how do those five-thousand-pound elephant seals navigate hundreds of miles of open sea and return to the beaches where they were born?

These are only two examples of the countless unanswerable questions about how the natural world works. The marvelous world of animals is full of so many mysteries that no scientist so far has yet been able to give us satisfactory answers how and why. Just as we cannot find those answers, neither can we answer the questions in the stories of Liao zhai.

Your life is story. My life is a story. Stories are stories. As long as they are good stories, we should not question too much the truthfulness of the tales, and would rather concentrate on the truth in the tales. This book contains a careful selection of the most interesting stories in Liao zhai. In order to best satisfy and entertain English-speaking readers, the stories have been revised and rewritten each of them.

Textbook 1 Price: US$ 24.95