What Did the Origin Myths in Soushenji Volume 14 Set Out to Explain? (3/3)

The short answer

Volume 14 of the Soushenji (搜神記) records the origins of things and of peoples in short entries. The Panhu (盤瓠) entry sets down a worm's transformation into a dog and the name "Manyi." The Silkworm Maiden (蠶馬) entry sets down the transformation of a girl and a horse's hide into silkworms and the name of the mulberry tree. Both entries can be seen as sharing one form: they tie a name still in use today to a single event in the past. This article deals only with the wording of volume 14 and with what Korean sources confirm. It is part 3 of 3.

The relationship with Korean sources can be stated only as far as the evidence allows. The Giyi chapter of the Samguk Yusa (三國遺事) carries a story of conception by a force that came down from heaven and a story of a child born from an egg. Volume 14 of the Soushenji carries the conception story of a maidservant of the king of Gori. The texts themselves confirm that motifs of the same kind appear in both books, but they cannot establish that either side copied the other.

A worm the size of a cocoon in the Panhu entry of volume 14

The Panhu entry in Soushenji volume 14 contains this passage: 「高辛氏，有老婦人，居於王宮，得耳疾，歷時，醫為挑治，出頂蟲，大如繭。」 An old woman living in the palace of Gaoxin developed an ailment of the ear, and when a physician treated it, a worm the size of a cocoon came out. The record does not begin with a divine will or a prophecy; it draws the story out of an everyday scene of illness and treatment.

Volume 14 describes the worm's transformation next: 「俄爾頂蟲乃化為犬。其文五色，因名盤瓠，遂畜之。」 The worm turned into a dog, and because its coat had five colors it was named Panhu and was therefore raised. The grounds for the name lie in the pattern, and this can be seen as a way of recording a name together with the event behind it.

Volume 14 then continues: 「乃募天下有能得戎吳將軍首者，贈金千斤，封邑萬戶，又賜以少女。」 A call went out that whoever obtained the head of General Rong Wu would receive a thousand catties of gold, a fief of ten thousand households and the king's young daughter. The list of rewards is concrete, with gold, a fief and a marriage standing side by side in a single sentence. Marriage, in other words, is written down as one item among the rewards.

In the first lecture of "The Historical Changes in Chinese Fiction," Lu Xun (魯迅) wrote: 「至於現在一班研究文學史者，卻多認小說起源於神話。」 That is his summary of how most literary historians of his day located the origin of fiction in myth. Lu Xun held that anyone searching for Chinese myth had no choice but to gather it piece by piece from old books, and he singled out the Shanhai jing (山海經) as the most important of them. The Shanhai jing describes the Queen Mother of the West (西王母) as living on Mount Yu, human in form but with a leopard's tail and a tiger's teeth. The Panhu entry in volume 14 can likewise be seen as a record that mixes the shape of a beast with the affairs of human beings.

The descendants of Panhu and the name "Manyi"

The Panhu entry in volume 14 gives the number of children: 「蓋經三年，產六男，六女。盤瓠死，後自相配偶，因為夫婦。」 Over three years six sons and six daughters were born, and after Panhu died the children paired off among themselves and became husbands and wives. The numbers are written down plainly. The record passes no judgment on these marriages and sets them down only as fact.

The same entry records the king's decision: 「王順其意，賜以名山，廣澤，號曰「蠻夷」。」 The king followed their wishes, granted them famous mountains and broad marshes, and called them "Manyi." The next passage specifies where they lived: 「今即梁漢、巴蜀、武陵、長沙、廬江郡夷是也。」 The Yi (夷) of Lianghan, Bashu, Wuling, Changsha and Lujiang commanderies are precisely these people. Name and territory stand together here, which makes clear that the entry served as an explanation of a people's origin.

The way a story settles at the end into a name and a territory can be seen as a feature that catches the eye in reading volume 14. The record does not stretch the event out; it links it directly to the name in use today. This narrative stance is treated separately in an article on how Gan Bao went about compiling the Soushenji. Here the focus stays on what the passages of volume 14 set out to explain.

The horse, the silkworm and the mulberry tree in the Silkworm Maiden entry

The Silkworm Maiden entry in volume 14 begins with what a girl said to a horse: 「乃戲馬曰：「爾能為我迎得父還，吾將嫁汝。」」 In jest she told the horse that if it could bring her father back, she would marry it. The record sets down her words together with the character 「戲」, and something said in jest takes the form of a promise.

The transformation comes in this passage: 「後經數日，得於大樹枝間，女及馬皮，盡化為蠶，而績於樹上。」 A few days later the two were found among the branches of a great tree: the girl and the horse's hide had both turned into silkworms and were spinning thread on the tree. The entry then describes the cocoons: 「其蠒綸理厚大，異於常蠶。鄰婦取而養之。其收數倍。因名其樹曰桑。桑者，喪也。」 They were thicker and larger than those of ordinary silkworms, so a neighbor woman took them and raised them, and her yield was several times greater; that is why the tree was called 桑. The gloss on the name can be seen as a passage placed at the very end of the record.

The Silkworm Maiden entry also records the names used in ritual: 「漢禮皇后親採桑祀蠶神，曰：「菀窳婦人，寓氏公主。」」 Under Han ritual the empress personally picked mulberry leaves and sacrificed to the silkworm deity, calling them Lady Wanyu and Princess Yu. Tale and ritual names sit together within a single record. The text itself confirms that the story is set down alongside the ritual names of the time.

In the first lecture of "The Historical Changes in Chinese Fiction," Lu Xun wrote: 「總之中國古代的神話材料很少，所有者，只是些斷片的，沒有長篇的」 This is his assessment that material for ancient Chinese myth is scarce and fragmentary, with nothing of any length. Lu Xun held that the natural environment of the Yellow River basin was harsh and life extremely hard, so that people valued the practical and slighted the imaginative, and myth therefore neither developed nor survived. The brevity of the Silkworm Maiden entry can also be read alongside this assessment. This, however, is Lu Xun's view, not an explanation offered by volume 14 itself.

Dongmyeong of Gori and the preface to the Giyi chapter of the Samguk Yusa

Volume 14 carries the conception story of a maidservant of the king of Gori: 「槀離國王侍婢有娠，王欲殺之。婢曰：「有氣如雞子，從天來下，故我有娠。」」 When the maidservant became pregnant the king wanted to kill her, and she answered that a force like a hen's egg had come down from heaven and that this was how she conceived. The river crossing follows: 「東明走，南至施掩水，以弓擊水。魚鱉浮為橋，東明得渡。」 Dongmyeong fled south to the Si'eom River and struck the water with his bow, whereupon fish and turtles rose to form a bridge and he crossed. A force from heaven and a crossing of water appear together in one record.

The preface to the Giyi chapter of the Samguk Yusa states why it records marvels: 「然而帝王之將興也。膺符命。受圖籙。必有以異於人者。」 When emperors and kings are about to rise, they receive the mandate and the prophetic charts, and they must have something that sets them apart from other people. The passage makes the miraculous a condition of writing about royal authority, and the compiler sets out his own criterion plainly within the text.

The Giyi chapter also cites other books: 「珠琳傳第二十一卷載。昔寧稟離王侍婢有娠。相者占之曰。貴而當王。」 Volume 21 of the Zhulin zhuan records that a maidservant of King Yeongpumni became pregnant and that a diviner declared the child would be noble and become a king. The chapter then gives the maidservant's words: 「婢曰氣從天來。故我有娠。及子之產。謂為不祥。捐圈則豬噓。棄欄則馬乳。而得不死。卒為扶餘之王」 She said a force came from heaven and that was how she conceived; when the child was born it was thought inauspicious and cast away, but a pig breathed on it and a horse gave it milk, so it did not die and in the end became king of Buyeo. The narrative names both the book cited and its volume number.

The Giyi chapter also contains a record about an egg: 「王棄之與犬豬。皆不食。又棄之路。牛馬避之棄之野。鳥獸覆之。」 The king gave the egg to dogs and pigs, but neither would eat it; when it was cast on the road, oxen and horses avoided it; and when it was cast into the fields, birds and beasts covered it over. The Talhae tale runs this way: 「七年後產一大卵。於是大王會問群臣。人而生卵。古今未有。殆非吉祥。」 Seven years later one large egg was born, so the king assembled his officials and asked about it, and it was said that no human had ever borne an egg, from ancient times to the present, and that this was surely inauspicious. Even while recording marvels, the Giyi chapter records the reactions of those who found them strange.

The Suijeon fragments and "Yeong-o and Se-o"

The Suijeon (殊異傳) is generally described as a collection of tales compiled by Choe Chi-won (崔致遠) at the end of the Silla period and later expanded and reworked by Pak In-ryang (朴寅亮) and Kim Cheok-myeong (金陟明). The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, published by the Academy of Korean Studies, records that no original copy survives today. The fragments are scattered through various books, including the Samguk Yusa and the Daedong unbu gun-ok (大東韻府群玉), and twelve survive once pieces that overlap in content are set aside. Though not the original text, these fragments are said to let us see the early narrative literature of the Silla period.

The circumstances of the reworking are also on record. The Samguk Yusa states that "a local man, Kim Cheok-myeong, wrongly polished the talk of the streets into a 'Life of the Dharma Master Wongwang' [鄉人金陟明, 謬以街巷之說, 潤文作光師傳]" — a case in which the documents themselves record how a tradition changed as it passed through other hands. Among the Suijeon fragments, "Yeong-o and Se-o" tells how the couple Yeong-o and Se-o went to Japan, and how, when the sun and moon of Silla lost their light, Se-o's woven silk was used in a sacrifice that restored it. The Samguk Yusa contains the passage 「第八阿達羅王即位四年丁酉。東海濱有延烏郎細烏女。夫婦同居。」, meaning that in the fourth year of King Adalla, a jeong-yu year, the couple Yeonorang and Seonyeo lived together on the shore of the East Sea. The two records spell the names differently.

It is worth noting where the original texts can be read directly. The Chinese texts of Soushenji volume 14 and Samguk Yusa volume one are available on the Chinese-language pages of Wikisource, and the entries on the Suijeon and on fiction in Chinese can be consulted in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture from the Academy of Korean Studies. In the first lecture of "The Historical Changes in Chinese Fiction," Lu Xun also recorded the bibliographic details of these old books. The Liexian zhuan (列仙傳) is listed in two volumes in the bibliographic section of the Sui shu (隋書), attributed to Liu Xiang (劉向), and contains the stories of seventy-one immortals including Chisongzi. The Shenxian zhuan (神仙傳) is listed in the same bibliography in ten volumes, attributed to Ge Hong (葛洪), and contains the stories of eighty-four figures including Xu You and Chao Fu. The Mu tianzi zhuan (穆天子傳) tells of King Mu of Zhou driving his eight steeds westward and is recorded as one of the miscellaneous texts from the old tombs of Ji commandery.

The bird-woman tale in volume 14 and the name "chuanqi"

Volume 14 also includes the story of women in feather garments: 「豫章新喻縣男子，見田中有六七女，皆衣毛衣，不知是鳥。」 A man of Xinyu county in Yuzhang saw six or seven women in a field, all wearing feather garments, and did not realize they were birds. The text confirms that a swan-maiden type tale is carried inside volume 14. It can be seen as a compilation in which origin explanations and transformation tales are placed in the same volume.

Criteria of classification differ from country to country. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture lays out its explanation item by item. First, "chuanqi" means the recounting of marvels and, in distinction from the "zhiguai" of the Six Dynasties period, refers to individual literary creation in the Tang. Second, Chinese literary history places zhiguai, chuanqi and huaben all within the category of fiction. Third, Japanese literary history does not include monogatari (物語) or soshi (草子) in fiction. Fourth, the roots of Korean fiction in Chinese reach back to the tale literature of antiquity, whose concrete form appears in the Samguk Sagi (三國史記), the Samguk Yusa and the Suijeon.

Stories were also bundled together across books. In "Kim Hyeon Moves a Tiger," a similar story called "Shen Tucheng" — one of the Tang chuanqi included in the Taiping guangji (太平廣記) — is appended to the tale of Kim Hyeon; this can be seen as an editorial approach that places the two stories side by side. The marvel narratives of the Suijeon fragments are also said to have exerted a direct and indirect influence on the writing of chuanqi fiction in the Joseon period, including Kim Si-seup's Geumo Sinhwa (金鰲新話). That is the encyclopedia's assessment, and the source does not trace the route of influence for individual works.

Written tradition is not the only kind. Lu Xun wrote that Shentu (神荼) and Yulü (郁壘) were great gods of antiquity who, in legend, hold reed cords in their hands, bind tigers and ward off malevolent spirits. For this reason, he explained, people in ancient times honored them as door gods (門神). Here written records and traditions surviving as custom are mentioned side by side.

"Hoseung" in the Bohanjip and the Geumo Sinhwa

"Hoseung" in the Bohanjip (補閑集) is explained as a tale of the same lineage as "Howon" (虎願) from the Suijeon. That judgment of common lineage rests on the explanation in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture. The sources do confirm that similar stories survive in different books, so it can be seen that the tradition did not remain confined to a single book.

The same source lays out the development of fiction in Chinese. Korean fiction in Chinese is assessed as having moved from tale literature through the "chuanqi" of the late Silla and early Goryeo period and the "gajeon" of Goryeo, reaching a first complete form in the Geumo Sinhwa of early Joseon. That sentence reads as an assessment rather than a record of fact. What it does confirm is that tales, chuanqi and gajeon are treated together as a single line of development.

Working with such sources also calls for weighing the date of composition. In the first lecture of "The Historical Changes in Chinese Fiction," Lu Xun wrote that the Dongming ji (洞冥記) and the Xijing zaji (西京雜記) had been shown to be the work of Six Dynasties authors, and he judged all six works of fiction he had cited earlier to be forgeries. This can be seen as a passage showing that the transmission of a title from antiquity guarantees nothing about when a text was written.

Not every tradition exists in writing. Lu Xun wrote that Shentu (神荼) and Yulü (郁壘) were great gods of antiquity who, in legend, hold reed cords in their hands, bind tigers and ward off malevolent spirits, and that people in ancient times therefore honored them as door gods (門神). Records preserved in writing and traditions preserved in custom are mentioned here side by side.

Related reading: In What Spirit Did Gan Bao Write the Soushen ji (1/3)

Summary

The Panhu entry draws the name from a five-colored pattern and records famous mountains, broad marshes and the name "Manyi," with a place of residence given as the Yi of Lianghan, Bashu, Wuling, Changsha and Lujiang commanderies. The Silkworm Maiden entry records the transformation, the state of the cocoons and the yield, the name 桑, and the ritual names the Han empress used in her sacrifice to the silkworm deity. The weight of the record falls on names and customs rather than on events.

The comparison with Korean sources confirms an overlap of motifs. No original Suijeon survives, only twelve fragments, and its marvel narratives are said to have influenced Joseon-period chuanqi fiction, including the Geumo Sinhwa. How volume 14 reached the tale collections of Silla and Japan, however, cannot be established from these sources alone. The original texts can be consulted directly on Wikisource and in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture from the Academy of Korean Studies.