Ever since I was a child, I was taught by the elders of my family to revere Master Tranquil Cloud as the greatest among all the illustrious ancestors of our noble clan. While he is a well-known historical figure, a high official of the royal court, and a famed scholar who was celebrated for his brilliance and integrity, I found him to be a rather mysterious figure when I came to research his life as an adult. Despite the plethora of information on him in the historical records, I found it difficult to comprehend someone who lived in an utterly different cultural context than my own. I was further beguiled by two central mysteries of his life that have never been solved. The first is the nature of the unusual addendum to his most celebrated writing, and the second, the strange circumstance of his death.
Master Tranquil Cloud lived during a particularly patriarchal time of the country’s history, one in which women were shut out of positions of power, marginalized in social life, and rendered invisible in its records. For that reason, the final addendum to his great work of judicial philosophy, Treatise on the Moral Training of Righteous Judges, is such a surprising text as it passionately advocates for women’s legal rights. Of particular interest is his detailing of seventeen typical ways in which women are treated unfairly by the courts, with their testimonies ignored, treated with undue skepticism, or even vilified as feminine lies. It ends with an earnest plea to judges, urging them to be aware of their prejudice against women, which could lead to miscarriage of justice. He asks them to consider how they would like their mothers, sisters, and daughters to be treated by the courts, and use that as the basis of their moral guidance. Given the unusual nature of the writing that provides significant insight into the social status of women in the period, the addendum has been published on its own in a number of anthologies of traditional texts under the modern title of “In Defense of Women Before the Law.”
Some scholars have expressed skepticism about the level of understanding and empathy toward women demonstrated by Tranquil Cloud who was a member of a traditional family of noble lineage. A few have even suggested that the addendum is an early modern forgery, pointing to the fact that no extant manuscript of the text that is older than a century and a half has survived. But other scholars have shown that the style of the writing is consistent with Tranquil Cloud’s other works, and they have unearthed a few contemporary references to the addendum. One feminist historian has speculated that the true author may have been a woman in Tranquil Cloud’s household who successfully replicated his style and surreptitiously included it in his collected writings. A recent best-selling novel details such a scenario, featuring a fictional illegitimate daughter of Tranquil Cloud who was secretly educated by him, despite legal prohibition against the teaching of letters to women. After watching her mother, a concubine of commoner status, suffer through a case of egregious injustice, she composes the addendum and places it in among her dying father’s works.
Despite the universal acclaim Master Tranquil Cloud garnered as an upright statesman, as well as the foremost legal philosopher of his time, his death is also clouded in mystery as it is unknown exactly when and how he passed. While the members of our lineage clan still pay particular respect to him on the days marked for the veneration of ancestors, they can only do so before a monumental tablet, as it is unknown where he was buried. What can be ascertained is that in his sixty-fifth year, when he held the position of state councilor of the left, he was exiled by the king for his vociferous defense of the queen dowager, who was being prosecuted for treason. He was sent to a remote village in the far northern province of Sturdy Hills where he disappeared some years later.
A fantastic tale that purports to explain his final fate can be found in a number of informal works of anecdotal history and regional folktales written as entertainment for better-educated commoners, though it is known that noblemen also read them as guilty pleasures. It can in no way be regarded as a reliable historical account of Master Tranquil Cloud’s last years, as the story features supernatural elements. The addendum on the legal rights of women is not mentioned in it, but it points to what could be construed as an explanation of how he came to write it—that an uncanny encounter with spirits may have inspired him to do so.
When Master Tranquil Cloud reached his sixtieth year, he found himself in such a content time of his life that he could not possibly have imagined the calamities that would befall him in the years that followed. After lauded tenures as the minister of punishments, the director of the Office of Forbidden Affairs, and the governor of the province of Resplendent Fields, he was due to ascend to the highest level of officialdom in the State Council. His reputation as a great scholar had already been established with the publication of Treatise on the Moral Training of Righteous Judges, which was universally regarded as the greatest work of judicial philosophy produced in the land. In it, he argued against the old legalist philosophers who advocated the use of stringent laws, strict enforcement, and harsh punishments as tools of social and political stability and control. Tranquil Cloud asserted that no matter how necessary the laws were, they were liable to be perverted and misused if they were practiced by judges lacking proper morals. A country with few laws but with many good judges can be a just place, he reasoned, whereas one with many laws but few good judges will inevitably degenerate into inequity. The bulk of the book details a program of ethical education for the proper moral cultivation of judges, including the practice of benevolence for all those concerned in a legal case.
Given his high achievements as both a statesman and a scholar, he imagined an easy course through the rest of his life. But then, just as his time as governor was coming to an end, misfortune fell upon him like a series of lightning bolts from a suddenly erupting storm. His beloved son, an official at the Ministry of Military Affairs who was serving as an inspector in the northern border, was killed in a barbarian raid. Not long after, his daughter died in childbirth, her baby son surviving for only a month before joining her in oblivion. His wife then fell ill and suffered terribly as an invalid for years before finally passing.
Even as he had to face such personal tragedies, his position in the government became precarious. After he returned to the capital from the province of Resplendent Fields and took up his new position as the state councilor of the left, a major crisis erupted in the royal court. The king discovered the scandalous and unseemly circumstances under which his mother had been deprived of her position as queen and eventually executed when he was still a little boy, which sent him on a path of frenzied vengeance. He arrested all the old officials who had been in the government during the time of his mother’s downfall and executed or exiled those he held responsible for her demise. He ordered the death of all three surviving former concubines of his father as well. Then he went after the queen dowager who had replaced his mother as the royal consort. Many of those who were persecuted had indeed been involved in the execution of the king’s mother for various political and personal reasons, but it was generally known that the queen dowager was innocent. She came from a minor lineage clan that had only a few junior-level officials in the government at the time of her marriage, and she had been chosen rather hurriedly to become the new queen so that the whole sordid affair could be forgotten. Yet the king meant to get rid of the woman who had taken his mother’s place beside his father.
Because of his preoccupation with avenging his mother, the monarch was neglecting his duties of the state so that all the important works in the kingdom was at a standstill. Many officials, consequently, thought that sacrificing the life of the guiltless dowager queen was an acceptable price to pay to finally allay the king’s wrath. But there were others, including Tranquil Cloud, who felt that the bloodletting had gone on long enough and claimed too many innocent lives already. In the crucial moment before the king was set to announce the prosecution of the queen dowager, Tranquil Cloud led the formal remonstrance against the course.
For ten days, he and many other officials sat before the throne room, begging the king to spare the life of the queen dowager. It ended with their mass arrest, which was followed by a trial for disloyalty to the monarch. Before Tranquil Cloud was deprived of his position and sent away in exile, he learned in prison that his long-suffering wife had passed away.
The journey to the remote corner of the Province of Sturdy Hills was long and arduous, but Tranquil Cloud’s fortune brightened a little when he finally arrived. The local magistrate was a great admirer of Treatise on the Moral Training of Righteous Judges and also sympathetic to the circumstances under which Tranquil Cloud ended up in exile. So the magistrate provided Tranquil Cloud with a modest but comfortable home on the outskirts of the village and even assigned his head servant, a large jolly fellow who was called Bull Dung, to see to his needs. And so Tranquil Cloud settled down to lead a quiet life of mourning for his family and meditating on the unfathomable vicissitudes of life.
One mystery that puzzled and distressed him was the disappearance of a girl named Butterfly who was one of three servants he had been allowed to take with him in exile. She was young, not yet twenty, and had been an orphan street beggar until his wife had taken pity on her and brought her into their household. A diligent and modest girl, she had always appeared content to be in Tranquil Cloud’s service, so he could not understand why she had run away. When he told Bull Dung that she was missing, the man offered to look for her but returned a few days later without having found any trace of her. It was yet another loss for Tranquil Cloud, who had been fond of her, but his sadness was soon eclipsed by the great grief that overwhelmed him when he was visited by the admiring magistrate, who informed him that the queen dowager had been executed by the order of the king.
About a year into Tranquil Cloud’s exile, the magistrate came for his regular visit to pay his respects. He was accompanied by Bull Dung, who carried the magistrate’s gifts of food and liquor on a wood-framed carrier. In the course of the leisurely afternoon conversation between Tranquil Cloud and the magistrate, the latter revealed that he was investigating an utterly confounding case of bloody murder. Five days before, the entire family of the richest merchant in town had been found dead in their sleeping chambers with their bodies mutilated. The merchant, his mother, his wife, and two sons had their bodies ripped open and their vital organs cut out in the middle of the night. The strange thing was, there had been no less than twelve household servants, but none of them had heard anything. They were arrested and interrogated for three days, and their rooms were thoroughly searched, but there was nothing that implicated them in the horrific crime. To add to the mystery, the magistrate’s soldiers discovered a grave in an obscure corner of the backyard, which they dug up and found the body of a young girl. From the clothing on the corpse, the servants identified her as one of their own who had gone missing a few months before. As she had been deeply unhappy at the household, they had all assumed that she had run away. The body was too decomposed to yield any clue as to how she had died.
At the end of the day, as Tranquil Cloud walked the magistrate out the house gate, he noticed Bull Dung leaning against a nearby tree, apparently deep asleep. After they bade farewell, the magistrate walked over to his servant and woke him up.
“What is the matter with you?” the magistrate asked. “You seem tired all the time these days. Every time I turn around, you fall asleep somewhere. Are you ill?”
“No, my lord,” Bull Dung said in a listless voice as he slowly got to his feet.
Tranquil Cloud watched them leave, feeling anxious with the presentiment that something terrible was about to occur. He mulled over the horrific story of the murder of the merchant and his family, the dead servant girl, and his own servant girl Butterfly who had gone missing. He shook off his unsettling thoughts, but that night he dreamt of an elderly servant woman who had taken care of him in his early childhood. The servant’s mother had been a shaman, so she knew many stories of ghosts, goblins, and monsters. Despite the fact that most of them were scary tales, he was thrilled to hear them and always asked for more. Now, all the terrifying creatures returned to him in his dream and tormented him until the morning.
A few months later, Bull Dung returned with more food and other gifts from the magistrate. When Tranquil Cloud saw him, he was shocked to see that the once hefty servant was reduced to an emaciated state, with his eyes sunken and his skin pale. As he was panting desperately from the effort of carrying the gifts, Tranquil Cloud had him sit down at the edge of the veranda and had some water brought to him.
“You look worse than when I saw you last. Have you gone to a doctor?”
“My lord, the magistrate, sent me to one, respected sir. But he could find no cause for my condition. Since I have no appetite, he advised that I continue to work so that I would grow hungry from it.”
“To no avail, I take it.”
“No, respected sir.”
“Have you been doing anything differently recently? Some new food or drink you’ve been taking?”
To Tranquil Cloud’s surprise, Bull Dung’s sickly face blushed with embarrassment.
“No, respected sir. Not that I can think of.”
Tranquil Cloud had spent enough time interrogating people at the Ministry of Punishments and the Office of Forbidden Affairs to know when someone was lying. So he found it odd that Bull Dung was obviously hiding something that he apparently knew to be making his health deteriorate. It was apparently better for him to keep getting sicker than to reveal the cause of his illness. But the servant was not a prisoner brought before Tranquil Cloud to be examined, so he did not to press him further.
Bull Dung got some rest, and then he set out to leave. When he walked out the house gate, some vague intuition made Tranquil Cloud follow him. On the road, he saw that Bull Dung was not heading back to the magistrate’s house in the village but going in the opposite direction, toward a nearby forest. Tranquil Cloud hesitated for a moment before setting off after him.
A few spans away from the house, Bull Dung suddenly left the road and entered in among the thickly standing trees. Tranquil Cloud went in as well, keeping his distance without losing sight of the servant. After a while, when he realized that Bull Dung was not alone, he quickly hid behind a tree. He peeked carefully around the trunk to see that the man was talking to a young woman in a white dress whose beauty, even at that distance, made her luminous. As he watched on, the woman stepped up to Bull Dung, took off his clothes, and pulled him to the ground. She then disrobed herself, revealing immaculate skin of pure white, and straddled Bull Dung. After she moved vigorously on top of him for a time, she got up, dressed again, and walked away.
When she was gone, Tranquil Cloud walked cautiously over to Bull Dung and found him dead with his eyes wide open with a look of horror on his face. The expression sent a chill down his spine. He looked around and saw that darkness was descending with the onset of dusk, so he started running back to the road. But the terror from what he had witnessed disoriented his mind, and he lost all sense of direction. As night fell, he found himself completely lost among the dark trees.
After wandering through the woods for an accountable period of time, he came across Bull Dung’s body again, having apparently walked in a circle. When he approached the corpse, he was horrified to see three foxes feeding on its vital organs.
“It is all right, my lord,” a quiet, gentle voice came next to him, startling him greatly despite its reassuring tone. “That will not happen to you. You are safe.”
Tranquil Cloud turned and found another fox looking up at him.
“Do you know who I am, my lord?” the fox asked.
“I know what you are,” Tranquil Cloud replied, on the verge of fearful panic.
“You are a fox demon. You and the others.”
“What do you know about us?”
“You appear before men in isolated places,” he said, remembering the stories the old servant woman had told him during his childhood, “you tempt them into lying with you, then you take away their vital strength until they become weak and obedient. When they are at the end of their strength, you finish them off and eat their organs.”
“Why do we do that?”
“Because you are hungry, and because you are evil.”
“Are human beings evil because they hunger for the meat of cows and pheasants?”
“What will you do to me?”
“You will be not be harmed, my lord.”
“Why do you call me that?”
“Because I have served you for a long time.”
“What?”
“Do you not see who I am?”
Tranquil Cloud stared at the fox until the animal transformed itself into a young girl.
“Butterfly? Is that you?” he asked in astonishment.
“Yes, my lord.”
“How… you ran away and became a fox demon?”
“I did not run away, my lord.”
“What happened to you then?”
“When we first came to this village, Bull Dung befriended me. One day, I was on my way to the village market when I ran into him. He promised to show me a short cut through the forest. There, he raped me, killed me, and buried my body here. But my sorrow and rage over how I died turned me into a fox spirit so I could avenge myself. I met other fox spirits who had been women and girls who died under such circumstances. We came together, and we helped one another.”
Tranquil Cloud jumped with fright when he realized that three other women were standing near him. One was elderly, another young, and the third a mere child. He could see that they were the foxes who had been eating Bull Dung’s organs because their lips and chins were covered with blood.
“That is Cricket,” Butterfly said, indicating the young woman, who bowed respectfully to Tranquil Cloud. “She was also a servant, at the house of the richest merchant in the village. He and his family abused her terribly, the merchant, his mother, his wife, and his sons. One day, they beat her so badly that she died. So they buried her body and pretended that she had run away. She was also transformed into a fox spirit, so that she could take revenge against the family.”
Butterfly pointed to the elderly woman, who also bowed to Tranquil Cloud. “That’s the blacksmith’s widow. After her husband died, his brother wanted to take her property, so he accused her of having killed the blacksmith with poison. He bribed the judge who ordered her execution.”
Butterfly turned to the last of the fox spirits. “And that’s Spring Blossom.” The little girl bowed to Tranquil Cloud. “Her father wanted a son as he already had three daughters. When Spring Blossom was born, he did not want to raise another girl, so he took her to a river and drowned her.”
Tranquil Cloud looked at each of the women, feeling his fear replaced by pity for their terrible end.
Butterfly addressed Master Tranquil Cloud again. “Yes, we sometimes lure men into isolated places and sap their vital strength before eating their organs. We also sneak into houses and eat the people there without making a noise. That much of what you’ve been told about us is true. What’s not true is that we are evil. We do not do such things out of hunger or desire to cause harm for no good reason. In this world where we do not have a voice, where we cannot attain justice for the evilest crimes committed against us, Heaven has seen fit to grant us a way of redressing the wrong done to us. We do not kill innocent people. We only harm those who harmed us. Those who have vilified us as evil, they judge us only for our actions without knowing the reasons behind them. But you, my lord, I know that you can understand our position, being such an eminent scholar of justice.”
“If that is so, then why… why have you shown yourself to me? What have I done that I deserve the same fate as Bull Dung?”
“You do not, my lord,” Butterfly said in a reassuring tone. “As I told you, you are safe. We have brought you here for a completely different reason.”
“What is it?”
“Please come with us, my lord. I promise you once again that no harm will come to you.”
Tranquil Cloud hesitated for a long time, but he ultimately decided to trust Butterfly’s word. Besides, he reasoned, if they meant to kill him and eat his organs, there was no reason why they could not do so then and there.
“Very well,” he told Butterfly.
They walked in silence through the dark forest for a long time until they came across a clearing with a great flat rock in the middle. When they got near, a gate appeared on the rock’s surface, which opened to let them in. Beyond the gate, Tranquil Cloud found himself in a beauteous land of abundant fields of green and yellow grass, freshly flowing water, and willow trees with their slender branches dancing gracefully in a gentle wind. There were also clean and well-kept houses here and there, from which women of all ages came out to greet them.
In the middle of the wondrous place, there was a magnificent mansion with lofty pillars holding up a roof with bright red tiles. As Tranquil Cloud and the crowd of women approached the place, a screen door slid open and an elderly woman in a shimmering white dress emerged.
“Your Majesty!” Tranquil Cloud said out loud as he beheld the sight of the executed queen dowager. He immediately prostrated himself before her.
“Master Tranquil Cloud, please get up,” the queen dowager said. “It is I who should be prostrating myself before you, for all that you did to try to save my life. I know that you could not even see your wife in her last days or mourn her properly because of your actions.”
“Your Majesty! How I grieve over what befell you!”
“It was a sorrowful end for me indeed, but raise your head and see that I am well now. Heaven has seen fit to turn me into a fox spirit. Even as we speak, the fate of the man who has done me wrong is being sealed. For what he did to me, to you, and to so many righteous officials who sought to dissuade him from his unjust course, he will come to no good end.”
“But why have you brought me here, Your Majesty?” Tranquil Cloud said with tears streaming down his face. “I feel nothing but guilt at how I failed you.”
“It was not within your power to save me, so trouble yourself no longer. Come, stand before me, I beseech you.”
Tranquil Cloud got to his feet but kept his head bowed in a respectful manner.
“I have remained in this world not just to avenge myself,” the dowager queen said, “but also to reward those who sacrificed themselves on my behalf. In a few years, the current king will be gone, and a new king will summon you back to the capital. But you no longer desire to return to officialdom. I know this because my transformation into a fox spirit gave me the power to see into the souls of living people. You have secured your reputation as a brilliant scholar, a revered statesman, and a courageous official who stood up for justice when it was dangerous to do so. You have also lost all those you loved in this world. What you want now is to rest, to find some measure of peace in the remaining years of your life. For the service you have rendered me, that is exactly what I offer. Stay here with us, in this secret world of fox spirits, where you will lead a comfortable and tranquil life. If you decide to go back, I will not stop you. But I know that your soul is so very tired, and you want nothing more than to be at peace at last.”
“Stay with us, Master Tranquil Cloud,” all the fox spirits chanted in unison, their heads bowing in respect. “Let this be your final home.”
The story ends in this way without revealing Tranquil Cloud’s decision.
What is known in the historical records is that six years after Tranquil Cloud’s exile began, the king was dethroned in a palace coup. The new monarch exonerated Tranquil Cloud and summoned him back to the capital. When the royal messengers arrived in the village, they could find no trace of him as, according to the testimony of the local villagers, he had disappeared some years back. The only thing of significance they found in his abandoned house was his last writings, which included the addendum in defense of women.