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发信人: winglam(林Ｓｉｒ) 整理人: roy_young(2002-03-01 19:52:46), 站内信件 |
| In which three Ming Loyalists discuss the Manchu Persecution, the Ming Histo
ry, the Beggars' Guild, and the Triad secret society. 1. The Deer and the Cauldron Along a coastal road somewhere south of the Yangtze river, a detachment of s oldiers, each of them armed with a halberd, was escorting a line of seven prison cart s, trudging northwards in the teeth of a bitter wind. In each of the first three carts a single male prisoner was caged, indentifiable by his dress as a member of t he scholar class. One was a white-haired old man. The other two men were of middle years. The four rear carts were occupied by women, the last of them b y a young mother holding a baby girl at her breast. The little girl was cryi ng in a continuous wail which her mother's gentle words of comfort were powe rless to console. One of the soldiers marching alongside, irritated by the b aby's crying, aimed a mighty kick at the cart. "Stop it! Shut up! Or I'll re ally give you something to cry about!" The baby, startled by this sudden vio lence, cried even louder. Under the eaves of a large house, some hundred yards from the road, a middle -aged scholar was standing with a ten- or eleven-year-old boy at his side. He was evidently affected by this little scene, for a groan escaped his lips and he appeared to be very close to tears. "Poor creatures!" he murmured to himsel f. "Papa," said the little boy, "What have they done wrong?" "What indeed!" said the man, bitterly. "During these last two days they must have made more than thirty arrests. All our best Zhejiang scholars. And all of them in nocents, caught up in the net," he added in undertone, for fear that the sol diers might hear him. "That little girl is just a baby," said the boy. "What crime can she possibl y be guilty of? It's very wrong." "So you understand that what the Government soldiers do is wrong," said the man. "Good for you, my son!" he sighed. "They are the cleaver and we are the meat . They are the cauldron and we are the deer." "You explained 'they are the cleaver and we are the meat' the other day, pap a," said the boy. "It's what they say when people are massacred or beheaded. Like meat or fish being sliced up on the chopping-board. Does 'they are the cauldron and we are the deer' mean the same thing?" "Yes, more or less," said the man; and since the train of soldiers and priso n carts was fast receding, he took the boy by the hand. "Let's go indoors now," he said. "It's too windy for standing outside. Insid e, the man picked up a writing brush and moistened it on the ink-slab; then, on a sheet of paper, he wrote the character for a deer. "The deer is a wild animal, but although it is comparatively large, it has a very peaceable nature. It eats only grass and leaves and never harms other animals. So when other animals want to hurt it or eat it, all it can do is run away. If it can't escape by running away, it gets eaten." He wrote the characters for "chasing the deer" on the sheet of paper. "That's why in ancient times they often used the deer as a symbol of the emp ire. The common people, who are the subjects of empire, are gentle and obedient. Like the deer's, it is their lot to be cruelly treated and oppressed. In the His tory of the Han Dynasty it says 'Qin lost the deer and the world went chasin g after it'. That means that when the Qin emperor lost control of the empire , ambitious men rose up everywhere and fought each other to possess it. In t he end it was the first Han emperor, who got this big, fat deer by defeating the Tyrant King of Chu." "I know," said the boy. "In my story-books it says 'they chased deer on the Central Plain'. That means they were all fighting each other to become emperor. The scholar nodded, pleased with his son's astuteness. He drew a picture of a cauldron on the sheet of paper. "In olden times they didn't use a cooking-pot on the stove to cook their foo d; they used a three-legged cauldron like this and lit a fire underneath it. When they ca ught a deer they put it in a cauldron to seethe it. Those ancient rulers and great ministers were very cruel. If they didn't like somebody, they would p retend they had committed some crime or other, and then they would put them in a cauldron and boil them. In the Records of an Historian Lin Xiangru says to the son of Qin, 'Deceiving your majesty was a capital offense. I beg to approach the cauldron.' What he meant was, 'I deserve to die. Put me in the cauldron and boil me.'" "Often in my story-books I've read the words 'asking about the cauldrons in the Central Plain'," said the boy. "It seems to mean the same thing as 'chasing the deer in the Central Plain'." "It does," said the man. "King Yu of the Xia Dynasty, the first Dynasty that ever was, collected metal from all the nine provinces of the empire and used it to cas t nine great cauldrons with. 'Metal' in those days meant bronze. Each of the se bronze cauldrons had the name of one of the provinces on it and a map sho wing the mountains and rivers of that province. In later times whoever becam e master of the empire automatically became the guardian of these cauldrons. In The Chronicle of Zuo it says that when the Viscount of Chu was reviewing his troops on Zhou territory and the Zhou king sent Prince Man to him with his royal compliments, the Viscount questioned Prince Man about the size and weight of the cauldrons. Of course, as ruler of the whole empire, only the Zhou king has the right to be guardian of the cauldrons. For a mere Viscount like the ruler of Chu to ask a questions about them showed that he was harb ouring thoughts of rebellion and planning to depose the Zhou king and seize the empire for himself." "So 'asking about the cauldron' and 'chasing the deer' both mean wanting to be emperor," said the boy. "And 'not knowing who will kill the deer' means not knowing who will be emperor." "That's right," said the man. "as time went by, these expressions came to be applied to other situations as well, but originally they were only used in the sense of wanting to be emperor." He sighed. "For the common people, thought, the subjects of empire our role is to be the deer. It may be uncertain who will kill the deer, but the deer gets killed all right. There's no uncertainty about that." He walked over to the window and gazed outside. The sky had now turned a lea den hue showing that snow was on its way. He sighed again. ----          
         
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