Lu Xun

In September 1936, a month before he died, the writer Lu Xun wrote a short essay called "Death." Thirty years earlier, he said, when he was a medical student, he had looked into the question of whether the soul exists, "and the result was: don't know." He had always belonged, he went on, to the "casual party" who did not think about such things. But during the illness of that year he had thought about it, and he had become sure of one thing:

At that time I became certain that I do, in the end, believe that when people die there are no ghosts.¹²

He had first published fiction in 1918, a story about a madman who reads the history of his country and finds the words "eat people" written between the lines, and he spent the next years attacking what he called "ghost-talk." Yet in 1908 he had written a long defence of the farmers' gods against the reformers who wanted to tear down their temples, and in 1926 he wrote with open affection about the ghosts of the Shaoxing stage. This chapter asks how a boy who lost faith first in his father's doctors came to lose faith in the ghosts as well, and why the man who mocked ghost-talk never stopped defending the people who believed it.

The doctors and the drug guides

He was born Zhou Zhangshou in Shaoxing, in Zhejiang province, in the autumn of 1881; the date in the old calendar was the third day of the eighth month, which Wikipedia gives as 25 September.³ His father was a scholar and his mother, born into the Lu family, was a country woman who had taught herself to read.⁴ The family owned forty or fifty mu of rice land. When he was about thirteen, a great disaster struck: in 1893 his grandfather was jailed (Wikipedia says over a scandal of bribery in the civil examinations), the family was scattered, and he and his younger brother were boarded with their mother's brother, where people sometimes called him a beggar.⁵⁶

Then his father fell ill. For three years and more, by one of his own accounts, and for more than four by another, the boy went every day to the pawnshop counter and then to the apothecary.⁷ The first doctor charged 1.4 yuan a visit, and each prescription called for a "drug guide" that was hard to find: reed root, sugar cane that had survived three frosts, a pair of crickets that were each other's first mates, the skin of a broken drum. Lu Xun did the fetching.⁸ After two years, he wrote in 1926, "I too gradually lost faith in things like the sugar cane that had survived frost for three years."⁹¹⁰ The second doctor offered another explanation. He suggested asking whether some "grievance" from a past life lay behind the illness:

I think we might ask someone to look into whether there is some grievance... A doctor can cure illness but not fate, isn't that so?¹¹¹⁰

He also offered a pill to be placed on the tongue; Lu Xun's father thought about it and shook his head.¹⁰ When his father lay dying, a woman called Madam Yan had paper money and a sutra burned to ashes and wrapped in paper to be pressed into his fist, and told the boy to call out to him. Thirty years later Lu Xun wrote that he could still hear his own voice, and that each time he heard it he felt it was "my greatest wrong toward my father."¹²¹³ His father died, by Wikipedia's date, in 1896.¹⁴

His timeline places the first crack here, and it was a crack in his faith in Chinese medicine, not in the gods. Looking back in 1922, he said that once he had studied the new medicine he came to see the old as "a kind of deliberate or unwitting fraud," and felt for the patients and families it had deceived.¹⁵¹⁶

The underworld of a boy in Shaoxing

The religion around him was the religion of the household and the town. The picture books he was allowed to look at openly showed rewards and punishments under the earth. "Under China's heaven," he wrote later, "it is hard enough to be a person, and hard to be a ghost."¹⁷¹⁸ At seven his father made him learn a history primer by heart before he could go to the festival of the Five Fierce Gods at Dongguan, and what he remembered was the lesson, not the festival.¹⁹ What he loved was the ghost called Wuchang, "Impermanence," the messenger who fetches the souls of the dying, as the Shaoxing players acted him in the Mulian opera and in the processions of the gods. He wrote in 1926:

I still remember clearly that in my hometown, together with the "lower classes," I often looked with delight at this ghost who is also a man, rational and feeling, fearsome and lovable: Wuchang.²⁰²¹

The poor of Shaoxing, he said, put their hope for justice there: "If you ask the common people, they will answer without a thought: fair judgement is in the underworld!"²²²¹

Huxley in Nanjing

In the spring of 1898 he went to Nanjing, to the Naval Academy, and after about half a year moved to the School of Mines and Railways.²³ His mother wept, he wrote, because students of "foreign learning" were thought to be selling their souls to the foreigners.²⁴ Religion followed him to Nanjing. On the Naval Academy grounds a temple to Guan Di stood on a filled-in pool where two students had drowned, and every year on the fifteenth of the seventh month the school invited monks to perform the rite that feeds hungry ghosts.²⁵²⁶

At the mining school he bought Yan Fu's Tianyan lun, a Chinese version of T. H. Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, and read it straight through. He remembered his surprise:

Oh! So the world really had a Huxley, sitting in his study thinking like that, and thinking so freshly?²⁷²⁸

The school taught geology and mineralogy, and his brother Zhou Zuoren remembered him copying out a Chinese translation of Lyell's geology.²⁹ An elder of his clan told him sternly that he was in the wrong and gave him a memorial against the reformer Kang Youwei to copy.³⁰ His timeline places the beginning of his doubt here.

Sendai: "don't know"

After he graduated he was sent to Japan; his brother dates his graduation to 1901 and Wikipedia to 1902.³¹ He chose medicine, he wrote, partly because he had learned that Western medicine had helped Japan's Restoration, and partly because the books he had read had convinced him that Chinese medicine was a fraud.¹⁶ He studied for two years at the medical school in Sendai, from 1904 until March 1906 by Wikipedia's dates.³² His anatomy teacher, Fujino Genkurō, told him:

Since I heard that Chinese people greatly respect ghosts, I was worried you wouldn't be willing to dissect a corpse. Now I can relax; it isn't so.³³³⁴

Lu Xun does not record what he answered. It was at Sendai, he said thirty years later, that he "looked into whether the soul exists," and the result was "don't know."³⁵²

What took him away from medicine, by his own account, was a lantern slide shown in a microbiology class: a Chinese man about to be beheaded as a "spy," surrounded by Chinese onlookers. His three accounts place the slide at slightly different moments.³⁶ His conclusion was the same in each:

A weak and ignorant people, however sturdy in body, can only serve as material and spectators for meaningless public spectacle.³⁷³⁶

The task was to change the people's spirit, and the means was literature. A literary magazine he planned, New Life, collapsed before its first issue.³⁸

1908: in defence of superstition

In Japan he went to hear the scholar Zhang Taiyan lecture; Zhang had taken over the revolutionary paper Minbao in 1906. Zhang's programme was, in Lu Xun's later words, "first, to use religion to arouse faith and raise the people's morals; second, to use the national essence to stir the race."³⁹⁴⁰ In 1908, under pen names, Lu Xun wrote a series of essays for Henan, a journal edited by Chinese from Henan province.⁴¹ In one he retold the life of Shelley, who wrote "The Necessity of Atheism," arguing that religion contributes nothing to love and equality; but this was Lu Xun telling Shelley's story, not stating his own creed.⁴²⁴³ In another he wrote that "those who mock myths as superstition and decry the old religions as shallow are people deluded by themselves."⁴⁴⁴⁵

The strongest of these essays, "Toward a Refutation of Malevolent Voices," appeared in December 1908 and ended "to be continued"; no continuation is known.⁴⁶ It is an attack on the reformers who were "smashing superstition." None of them, he complained, first told people what the right belief was, and without it how could anyone know what was delusion?⁴⁷⁴⁸

The human heart must have something to lean on; without faith it cannot stand; the making of religion cannot be stopped.⁴⁹⁴⁸

What the reformers called delusion, he wrote, was "a people pressing upward, wishing to leave this finite, relative world for the infinite and absolute."⁵⁰⁴⁸ He defended Buddhism, and the village festivals the reformers wanted to ban: "A farmer's consolation, when 'men of purpose' interfere with it, becomes a calamity far worse than a tyrant's."⁵¹⁵² He mocked the half-taught "scientist" who seizes "the shallowest and most mistaken scraps" of theory "and presumes to explain everything."⁵³⁵² And he summed it up in one line:

False scholars must go; superstition may stay: that is the urgent task of today.⁵⁴⁵²

The essay never says that its author believes in anything. It argues for the dignity of belief, and for the believers against their reformers; that reading is this book's inference from the text, not a statement by Lu Xun.⁵⁵

The quiet years

Back in China he taught chemistry and physiology at Hangzhou, then ran a school in Shaoxing; after the revolution of 1911 the new education minister called him to the ministry, and he moved with it to Beijing.⁵⁶⁵⁷ There he copied inscriptions in the Shaoxing Guild Hall, and later he said he used every means "to anaesthetise my own soul."⁵⁸⁵⁹ His diary for 1914 records him buying Buddhist sutras and commentaries in quantity, and in July he paid for the printing of the Hundred Parables Sutra, which the editors of the diary say was a gift for his mother's birthday. The diary states no belief.⁶⁰⁶¹ In 1915 he attended rehearsals for the official Confucian rites and a pre-dawn sacrifice; the lines in the diary contain no ridicule.⁶²

The madman and the ghost-talk

In 1917 the diary shows letters and evening visits from Qian Xuantong.⁶³ In the preface to his first collection, Lu Xun remembered how Qian (he calls him Jin Xinyi) asked him to write for New Youth, and how he answered with a picture:

Suppose an iron house with no windows that can hardly be broken, with many people asleep who will soon suffocate; they pass from sleep into death and feel no sorrow at dying.⁶⁴⁶⁵

In the end he agreed to write, because "Hope lies in the future; I could not use my proof that it cannot be to refute his claim that it can."⁶⁶⁶⁵ He wrote "A Madman's Diary," dated it 2 April 1918, and published it in New Youth in May under a new name, Lu Xun.⁶⁷⁶⁸

The madman believes his family and neighbours mean to eat him. He reads history to find out why:

I looked up the history. It had no dates; crooked characters across every page spelled "benevolence, righteousness, morality." I couldn't sleep, so I read carefully half the night, and at last from between the lines I made out the words: the whole book was written with two characters, "eat people."⁶⁹⁷⁰

The family doctor is an executioner in disguise, and the old pharmacopoeia, the madman says, "clearly says human flesh can be fried and eaten." The story ends: "Save the children..."⁷¹⁷²⁷⁰

The same issue carried two essays against spiritualism, Chen Daqi's "Refuting Spiritualism" and Chen Duxiu's "Doubts on the Existence of Ghosts."⁷³ Lu Xun joined the attack in his short "Random Thoughts." He quoted the other side. The preface of the Celestial Master Zhang Yuanxu, as Lu Xun quoted it, warned that "when awe ceases, morals have no root from which to grow," and a writer in the spiritualist journal that "if the doctrine of ghosts and spirits is not spread, the nation's fate will quickly be cut short!"⁷⁴⁷⁵⁷⁶ His answer was:

There is now a class of people who like to talk of ghosts and hate science most, because science makes principles clear, makes thought clear, and does not allow muddle.⁷⁷⁷⁶

The cure was "science, the enemy of ghost-talk," and "not skin-deep but true science."⁷⁸⁷⁶ Salvarsan, the drug called 606, had been found for syphilis; he hoped for a "707" for diseases of thought, and that medicine, he said, was science.⁷⁹⁸⁰ In January 1919 he listed among China's "national essence" spiritualism alongside cannibalism and the trade in people, all of it matching "the culture of savages."⁸¹⁸² His timeline places his declaration here.

The other side

The traditionalist translator Lin Shu answered the whole New Culture camp in a newspaper satire of March 1919, in which a Buddhist demon devours them. His argument was moral: "Nothing is more auspicious than everyone knowing the human bonds; nothing is more calamitous than gentlemen willing to be beasts." He also made a fair point against the claim that the old culture blocked the new learning: "Classical prose does no harm to science and science has no use for classical prose; the two are unrelated, as all know."⁸³⁸⁴⁸⁵ An ally read the story differently from either. The scholar Wu Yu wrote in New Youth that November that Lu Xun had shown "those who eat people are those who preach the ritual code!"⁸⁶⁸⁷ The first public reading aimed "A Madman's Diary" at Confucian ethics, not at religion.

"Whether souls exist I do not know"

In "The New Year's Sacrifice," written in 1924, a narrator comes home to his village at the New Year. A widowed servant, now dying, stops him to ask whether there is a soul after death, and a hell. He has never cared about the question, he tells us, but now he does not know what to say to her, and he answers only, "In fact, whether there is a soul, I cannot say."⁸⁸⁸⁹⁹⁰ Another servant has told the widow that in the next world the king of hell will saw her in two for her two husbands, and she has given the temple a threshold to be trampled in atonement.⁹¹ The narrator is a character, not Lu Xun, but the uncertainty is the one he had brought home from Sendai.

In "The Eternal Lamp" (1925) a village madman wants to blow out the temple lamp that is said to hold the village up. "I know that even if it is put out, they're still there," he says; the villagers lock him up.⁹²⁹³

The revision: Dawn Blossoms

In 1926, in flight from Beijing and then at Xiamen University, he wrote the ten memoirs of childhood later collected as Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk.⁹⁴ They are where the doctors, the deathbed, Fujino and Huxley are told; they are also where Wuchang returns, described with delight. The ghost, he wrote, "is truly a creation of us Chinese."⁹⁵⁹⁶ The man who had called ghost-talk a disease now wrote warmly of the ghost the poor loved, and of the stage where they found the justice the world above denied them. His timeline places his revision here: not a return to belief, but a return to the affection of 1908 for the people who believed.

The last year

In October 1936 he looked back on Zhang Taiyan's programme of "religion to arouse faith" and judged that it had come to "nothing more than a lofty fantasy."⁹⁷⁹⁸ In "Death," that September, he said he was certain there were no ghosts.¹² And in the same month, writing about the hanged woman of the Shaoxing opera, a ghost who comes back for revenge, he wrote with irony for the benefit of "progressive" readers: "Of course suicide is cowardly, and a ghost's revenge is even less in accord with science, but those were ignorant women who could not even read."⁹⁹¹⁰⁰ He described her with the same affection he had given Wuchang.

He died in Shanghai on 19 October 1936.¹⁰¹ Five days later his brother Zhou Zuoren wrote that among modern writers "there is hardly a second man who holds such a dark, pessimistic view of the Chinese people."¹⁰²¹⁰³

Did his unbelief change shape?

Lu Xun never called himself an atheist.¹⁰⁴ He came to unbelief by way of the doctors who failed his father, Huxley's evolution and the dissecting room, and he said so only near the end, and in the narrowest words: when people die there are no ghosts. In between he took both sides. In 1908 he defended the farmers' gods against the reformers, in 1918 he attacked ghost-talk as a disease of the nation, and in 1926 he wrote of Wuchang with love. What did not change was the side he stood on. He was against the half-educated who mocked the people's beliefs and against the ghost-talk of the learned, and he was for the sleepers in the iron house.

Hu Shih, the other sceptic of the May Fourth years, who reached "no ghosts, no soul" by a different road, has his own chapter in this book.

Footnotes

1. Lu Xun: Death, 死 [WS. ↩ ↩²

2. Death, 死 [WS] (Q28, Q29, Q37). ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. ZZR1936 (para 2); WP (Gregorian date). Reported at second hand; the original has not been seen. ↩

4. Autobio1925 (para 1 of the sketch). ↩

5. Autobio1925. ↩

6. ZZR1936 (para 3); WP. ↩

7. Autobio1925; LXQJ1 p. 269. Accounts differ; see the disputed points. ↩

8. Dawn, 父亲的病 [WS; LXQJ1 pp. 269-270. ↩

9. Lu Xun: Dawn, 父亲的病 [WS. ↩

10. Dawn, 父亲的病 [WS] (Q45, OQ5). ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. The second doctor (called Chen Lianhe in the essay), as reported in Lu Xun's memoir: "I think we might ask someone to look into whether there is some grievance... A doctor can cure illness but not fate, isn't that so?" A traditional reading of illness: the doctor admits the limits of medicine: Dawn, 父亲的病 [WS. ↩

12. Lu Xun: Dawn, 父亲的病 [WS. ↩

13. Dawn, 父亲的病 [WS] (Q43, Q32). ↩

14. WP; Autobio1925. ↩

15. Lu Xun: LXQJ1 p. 270 (Preface, 1922-12-03). ↩

16. LXQJ1 p. 270 (Preface, Q1); Autobio1925. ↩ ↩²

17. Lu Xun: Dawn, 二十四孝圖 [WS] (10 May [1926]). ↩

18. Dawn, 二十四孝圖 [WS], dated 10 May (1926) (Q25). ↩

19. Dawn, 五猖會 [WS], dated 25 May (1926). ↩

20. Lu Xun: Dawn, 无常 [WS] (23 June 1926). ↩

21. Dawn, 无常 [WS], dated 23 June 1926 (Q23, Q24, Q47). ↩ ↩²

22. Lu Xun: Dawn, 无常 [WS. ↩

23. ZZR1936 (para 3); Autobio1925. ↩

24. LXQJ1 p. 270 (Preface). ↩

25. Lu Xun: Dawn, 琐记 [WS. ↩

26. Dawn, 琐记 [WS], dated 8 Oct (1926) (Q34). ↩

27. Lu Xun: Dawn, 琐记 [WS. ↩

28. Dawn, 琐记 [WS] (Q33); Thoughts no. 25 [WS] (Yan Fu named as translator). ↩

29. ZZR1936 (para 5); Dawn, 琐记 [WS. ↩

30. Dawn, 琐记 [WS. ↩

31. Autobio1925; ZZR1936; SW1956; WP. ↩

32. Autobio1925; Dawn, 藤野先生 [WS; WP. ↩

33. Fujino: Dawn, 藤野先生 [WS] (12 Oct [1926]). ↩

34. Dawn, 藤野先生 [WS] (Q31). ↩

35. Lu Xun: Death, 死 [WS] (5 Sept 1936). ↩

36. LXQJ1 p. 271 (Preface, Q2); Dawn, 藤野先生 [WS; Autobio1925. ↩ ↩²

37. Lu Xun: LXQJ1 p. 271. ↩

38. LXQJ1 p. 272; WP. ↩

39. Zhang Taiyan (as quoted by Lu Xun, citing Minbao no. 6): Taiyan (關於太炎先生二三事) [WS. ↩

40. Taiyan (關於太炎先生二三事). ↩

41. ZZR1936 (para 2); Science, Mara, Extremes headers. ↩

42. Lu Xun on Shelley: Mara [WS] (Feb-Mar 1908). ↩

43. Mara [WS] (Q16). ↩

44. Lu Xun: Science [WS] (June 1908). ↩

45. Science [WS] (Q15). ↩

46. Poesheng (note 1 of the 1981 edition; last line). ↩

47. Lu Xun: Poesheng para 9. ↩

48. Poesheng para 9 (Q9, Q10, Q11). ↩ ↩² ↩³

49. Lu Xun: Poesheng para 9. ↩

50. Lu Xun: Poesheng para 9. ↩

51. Lu Xun: Poesheng para 10. ↩

52. Poesheng para 10 (Q8, Q12, Q13, Q14, Q14b). ↩ ↩² ↩³

53. Lu Xun: Poesheng para 10. ↩

54. Lu Xun: Poesheng para 10. ↩

55. Poesheng; inference. ↩

56. Autobio1925. ↩

57. Autobio1925. ↩

58. Lu Xun: LXQJ1 p. 273 (Preface); also zixu.txt. ↩

59. LXQJ1 p. 273 (Preface); Q48 [zixu.txt. ↩

60. Diary (1914), entries listed; texts/diary1914.txt. ↩

61. Diary (1914, 1915). ↩

62. Diary (1915); WP. ↩

63. Diary (1917). ↩

64. Lu Xun to Qian Xuantong: LXQJ1 p. 274. ↩

65. LXQJ1 p. 274 (Preface, Q3, Q4). ↩ ↩²

66. Lu Xun: LXQJ1 p. 274. ↩

67. LXQJ1 p. 277; WS-TOC. ↩

68. Autobio1925 (Q35). ↩

69. The madman: LXQJ1 p. 281. ↩

70. LXQJ1 pp. 281-283, 291 (Q5, Q6, Q7, Q42). ↩ ↩²

71. The madman: LXQJ1 p. 283. ↩

72. The madman: LXQJ1 p. 291. ↩

73. WS-TOC (新青年/第04卷, 第五號). ↩

74. The Celestial Master Zhang Yuanxu's preface, as quoted by Lu Xun: "When awe ceases, morals have no root from which to grow." Believer's argument that the fear of spirits sustains moral order, written after the Boxer disaster and the arrival of "material civilisation": Thoughts no. 33 [WS. ↩

75. Yu Fu, writer in the Spiritual Study (Lingxue) journal, as quoted by Lu Xun: "If the doctrine of ghosts and spirits is not spread, the nation's fate will quickly be cut short!": Thoughts no. 33 [WS. ↩

76. Thoughts no. 33 [WS] (Q17, Q18, OQ3, OQ4, Q46). Not verified. ↩ ↩² ↩³

77. Lu Xun: Thoughts no. 33 [WS. ↩

78. Lu Xun: Thoughts no. 33 [WS. ↩

79. Lu Xun: Thoughts no. 38 [WS] (15 Nov 1918). ↩

80. Thoughts no. 38 [WS] (Q41, Q44). ↩

81. Lu Xun: Thoughts no. 42 [WS] (15 Jan 1919). ↩

82. Thoughts no. 42 [WS] (Q19). ↩

83. Lin Shu (1852-1924), classical-prose translator and traditionalist, March 1919: "Nothing is more auspicious than everyone knowing the human bonds; nothing is more calamitous than gentlemen willing to be beasts." His target is the New Culture camp's rejection of Confucian ethics: LinShu (妖夢). ↩

84. Lin Shu: "It must be known that classical prose does no harm to science and science has no use for classical prose; the two are unrelated, as all know." A fair argument against the claim that the old culture blocks science: LinShu. ↩

85. LinShu (OQ1, OQ2). ↩

86. Wu Yu: "Those who eat people are those who preach the ritual code! Those who preach the ritual code are those who eat people!" Shows that the first public reading aimed the story at the ritual code, not at religion: WuYu. ↩

87. WuYu (OQ7, OQ8). ↩

88. The narrator: Zhufu [WS. ↩

89. The narrator: Zhufu [WS. ↩

90. Zhufu [WS] (Q20, Q21, Q22). ↩

91. Zhufu [WS. ↩

92. The madman of the lamp: Lamp [WS] (1 Mar 1925). ↩

93. Lamp [WS] (Q27, Q27b). ↩

94. Dawn, 朝花夕拾/小引 [WS] (Q50). ↩

95. Lu Xun: Dawn, 无常 [WS. ↩

96. Dawn, 无常 [WS] (Q23, Q47). ↩

97. Lu Xun: Taiyan (關於太炎先生二三事) [WS. ↩

98. Taiyan (Q51, Q52). ↩

99. Lu Xun: Death, 女吊 [WS] (19-20 Sept 1936). ↩

100. Death, 女吊 [WS] (Q30). ↩

101. WP; ZZR1936. ↩

102. Zhou Zuoren, brother and memoirist, 1936: "Among modern writers there is hardly a second man who holds such a dark, pessimistic view of the Chinese people." Not an opposition voice but the closest observer's judgement: ZZR1936. ↩

103. ZZR1936 (OQ6). ↩

104. search of texts/. ↩