The Sorcerer of the White Lotus Lodge

There was once a sorcerer who belonged to the White Lotus Lodge. He knew how to fool crowds of people with his black magic, and many who wanted to learn the secret of his spells became his pupils.

One day, before going out, the sorcerer set a bowl in the hall of his house, turned a second bowl upside down over it, and told his pupils to keep watch on it. But he warned them not to lift the cover to see what was inside.

The moment he was gone, the pupils lifted the cover. The bowl was full of clear water, and floating on it was a little boat woven of straw, complete with masts and sails. Fascinated, they poked at it with their fingers until it tipped over. They hurriedly set it upright again and put the cover back. By then the sorcerer was already standing among them. “Why did you disobey me?” he scolded angrily.

The pupils jumped up and swore they had not.

“My ship capsized at sea,” the sorcerer said, “and still you try to lie to me?”

Another evening he lit a huge candle in his room and told his pupils to guard it so that the wind would not blow it out. It was perhaps the second watch of the night, and the sorcerer had still not come back. The pupils grew tired and drowsy, so they lay down and one by one dropped off to sleep. When they woke, the candle was out. They sprang up and lit it again, but the sorcerer was already in the room, and once more he scolded them.

“Truly, we never slept!” they protested. “How could the light have gone out?”

“You made me walk fifteen miles in the dark,” the sorcerer replied angrily, “and you still talk such nonsense!” Then his pupils were badly frightened.

In time one of the pupils insulted the sorcerer. The sorcerer remembered it but said nothing. Soon afterward he sent the young man to feed the pigs, and as soon as he stepped into the sty, his master turned him into a pig. The sorcerer immediately called in a butcher and sold him the pig, and it went the way of every pig that goes to the butcher.

One day the pupil’s father came to ask after his son, who had not been home for a long while. The sorcerer told him that the young man had left long ago. The father went home and searched everywhere without success. But one of his son’s fellow pupils, who knew what had happened, told the father the truth, and the father went to the district mandarin with his complaint.

The mandarin, though, was afraid the sorcerer might make himself invisible. He did not dare to arrest him on his own, so he reported to his superior and asked for a thousand well-armed soldiers. They surrounded the sorcerer’s house and seized him, along with his wife and child, and all three were shut in wooden cages to be carried to the capital.

The road wound through the mountains. In the middle of the hills a giant as tall as a tree came striding toward them, with eyes like saucers, a mouth like a dinner plate and teeth a foot long. The soldiers stood shaking, not daring to move.

“That is a mountain spirit,” said the sorcerer. “My wife can drive him away.”

They did as he said and unchained the woman. She took a spear and went to meet the giant, but the giant grew angry and swallowed her whole, which frightened the soldiers even more.

“Well,” said the sorcerer, “if he has finished off my wife, then it is my son’s turn.”

So they let the son out of his cage, and the giant swallowed him in just the same way. The soldiers looked on, not knowing what to do.

Then the sorcerer wept with fury. “First he destroys my wife and then my son! If only he could be punished for it! But I am the only one who can punish him.”

Sure enough, they took him out of his cage too, gave him a sword and sent him against the giant. The sorcerer and the giant fought for a while, until at last the giant grabbed the sorcerer, stuffed him into his jaws, stretched out his neck and swallowed him down. Then he strolled off, well satisfied.

Only then, when it was too late, did the soldiers realize that the sorcerer had tricked them.

Where this story comes from

“The Sorcerer of the White Lotus Lodge” is chapter LX of Richard Wilhelm’s The Chinese Fairy Book, translated by Frederick H. Martens (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1921), the first of his “Historic Legends.”

Wilhelm’s historical note associates the White Lotus name with a secret revolutionary society and a legendary founder. This magical story does not establish the conduct of actual members or provide a history of the movement. He also gives away the ending’s secret: the “mountain spirit” is an illusion the sorcerer conjures up himself, so that he can free his family and himself from the soldiers.

Read the original: The Chinese Fairy Book (Project Gutenberg)

Reading guidance: older readers. A teacher turns a pupil into a pig and sells him to be killed; other characters appear to be swallowed alive. The escape’s cleverness does not excuse the teacher’s earlier crime.

Reading the story closely

The first two episodes make distant consequences visible through household objects: a capsized model and an extinguished candle. The road escape reverses that relation. The soldiers see a spectacular event but accept the sorcerer’s explanation of it, releasing one prisoner after another. Their numbers cannot compensate for trusting the person who controls what they see.

Give the soldiers a three-row record: what they observe, what the prisoner tells them it means, and what they do next. At which step could they have paused? Also note that the wife and child are imprisoned without any separate wrongdoing described.

Questions to ask

• How does the sorcerer always know when his pupils have disobeyed him?
• Why is the mandarin afraid to arrest the sorcerer with just a few men?
• Wilhelm says the giant was an illusion. Looking back, what clues point to the trick?

More stories like this

• Black Arts — another Wilhelm tale of a sorcerer and his dangerous magic
• The Three Evils — the historic legend that follows this one
• The Miserly Farmer — a magician who makes fools of the people watching him