The Vengeance of the Goddess

In a temple in the north of the Empire there once lived a famous priest named Hien-Chung. People far and wide spoke of him, not only because his life was so holy, but also because of the supernatural powers he was known to have, which he had shown on several remarkable occasions. They would have wondered at him less if they had known the truth. This man in the long slate-gray robe, with his shaved head and his saintly face that no one had ever seen break into a smile, was really a pilgrim traveling toward the Western Heaven, where he hoped one day to arrive and become a fairy.

One night Hien-Chung was asleep in a room that opened off the main hall of the temple. In that hall, wrapped in deep darkness, sat the great statue of the Goddess of Mercy with her kind and gracious face. Suddenly a tall, splendid figure stood beside his bed. The stranger had the air of a king, as if he were used to giving orders. He wore a crown on his head, and his clothes were the kind that no ordinary subject would ever be permitted to wear.

Hien-Chung stared at him in amazement. At first he suspected that this was an evil spirit who had put on a clever disguise to fool him. The very moment that thought crossed his mind, the stranger began to cry. It was pitiful to see such a kingly man so crushed by sorrow that tears poured down his face, and Hien-Chung, who was always gentle, told him how deeply he felt for his grief.

“Three years ago,” said the visitor, “I was the king of this land, the Kingdom of the Black Flower. In fact I founded my own royal line. I won my fortune with my sword and turned this small state into a kingdom. For a long time I was very happy, and my people were loyal and devoted to me. I had no idea of the sorrows and disasters that lay just ahead.

“Five years ago a terrible drought struck my kingdom. The rain stopped. The streams that used to tumble down the mountains and water the plains dried up, and the springs that fed the wells gave out. Crops failed everywhere, and the burning sun slowly withered the green grass where the cattle grazed. Ordinary people went hungry in their homes, and many of the poorest starved to death. It grieved me terribly. Every day I prayed to Heaven to send rain on the parched land and save my people. I knew this disaster had come upon my kingdom because of some wrong I had done, and my heart was torn with regret.

“One day, while I was sick with worry, a stranger arrived at the palace and begged my ministers to let him see me. It was most urgent, he said, because he had come with a plan to save the country. I ordered him brought to me at once, and I asked him whether he could make it rain.

“‘I can,’ he answered. ‘Come with me to the front of your palace, and I will show you that I can do that and more.’

“He strode out onto a balcony that looked over the capital toward the hills in the distance. There he raised his right hand to the sky and spoke some words I could not understand. At once, as if by magic, the air began to change. The sky grew dark, and heavy clouds rolled in and hid the sun. Thunder rumbled, bright lightning flashed from one side of the heavens to the other, and within an hour rain was pouring down over the whole country. The great drought was over.

“I was so grateful to this mysterious man for saving my kingdom that there was nothing I would have refused him. I gave him rooms in the palace and treated him as my equal. I loved him truly and tenderly, and he seemed just as devoted to me.

“One morning we were walking hand in hand in the royal gardens. The peach trees had just burst into flower, and we strolled up and down among them, enjoying their wonderful scent. After a while we came to a well hidden behind a clump of oleander bushes. We stopped to look down into it and catch a glimpse of the dark water far below. As I leaned over, my friend suddenly shoved me, and I fell headfirst into the water at the bottom.

“As soon as I vanished, he laid a wide slab of stone over the mouth of the well, spread a thick layer of earth on top and planted a banana root in it. Thanks to his magic, within a few hours it had grown into a full-sized tree. For three years I have lain dead in that well, and in all that time no one has come forward to avenge me or set me free.”

“But in three whole years, have your ministers made no effort to find their missing king?” asked Hien-Chung. “And what of your wife and family? Have they meekly let you disappear without raising a cry that would ring through the whole kingdom? I cannot understand how a king could vanish from his own palace without the entire land searching high and low until the mystery was solved and his cruel murder avenged.”

“That is where my enemy has been cleverest of all,” replied the dead king’s spirit. “No one suspects any treachery, because he has used his spells to change his own appearance until he looks exactly like me. As far as anyone knows, the man who brought the rain and saved the country from drought and famine has simply gone away, and I, the king, still rule as before. Not one person in the whole nation has the slightest idea of the truth, so the false king sits perfectly safe on my throne.”

“Have you never taken your case to Yam-lo, the ruler of the Land of Shadows?” asked Hien-Chung. “He is the great judge who rights the wrongs and crimes of the earth. Now that you are a spirit and under his rule, you should bring your complaint before him and ask him to punish the one who has made you suffer.”

“You don’t understand,” the spirit answered quickly. “The one who ruined my life is an evil spirit. He is nothing like a man. He was let loose from the place where evil spirits are kept, to punish me for some wrong I did in the past. So he knows all the ways of the underworld and is close friends with its rulers, even with Yam-lo himself. He is also on the best of terms with the guardian god of my capital city. None of the powers that rule the land of the dead would listen to my complaint for a moment.

“There is another strong reason too why they would ignore any plea of mine. My soul has not yet been set free from my body. It is still shut up inside it, down in the well. The courts of the Underworld would never accept me, because I still belong to this life, and they have no power over it.

“Only today,” he went on, “a friendly spirit told me quietly that my imprisonment in the well was nearly over and that the three years I was sentenced to stay there would soon be up. He urged me to come to you. He said your powers are greater than my enemy’s, and that if you are willing to use them, I shall soon be free of his wicked influence.”

Now the Goddess of Mercy had given Hien-Chung several helper spirits to protect him in times of need. So the next morning he called the cleverest of them, whose name was Hing, to talk over how the king could be freed from the prison that had held him for three years.

“The first thing to do,” said Hing, “is to win the crown prince to our side. He has often been puzzled by the way his supposed father behaves. For one thing, in three years the prince has never once been allowed to see his mother. All we need now is some solid proof to convince him that something mysterious is going on in the palace, and he will join us.

“And I have had a piece of luck,” Hing continued. “I’ve found something that will help us persuade the prince to listen about his father. You may not know this, but around the time the king was thrown into the well, the royal seal of the kingdom vanished, and a new one had to be carved. I knew you would call me about this matter, so at dawn today I went down into the well, and there I found the missing seal on the king’s body. Here it is. Now we must plan how to work on the son’s mind so that we can rescue the father.

“I hear the prince is going hunting tomorrow in the hills nearby. In one of the valleys stands a temple to the Goddess of Mercy. If you take the seal and wait for him there, I promise I will find a way to lead him to the shrine.”

The next morning the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of the Black Flower rode out with a noisy crowd of followers for a day’s hunting in the wooded hills above the capital. They had hardly reached the hunting grounds when a hare of a most unusual kind burst into view and caused a great stir. It was clearly bigger than an ordinary hare, but the strangest thing about it was its color: it was as white as fresh snow.

As soon as the hounds saw it, they raced after it, barking and baying wildly. Yet the hare did not seem frightened at all. With graceful leaps that carried it swiftly over the ground, it easily stayed ahead of the fastest dogs. It almost seemed to be enjoying how easily it could outrun them, while the dogs grew more and more frantic, because the hare was always right in front of them and yet they could never get close enough to catch it.

Stranger still, the hare did not seem to want to get away. It never used the bushes or the clumps of trees to hide which way it was going. It kept in full view of the whole hunting party, and when it came to the sharp bends in the road that wound toward a famous temple in a distant valley, it would pause for a moment and let the baying hounds come dangerously near before shooting away like lightning and leaving them far behind.

The hunters never guessed that the beautiful animal giving them such an exciting chase was really the fairy Hing. He had taken this shape to lead the prince to the lonely temple in that hidden valley. There, safe from the eyes of his father’s murderer, the prince could hear the story of the treachery, and they could plan how to put his father back on the throne.

When it was close to the temple, the mysterious hare disappeared as suddenly as it had come. It left not a single trace, and the dogs ran around and around in circles, unable to find the scent.

The prince was a faithful follower of the Goddess of Mercy, so he got down from his horse, went into the temple, burned incense at her shrine and quietly prayed for her blessing. After a while he was rather surprised to notice that the chief priest of the temple did not come forward to wait on him with the courtesy due to a prince. Instead, the priest stayed in the darkest corner of the hall, his eyes on the floor and his face very grave.

So when the prince had finished his prayers, he went over to the priest and asked kindly whether something was troubling him.

“Yes,” replied Hien-Chung, “something is, and it concerns Your Royal Highness closely. If you will come into my private room for a moment, I will try to explain the matter that has been weighing on my mind.”

When they were inside the abbot’s room, Hien-Chung gave the prince a small box and asked him to open it and look at what lay inside.

The prince took the object out, and the moment he glanced at it, he was astonished. His face lit up with excitement. “Why, this is the great seal of the kingdom, which was lost three years ago and never found!” he cried. “How did you come to have it, and why haven’t you given it back to the king? He has wanted to recover it for so long.”

“The answer is a long one, Your Highness, and to satisfy you I must tell it in some detail.”

Then Hien-Chung told the prince all about his father’s visit in the middle of the night: how he had been murdered by the man now pretending to be king, and how he had begged to be freed from the misery of the well where he had lain for three years.

“As for the seal,” he went on, “my servant Hing, who is here with us, can tell you how he used his supernatural powers to go down into the well and find it on your father’s body. This gives us certain proof that what I saw that night was no dream. It truly was the king, asking me to save him from an enemy set on destroying him.

“We must act, and act quickly,” he said. “The man posing as ruler of your kingdom has enormous powers, and as soon as he learns that his secret is out, he will use every trick he knows to defeat us. Here is my plan. Send most of your followers back to the palace with a message that you will spend the night here at a special service for the Goddess, since by good fortune today is her birthday. When night has fallen over the city, Hing will go down into the well and bring your father’s body here. Then you will have all the proof you need, and we can decide what to do next.”

A little after midnight Hing arrived, having done exactly as Hien-Chung asked, and brought the king’s body with him. With his wonderful powers, and with the help of unseen forces he had called to his aid, he had carried it from the miserable place where it had lain so long to the friendly temple of the Goddess of Mercy. There it was laid, with all due ceremony and respect, in one of the inner rooms.

The prince was deeply moved to see his father. By good fortune the body had not changed at all since the day it was thrown into the well. There was no trace of decay on the king’s noble face. He looked as though he had simply fallen asleep and might wake up any moment and talk with them as he always used to. His soul had never been parted from his body, and in some mysterious way that had kept him perfectly preserved. All the same, the king appeared to be dead, and the great question was how to bring him back to life so that he could be given back to his family and his kingdom.

“The time has come for bold measures if the king is ever to live again,” said Hien-Chung. “When he came to me in the night, he begged me urgently to save him, because one of the gods had told him I was the only one who could. So far we have freed him from the grip of the demon who caused his death. Now it is up to me to find a remedy that will bring back his life and make him a living man once more.

“I have never dealt with so serious a case,” he went on, “but I have a little bottle of the Elixir of Life, which I received from the Patriarch of the Taoist Church. It has the wonderful power of lengthening the life of anyone who drinks it. We will try it on the king. Since his body shows no sign of decay, let us hope it will bring him back.”

He went to a locked desk and took out a small black clay bottle. From it he let a single drop fall onto the lips of the still figure. In a few seconds a rosy glow spread over the king’s face. With a second drop, a look of life flickered across his pale features. With a third, after a short pause, his eyes opened and looked with understanding at the people gathered around his couch. With a fourth, the king sat up and asked how long he had been sleeping and why he was in this little room instead of his own palace.

He was soon given back to his family and to his place at the head of the State. The false king made one or two weak attempts to hold on to his power, then fled the country in disgrace.

A little while later Hien-Chung met the king in private. “I want Your Majesty to understand why such a disaster came into your life,” he said. “Some years ago you had a Buddhist priest put to death without any just cause. You never showed any sorrow for that great wrong, so the Goddess sent a harsh drought upon your kingdom. Still you did not repent. Then she sent one of her ministers to punish you by taking away your home and your royal power. The man who pushed you into the well was only carrying out the Goddess’s orders. Your three years in the well were part of the punishment she set for your crime, and when they were over, I was given the power to set you free.

“Kings are bound by the great law of righteousness just as their subjects are, and if they break it, they must suffer like anyone else. I warn Your Majesty: unless you show some sign of repentance for taking a man’s life unjustly, more sorrows will surely come upon you.”

Where this tale comes from

“The Vengeance of the Goddess” is chapter VI of Chinese Folk-Lore Tales by the Rev. J. Macgowan (London: Macmillan, 1910). Its hero is a holy priest of the Goddess of Mercy who is secretly a pilgrim on the road to the Western Heaven, served by helper spirits the Goddess has given him.

The tale ends with a twist: the wicked magician turns out to be the Goddess’s own servant, sent to punish the king for an unjust killing, and the priest’s closing words make the point that kings must obey the law of righteousness like everyone else.

Read the original: Macgowan’s Chinese Folk-Lore Tales (Project Gutenberg)

For older readers: famine and starvation, an unjust execution, a king’s murder and prolonged supernatural imprisonment. The elixir and the explanation of drought as punishment belong to the tale’s fantasy and religious framework.

Reading the story closely

The king’s account initially casts him as a grateful ruler betrayed by a trusted guest. The final explanation adds a fact he did not disclose: his unjust killing of a priest. Retell the opening complaint with that information included and notice how sympathy changes. Yet the revelation does not make every consequence fair: the drought also kills poor people who are not said to have taken part in his crime.

Hing’s hare supplies access, the seal provides a recognizable clue, and the recovered body gives the prince stronger evidence of substitution. Identify which obstacle each removes. Then distinguish restoration from repentance: the king regains his life and throne before Hien-Chung’s warning, and the story ends without showing his response. The moral is therefore a demand for accountability, not proof that remorse has already repaired the harm.

Talk about it

• How did the false king keep anyone from noticing that the real king was gone?
• Why did Hing turn himself into a white hare?
• At the end, the priest says the king’s troubles were a punishment. What evidence of repentance does the story actually show?

Related stories

• The Fairy Bonze — another Macgowan tale of a holy man with secret powers
• The Kindly Magician — a Wilhelm tale about brewing the elixir of life
• The Reward of a Benevolent Life — a Macgowan tale of good and evil repaid