Original Text
In Jinan there was a monk, whose origin was unknown, who went barefoot and wore a tattered robe of a hundred patches. Each day he would chant sutras and beg for alms at the assembly halls of Furong and Minghu. When people offered him wine, food, money, or grain, he refused them all. When asked what he desired, he would not answer. No one had ever seen him eat. Someone advised him, saying, "Revered master, since you abstain from wine and meat, you should beg in desolate villages and remote lanes—why must you daily frequent these noisy places?" The monk closed his eyes and continued chanting, his eyelashes longer than a finger's breadth, as if he had not heard. After a while, another person repeated the same advice. The monk suddenly opened his eyes and said sternly, "This is precisely how I must beg!" Then he resumed his chanting without pause. He chanted for a long time before leaving on his own. Someone followed him, repeatedly asking why he begged in such a manner, but the monk walked on without a word. When the follower pressed him again and again, he said harshly, "This is not a matter for you to know! This old monk must beg in this way!" A few days later, the monk suddenly left through the southern city gate and lay stiffly by the roadside, unmoving for three days and three nights. The local residents, fearing he might starve to death and bring trouble upon the neighborhood, gathered around him and urged him to leave, promising that if he would go, they would provide him with food or money. The old monk still kept his eyes shut and did not stir. The crowd then shook his body and pleaded with him. The monk grew furious, drew a short knife from his robe, cut open his own belly, reached inside, arranged his intestines on the road, and finally breathed his last. The people were greatly alarmed and reported the matter to the authorities, who had him hastily buried. A few days later, a wild dog dug a hole in the monk's grave, exposing the mat. When someone stepped on it, the mat seemed hollow; upon opening it, they found the burial mat neatly rolled up, but the body was gone, as empty as a shed silkworm cocoon.
Commentary
The novel recounts the deeds of a singularly independent monk from Jinan.
The monk's conduct was extraordinary and contrary to convention; people did not understand him, nor did he require their understanding. To the reactions of the common folk, he invariably "gave no reply," "paid no heed," and "offered no response." Though he chanted sutras and solicited alms in bustling places, he neither ate nor drank, nor accepted any offerings. In the end, he cut open his own belly and died, yet after burial, his corpse vanished. The tale uses few words but leaves a deep impression of that self-willed mendicant monk through repeated utterances of his idiosyncratic phrase, "Thus must I beg," and through apt metaphors, such as the concluding image of the straw mat used for his hasty burial being "like an empty cocoon."