Original Text
When Zhai Zhanchi was appointed as the judicial commissioner of Raozhou, he passed by Poyang Lake on his journey. On the lake stood a temple, so Zhai Zhanchi alighted from his carriage to visit it. Inside the temple were enshrined the statues of loyal martyrs such as Ding Pulang, among which a statue of a man surnamed Zhai occupied the lowest position. Zhai Zhanchi remarked, "How can one of my own clan be placed at the bottom!" He then exchanged the position of that statue with the one at the top. Later, as Zhai Zhanchi boarded his boat to continue his journey, a great wind snapped the sail and toppled the mast, causing the whole family to weep in despair. After a while, a small boat came riding the waves and drew near the official vessel. The boatman hastily helped Zhai Zhanchi onto the small boat, and then all his family followed. Zhai Zhanchi looked closely at the man and found him to be an exact likeness of the Zhai statue. Soon, the wind and waves subsided, and when he searched for the man again, he had vanished without a trace.
Commentary
This story is quite brief, merely recounting the risk encountered by an official surnamed Zhai when he happened to rearrange the seating order for his clan's deities at Poyang Lake. It may be that Pu Songling casually recorded this strange rumor, yet it reflects the ugly aspects of seating precedence and patriarchal blood ties within traditional Chinese culture.
If even the arrangement of deities' seats within a temple shrine invites such meticulous contention, how much more fiercely must the hierarchies of the mortal world be contested? The official surnamed Zhai, merely on account of shared clan ties, moved the temple's gods from their places through private favor—one cannot but suspect that in worldly affairs, he would not hesitate to bend the law for the sake of nepotism. As for that "deity of the Zhai clan," having received favors from the official Zhai, he repaid kindness with kindness by lending aid amid the stormy waves, thereby revealing the true and ugly visage of so-called gods. Though this tale is small, it tears open the foul inner workings of officialdom as a community of shared interests!