Original Text
In the county there was a rustic fellow, habitually unruly and unprincipled. One morning, at daybreak, two men seized him and carried him off. When they reached the market, they saw a butcher hanging half a pig from a rack; the two men shoved him violently, and he felt his body merge with the pork, whereupon the men departed. Soon the butcher began to sell the meat, wielding his knife to cut it, and the fellow felt each incision as a sharp pain, piercing to the very bone. Later, an elderly neighbor came to buy meat and haggled bitterly with the butcher over the price, now demanding extra fat, now extra trimmings, slicing off bits piece by piece, causing the fellow unbearable agony. When the meat was all sold, he finally found his way home, arriving around the hour of seven or eight in the morning. His family thought he had risen late, but he recounted his ordeal in detail. They summoned the neighbor to inquire, and the old man had just returned from buying meat; when asked about the number and weight of the slices, it matched exactly. In a single morning, this man had suffered the punishment of death by a thousand cuts—truly a strange affair!
Commentary
This story carries the allegorical nature of moral exhortation.
In the penal codes of ancient China, while there existed the punishment of "lingchi" (death by a thousand cuts), common folk rarely witnessed its true form. Religious doctrines of hellish retribution spoke of "mountains of knives and forests of swords," yet these were absurd and insubstantial. This tale, through the waking account of a rogue villager, employs the familiar imagery of "a butcher selling meat, wielding his knife to sever and slice," and "adding fat to flesh, cutting piece by piece," not only vividly rendering the agony of "lingchi" but also, as a form of punishment, ensuring that "the number of slices and the weight of flesh were exact to the slightest fraction," bearing the characteristics of measured sentencing. As Dan Minglun speculated, the creation of this story might be "a path for ghosts and spirits to offer self-enlightenment? Or perhaps to use his words to warn the world? Otherwise, in the future, when he is again cut in the hells, there will be no one to testify to the number of slices or the weight of flesh." Of course, some also believe that the purpose of this tale is to admonish against the taking of life.