Original Text
There was a cloth merchant who traveled to Qingzhou and happened upon a dilapidated temple, where the crumbling halls stirred deep melancholy in his heart. A monk nearby said, "If you can muster a kind heart and merely repair the temple gate, it would be a righteous deed to glorify the Buddha." The merchant readily agreed. Overjoyed, the monk invited him into the abbot's quarters and treated him with great hospitality. Then, the monk enumerated all the inner and outer halls and pavilions, pressing the merchant to renovate them all. The merchant declined, pleading insufficiency. The monk insisted with fierce words and an angry countenance, and the merchant, terrified, yielded, handing over all the money he carried. As he rose to leave, the monk barred his way, saying, "You gave your all, but your heart is unwilling; surely you will seek to kill me to be at peace. Better to kill you first." With that, he brandished a knife and advanced. The merchant begged piteously, but the monk was unmoved. The merchant then begged to be allowed to take his own life, and the monk consented, forcing him into a dark chamber and urging him to hang himself quickly. At that moment, a coastal defense general passed by the temple and, from a distance through a broken wall, saw a woman in red enter the monk's quarters. Suspicious, he dismounted and entered the temple, searching everywhere but finding nothing. He came to the dark chamber, found the doors locked, and the monk refused to open them, claiming there was a demon inside. Enraged, the general broke in and found the merchant hanging from a beam. He hastily cut him down, and after a while, the merchant revived. The general learned the truth, then tortured the monk, asking where the woman in red was. There was no such woman; it was a divine manifestation meant to save the merchant. The general executed the monk and returned the money to the merchant. The merchant then raised more funds to rebuild the temple, and from then on, its incense flourished greatly. This tale was told in greatest detail by the military graduate Zhao Fengyuan.
Commentary
This chapter exposes how a monk used temple repairs as a pretext to plunder wealth, while also praising the manifestation of divine spirits. At the end of the chapter, it is stated that the source of the story is "Zhao Xiaolian Feng Yuan narrated it most thoroughly," rather than simply "Zhao Xiaolian Feng Yuan narrated it," because many people knew this tale, but Zhao Xiaolian told it in the greatest detail.
The source of this story is likely adapted from the opening narrative of the twenty-fourth chapter of "Strange Tales from a Make-Do Studio" published at the end of the Ming dynasty, titled "The Old Demon of Yanguan County Seduces with Beauty, and the Great Scholar of Huishan Mountain Exorcises Evil." Slightly different, in this tale, a certain cloth merchant, who in "Strange Tales from a Make-Do Studio" was a merchant from Huizhou, the location was the Hongji Temple in Jinling, and the divine manifestation was the "Guanyin statue enshrined in the hall." The Huizhou merchant was plied with wine by the temple monks until he was dead drunk and then murdered, and it was the river-patrolling arrest commander who discovered the merchant's death.