Original Text
In the mansion of Grand Secretary Feng in Qingzhou, a pig was once slaughtered, and after scalding off its bristles, characters were found inscribed on its flesh reading: "The seventh incarnation of Qin Hui." When cooked and tasted, the meat was extremely foul, so it was thrown to the dogs to eat. Alas! The flesh of Qin Hui, I fear, even dogs would not deign to consume!
I heard from a native of Yidu that the grandfather of Grand Secretary Feng had a former life in the Song dynasty, where he was wrongfully killed by Qin Hui, and thus throughout his life he held the greatest reverence for Yue Fei. By the main road north of Qingzhou city, he built a temple to King Yue, and also erected statues of Qin Hui and Moqi Xie kneeling on the ground. Travelers who came to pay homage to King Yue would throw stones at the statues of Qin Hui and Moqi Xie, and the temple's incense offerings flourished without cease. Later, in the year when the Qing army campaigned against Yu Qi, the descendants of the Feng family destroyed the statue of King Yue. Several li away, there was a folk shrine to the "Goddess of Children," and people carried the statues of Qin Hui and Moqi Xie there, making them kneel facing the goddess. After another hundred years, this affair will surely lead to a misunderstanding as absurd as someone mistaking Du Shiyi for Du Shiyi or Wu Zixu for Wu Xuxu—how truly laughable.
Furthermore, in the city of Qingzhou, there once stood a shrine dedicated to Tantai Ziyu. During the time when the powerful eunuch Wei Zhongxian was at the height of his influence, certain members of noble families, seeking to curry favor with him, removed the hat and beard from Ziyu's statue and remodeled it to resemble Wei Zhongxian. This too was a shocking and outrageous affair.
Commentary
This chapter consists of three stories that are not directly connected in content but are linked by a chain of associations. The first story tells of Qin Hui's seventh reincarnation after death as a pig. However, even as a tale of karmic retribution, it is highly implausible, for from the Southern Song to the early Qing dynasty, there were far more than seven generations. The second story recounts how the statues of Qin Hui and Moqi Xie were accidentally placed in a common temple dedicated to the Goddess of Children during the Yu Qi rebellion, leading the author to reflect that in a hundred years, folk shrines would inevitably suffer from such misattributions. The third story springs from the second, as the author recalls the absurd phenomenon of the Temple of Tantai Ziyu in Qingzhou being transformed into a shrine for the living worship of Wei Zhongxian. Though these three brief tales are fragmented, they reveal one aspect of Pu Songling's collection of folk materials, serving as valuable resources for the study of folklore and folk literature.