Bai Ze

Someone at Dunhuang pasted two identical woodblock prints of Avalokiteśvara over an older painting and, by covering it, saved it. Underneath is a beast. It has a lion’s head set inside a heavy upstanding mane, a body that reads as dragon along one line and cow along another, a band of scales running the length of its chest, curling feathered wings behind the forelegs, and hooves. The forelegs are folded under it, kneeling. Its tongue is out of its open mouth because it is in the middle of speaking. To the right a man in official dress writes on a tablet, and flame rises off the surface of what he is writing. Between them, on a red cord, hangs a string of twelve coins. The sheet is about forty-five centimetres tall, it was made around the tenth century, and it is the only picture of White Marsh to survive from Tang China.

The scene it recreates is a meeting on a beach. The Yellow Thearch went east on an inspection tour until he ran out of land, climbed Mount Huan, and found the creature standing at the waterline in the salt wind. It was white. It could speak, and what it knew was the nature of everything alive and everything that was not. He asked it about the ghosts and spirits of the world, about essence hardening into things and loose souls turning into something else, and it answered at a length repeated ever since with unlikely precision: eleven thousand five hundred and twenty kinds. He ordered every one of them drawn and written down so that all under heaven could be shown. Then he composed a formula for cursing evil away, and used it.

That version of the story is late. The oldest surviving mention of the beast is a single clause. Around the 320s the alchemist Ge Hong set out, in his Baopuzi, a list of the teachers the Yellow Thearch had needed, because his point was that even a man born able to speak could not simply sit down and become immortal. He climbed Wangwu for the cinnabar scriptures. He went up Kongtong to question Guangcheng. He asked Fenghou about omens, took his geomancy from Qingwu, learned diagnosis from Lei and Qi. And to get to the bottom of spirits and malignities, Ge Hong writes, he recorded the words of White Marsh. That is all. No shoreline, no mountain, no number, no description of the thing that spoke. The beach and the eleven thousand five hundred and twenty come from the Yunji qiqian, a Daoist compendium assembled in the eleventh century, roughly seven hundred years downstream.

Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained the name. Bai is white and ze is a marsh, and the two words sitting together have resisted every attempt to make them mean anything. The silence extends to the body. When Sun Rouzhi catalogued auspicious signs in the early sixth century he included White Marsh and did not say what it looked like. No Tang writer describes it either. The painting out of the cave is not an illustration of a text. It is the earliest evidence there is.

Two quite different objects went by the name Baize tu, which has confused people for a long time. One was a book, a demonography, a working index of the unseen that paired ordinary domestic wrongness with the name of whatever was causing it, on the principle that a demon caught by its name stops being a problem. The other was a sheet of paper with the beast drawn on it, hung above the door. The book was for consulting. The sheet was for living behind.

A second strand runs through Buddhism and cattle. In the seventh century the monk Kuiji listed ten auspicious signs that preceded Mañjuśrī’s arrival in the world, and the eighth of them was that a cow engendered White Marsh. A Dunhuang manuscript of the ninth or tenth century promotes it to tenth place, ahead of the six-tusked elephant, and describes it at work: gulping breath and blowing out blasts, travelling each day quick as wind, demonic prodigies annihilated and driven off, ominous evils routed and fleeing. The verse attached to it is stranger and better. White Marsh had lived in heaven, and it came down among people by way of a borrowed birth in a cow’s belly.

At court the beast was furniture and uniform. Tang records list a White Marsh headrest, which guarded whoever slept on it, a White Marsh banner carried in processions, and a White Marsh badge embroidered on robes to mark rank. The name itself worked as armour: in the 460s the Northern Wei ruler Xianwen conferred it on a man named Zhang, replacing another protective name he was already carrying. Lower down the scale, the picture was so ordinary it vanished into the wall. At a farewell party in the ninth century flies kept settling on the guests, and when the servants fanned them off, one of the poets present produced a line about green flies being fanned from their seats. Luo Yin, who was the one leaving, glanced up at the doorway, saw the sheet nailed there where such sheets always were, and capped him: White Marsh meets the nail and gets nailed to the door. A Chan master of the same century used it just as offhandedly. Asked something deliberately impossible about a single speck swallowing the ocean, he answered that when a home has the White Marsh Diagram, prodigies like that cannot happen.

Then it went out of use. The demon-queller Zhong Kui, whose legend grew up in the eighth century around a dead man’s ghost and a sick emperor, took over the doorways and never gave them back. What survived in China was the court version, and the court version drifted: a thirteenth-century account of the banner gives a tiger’s head, red hair with horns, and a dragon’s body, and later drawings settle into a lion with claws where the hooves used to be. The cow was forgotten. Something else happened as well. White Marsh is not in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, whatever gets said about it now. It was inserted into an illustrated edition of that book by Hu Wenhuan, printed in 1593, copied from there into the Sancai tuhui a few years later, and the borrowed antiquity has been sticking to it ever since.

In Japan it kept going. As Hakutaku it turns up in mid-sixteenth-century dictionaries with a human face, four legs and two horns on its back, and a commentator who died in 1597 describes it as human-faced with the body of a beast resembling a cow. He also says it eats bad dreams. That is not its trade. Dream-eating belongs to the baku, and by then the two names had run together so thoroughly that nobody bothered to separate the jobs. The nine eyes, three on the face and three down each flank, and the six horns that everyone now draws are eighteenth-century Japanese, with no Chinese source behind them at all.

The Edo sheets are where the method finally becomes legible. Beneath the picture runs a list of ordinary household omens with a demon’s proper name attached to each. A dog gets on the roof: Spring Woman. A hen crows like a cock: Dead Dragon. A rat squeaks: Metal Office. Blood on your clothes: Travel Subtle. The instruction at the bottom is that when one of these happens you shout the name, and the prodigy destroys itself and sinks three feet into the ground, and the misfortune turns into good fortune, and you must say the name seven times. One surviving copy was written out by a monk called Bansen at Myriad Pine Mountain, dated to the equivalent of 30 October 1785.

Everything the creature can do comes out of one faculty. It knows what things are and it can say so, which is the only weapon needed against a class of enemy whose entire advantage is going unrecognised. It does not fight, and there is no story in which it tries. It cannot be summoned either; the old formula is that it appears when a ruler’s virtue has grown bright enough to reach the obscure and the distant, which makes its arrival a verdict rather than a rescue, and means the worse the age, the less likely the help. And the knowledge it handed over did not keep. Most of what it said is gone. What is left is two damaged scrolls out of a sealed cave, a wall of quotations in other people’s books, and a painting that only survived because somebody wanted the paper.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Bai Ze?

Bai Ze, whose name means White Marsh, is a speaking beast of Chinese mythology that knows the name, shape and habits of every spirit and prodigy in the world. It is a protector rather than a threat, and its role in the tradition is to tell people what they are dealing with. Its image was hung above doorways in Tang China as a guard against ominous events.

What did Bai Ze tell the Yellow Emperor?

According to the eleventh-century Daoist compendium Yunji qiqian, Bai Ze met the Yellow Thearch on the seashore during an eastern inspection tour and described to him every kind of ghost and spirit under heaven, 11,520 in all. The Thearch ordered them drawn and written down so the whole world could be shown, then composed a formula for cursing evil away. The much older notice in Ge Hong’s Baopuzi, from the early fourth century, says only that he recorded the words of White Marsh.

Is Bai Ze in the Classic of Mountains and Seas?

No. Bai Ze does not appear in the ancient Classic of Mountains and Seas, despite being widely credited to it. The text and drawing were added by Hu Wenhuan to his illustrated edition first printed in 1593, and were then copied into the Sancai tuhui, which is how the mistaken attribution spread.

What does Bai Ze look like?

No Tang source describes Bai Ze, and the earliest catalogue to mention it, in the sixth century, gives no appearance at all. The oldest surviving picture, a tenth-century painting from Dunhuang, shows a lion’s head in a heavy mane, a scaled dragon-like body with curling feathered wings, and the kneeling forelegs and hooves of a cow. Later Chinese drawings replace the hooves with a lion’s claws.

What is the difference between Bai Ze and Hakutaku?

Hakutaku is the Japanese form of Bai Ze, and it kept the older cow-like appearance long after China had settled on a lion. It also picked up a habit that was never Bai Ze’s, the eating of bad dreams, which properly belongs to the baku. The familiar nine eyes and six horns are eighteenth-century Japanese iconography rather than anything Chinese.

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