Mogwai

Under the fig tree, in the last hours before his awakening, the seated man was attacked with everything the demon king could summon. Māra’s armies covered the plain, armored and howling, and they threw fire, boulders, and whole trees at the still figure at the center. The weapons turned to flowers in the air and fell as petals. Māra’s daughters danced close, beautiful and insistent. When the man reached down and laid one hand flat on the ground, calling the earth itself to witness what he had done to deserve this seat, the whole host broke apart and blew away like smoke off a dead fire.

The demon king who lost that night left his name inside the Chinese language. Móguǐ, written 魔鬼 and carried into English through the Cantonese pronunciation mogwai, is the plain word for a devil, and it is stitched together from two very different threads. The second character, guǐ, is ancient. It sits in the oracle-bone inscriptions more than three thousand years old, a squat figure with an oversized head, and it has always meant the thing itself: the bogey, the spirit of the dead. The first character had to be built from scratch. When Buddhist scriptures reached China and the translators needed a way to write the Sanskrit māra, the killer and tempter who had failed under the fig tree, they took the sound-sign for hemp and set the demon-sign beneath it, making a new character that meant, roughly, a má-type demon.

An emperor is said to have finished the job. Early translators had used a graph topped with the sign for stone, but Emperor Wu of Liang, a ruler so devout that he kept trying to give his own body to a monastery, decided that a being whose whole work was to torment people ought to be written with the demon-sign, not the stone. The stone came off. The demon went on. The character has carried its little crouching ghost at the bottom ever since.

In everyday speech mó, guǐ, yāo, and guài blur together into a general noise of malice, but the careful distinctions survive underneath. A guǐ is usually a dead soul, a person who has not settled. A yāoguài is a fox, a tree, or an old household object that has soaked up enough time and strangeness to wake into a hungry, shifting monster. A guài is merely something wrong, an omen, a birth out of order. The móguǐ are the ones with intent. They are not confused dead or jumped-up animals but beings whose nature is to do harm, and it is no accident that when Chinese Bibles needed a name for Satan, this was the word they reached for.

The face most often given to the móguǐ arrived from India along with the sutras. The yèchā, the Chinese yaksha, fly through the night on a strange dark radiance, red or blue or yellow in the face, sometimes crowned with an animal’s head, and they take open pleasure in human suffering. The luóchà, the rakshasa, are worse: bloodthirsty man-eaters of enormous size and speed who, once bound into the Buddhist order, are set to work as jailers in the courts of hell, dragging the damned to their punishments. They crowd the old books. They stalk through the Ming epic of the gods’ investiture, and Pu Songling sends a young merchant into a whole country of them, a land where his ordinary human face is judged so hideous that he can only get by among monsters who find beauty in the reverse of everything he knows.

In the hell scrolls one of them stands at a boiling cauldron, iron-muscled and tusked, a spiked club gripped in one fist, waiting with the patience of a clerk for the next soul to be brought forward. The heat comes off the iron in a haze. Nothing about the scene is hurried.

One older strand of belief even ties their increase to the weather, and has the demons breeding with the coming of the rains, timing themselves to the seasons of plenty the water brings. Mostly, though, the móguǐ are a problem to be managed. A death that goes wrong, a burial done badly, a grievance left to rot, and the dead can curdle into something that comes back for the living. Then the living answer with what they have: firecrackers and drums, red paper on the doors, and paper money burned by the armful, so that the aggrieved spirit has funds enough in the next world to stop troubling this one.

Their powers follow from what they are. They tempt, because their first ancestor was a tempter. They frighten, they sicken, they deceive the eye, they fly, and the strongest of them eat human flesh without effort. Their weakness follows just as directly, and it is the whole point of the story under the fig tree. A móguǐ has no purchase on a mind that will not be moved. The armies and the dancing daughters and the flung mountains all failed against a man who simply sat, and the same logic runs down through the folk defenses: steadiness, ritual, and the right offering will send a demon off, because a demon feeds on the fear and the disorder it can raise, and starves without them. The móguǐ is, in the end, a category before it is a creature. Write the word today and it means the Devil, or a cruel man, or the thing a child is afraid of in the dark, and at the foot of the character the same small ghost is still crouching, three thousand years on.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does “mogwai” mean?

Mogwai is the Cantonese pronunciation of the Chinese word móguǐ (魔鬼), meaning “devil,” “demon,” or “evil spirit.” It refers to genuinely malevolent supernatural beings, as opposed to ordinary ghosts or animal-spirits. In modern Chinese it is also the standard word for the Devil of Christian and Buddhist scripture.

Is the mogwai the same as the creature in the movie Gremlins?

The 1984 film Gremlins borrowed the word “mogwai” from Cantonese, where it means “devil” or “demon,” and attached it to its furry creature Gizmo and the monsters he spawns. The folkloric móguǐ is not a single cute animal but a broad class of Chinese demons and devils. The film took the name, not the tradition.

Where does the word móguǐ come from?

The “guǐ” (鬼) half is native Chinese and appears in oracle-bone inscriptions over three thousand years old, meaning a ghost or spirit of the dead. The “mó” (魔) half was invented by Buddhist translators to write the Sanskrit māra, the demon who tried to stop the Buddha’s enlightenment. Combined, móguǐ means something close to a “māra-type demon.”

What is the difference between mogui, gui, and yaoguai?

A móguǐ (魔鬼) is a true demon defined by malicious intent. A guǐ (鬼) is usually the restless soul of a dead person. A yāoguài (妖怪) is a monster formed when an animal, plant, or object gains supernatural power and transforms, closer to a goblin or sprite than to a devil.

How do people protect themselves from demons in Chinese tradition?

Chinese folk practice defends against demons with fire, loud noise such as firecrackers and drums, and the color red, all believed to repel evil. When a vengeful spirit is the trouble, families burn paper money so the dead have funds in the afterlife and are persuaded to move on. In the Buddhist frame, a demon also has no power over a calm, steadfast mind.

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