CHAPTER 2 Thunder, Writing, and Justice

Thunder’s Logic

Thunder was unseen but not unknowable. Although it was threatening, it operated logically, if not at predictable intervals. Many guidebooks and manuals explained the heavenly retribution for certain misdeeds that hinted at these forces, such as the many versions of the Tract of Taishang on Action and Response (Taishang ganying pian), which claimed that “inside a person’s body there are the three corpse worm/spirits (sanchong/sanshi) who on every fifty-seventh day of each sixty-day cycle report a person’s crimes and transgressions to the heavenly tribunal. On the last day of each month, the Kitchen God (Zaoshen) also makes such a report.”¹¹ These misdeeds might then meet with retribution from heaven or its servants. The system of retribution at work in the world was multifarious. As historian Cynthia Brokaw has noted, “Man was on intimate, even familiar terms with the supernatural, what with the [three corpse worms] living in his body, the Kitchen God resident in his home, and constellations of overseer stars hovering over his head.”¹² These greater systems of moral surveillance and retribution were panoptical but not infallible. The agents, gods, and sentient powers that brought judgement and punishment were perceived to be open to human manipulation, just as fate was.

Aside from adhering to social mores, people could protect themselves from thunder by attempting to pollute it, especially with urine or excrement. In 1762, for instance, “thunder broke out in Huai’an and was about to strike an old lady from an institution that cared for orphans and the poor. The old lady had just taken off her trousers to pee and became worried [about the approaching storm] so she poured out the chamber pot toward [the thunder].” The thunder god appeared, squatting beside the old lady. He was about two feet tall, with a black body, sharp beak, and glittering wings fluttering constantly. It was not able to leave until the magistrate called in a Daoist who chanted spells and poured clean water on the god’s head. The next day, it rained again, and the thunder god was able to fly away.¹³ Thunder can become polluted, presumably for the same reason all god-like things can be, since their natures are pure, and since thunder is associated with the cleanliness of rain. But why would thunder plan to strike an old lady who cares for orphans and the poor?

Retribution from thunder was not strange; it was the norm. But puzzling out its forms, mechanisms, and occasional mistakes required investigating anomalous thunderstrikes. Depicting thunder as a bird-like figure was consistent with texts designed for popular consumption such as Illustrated Exhortations and Admonishments (Quan jie tushuo; hereafter Illustrated Admonishments), by Zou Diguang (1549–1625).¹⁴ Published in 1589, it presents two hundred stories of only a few sentences each about the retribution incurred by varieties of virtuous or dastardly behaviors. The language is very clear and simple classical Chinese, and each story is accompanied by a woodblock illustration. It was written by an official for consumption by general readers. It must have been somewhat popular, since it was republished in 1594 by Wanshou Temple in Beijing, and by Anzheng Tang, a Fujian commercial house that specialized in popular texts with an eye to either entertainment or utility.¹⁵ Anzheng Tang also published medical texts, xiaoshuo, and encyclopedia for daily use. They had a broad readership and sold many books.¹⁶

Thunder, lacking subtlety, often makes its lesson explicit. In one instance in Illustrated Admonishments, adulterers are struck by thunder, leaving the phrase “adultery is theft” written down their sides to “let the public know [why they were punished].”¹⁷ A man who stole lumber that had been designated for a coffin was similarly punished and exposed, with “Did not allow family member to be buried” branded on the side of his corpse.¹⁸ Thunder explains its reasons in writing in Illustrated Admonishments, while in other texts, it writes on the corpse in scorched letters “retribution for a former life,” seemingly defending itself for striking dead people who otherwise seem quite decent.¹⁹

Illustrated Admonishments depicts thunder as a winged humanoid with bird-like features, carrying a hammer in one hand and an awl or stake in the other, flying in clouds and accompanied by fire (lightning) and drums, obscured from the view of those who are about to be struck. Thunder seems to be the primary retribution for lack of filiality and for infidelity, whereas other punishments, such as drowning, being eaten by tigers, being made by demons to vomit fish, and being made to eat feces fit their crimes in a flourish of poetic justice. Some of the images in Illustrated Admonishments show the ammunition of thunder, at times referred to as lightning-fire (dianhuo), raining down on the evil doers while they are kneeling with their wrists bound behind their backs in a recognizable pose of one about to be executed with a sword. There must have been some confusion or collation with the vengeful shashen, another bird-like spirit or demon that would return to the scene of a death to collect a soul, killing all in its path.

The thunder god’s origins are detailed in the early seventeenth-century novel Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi). Ji Chang finds a baby on Mount Yan after a thunderstorm and leaves it with the Daoist Master of the Clouds (Yunzhong Zi) to raise for seven years until he can return to fetch the boy (chapter 10). Seven years later, the boy, nicknamed Thunderbolt (Leizhen), is sent to find a weapon so that he may assist his father, but instead he finds two delicious apricots. After eating them, he sprouts wings and bird feet, grows twenty feet tall, and is given a golden cudgel (chapter 21). With a blue face, green body, red hair, and fangs, he fights alongside Nezha and other gods under the command of Jiang Ziya. Oddly, he attacks not with thunder but only with his cudgel, while it is Master of the Clouds who emits thunder from his fingers (chapter 52). This last image, with thunder accompanied by Master of the Clouds (or a similar deity) shooting thunder-fire from their fingers explains the woodblock depictions featured in roughly contemporaneous moral tracts such as Illustrated Admonishments.

The overlap between the didactic Illustrated Admonishments and the fantastical myths of Canonization of the Gods reinforced some aspects of thunder but left many questions unanswered.²⁰ Did it have moral agency? Was it fallible? In the example from Dianshizhai above, when the wife of Liyang was struck dead, “no one could understand the reason” (mojie qigu), suggesting that thunder has thoughts. Presumably, heaven takes reports from spirit/corpse worms and others, the way the earthly emperor receives reports from his ministers and then orders thunder to mete out punishment. The entry for thunder in many daily-use encyclopedias consider thunder an omen: “If there is thunder without clouds, it foretells sudden upheaval or commotion.”²¹ Others say thunder forewarns of “sickness, bandits, and the like.”²² This text is repeated, almost unchanged, in subsequent editions of encyclopedias for decades, but by the middle of the eighteenth century, some reprinted (or pirated) editions changed the image of thunder from a bird-like figure to an abstract representation. Perhaps editors of encyclopedias were beginning to lose faith in the thunder god and beginning to see thunder as a more natural phenomenon.

Little of thunder’s public displays of retribution would be clear without the helpful inscription of writing on the corpses he punishes and leaves exposed. Often though, these messages were indecipherable. Shen Gua writes, “When I was in Handong, two men were struck dead by a thunderbolt in the garden of the local magistrate’s house on the day of the Qingming festival. Two words were found under their armpits, which were shaped like cypress leaves and looked as if they were painted with an ink brush. Nobody could discern these two characters.”²³ Why would heaven send a message explaining its actions and exposing crimes in garbled words? Everyone recognized the charred marks on bodies and pillars and other struck things as words. But what words were they? Huang Liuhong, writing in his handbook for local officials about how to investigate corpses for evidence of foul play, states, “In the area where thunder strikes, the skin and flesh will be hardened and black.… Some victims bear what seems to be, on the chest or shoulders, great-seal-character writing.”²⁴ Huang apparently was paraphrasing from the handbook for coroners, Washing away Wrongs (Xiyuan lu), which contains identical information. Although written characters are unintelligible, in this case the medium is truly the message.

There was widespread discussion in texts about the possible miscarriage of thunder’s justice. What explanation could be given for the inconsistent punishment of the wicked and the casual disaster brought to the innocent? One possibility was that the messengers of heaven were fallible. Ji Yun seems to think that thunder generally does not strike crowded places, expressly to avoid collateral damage. He writes that a thunderbolt once struck a house where his cousin was staying, and the next day, he discovered holes the size of a coin in the east and west walls of the house. This was the thunder god pursuing demons, he concludes: “Generally, thunder that strikes people comes down from the sky. Thunder that strikes demons, often moves horizontally, to chase after those that flee [it]. As for ordinary thunder, it is the earth’s qi accumulating and surging upward.” But it seems that Ji Yun also suspects that thunder is a naturally occurring phenomenon. He writes that he has seen thunder come down from the sky and he has seen it rise up from the earth, both like smoke and vapor, gathering in density until there was a flash and a boom, exactly like the firing of a cannon. Yet all these instances, Ji says, occurred in uninhabited areas. It is not that heaven fears killing people but that thunder occurs where qi accumulates: “Where people gather, the qi of heaven and earth flows freely, and where it flows, it doesn’t accumulate. So how could there be thunder?”²⁵

There is little tension in the comingling of supernatural and natural logic here. Ji Yun sees physical phenomena, the qi of heaven and earth, behaving according to recurring principles. Those natural patterns may or may not reflect the will of heaven. Yet the god of thunder chases demons. Ji admits, however, that there are targeted thunderstrikes that come from heaven above, and he recalls an anecdote he heard as a child about how Li Shanren was struck dead by thunder and his body was found kneeling upright, looking up at the sky with red script on his back, the characters entangled and unrecognizable.²⁶

Ji Yun also offers evidence for his argument that retributory thunder comes from above and natural thunder from earth. He tells of a big storm in the sixth month of the tenth year of the Yongzheng reign (1732) in which a villager was struck by thunder and killed. The local magistrate, Ming Sheng, arrested and questioned a man about why he bought so much gunpowder at the market recently, many times the amount needed for a hunting excursion of a few days. The magistrate elicited a confession from the man that he had murdered the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair. Ming Sheng then explains that the effects of a thunderbolt cannot be faked with less than thirty pounds of gunpowder. This must be mixed with sulfur (liuhuang) and charcoal powder to produce an explosion. It was then high summer, not the New Year when firecrackers are let off, so very few people were buying sulfur. The magistrate had secretly sent someone to the marketplace to find out who was buying sulfur in large quantities, and the answer came back that it was this man. The magistrate was asked how he knew that the thunderbolt had been faked. He replied, “When thunder strikes people, it comes down from above and does not split the ground open. Even when it destroys a house, it’s from top to bottom. But here, the thatched roof and rafters were sent flying up in the air, and the top of the kang was also blown off. Thus, it was clear that the explosion came from below.”²⁷ The murderer relies on the common knowledge that thunder rises up out of the ground, not realizing the distinction that when it strikes people it comes from above. Ji Yun recorded this event about fifty-seven years after it was purported to have happened, suggesting that the insight of the magistrate to contravene this bit of common knowledge was considered remarkable. The extraordinary event in this story is not the perpetrator’s ability to smuggle so much gunpowder into the home of his lover’s husband or to make it explode at the very moment there was a thunderstorm, but the magistrate’s perception of the ruse. If thunder reveals its intentions in striking villains in some accounts, here the clever magistrate reveals that this was not heaven’s will but the actions of a villain who did not understand the properties of thunder.

Thunder was not infallible. Tales Overheard (Ertan, 1602) and its categorized expansion, Ertan leizeng (1603), recount thunder striking dead a person riding a reddish-colored horse. Shortly after, another person riding a similar horse in the same place was also struck dead. That night, the first horse rider returned to life. People who heard about it said that a voice came from the sky saying, “That was a mistake. It was supposed to be the second rider.” Following this, a host of demons took the first corpse and “blew qi into his rectum and stimulated his nose, so that the qi would come out [reviving him]. Others urged him not to file a complaint against the thunder division.”²⁸ Despite the serious investigations into the mechanisms of thunder in these texts, this account seems to take a satirical stance, questioning the infallibility of thunder and also resuscitation methods.

Huang Liuhong, writing in the last decades of the seventeenth century, refers to the restraint of thunder as an example of the temperament expected of good magistrates: “The world is not perfect and is full of rogues and criminals, just as a forest is full of tigers and wolves. Society is fraught with injustice as the jungle is fraught with danger. If the magistrate is obsessed with the complete elimination of all rogues and criminals in society, he should ponder why heaven does not eradicate all the tigers and wolves in the forest with a thunderbolt.”²⁹ In a similar line of thinking many pondered why thunder would strike down cows in the field. Hong Mai (1123–1202) wondered why thunderbolts kill dogs or chickens at times, remarking that “the crimes of dogs are unknowable.”³⁰ It was unclear if Hong Mai presumed that the dog was a reincarnated human who had not fully atoned for his misdeeds, but he may have been, like others, objectively curious why cows would be struck down in the field. Huang must have known arguments that all natural phenomena can be explained by stimulus and response (ganying): “When people do bad things, there is bad qi that clashes with the bad qi of heaven-and-earth and then brings on death by shock. Thunder is the angry qi of heaven-and-earth.”³¹

Ji Yun illuminates debates surrounding thunder, justice, and the circulation of information in a discussion about the evil eunuch Wei Zhong-xian (1568–1627). It was common knowledge, according to Ji, that Wei had attempted, nearly a century and a half earlier, to avoid arrest by secretly keeping an incredibly fast horse to escape on and a doppelganger of himself who could be executed in his stead. Ji writes that Wei could escape neither the laws of man nor the retribution of heaven: “I think [that theory] is a load of nonsense. In terms of the way of heaven, unless we are deceived about the thoroughness of divine justice, there is absolutely no reason why [Wei] should have been spared. From the point of view of the realities of life on earth, Wei Zhongxian strode about the court for seven years, so who did not know him?” He surely would have been recognized, trussed up, and brought to the authorities had he tried to escape justice. Had he been decent, like the overthrown Jianwen emperor, perhaps loyalists would have taken him in and hidden him, but “in contrast, Wei Zhongxian’s barbarity stank to heaven and his poison infected the whole land.” Therefore, Ji Yun firmly rejects the idea that Wei escaped heaven’s justice. Apparently, it was not common knowledge in 1791, even to Ji Yun, one of the most widely read people in the empire, that Wei Zhongxian committed suicide in 1627 and that a year later, the details of Wei’s end were published in official accounts and entertainment literature (xiaoshuo) accounts.³²

Ji Yun struggles to explain how heaven does not punish all crimes. He writes about fox spirits who escape thunderbolts. How could the way of heaven allow these licentious foxes to escape? How could heaven allow them to know the preordained date and time they were scheduled to be executed? If foxes did have foreknowledge and escape, why wouldn’t heaven execute them at some other time?

Indeed, not to follow up with punishment would be miscarriage of justice, which is again inconsistent with the way of heaven. Is there a plausible theory to explain this? I happened across an entry about the burning of a drought demon [hanba] and two entries about foxes eluding [thunderbolts] in Compiled Notes from Evening Chats [Yetan conglu] by a contemporary writer.³³ I record [here] my doubts, to await future inspection by scholars investigating things and interrogating patterns.³⁴

Ji questioned the veracity of some of the information he encountered in various biji and miscellanies, and by implication, he generally expected to encounter reliable information in them. But there were limits to his curiosity and his incredulity. He questions the possibility that licentious fox spirits are so clever that they can elude the justice of heaven’s thunder, but he does not attempt to replace common knowledge with a more plausible theory.

Ji, unaware that Wei had committed suicide, was confident that Wei Zhongxian’s crimes were so extreme that he would certainly have been punished by heaven. Wei, like the fox spirits, should not be able to evade heaven. Ji recounts a story from Wang Yuefang, who told of a violent storm that shook the Confucian temple in Wen An. Thunder and lightning filled the sky. Wang Zhuqi, the director of studies, thought this strange and entered the temple, where he saw a huge centipede crawling over the sage’s spirit tablet. He grabbed it with tongs and threw it down the steps, where it was immediately struck by thunder and killed. The sky cleared and he investigated the centipede, finding the characters “Wei Zhongxian” inscribed in red on its back. Ji Yun then states, “It is said so, and I tend to believe it.”³⁵ How much sarcasm is implied in this statement is unclear, and Ji Yun’s point is simply that Wei Zhongxian, like evil fox spirits, cannot avoid heaven’s punishment. But this piece rings familiar, invoking as it does thunder striking huge centipedes, reports of which were common. Moreover, this anecdote, like many others, also raises the question of thunder’s engravings, making explicit the judgement implied in any thunderstrike. But why did thunder not dispense justice to everyone who deserved it? To cite just one 1884 account from Dianshizhai Pictorial:³⁶

Within the four seas, those who use poisons to harm people are without limit, yet heaven is unable to punish them all. The reason heaven neglects to punish some is unfathomable. In Cixi, one day, the heavens suddenly became black, wind and rain intertwined, lightning flashing and thunderbolts following. Residents sat anxiously in their homes, as if they could hear something in the sky battling with the thunder and lightning. After a short while, the rain stopped and the sky cleared, revealing a giant centipede, half in the river and half hanging on the hillside, apparently struck dead by lightning. Its length was unknown, and its width was about three feet, truly an extraordinary and monstrous creature.³⁷

Centipedes were tantamount to, or perhaps created by, poisoners (see chapter 5). There were too many of both for heaven to eliminate all of them. Perhaps it was because bugs, like dragons, had a special relationship with thunder that it took so long for thunder to grapple with the giant centipede in this account.

Li Shizhen explains that when bugs drink rainwater in late autumn, they hide and go into hibernation. By spring, “when they hear thunderclaps, they rise from hibernation and come out again.”³⁸ Bugs respond to natural markers of seasons passing, but their relation to thunder is deeper than just clocking time. Li Shizhen quotes and edits an account recorded in “Idle Views from a Secluded Study” (Dunzhai), a collection of brush notes from the Northern Song dynasty written by Chen Zhengmin that Li must have read secondhand in the late-Yuan collection and brush notes Purlieus of Exposition.³⁹ Li, again quoting a text modern scholars might consider to be “fiction,” read this story for its useful information. He excised the words struck through:

My friend Liu Bo often met with Yang Mian, a scholar living in Huai xi. He told him that [Yang Mian] in his prime got a strange illness. Whenever he said something to answer [a question], this was right away echoed by a low voice in his abdomen. Over time, the voices became louder and louder. A Daoist witnessed this and said, frightened: “This is an echo bug [yingsheng chong] (!) If this is not cured soon, it will be transferred to your wife and children. You should read the Bencao. When you come to [a substance] that the bug does not repeat, you should ingest it.” [Yang] Mian did as [the Daoist] had said. He read [the list of drugs in the Bencao] and when he reached thunderbolt mushroom [leiwan], the bug did not respond. He ingested several servings [of leiwan] and was cured.⁴⁰

The cure, and understanding the point of the story, relies on the common knowledge that bugs, like dragons, respond to the call of thunder—or the ingestion of physical manifestations of thunder, as thunderbolt mushrooms were believed to be.⁴¹ Li Shizhen, removing the suspense and some details unrelated to the facts of leiwan, not only reads the story as fact but ensures that his readers will do so as well. Li Ruzhen (1763–1830?), author of the 1828 novel Flowers in the Mirror (Jinghua yuan), may have been one of these readers, since his character Tang Ao expels parasitic worms from a young woman with the use of thunderbolt mushroom.⁴²

The mechanism of thunder was still somewhat mysterious as were its resonances among certain animals. Li writes that when the tusks of an elephant (xiang) feel thunder, patterns arise on them in a manner analogous to patterns arising in celestial phenomena (also pronounced xiang) in response to qi.⁴³ These patterns, created in a response to thunder, are what made elephant’s tusks good medicine for eliminating evil, expelling the strange, and curing bewilderment caused by demons. Other animals were also responsive to thunder—some going underground at the sound of thunder and there transforming into something else. Snakes and pheasant eggs, for instance, were thought to transform into flood dragons. Tadpoles lost their tails at the sound of thunder, and clams shrank. Thunder was a mechanism of justice, and it was a catalyst of change.

Thunder/Gods

The relationship between thunder gods and thunder is not at all clear. Like dragons and dragon spirits, thunder and thunder gods seemed to coexist in the popular imaginary without much conflict. Perhaps at some time in antiquity the god anthropomorphized unseen forces by giving them physical, animal shape, but over time, the connection between the two became fuzzier. Even in antiquity, Wang Chong (27–97 CE), in his Balanced Inquiries (Lunheng), took issue with the possibility that thunder, or thunder gods, have a representable image:

When painters represent thunder, [he/it] has the form of many drums joined together. They also paint a man who looks very strong and call him Thunder God [Leigong]. Holding the linked drums in his left hand, he swings a hammer with his right, as if ready to strike. It means that the rolling sound of thunder is produced by the drums knocking together, and that the sudden crashing noise is the blow of the hammer. When a man is killed, he is struck with the drums and the hammer at the same time. People in the world believe this and do not doubt it. But if we get at the bottom of it, we find that these images are mere fabrications.… The divine is formless and moves without limits, hence it is called divine. Now, if Thunder God has a form and thunder has a device, how can they be divine? If it is formless, it cannot be depicted; if it has form, it cannot be called divine.⁴⁴

Wang Chong’s argument here is not that there is no thunder god but rather that this could not be an accurate portrait of him. If spirits are diffuse and incorporeal, then they cannot be seen, and if they can be seen, they have a body and are not spirits. Wang Chong was taking issue not with thunder being a spirit with agency and will but with the notion that such a spirit would have a physical form. Envisioning thunder was not the problem; seeing it was. Using the same reasoning, he goes on to suggest that there is no dragon spirit: “The best proof that, as a fact, there is no [dragon] god is that it can be pictorially represented.”⁴⁵ Wang Chong makes it clear that dragons are animals, foremost among the scaly creatures, but not spirits.

Wang Chong postulated that thunder is an “outburst of solar qi” (taiyang zhi jiqi). Like later observers, Wang notes that this qi rises in the spring and reaches its height in summer, when there are sudden claps of thunder. In autumn and winter, yang declines, and with it, thunder retires:

At the height of summer the sun does its business, but yin seeks to intercede. Yin and yang contend and become entangled; entangled there are outbursts and shooting; the outbursts and shooting lead to danger [lit., poison]. A man caught in the middle of this struggle is struck dead, a tree caught in the middle is split, a house caught in the middle is demolished. How can one prove it? Take some water and pour it onto a fire used for smelting and casting. The qi will explode with a sound like thunder.… Heaven and Earth are a great furnace; yang qi is an immense fire, clouds and rain are copious water.⁴⁶

Wang Chong also discussed the nature of traces left by a thunder strike. He argues that because the charred writing is illegible, thunder is not punishment sent by heaven. When heaven wishes to make itself known to man, its messages are perfectly clear.⁴⁷ Wang writes that it is common knowledge that thunder splits trees, demolishes houses, and occasionally kills people because it is either fetching a dragon or punishing people for their hidden faults: “Everyone, no matter whether intelligent or stupid, says so. But if we look into the matter rationally, we find that this is all nonsense.”⁴⁸

Wang Chong’s attempt to argue against the common knowledge that thunder gods create thunder or that thunder is the growl of an angry heaven does not seem to have been adopted by many. Although Wang argues that thunder gods wielding drums and hammers to create thunder are a human invention, thunder god rituals were practiced locally and at court well into the early modern period. Thunder god rituals were popular and institutional. Official and anecdotal records narrate how the emperor himself was personally confronted with the wrath of the Thunder Division. Thunder shook the court of the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–98), who witnessed the thunder god inside the Forbidden City in 1380. In his own words, on the eve of the fifth day of the fifth month, “thunder has struck at Prudence Hall. We, the emperor, are very frightened by it.” Thinking that thunder struck because he had not done enough good deeds, Zhu issued a general amnesty for all prisoners.⁴⁹ A month later, the magnitude of the event was confirmed when Zhu issued another decree, in which he openly assumed guilt by saying that he lacked virtue and had neglected sacrifices to his ancestors, inviting thunderstrikes.⁵⁰ The influence of the event had a powerful effect on the cultural imagination, occasioning stories and other adaptations. The late Ming author Qian Xiyan (1562–1638) retells the story in which thunder struck unexpectedly right in front of the hall where the emperor was seated. The emperor beheld a figure three feet tall, with a dark blue body, wings, and flashing eyes. It bowed to the emperor and then soared off into the sky and disappeared. This story revises the emperor’s own account, explaining his authority over the gods of thunder but also popularizes the historical account via xiaoshuo.⁵¹

Thunder had long been perceived as both a beneficial and a harmful force, a welcome sign of rain and an unexpected cause of destruction. Thunder magic was a human attempt to ritually harness thunder’s benevolent and destructive powers to bring relief in times of drought and also to destroy illness demons. The divinization of thunder was already well established in classical times, as evidenced by its discussion by Wang Chong.⁵² Magicians who summoned thunder to various ends appear in sources as far back as the Han dynasty.⁵³ Natural forces continued to be mediated both by thunder gods and human masters of thunder rituals for centuries. Du Guangting’s (850–933) Traditions of Responsive Encounters with Divine Transcendents (Shenxian ganyu zhuan), a collection of tales relating meetings between Daoist transcendents and humans, includes a biography of Ye Qianshao. When Ye was a young man, the thunder god appeared and transmitted to him a scroll that enabled its possessor to bring down thunder and rain and to cure sickness for the benefit of mankind.⁵⁴ The power to control thunder was, according to official documents, no myth; the Ming Histories record that Liu Yuanran (1351–1432), the Ming founder’s last known Daoist advisor, was “quite accomplished in calling wind and summoning thunder.”⁵⁵ Some ritual masters called upon the thunder god and some were able to summon thunder itself.

By the late eighteenth century, at least as recorded in biji and zhiguai, the thunder god had mostly disappeared or become the butt of humorous accounts. In the work of Pu Songling, and Yuan Mei (1716–97), the thunder god is repelled with the contents of chamber pots, has his awl stolen, and is generally described with scorn, perhaps suggesting, as Ji Yun makes explicit, that thunder was a natural force wielded by heaven and not men or gods as many people still believed.⁵⁶ Perhaps it was the contending influences of entertainment literature—raising gods from the status of demons and making them powerful protagonists, as in Canonization of the Gods in the late Ming and the mid-Qing accounts in brush-note literature—that either derided the thunder god or sought secular explanations for the machinations of thunder that contributed to a sense that thunder gods had become figures of fantasy and satire.

Thunder and Healing

In addition to its associations with dragons, bugs, destruction, and justice, thunder also was called upon by healers to drive out illness demons or plague demons since at least the Tang dynasty. But thunder was also invoked for more personal illnesses, usually in the form of written talismans. Talismans attest to the power of the written Chinese character. Talismans were often prescribed along with pharmaceuticals. The talisman was burned and its ashes ingested, after which the drugs guided the talisman to the right place in the body to apply its effects. Simpler character talismans, by contrast, were often not meant to be taken internally but to be applied to a surface such as a door, written on water in a bowl that was to be ingested, or written directly onto the body with ink or water.⁵⁷

The combined characters of “water” and “ghost,” “rain” and “ghost,” and “thunder” and “ghost” constitute many of the talismans found in apotropaic manuscripts and daily life encyclopedias. We see thunder and rain in many talismans of the “elaborate” (huafu or fushi) type that combine images and characters. With rain 雨 on top and ghost 鬼 on the bottom left, the bottom right seems to have been the place to write what one hoped for. This may have evolved into the character for thunder / lightning lei 雷 / 電, which had a similar shape, especially when exaggerated with a flourish as was common in talismans.

Water, thunder, and Chinese characters all combined for powerful healing magic. In one manuscript, we see “amulets to be drawn on ulcers” (huachuang fushi) and “ink method for spells written on ulcers (huachuang zhou mofa).”⁵⁸ These amulets have the character for thunder, lei 雷, to their left. The final stroke of the character lei is drawn far to the right, creating the character dian 電, lightning. and creating an ink border below one of the seven following characters written to the right of the amulet: shou 收 (to gather), tui 退 (to withdraw), zhan 斬 (to cut), sha 殺 (to kill), ji 急 (quickly), xiao 消 (to vanish), mie 滅 (to perish). The meaning of these amulets seems straightforward given that they were used to treat an ulcer or tumor. Other talismans are similar in shape but less clear in mechanism. Again, the character for thunder is on the left, with a long, sweeping stroke across the bottom and a smaller character to the right: “dragon” 龍 “tiger” 虎, or “wind” 風, as seen in figure 2.6. The method of “drawing [an amulet on] an ulcer” is as follows: First, an amulet is drawn on the door. Then it is drawn on the ulcer with “sourceless water” (wugen shui, different kinds of water are discussed in chapter 4). The seven talismans mentioned above are then to be written one after the other, with incantations interspersed. Similar methods of constructing and applying talismans appear in other manuscripts. Some seem to have their origins in the south, which may be another example of the perception of these practices as anomalous accounts, coming from the periphery to the center.⁵⁹

In the medical manuscripts of the Unschuld collection housed in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, an important archive of texts made by practitioners for their own use, the word “thunder” is often used either in discussing the practice that is now called moxibustion, or in creating written talismans to expel demons, ulcers, and other illness causing things.⁶⁰ The thunder god who can dispel plague becomes a talisman that can do the same. Contrastingly, in printed bencao (materia medica) works, thunder is more likely to strike the earth and to bury important medicines in the ground or tree that it struck, to be dug up and employed by healers. Li Shizhen explains this phenomenon:

Wait until a [thunderbolt] has struck somewhere and dig three chi deep to obtain it. It occurs in different physical forms—it may resemble the blade of an axe, knife, chisel, and some have two holes.… Some say these are stones crafted by humans and offered to the heavens, but the truth is unknown. Thunderclap is a sound caused by the clash of yin and yang qi but this is controlled by gods. Hence it commences and ends just like all the other myriad items. Axes, borers, anvils and mallets are all real items. It is said that these are images in heaven that assume a physical appearance once they have reached earth.

Just like stars that fall [from the sky] and become stones [once they reach earth]. Now, when it rains metals and stones, when it rains millet and wheat, when it rains hair and blood, and all types of strange items, is it that they, too, assume a physical appearance when they reach earth?⁶¹ Somewhere in the great void there must be some god who is responsible for all this.… The way of demons and spirits is obscure and invisible. It really cannot be investigated completely.⁶²

This seems an evolution of Wang Chong’s claim that things that are in the sky, like thunder and stars, are without form, but when they fall from heaven, they take shape on earth. Li’s stance also resonates with that of Zhu Xi (1130–1200), writing four centuries earlier, who discussed rainbows as an analogue to thunder (a conversation we will take up in chapter 4).

Thunder as a Phenomenal Thing

Like other things with substance but no form, thunder was thought to be accessible via objects with which it had come into contact. Bencao authors, with their interest in physical substances, understandably focused on its tangible transformations. Li Shizhen shares with Wang Tingxiang (1474–1544) a disenchantment with the understanding of thunder as caused, as were so many things, by the interaction of yin and yang qi or even by retributory qi provoked in response to evil qi.⁶³ That formulaic explanation of natural phenomena seemed to be able to explain everything and yet nothing.⁶⁴ Hence, Li’s claim that thunder must be controlled by gods. Wang agrees that there must be other forces at work:

It is said that thunder is caused by the blocking of yin qi by yang qi: when the yin breaks out of the blockage, it makes a loud clap. While this may explain thunder that comes on suddenly and loudly, it does not seem to apply to thunder that sounds either slow and deep or long-winded and meandering. To call these the sounds of yin and yang striking at each other is simply nonsense. Yin and yang are both qi; how could their collisions produce such [varied] noises? I suspect that these are the workings of some living beings which come out only when clouds and rain are present. They may entwine themselves and copulate, or engage each other in a fight, while we humans have no way to see such goings-on from far below. In recent years, in Huayin and Wuyang counties, lin [a unicorn-like creature] have been spotted in the fields. They roared like thunder, and their mouths spewed out a fire which resembled lightning. Such is the power of some living beings.… The ancients said that the divine dragons can expand and contract their bodies; after making rain in the sky, they withdraw their essences, return, and hide in the earth.

This is why human beings cannot see them well. Could thunder be the work of dragons? It is regrettable that we do not know whether dragons are able to make thunderous noises and spew out fire like lin. Or could there be still some other animal that is responsible for it?⁶⁵

The clash of two kinds of qi is, in Wang’s view, an overly simplistic explanation. We now know that this explanation mirrors closely the modern scientific understanding of thunder. Air, superheated by lightning, rapidly cools and produces sound; the closer it is, the more it sounds like a crack, and the farther, the more like a rumble. Wang was willing to debunk one theory without fully exploring a new one, an understandable impulse when the dominant paradigm was one of transformation. As Wang frequently remarked in his works, the universe is vast, and the capacity for the spontaneous transformation of qi to bring new things into being is limitless. In a sentiment later echoed by Li Shizhen, Wang asks, “What can be too strange to exist?”⁶⁶ Many had doubts, but few dared to challenge the hegemonic paradigm of transformation.

Modern scientific understandings of thunder coexisted with traditional ones for many years. Understanding the certain, calculable realities of thunder did not seem to undermine the knowledge that it was sent by heaven to punish the wicked. In a scene from the 1828 novel Flowers in the Mirror, young, intelligent women characters discuss charlatans who claim to “steal the sky and change the sun.” One character, Lanfen, replies that those are indeed the words of swindlers, but she can calculate the distance of thunder based on its sound. She then demonstrates how to use the “self-chiming clock on the table” to measure the time elapsed between a flash of lightning and a thunderclap. Lanfen calculates how far away the thunder is based on the speed of thunder and the time elapsed. She announces that the thunder has struck about ten li away, and her friend jokingly comments that this is just another swindle.⁶⁷ Despite the cheeky implication that Lanfen’s calculations are as difficult to believe as those of fortune tellers, the scene that follows proves them correct. A wet nurse reports that thunder avenges injustices and that she had just witnessed a thunderbolt strike and kill a wicked man who had committed all sorts of misdeeds. When asked where this happened, she replies that it was just ten li away. This comment verifies both Lanfen’s understanding of thunder as a natural phenomenon and its traditional role as heaven’s executioner.

It is likely that Li Ruzhen’s math was derived from the Collected Basic Principles of Mathematics (Shuli jingyun, 1724), reflecting the academic mood among evidential scholars and propagating it through popular xiaoshuo.⁶⁸ The “challenge” of “new” knowledge to traditional belief did not replace it in the popular imagination, though, at least according to an 1877 report in the Shenbao: “On Thunder and Lightning: The matter of lightning strikes is disputed between Chinese and Westerners. Chinese believe that it is the work of divine beings, while Westerners argue that it is caused by the contact of electric charges. Both views have their merits, and it is difficult to say which is entirely right.”⁶⁹ Just as in Flowers in the Mirror fifty years earlier (and reprinted by the publishers of Shenbao repeatedly in the 1880s), this newspaper account makes it clear that thunder’s phenomenological realities did not need to supplant its heavenly purpose.