Bai Ze (白泽): The Beast That Named 11,520 Spirits

Every other great beast in the Chinese bestiary is defined by what it does to you. The qilin appears when a sage is born. The phoenix turns up for a golden age. The pixiu swallows treasure and, having no anus, never gives any of it back, which is a design decision of some elegance if you are in the market for a wealth charm.

Bai Ze is defined by what it says.

It is the only creature in the whole cast whose function is bibliographic. It meets the Yellow Emperor on a shoreline, it opens its mouth, and out comes a complete inventory of the supernatural world: every spirit, every monster, every category of haunting, named and enumerated. The emperor takes dictation. The result is a book.

And the book was real. That is the thing about this animal that keeps me up. Somewhere behind the legend of a talking beast on a beach there is an actual, physical, circulating text, used in Chinese households for centuries as protection, quoted by other books, and now lost, apart from one battered Tang-dynasty copy that a French archaeologist carried out of a cave in 1908 and which is presently in Paris.

The beast that gave a briefing

The story, in the fullest version we have, goes like this.

The Yellow Emperor, the semi-divine sovereign at the front of the Chinese historical tradition, is on a progress through his territories. He goes east until he reaches the sea, climbs a mountain called Huan, and on the shore he encounters a divine beast called Bai Ze. It can speak. More than that, it understands, in the phrasing of the text, the nature of all things.

So he asks it about ghosts and spirits.

And the beast answers. Of the things which are, in the text's formula, essence become substance or wandering soul become alteration, there are eleven thousand five hundred and twenty kinds. Bai Ze names them all. The emperor orders the whole set drawn and published for the empire to see.

That passage comes from the Yunji Qiqian, an enormous Daoist anthology compiled around 1029, which is quoting an older work called the Basic Annals of Xuanyuan. It is late, and it is the version everybody retells, and it is worth being precise about what "late" means here: the anthology is a thousand years old and the source it quotes is older still, but neither of them is contemporary with anything.

The oldest text we can put a date on that names the animal at all is much earlier and much shorter. Ge Hong, the alchemist and physician, finished the Baopuzi around 320, and in the chapter on extending life he runs through everything the Yellow Emperor had to go and learn from somebody else, since even a sage born able to speak could not simply sit still and acquire the Way. He climbed one mountain for an alchemical text and another to question a hermit. He consulted specialists on breathing, on astronomy, on medicine, on siting a grave. And, in seven characters: to get to the bottom of spirits and malignities, he recorded what Bai Ze said.

That is the whole mention. One clause in a list of consultants, four centuries before anyone wrote the story out. English reference works often name the Book of Song as the earliest source instead, and they are right about a different thing: the Book of Song is the earliest text that tells the story. The Baopuzi is the earliest that knows the name.

Eleven thousand five hundred and twenty

The number deserves a paragraph of its own, because it is doing something.

11,520 is not a round number in the way English expects round numbers to look, but it is deeply round in Chinese numerological terms, and it comes from the Book of Changes. The Xi Ci commentary counts the total of the "myriad things" at 11,520, arrived at by multiplying out the yarrow-stalk numbers of the sixty-four hexagrams. It is the traditional figure for everything.

So when Bai Ze names 11,520 kinds of spirit, the text is not reporting a tally. It is saying: all of them. The complete set. Nothing left over.

The formula the passage uses for what those things are comes from the same commentary: essence become substance, wandering soul become alteration. It is the classical Chinese account of how a ghost happens. Not a soul that fails to move on, in the Western way, but a concentration of vital stuff that has taken on a form, and a detached soul that has become a change in the world. Two mechanisms, one for monsters and one for hauntings, in eight characters.

An informant who covers all 11,520 is not a folklore character. It is a claim about a complete science.

It is not in the Classic of Mountains and Seas

Now three corrections, because the received version of this creature in English is wrong in three separate ways and each one is fixable.

The first: Bai Ze is repeatedly said, on wikis and in game lore and in a good deal of published fantasy reference, to come from the Classic of Mountains and Seas. It does not.

What does exist is a floating sentence, to the effect that on a certain eastern mountain there is a beast called Bai Ze which can speak, and which comes when a ruler has virtue. That sentence circulates widely with the Classic of Mountains and Seas attached to it. It is a fragment, quoted in later compendia, and it is not in the book.

How do I know? By checking, which takes about four minutes and which nobody appears to do. The received Classic of Mountains and Seas is eighteen chapters, it has been in continuous transmission for two thousand years, and the full text is freely available. Read all eighteen and the creature is not in any of them, not under this name and not under the shorter one. Anybody can repeat the check.

Where the fragment came from is a separate question and an open one. It may be a genuine lost passage from an edition that no longer survives, since the text we have is not the text the Han had. It may be a later attribution that stuck. What it is not is something you can look up.

The Ze beast, before it was white

The second correction is smaller and stranger.

The earliest full narrative of the encounter is not in the Daoist anthology at all. It is in the Book of Song, the official history of the Liu Song dynasty, finished by Shen Yue in 488, in the section on auspicious omens. And that passage does not call the animal Bai Ze. It calls it the Ze beast, with no white on the front.

It says: in the time of the Yellow Emperor, when he toured east as far as the shore, the Ze beast came out. It could speak, and it understood the essences of all things, so as to warn the people and rid the age of harm. And, in the standard formula for this class of omen, it says that when a worthy ruler's bright virtue reaches into the remote, it comes.

Everything is there except the color. Which raises the mildly awkward question of what the white is doing, and the mildly awkward answer is that nobody can say for certain. The second character of the name, on its own, can mean a marsh or a low wet place, and it can also mean a luster, the sheen on a polished surface. White marsh, or white brilliance. Translators have gone both ways and neither is provably right, and a page that picks one and states it flatly is telling you more than it knows.

I have some sympathy for whoever added the white. A speaking beast on a shoreline is better with an adjective.

The book, and the piece of it in Paris

The third thing is not a correction. It is the reason this creature is worth a page at all.

The Bai Ze Tu, the diagram or chart of Bai Ze, was a real book. Its premise was exactly what the legend describes: a catalog of supernatural entities, each one identified, so that a person confronted by one would know what they were looking at and what to do about it. Know the name, and you have the thing half beaten. This is a very old idea and it turns up everywhere, but the Chinese version came with a manual.

It was used domestically. There is a saying, still quoted, to the effect that a household with the Bai Ze chart in it has no trouble with monsters. In the Tang dynasty the beast's image went further up the social scale: a Bai Ze banner was carried in imperial processions, recorded in the Tongdian, and Bai Ze pillows are noted in a treatise on the five phases as something you slept on to keep bad things away. The catalog had become an amulet, which is what happens to reference works when they get famous enough.

And then it was lost. The complete text does not survive.

What survives is one manuscript, cataloged as Pelliot chinois 2682, copied in the ninth or tenth century, recovered from the sealed library cave at Dunhuang and now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It is a fragment of the Bai Ze Jing Guai Tu, the chart of Bai Ze's spirits and prodigies. It gives entries: this kind of apparition, this is its name, this is what you say to it or do about it.

There is one detail in it I find genuinely moving, and it is a negative. The surviving fragment contains no picture of Bai Ze.

Of course it does not. It was never a book about the beast. It was the beast's book, the transcript of the briefing, a list of everything else. The informant does not appear in the file.

Nine eyes and six horns are Japanese

Which brings us to the image in your head, if you have one, and where it came from.

The Bai Ze that appears in games, on card art, in fantasy encyclopedias and on a large majority of the images returned by a search, has three faces, nine eyes distributed across them and its flanks, and six horns. It is a striking and genuinely unsettling design. It is also Japanese, and it is younger than the United States.

The creature crossed to Japan, where it is read Hakutaku, and the standard depiction was established by Fukuhara Gogaku in a work called Hakutaku hi kai zu, published in 1785. That is where the three faces and the multiplied eyes come from. It has no basis in the Chinese sources, which describe a speaking beast and are otherwise not very interested in what it looked like.

Japan then took the idea and ran with it in a way China never quite did. During the cholera epidemic that hit Edo in 1858, people placed images of Hakutaku at their pillows for protection. That is a real and specific and rather touching use of a monster catalog's mascot: a city dying of an unknown disease, reaching for the animal that is supposed to know the names of things.

None of this makes the Japanese version illegitimate. It is a genuine and old tradition in its own right and the artwork is far better than anything the Chinese record left us. But if you are told the nine eyes are ancient Chinese iconography, you are being told something that is off by about fifteen hundred years and one country.

What it is for

Set the three corrections aside and what remains is a creature with an unusual and rather modern preoccupation.

The qilin means a sage is coming. The pixiu means money is staying. Both are omens in the ordinary sense: a message about the state of the world, delivered by an animal turning up.

Bai Ze is an omen too, on the same schedule, arriving when a ruler is good enough. But its message is not itself. Its message is a document, and the document is about everything else, and the point of the document is that being frightened of an unnamed thing is worse than knowing what the thing is called.

That is the whole idea. A jiangshi, the stiff-limbed hopping corpse of Chinese folklore, is exactly the sort of entity that would have had an entry in the chart: a name, a description, a line on what to do. Whether it did, we cannot know, because that page of the book is one of the ones that is gone.

Eleven thousand five hundred and twenty of them. One fragment left. And the beast that dictated the list is not in the picture.