by Brian Griffith
This is the story of one of China's many immortal woman, the Lady Linshui (originally called Chen Jinggu), who illustrates the constant re-generation of goddess cults, their ancient roots, and their psychological depth. This woman was a Taoist shaman in the ancient mould. According to legend she was also a daughter of Kuan Yin. The following version of her story is condensed from Brigitte Baptandier’s study, “The Lady Linshui: How a Woman Became a Goddess.”[i]
Long ago, in the 700s or maybe the 900s, the prefect of the district near Quanzhou (on the Fukien coast) tried to build a bridge across a tide-swept arm of the sea. The passage was dangerous, and travelers had been drowned there every year. But where a bridge was most needed, it was most difficult to build. The foundations for pilings across the bay had to be large and expensive. The prefect therefore prayed to Kuan Yin for help in the enterprise. She answered his prayers, appearing wondrously in a boat before the fishing villages. As the local people flocked to the shore to see this marvel, Kuan Yin announced she would marry whoever could throw a coin and touch her. Hundreds of men rushed forward, throwing coins out to her boat. The coins landed about the goddess’s feet, filling the bottom of the boat. The fund-raising gambit was working very well, till one vegetable seller managed to hurl a handful of silver powder, and touch the goddess on the hair. Kuan Yin promptly vanished. Desperate to claim his prize, the man hurled himself into the sea after her, and was drowned. And at this, the goddess reappeared. She pulled out the one silver-coated hair from her head, and cast it on the sea. Then she bit her finger, sucked the wound and spat the blood the water. Unknown to the amazed observers, she sent the soul of the vegetable seller to be reborn as a young scholar in Gutian.
As a chain of results, the bridge was built with the money in the boat. The silvered hair from Kuan Yin’s head came alive as a white female sea snake. The blob of blood floated to the lower ford at Fuchow, where a childless woman was washing clothes. She saw the curious red clot, ate it, and conceived a girl prodigy.
The girl, named Chen Jinggu, could talk soon after her birth. She could write soon after learning to walk. A few more years, and she announced herself ready to leave home on a quest to learn magic from the spiritual adepts on Mount Lu. In her apprenticeship as a shaman, the girl mastered every magical art save childbirth. She didn’t bother with that, because she wasn’t interested in getting married.
On returning home, Chen Jinggu rejected her mother’s efforts to find her a husband, and set up a practice as a professional shaman. She was hired for traditional shamanic roles such as rain-making, spirit-calling, or exorcising demons. She protected the kingdom of Min from evil spirits, and trained a group of sworn sisters, forming a shamanic community of heroines. But of all the enemies Chen Jinggu fought, the worst was the white water snake born from Kuan Yin’s hair. Once it attacked the king’s palace, and Chin Jinggu managed to drive it away only after it ate all the king’s consorts in his bed. Another time it attacked a brilliant young official named Liu Ch’I, who happened to be the man reincarnated from the drowned vegetable seller. Only after a desperate struggle was Chen Jinggu able to save him. The two promptly fell in love, and so the great shamaness married. The vegetable seller was granted his wish to marry the goddess, but only on the other side of death.
Some time afterward, the Kingdom of Min suffered a deadly drought. Chen Jinggu was called as chief shaman for the invocation of rain. This ritual involved the difficult and strenuous feat of dancing on the waters. It had to be done, and could not be delayed, but Chen Jinggu was pregnant at the time, and in no condition to undertake the dance. Therefore, she magically took the fetus from her womb, sealed it against injury, and kept it at her mother’s house. Then she returned to perform the ritual.
She was out on the waters dancing when the white snake broke into her mother’s house, and swallowed the fetus “to feed its life.” Chen Jinggu suddenly began to hemorrhage badly. Realizing what had happened, she staggered back to her mother’s house and engaged the snake in mortal combat. With her strength almost gone, she barely managed to kill the snake. But when it died, she died as well—because it was her alter ego.
After dying at age twenty-four, Chen Jinggu went in spirit back to her teachers on Mount Lu. There she finally learned the wise woman’s arts of childbirth. She took back the spirit of her unborn child, and transformed him into the child-god San Sheren, otherwise known as the Third Secretary Who Rides the Unicorn. Chen Jinggu received the title of Lady Linshui.
The first temple to Lady Linshui and her sworn sisters was dedicated in 792 CE, in Daqiao village. Legend says the temple was built on the site of a cave where an older python goddess was worshiped. Originally this python goddess may have been a creator, like the snake woman Nu Wa. But in some split of roles, this python became a goddess of death as opposed to birth. She took back two children every year, till Chen Jinggu fought her. There in a cave beneath Lady Linshui’s enthroned image, the mummified body of Chen Jinggu reportedly sits on the head of the slain serpent. So these ancient goddesses of life and death, after their struggle as opposites, lay together in eternity.
Lady Linshui was officially recognized in the emperor’s Register of Sacrifices around the year 1250. Perhaps the rulers of the Southern Sung dynasty sought her aid against the advancing Mongol horde. The primary temple in Daqiao burned in 1875, but was carefully restored. Then in 1950, statues of the goddess were defaced in Communist anti-superstition riots. The Red Guards inflicted more damage in the 1960s. The Communist government passed laws against the practice of superstition, as if all the spiritual heroes of village China had been fronts for oppression. Most local women, however, trusted their own traditions and values. Since 1980 they restored and expanded the Lady Linshui’s temples. Her devotees argued that the laws against superstition do not apply to them, because their goddess is real.
In the past two decades a number of books and movies about Chen Jinggu have sold well. In 1993, the Association of Research on Civilization and the Association of Research on Popular Literature and Arts of Fujien (Fukien) hosted an international conference on “Research into Chen Jinggu’s Cult.” The cult’s temples have received a rising flow of guests and pilgrims, many of them from overseas. Worshipers of the goddess claim that she and her sworn sisters still rove the world, fighting injustice wherever it appears.
[i] Baptandier Brigitte, “The Lady Linshui: How a Woman Became a Goddess,” in Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1996, 105-135.
from The Chinese Age of the Goddess, Brian Griffith