Gods, Demons, and Miracles: Four Hidden Legends of the East

Welcome to Hidden Legends of the East. Tonight, four stories of gods, demons, and miracles drawn from the old texts of the East. A flower that blooms once in 3,000 years. Why human eyes cannot see the gods. How heaven keeps account of every deed. And where demons hide in the human world. It is smaller than a grain of rice. It has no roots, no leaves, and sometimes it appears on solid steel. In 1997, monks at a temple in South Korea noticed tiny white flowers blooming on the face of a golden statue of the Buddha. Not near the statue, on it, growing out of the metal itself. News cameras came, then more reports followed from China, from Taiwan, from Australia, and from the United States. The same tiny flower on windows, on gates, on statues. And every time it appeared, people across Asia whispered the same word, Udumbara, the flower the old scriptures promised would bloom only once every 3,000 years. If you grew up in the West, you have probably never heard of it. So let me explain why a flower the size of a pinhead can stop a temple full of people in their tracks. In the ancient Buddhist writings of India and China, the Andambara is not really a plant. It is a sign. The old texts describe it as a flower from heaven that appears on earth only when something momentous is about to happen. The arrival of a great king of wisdom, or the coming of a Buddha, an awakened one who teaches the world how to escape suffering. The Lotus Sutra, one of the most loved scriptures in all of Asia, compares the teaching of the Buddha to this flower, something so rare that most generations live and die without ever seeing it bloom. Some of the texts name the one who's coming, it announces, the wheel-turning king, a ruler of wisdom whose arrival turns the whole age toward the good. Think of it this way. In Western tradition, people watch for comets, for eclipses, for a star in the east. A strange light in the sky means heaven is speaking. In the East, the sign was smaller and quieter. Not a star. A flower. A flower that blooms once in 3,000 years. On nothing at all. Now the sightings. The Korea report in 1997 is the one that started the modern wave. Tiny white blossoms, each on a hair-thin stalk, found on a golden Buddhist statue at a temple in Cheonggi, and covered by Korean television. In 2005, similar flowers were reported on statues at a temple on Mount Sumi in Korea, and Chinese state media reported finds in Chongqing around the same years. Believers traveled to see them. Some wept. They came because the old texts had told them exactly what to look for, and there it was, blooming on the metal. Many of these reports were carried to the wider world by practitioners of Falun Dafa, a Buddhist-rooted spiritual practice. They read the flower through these same scriptures, the sign that a great sage has come into the world. If the scriptures were right, these believers said, then seeing the flower in your lifetime meant you were living in extraordinary times. Not everyone is convinced, and honesty requires a brief mention of why. Botanists note that the tiny white clusters closely match the eggs of the green lacewing, a small insect that lays its eggs on thread-like stalks to keep them safe from predators. But the legend has an answer for that, and it is older than the argument. The old teachers never said the sign would be impossible to doubt. In fact, they expected most people to walk right past it, a flower smaller than a grain of rice, hidden on a window or a gate. That is the kind of sign only someone who is looking will ever see. The ancients believed heaven does not shout, it whispers. And the Udumbara's whole meaning is in its size. The greatest turning points, the story says, do not arrive with trumpets. They arrive quietly, in plain sight, blooming on cold steel where nothing should be able to grow. Eggs can be explained and put out of mind. A sign stays with you. That is why this flower has never loosened its hold on the people who know its name. The scriptures made their promise long ago. The flower blooms when a sage comes into the world. And in our own lifetime, on golden statues, on temple gates, on cold steel, the tiny blossoms have been sighted again, just as the old text described. Impossibly small and blooming where nothing should be able to grow. The believers who kneel before it are not wondering whether it might be the sign. In their hearts the promise has already been kept. So the next time you pass a statue, a temple gate, or an old window, look a little closer. Somewhere, smaller than a grain of rice, something may be blooming that should not be able to bloom at all. In the next episode, we ask the question the old stories raise again and again. If the gods walk among us, Why can no human eyes see them? An old teaching of the East holds that man is born with five kinds of eyes, and most men die having opened only one. Perhaps that is why the gods can walk among us unseen. They cross our rooftops on the wind, they stand in the marketplace crowd, they pass us on the road. And yet, if you turned around right now, you would see no one. So where are they? If heaven is really so crowded, why is it invisible? The old teachers answered without embarrassment. The gods are not far away. Our eyes are too weak. If you grew up in the West, this may be new. So let me lay out the five eyes as the Buddhist texts teach them. The first is the flesh eye, which sees the solid stuff of the world, wood and stone, cloth and skin. The second is the divine eye, and nobody is born using it. It opens slowly, through years of meditation and a purified heart. And through it, a person sees the beings of heaven as plainly as you see this screen. A room can be full of music, yet until a radio is tuned to it, you hear only silence. The gods, the texts say, are like that. Their bodies are made of finer stuff than ours, closer to light than to stone. And flesh eyes slide off them. Heaven is not hiding. It is playing on a channel our eyes were never built to receive. The old stories love a god who carries that second sight in his face. His name is Erlang Shen, a warrior of heaven, and in the middle of his forehead stands a third eye, called the Eye of Heaven. In Journey to the West, heaven sends Erlang to capture Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. Wukong changes shape again and again. A bird, a fish, a snake, even a little temple, with his tail stuck up as the flagpole. The armies of heaven had failed, but Erlang was not fooled. His third eye saw through every disguise to the monkey hiding inside it. The gods, the stories teach, can always see us, and no mask we wear has ever fooled them. And yet, sometimes the veil tears, and an ordinary man sees. A woodcutter named Wang Ji climbed Mount Shishi to cut firewood and heard singing. Four young men sat singing over a board game, and they gave him something to eat, a thing like the pit of a date. When the game ended, the handle of his axe had rotted away in his grip. He walked home and found strangers in his house, his family gone. Decades had passed while he watched one game. Those young men were immortals. Wang Ji had stood before the divine, eaten its food, and never known. He saw them perfectly, and simply did not know what he was seeing. Sometimes the veil is a torn robe and a smell of wine. In Hangzhou, there was a monk named Daoji, and the other monks could not stand him. He ate meat, he drank wine, his robes were filthy, he stumbled like a drunk, and the temple threw him out. The crowds laughed at the mad monk, but the poor of the city noticed what the temple had missed. Wherever he went, the sick recovered and the wronged found justice. Slowly the word spread. This beggar was no beggar, and the people recognized him for what he was, the dragon subduing Arhat, a guardian of heaven walking the earth in a madman's body. A god had lived among them for years in plain sight, and nearly everyone walked right past him. Perhaps the veil is thinner for some than for others. Folk belief speaks of the yin-yang eye, a second sight that lets a person see spirits among the living. Some are born with it, most often small children, whose eyes have not yet hardened to the world. Some receive it after standing at death's door and coming back. Wipe your eyes with the tears of a cow, the old tales say, and for a while you may see what the cow sees. That is how the tales hand it down, something people did and saw. Beneath it sits the same conviction as the scriptures. Sight is a gift that is given, not a right that is owed. The gods show themselves to the fated and the sincere, at the moment heaven chooses, and not one moment before. This is why the world looks the way it does. If the divine moves on a finer channel than flesh can receive, then of course the street looks empty. A crowded heaven and an empty street. Statues we can see, and gods we cannot. A mad monk we laugh at, until the day we need him. The traditions never taught that the gods are absent. They taught that our eyes are unfinished. So the next time the hairs rise on your neck in an empty temple, or a stranger's kindness finds you just as you are about to break, remember the five eyes. Perhaps something passed that your one open eye was never built to catch. And if the gods can move among us unseen, one question follows like a shadow. In the next episode, we ask, why do the gods know everything humans do? There is an old saying in the East, lift your head and three feet above it, the gods are watching, not above the clouds, not beyond the stars, three feet, close enough to hear every word spoken in an empty room. If no one saw your deed, how did heaven find out? Ask the old teachers, and they do not answer with magic. They answer with paperwork. Heaven, in the old belief, is a government, not a throne room. It keeps clerks, registers, and reports, and no place under it is secret. Its clerks are everywhere, one in your kitchen, one keeping the rolls of your town, three inside your own body. Begin in the kitchen, where every home once kept its smallest temple. Above the stove hung a paper picture of Zhao Jun, the stove god, and beside him, his wife. She writes down everything said in the house. He listens all year, at the heart of the home, and every quarrel and kindness goes into the account. On the 23rd day of the last month, he rises to heaven and reports to the Jade Emperor, ruler of the gods. The family, knowing what he carries, tries one last thing. They smear his paper lips with honey and set out sticky candy, so his words come out sweet or his mouth stays shut. Then they burn his picture and light firecrackers to speed him on his way. On New Year's Day, a fresh picture goes up, and the listening begins again. But the oldest witness of all lives closer than the stove. The Taoist books teach that three spirits, the three corpses, live inside every body, in the head, the chest, and the belly. They want you dead early, for when the toast dies, they go free as wandering ghosts. On the Genshen nights, which return with a 60-day cycle, they slip out of your sleeping body and rise to heaven. There they report your sins to Saiming, the director of destinies, keeper of the measure of every life. A great sin costs years of your span, the books say. A small one costs a piece of your fortune. So the devout sat up all Genshen night till dawn, to keep their witnesses locked inside a waking body. Scale up from the house to the town, and heaven has an office there too. Every city has its city god, the Cheng Huang, a magistrate of the unseen. His temple keeps secret registers of everything in his town, worked by clerks and assistant judges. When a townsman dies, his soul is led to that altar, and the register is opened. Below the world, in the courts of the ten kings, the bookkeeping becomes a mirror. In the first court stands the mirror of retribution, raised on a platform taller than a man. The soul stands before it, and the mirror gives back not a face, but a life. Every deed, played again in the glass. No advocate speaks. Your own life testifies, and the king judges by what the mirror showed. What does a man do when he learns his life is already written? A Ming Dynasty official, Yuan Liao Fan, learned exactly that, and wrote it down for his son. As a youth he met a fortune teller named Kong, who calculated his whole life from numbers. Every rank, every office, his salary in grain. Kong said he would never take the highest degree. He would have no son, and he would die at 53. For 20 years every prediction landed, to the rank, to the year. Liao Fan stopped striving. If the book is finished, why hold the pen? Then, at Qixia Mountain, he sat three days and nights beside the Zen master Yungu, his mind perfectly still. Asked how, he said, a foretold man has nothing left to hope for, and nothing left to fear. The master laughed, I took you for a hero, you are only an ordinary man. Fate binds a man only while he refuses to rewrite it, Yungu taught. The ledger is real, but it is not sealed. And he handed him a ledger of merit and demerit, priced by the deed. A hundred points for saving a life, one for feeding a hungry man. Faults subtracted. Liao Fan vowed 3,000 good deeds to win the degree heaven said he would never hold. The predictions cracked at once. Foretold to place third, he placed first. The 3,000 took 10 years, most of them done where no one could see. His wife could not write, so she marked a red circle on the calendar with a goose feather stem for every good deed at home. Some days she marked 10. A second vow of 3,000 was made, and a son was born to the man written childless. A third vow, 10,000, won him the highest degree and the magistrate seat of Bowdee County. There he kept the ledger on his desk, and at night reported his deeds to heaven over incense, as the stove god reports a house. He halved the county's field tax, and a god told him in a dream that the one act filled the ten thousand, for it fed ten thousand mouths. He lived long past the year written for his death, and his book is read to this day. If kindness is written in secret, cruelty is written in the same hand. 28 centuries ago, King Xuan of Zhu ordered the women of his realm put to death on a rumor. His minister, Du Bo, called the order unjust to his face. The king had him executed, though warned that Du Bo's ghost would return. Three years later, the records say, Du Bo returned in full daylight before the court and shot his king dead. Centuries later, the philosopher Mozi built a teaching on that case. The spirits see clearly, Mosey argued, and testimony seen by many eyes and heard by many ears stands. So here is the answer the Old East gives. The gods know everything because nothing human is done unwatched. The stove listens, the body reports, the town keeps its registers, the mirror keeps the rest. A deed done in an empty room was never done in an empty room. It was done before the clerks of heaven, and it is already written. But evil begins earlier than the deed, as a thought in the heart, where no register has yet reached. In the next episode, we ask, where do demons hide in the human world? Where do demons hide in the human world? Ask a child, and he points at the graveyard, the cave, the dark wood at the edge of town. Ask the old teachers of the East, and they shake their heads. Demons do not need darkness, they say. Darkness is scarce, and demons are many. They hide in plain sight, in the places a man visits a hundred times a day, in his anger, in his greed, in his habits. They do not break into a life. They are invited, fed, and carried, often by the very hands they ruin. A demon, in the old books, is less like a burglar than like a tenant, and the first tenant the tradition ever named did not live in a cave at all. His name was Mara, and the old texts call him the evil one, the lord of desire and the bringer of death. When the prince who had become the Buddha sat down beneath the Bodhi tree and vowed not to rise until he understood, Mara came against him with everything he had. He sent his armies, and their arrows turned to flowers in the air and fell harmless at the Buddha's feet. He raised a whirlwind, and the sitter did not move. He sent his three daughters, whose names are a teaching by themselves, craving, passion, and discontent. The Buddha looked at every offer the way a man looks at weather, and let it pass. At last, Mara mocked him. Who will ever know what you found here, alone under a tree? The Buddha touched the ground with his fingertips, and the earth itself trembled as his witness. Mara withdrew, beaten. But notice what the old books insist on. He was not destroyed. The texts say he followed the Buddha and his monks for the rest of their lives, whispering at quiet moments, because his kingdom was never a place. Mara rules the realm of desire itself, and his throne stands wherever a heart agrees with him. The Buddhist books go further and give the tenants their true names, delusion, greed, and anger, the three poisons, the roots from which every other affliction grows. At the hub of the great wheel of life, the painters draw them as three animals in a circle, a pig for delusion, a rooster for greed, a snake for anger, each one biting the tail of the next. A poison is a strange kind of demon, for no one forces it down your throat. A man takes it himself, a little at a time, and calls the dose his due, his temper, his nature. Feed a state of heart for a year, and it becomes a habit. Feed a habit for ten years, and it becomes a character. Feed it for a lifetime, and the old teachers say the man no longer has a demon problem he can point to. He has become the house his demon always wanted. 300 years ago, the storyteller Piu Songling wrote down what such a tendency looks like in his Tale of the Painted Skin. A scholar named Wang of Taiyuan met a girl on the road at dawn, fleeing a rich house that treated her cruelly, she said. She was beautiful, and he pitied her, and he took her home and hid her in his study. His wife, Chen, saw the danger at once and begged him to send the girl away, and he would not hear it. In the marketplace, a Taoist priest looked at Wang with alarm and told him plainly, You are bewitched, sir. An evil spirit is on you. Wang laughed and went home and found the study door bolted from inside. He crept to the window and looked in, and there sat a green-faced demon with teeth like a saw, spreading a human skin across the bed and painting a lovely face upon it, stroke by stroke. Then the demon lifted the skin, shook it out like a garment, and stepped into it, and was the girl again. Wang begged the priest on his knees, and the priest, who wished harm to no living thing, not even a demon, gave him only a charm to hang upon his door. It was not enough. The demon came in the night and tore out Wang's heart. In his fury, the priest hunted the creature down where it hid, disguised as an old servant in the brother's house, and took its head with his wooden sword, and rolled the painted skin up like a scroll. But a sword cannot put back a heart, so the priest sent the widow to a filthy madman in the marketplace, and Chen endured his jeers without a word of pride, and swallowed what he gave her to swallow. And at home, over her husband's cold body, she brought up a living, beating heart and laid it in his chest, and Wang lived. Pu Songling's own judgment on his tale is the coldest line in it. Men see nothing but beauty in what is clearly evil, and they call it love until it shows its teeth. This is why the old Chinese hung bronze mirrors in their temples and above their doors, demon-revealing mirrors. A demon can lie to any eye, the belief runs, but it cannot lie to the mirror, which shows the thing as it is. Its most famous exposure was Daji, beloved consort of the last king of Shang, the most beautiful woman in a falling court. The mirror showed what the king's whole palace had warmed and adored for years, a nine-tailed fox wearing a woman's shape. A demon does not need a graveyard when it has a palace and a welcome. But the mirror has one more turn in it, and it belongs to a monk. Hakuin, the great Zen master of Japan, in the worst sickness of his seeking, dreamed that his dead mother came to him carrying a robe of purple silk. In each sleeve of the robe lay a mirror. The mirror in the right sleeve, he wrote, shone straight into his heart, and his mind, the mountains, the rivers, and the great earth stood clear and bottomless like still water. From that night, he said, whenever he looked at any living creature, it was as if he were seeing his own face. The mirror in the temple shows the demon across the room. The mirror in the sleeve shows the one who lives at home. The teachers of China had a word for that tenant, Shinmo, the heart demon. It does not roar, and it does not rattle chains. It reasons, in a man's own voice, with a man's own reasons. One more indulgence, one more grudge nursed, one more night of the old habit, and look at how the exorcisms in these stories actually work. The Buddha did not slay Mara. He saw through him, and a thing seen through has nowhere left to stand. The priest's sword took the demon's head, but it was a wife's humility that carried the heart home. The mirror performs no execution at all. It simply shows the truth, and the haunting is over. So where do demons hide in the human world? In the beautiful face we refuse to question? In the anger we rehearse every morning like a lesson? In the habit we feed like a pet and defend like a child? The old stories never promised a world emptied of demons. They promised something harder and better. That no demon can live long in a house where it is not fed. And none at all in a heart that has seen itself in the mirror. Next time, we take up the most famous journey in the East. A monk, a monkey, a pig, and 81 trials on the road to fetch the scriptures. For the demons on that road, as the old teachers always warned, were never only on the road. If this story stayed with you, like the video and subscribe to the channel, because there are doors inside this story we did not open tonight. The night Mara sent his three daughters, craving, passion, and discontent, to tempt the Buddha under the tree. The story of Da Ji, the nine-tailed fox spirit who wore the most beautiful face in China, and the dynasty that fell for it, and why a priest's sword could kill the demon, but only a mad beggar could carry a dead man's heart back home. Leave a comment and tell us which door you want opened, and that story will get an episode of its own. And one question to carry with you. The old stories say no demon can live long in a house where it is not fed. Which one have you been feeding?