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 Qijia 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 three thousand 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's 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 10,000, for it fed 10,000 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. Twenty-eight centuries ago, King Swan 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, Dubot returned in full daylight before the court and shot his king dead. Centuries later, the philosopher Mosey 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?