Hakka Folktales (1)

[CHUNG Yoon-Ngan <chungyn@mozart.collective.com.au>]

    Hakka Folktales (1)
    Excerpts from Studies in Hakka Folktales
    by Wolfram Eberhard
    edited by Professor Lou Tsu-Kuang

   The Master of the Fishes

   Once there was a fishmonger who walked through the mountains.
There was a hare caught in a trap by hunters and struggling to get free. 
The fishmonger thought that he had eaten so much fish that he had enough
of the fish and wanted to eat hare meat once for a change. So he took the
hare home, but out of his good heart, he put the biggest of his fishes on
to the hook of the trap to repay the hunter for his prey.

   Later the hunter noticed that in the mountains he had caught a big fish
in his trap. People began to say that this was an appearance of the Master
of the Fishes, and they all came to the place, burned incense and
venerated him. People with illnesses, too, went and prayed to the Master
of the Fishes, took some medicinal herbs home, and, it is said, the
medicine of the god was very good. So this became a very lively place; the
whole day over people came to pray to the god. After a couple of years
this fisherman passed again along these mountains and saw these masses of
people in the mountains. He began to wonder and he asked these people.
They told him what they had come for. He began to laugh and told them:

"That fish was left there by myself."

Now the people there began to understand that there was no Master of the
Fishes, only a fish which the fisherman had left there. They now knew that
the story of the Master of the Fishes was false, and from then on nobody
went any more to venerate the god.

This story was told by a 54-year old Hakka farmer in Xin Zhu in Taiwan.