Lady White

Legend has it that a Buddhist mendicant, Pei Toutuo (裴頭陀), found a couple of gold nuggets while practicing asceticism according to the dharma near the mountain to the northwest of Zhenjiang. The mendicant was a son of Pei Xiu (裴休), a prime minister of the Xuanzhong emperor of the Tang Dynasty (唐玄宗) who reigned from 847 to 860 A.D. The premier was a very pious Buddhist. So he had his son ordained. The mendicant turned the gold nuggets to a governor of Zhenjiang, who then submitted them to the emperor as a tribute. The emperor was magnanimous. He donated the gold for construction of a temple, where the mendicant would live and teach disciples. The monarch named it Gold Mountain Temple. Its venue was renamed Gold Mountain.

The mendicant had the Buddhist name of Fahai (法海) or Dharma Ocean. He is regarded as the founding prior of Gold Mountain Temple, which at one time toward the end of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1564) accommodated more than 10,000 monks and members of the Sangha. It was so well known abroad that a Japanese monk, Setsushu (雪舟), visited it in 1472 and painted his masterpiece, Kinzan Zen-ji, which is Jinshan-shi pronounced in Japanese.

Fahai was a greatly revered Buddhist monk. But in one of China's most popular romantic stories, he is depicted as the evil-minded priest, either Buddhist or Taoist, who persecutes the heroine, Lady White or Bai niang-niang (白娘娘) who is in fact a 1,000-year-old white snake ready to become an immortal.

The story of Lady White (白蛇傳) has many versions. It is set at Hangzhou and Suzhou during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1206). Incidentally, the Southern Song Dynasty, started by the Gaozhong emperor (宋高宗), had its capital at Hangzhou, south of the Yangtze River.

At its most basic form, the story tells of a young scholar who falls in love with a very beautiful woman. He is unaware that she is a white snake ready to become an immortal but takes on human form to repay the favor he did her in his previous life. A monk intervenes in order to save the young scholar's soul. The monk, Fahai, succeeds in imprisoning the white snake in a Buddhist pagoda. Over the centuries it has evolved from horror story to romance with the scholar and the white snake genuinely in love with each other. In one latest version, the man-snake couple has a son, who eventually passes the highest-level civil service examination with top honors and comes to the pagoda to meet his mother.

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