Last year, when we were preparing for the university anniversary, our law school erected a statue in the greenhouse-like indoor garden of the college building. People who did not know better all assumed it was a lion, but of course it was not. Why would anyone set up only a single lion? It was in fact a statue of a zhi (pronounced zhi, fourth tone), a divine beast known in the Record of Marvels as the xiezhi. In traditional Chinese characters, the character for “law” is made up of the water radical together with zhi. Legend says that the zhi bears a single horn on its head, and that when judging a case, if you brought it before the suspects, it would touch with its horn the one who was truly guilty.
In truth, the design of this statue was flawed. A real zhi does not resemble a lion, a suanni, or any of those other mythical beasts. Rather, it is a deer with a single horn on its head. I myself once saw one at Wangwu, though some people say it looks more like an ox or a sheep. Yet despite the fact that this statue had the wrong appearance, people repeatedly claimed to have seen it move. At first I did not believe them. Then one day several of us in the dormitory made a wager over whether the zhi’s mouth was open or closed. I said it was open, because I had a photograph in my album that I had taken on the day the statue was finished. Fourth Brother insisted that its mouth was closed. So we all went to see for ourselves. When we reached the college building, we found that the zhi’s mouth was in fact split open in a grin. Everyone else was astonished. I, however, felt strangely reassured.
The zhi is the most just and gentle of divine beasts, and in ancient China it enjoyed the highest prestige. But in our own day, if one counts across the whole breadth of the land, how many golden images of the zhi are there? The zhi feeds on books, and though the statue at our college may be somewhat mistaken in form, I imagine the beast itself does not take offense. We are now supposed to live in an age ruled by law. At the gates of all our courts and procuratorates, if people would smash those tasteless and ill-matched stone lions and set up a few more zhi instead, then at the very least more people would know that our vast China has its own divine beast that guards the law.