present life are the punishments of sins committed in a previous life, and that present happiness is a reward for past goodness. Only when in trouble will one consult this kind of oracle. If a woman is cursed with a drunken husband and is driven to desperation, she consults the pansu, and he, after looking up the formula, tells her that in a previous existence she was a bullock-driver and her husband was the bullock, that she beat and abused him so cruelly that she was now doomed to be ill-treated by him in turn. But he tells her that if she will take a bundle of flax-stalks and tie them at seven places, as a corpse is tied for burial, and place it in the room and hide, her husband, coming home drunk, will mistake the bundle for his wife and beat it to pieces. This will take away his propensity to maltreating his wife. Another woman, who asked what she should do to insure the continued loyalty of her son to herself, was told that in a past life she had been very kind to a starving dog, and that providence had decreed that she should come into the world again and that the dog should become her son. If she continued to treat him well, she would have no trouble. A man's bullock was struck by lightning, and he consulted a pansu to find why this calamity overtook him. The seer told him to go back home and look carefully at the hide of the animal and he would find what an evil past it had had. The mystified farmer went and looked, and on one of the horns was written in fine Chinese characters the legend " In the days of the Tang Dynasty lived a Prime Minister, Yi Rim-po. After his death he was transformed nine times into a dancing-girl and three times into a bullock, but even so he could not expiate the crimes that he had committed; so at last Heaven smote him with a thunderbolt and thus cancelled the debt of vengeance." It is only necessary to add that this Yi Rim-po was one of the most corrupt officials China ever saw, which is saying a good deal.
Still another form of divination depends upon the "Thoughts on the Works of the Jade Emperor of Heaven." If a demon of disease is so malignant that nothing but the direct command of the deity can exorcise it, recourse will be had to this book.
