原文 Original Text

晋太和中，广陵人杨生，养一狗，甚爱之，行止与俱。后生饮酒醉，行大泽草中，眠不能动。时方冬月燎原，风势极盛。狗乃周章号唤，生醉不觉。前有一坑水，狗便走往水中，还以身洒水左右草上。如此数次，周视跬步皆湿。火至，免焚。生醒方知之。后生以事入狱，狗亦随之。狱吏欲杀之，狗衔生衣裾，吏乃止。后生出狱，狗死于狱门。

Translation

During the Taihe era of the Eastern Jin, a man of Guangling named Yang had a dog he loved dearly. They went everywhere together — man and beast, inseparable.

One day Yang drank too much and collapsed in a field of tall grass by a great marsh. He could not move. It was winter, and the season for burning the fields had come. A wildfire swept across the plain, driven by fierce wind. The flames roared closer.

The dog ran in circles, barking frantically, but Yang was too drunk to wake. Then the dog spotted a pit of water nearby. It plunged in, soaked its fur, ran back to Yang, and shook itself dry over the grass around him. Back and forth it ran — into the water, back to the man, shaking, soaking, running again. Every blade of grass within reach was wet.

When the fire reached them, it stopped. The wet circle held. Yang woke to find himself surrounded by charred earth — except for the damp patch where he lay, and his dog, exhausted and panting at his side.

Later, Yang was arrested on some charge and thrown into prison. The dog followed him inside. When the jailer tried to drive it away, the dog seized Yang's hem in its teeth and refused to let go. The jailer relented.

When Yang was finally released, he walked out the prison gate. His dog lay dead on the threshold. It had waited for him until its last breath, and died the moment he was free.

🐕 The "Wet-Grass" Motif This story is one of the earliest versions of the "wet-grass rescue" motif that appears in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese folktales. The image of a dog running between water and fire, soaking itself again and again, is one of the most powerful in all of Chinese animal literature. It requires no supernatural element — no magic, no divine intervention — only the pure, desperate intelligence of an animal trying to save the being it loves.

Analysis 解读

The story's emotional power lies in its structure: two acts of sacrifice. The first is physical — the dog risks death by fire to save its master. The second is spiritual — the dog dies of grief, or perhaps of purpose fulfilled, at the prison gate. The first act saves the body; the second completes the bond. The dog does not merely protect Yang; it waits for him, and its waiting is its final gift.

In Chinese literary tradition, the loyal dog (义犬, yiquan) is a moral exemplar — not because dogs are noble, but because their loyalty is unreasoning. The dog does not calculate risk, weigh consequences, or consider whether its master deserves salvation. It acts from love alone. The implicit critique of human society is devastating: in a world where friends betray, officials corrupt, and dynasties fall, the most reliable moral agent is a dog.

📖 Cross-Cultural Parallel: Gelert and Beyond Western literature has its own loyal-dog tales — the Welsh legend of Gelert, the story of Hachikō in Japan. But the Chinese version is darker. In the Gelert tale, the dog is wrongly killed; in Hachikō, the dog waits faithfully. In the Soushen Houji version, the dog both acts and waits, and its death is not a tragedy of misunderstanding but a completion of purpose. The dog has done everything it can. It can rest now.

Further Reading