The Story 故事

原文：

孟州士人陈生，游一废寺。见壁上有画，绘一女子，容色绝丽。陈生凝视久之，忽觉身在画中。楼阁玲珑，花木扶疏，女子迎笑曰："郎君来耶？"遂与同居，生一子。居二十年，忽闻壁外有人声，惊觉身仍在寺中，凝立壁前。视画上女子，已抱一婴儿矣。

A scholar surnamed Chen of Mengzhou was wandering through an abandoned temple. On the wall he saw a painting of a woman of extraordinary beauty. He stared at it for a long time.

Suddenly he found himself inside the painting. The painted world was real: pavilions with carved railings, gardens in bloom, the scent of plum blossoms. The woman from the mural came to meet him, smiling.

"You've come at last," she said.

They lived together. They had a son. Twenty years passed — years of happiness, of watching their child grow, of growing old together.

Then one day Chen heard voices from outside the wall. He started — and found himself standing in the temple again, exactly where he had been, staring at the mural. Only now the painted woman was holding a baby.

文化注释 Cultural Note This is one of the most philosophically rich stories in the Yijian Zhi, and it directly influenced the famous "Painted Wall" (画壁) episode in Pu Songling's Liaozhai Zhiyi three centuries later. The story engages with the Buddhist concept of se kong (色空, "form is emptiness") — the idea that the phenomenal world is both real and illusory. The twenty years inside the painting are not a dream; they are a different kind of reality. The painted woman's pregnancy is the proof: what happens inside the wall leaves marks on the wall.

The Paradox of the Wall 壁上之悖论

The story's power lies in its paradox. If the twenty years were imaginary, why does the painting change? If they were real, why does no time pass in the temple? The answer, in Buddhist terms, is that both are true: the painting and the temple are equally real and equally empty.

But there is a human reading too. Chen lives a complete life inside the wall — love, parenthood, aging, loss. The painting gives him what the real world does not: a life without interruption, without compromise, without the noise of other people's expectations. The tragedy is not that the life was false. The tragedy is that it was better.

文化注释 Cultural Note The "world within a painting" motif has deep roots in Chinese art theory. The painter Zong Bing (宗炳, 375–443) wrote of "lying down to wander" (卧游) through landscapes by gazing at paintings. Hong Mai takes this aesthetic idea and makes it literal: the scholar does not merely imagine the painted world — he enters it. The story asks: if a painting can be lived in, what makes the "real" world more real?