Zhiguang

Zhiguang is a Buddhist monk whose reputation rests on compassion rather than martial prowess: after losing his martial arts, he devoted himself to treating people afflicted by malaria and illness in remote regions. Revered as the “Living Buddha of 10,000 Families,” he becomes a crucial witness to the old violence that shaped Xiao Feng’s life. At Zhiguan Temple, he reveals the truth behind the attack on Xiao Feng’s parents, gives him a rubbing of his father’s final words, and offers a Buddhist vision of equality that Xiao Feng cannot simply adopt. Yet Zhiguang does not name the “leading big brother” Xiao Feng is trying to find; he dies after their meeting, leaving the central question unresolved.

Identity and reputation

The account of Zhiguang’s life emphasizes an ethical transformation. He had taken part in the battle that killed Xiao Feng’s parents, but afterward he developed a strong commitment to helping people in the remote regions of Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, and Guangxi. He gathered tree bark to treat malaria and illnesses associated with miasma, saving countless people. In doing so, he contracted a serious illness himself; after recovering, he had lost all his martial arts.

That loss does not diminish his standing in the martial world. No one in jianghu fails to respect him for his work among ordinary people, and he is known as the “Living Buddha of 10,000 Families.” The title makes his later role more than that of a keeper of secrets: the man who once participated in a violent mistake has spent decades serving the people, and his moral authority derives from that service.

The journey to Zhiguan Temple

After Qiao Feng and A'Zhu encounter villagers who blame and curse Qiao Feng during a fire, Qiao Feng chooses to travel to Mount Tiantai to find Zhiguang. He has no wish to endanger the monk, despite knowing that Zhiguang took part in the battle connected to his parents’ deaths. The journey south from Tai’an is deliberately slow. Qiao Feng hopes that arriving at a measured pace might help keep Zhiguang alive, whereas rushing could mean finding him dead or his temple burned; Zhiguang, moreover, often travels and might not be at the temple.

The destination appears unassuming. Zhiguan Temple is a small, ordinary-looking building with much of its exterior plaster and paint peeled away, unlike the famous Guoqing Temple on Mount Tiantai. Monk Pozhe leads the travelers there, and Zhiguang greets them at the door with joined palms. Once they meet, Qiao Feng and A'Zhu remove their disguises and present themselves in their true appearances. Qiao Feng apologizes for disturbing the monk’s quiet religious life, and Zhiguang welcomes them before raising the question of Qiao Feng’s original surname.

Correcting the history of the attack

Zhiguang explains that Xiao Feng’s father left writing on a stone wall outside Yanmen Pass under the name Xiao Yuanshan. The inscription called the infant “Feng’er”; the people who took the child in preserved that name but gave him the surname of his foster father, Qiao Sanhuai. Xiao Feng weeps at learning his father’s name and bows to Zhiguang in gratitude. He then understands that he belongs to a prominent Khitan clan and tells A'Zhu that he is Xiao Feng, not Qiao Feng.

The wall inscription itself has been scraped away, so Zhiguang produces a rubbing made from it, stitched from many scraps of cloth. Its characters are in Khitan, and Zhiguang recounts the version of the text translated by people familiar with the language. Xiao Yuanshan wrote that he and his wife were taking their one-year-old son to visit his maternal grandmother when they encountered men from the Southern Dynasty. His wife was killed. Xiao Yuanshan also wrote that he had vowed to his Han martial arts teacher never to kill Han people, yet had killed more than ten in the encounter; he felt both shame and grief, and believed he could not face his teacher after death.

This testimony revises Xiao Feng’s understanding of his father’s death. He recognizes that Xiao Yuanshan’s decision to leap from the cliff was not explained by grief alone: shame at having broken his vow also contributed. Zhiguang further admits that the attackers had initially believed Xiao Yuanshan was leading Khitan warriors to Shaolin Monastery to steal scriptures. The inscription made that account untenable: a man supposedly on a raid would have had no evident reason to bring a noncombatant wife and a very young child. Their investigation traced the claim about the raid to an ignorant person who had deliberately deceived the “leading big brother” and sent him on a journey of thousands of li as a joke.

The revelation establishes a grave error at the root of the conflict without identifying the person Xiao Feng most wants named. Zhiguang says the “leading big brother” was furious when the deception came to light, but the instigator had already fled and disappeared. Xiao Feng asks who that leader was. Zhiguang does not answer directly; instead, he says that he has heard of the deaths Xiao Feng has been accused of causing, including those of Elder Xu, Grandpa Tan, Granny Tan, and Zhao Qiansun, as well as the killing of Shan Zheng’s family and the burning of the Shan family manor. He tells Xiao Feng to wait while he fetches an object.

Buddhist counsel and an unanswered question

In the meditation room, Zhiguang sits cross-legged on a bulrush mat and writes on the dusty floor: “All things are the same; all creatures are equal. Sages and animals are treated evenly. Han or Khitan is reality and also fantasy. Kindness, enmity, honor and disgrace all are mere dust.” The message offers Xiao Feng a way to see ethnic identity and the injuries carried in its name as transient distinctions. Xiao Feng understands the Buddhist proposition that humans, animals, hungry ghosts, emperors, and generals are not ultimately different, but admits to himself that he is not a Buddhist and cannot detach himself so readily. He asks again for the identity of the “leading big brother”; Zhiguang only smiles.

The unanswered name matters because Xiao Feng’s search is not merely historical. At this point, he believes the old event has generated present accusations, deaths, and revenge. Zhiguang’s counsel asks him to release his attachment to distinctions such as Han and Khitan and to honor and disgrace, while the unresolved question keeps those distinctions painfully active in Xiao Feng’s life. The scene sets spiritual detachment beside a demand for concrete accountability, without pretending that the two have been reconciled.

Zhiguang’s silence ends in death. Xiao Feng notices that the monk has become motionless, checks for his breathing, and discovers that he has died. He kneels and bows several times before leaving with A'Zhu. On the way back toward Tiantai county, Xiao Feng says he had no intention of harming Zhiguang and wonders why the monk made himself suffer. A'Zhu suggests that Zhiguang was enlightened and regarded life and death as equal. They also suspect that the “prime villain” had told Zhiguang in advance that they were coming to seek revenge, leading the monk to expect that he would not escape Xiao Feng’s violence and to take poison after their conversation. That explanation remains their inference, not a fact Xiao Feng can verify.

A witness within a chain of contested memory

Zhiguang’s importance lies in the way he preserves and revises the past. The original stone inscription has vanished, but its cloth rubbing survives; its meaning reaches Xiao Feng through Zhiguang’s account of an earlier translation. Rumor, written testimony, and retrospective explanation therefore do not carry equal authority: the alleged Shaolin raid was a false story, while Xiao Yuanshan’s words supply a different account of the encounter and its aftermath. Zhiguang corrects the old misunderstanding, but cannot—or will not—complete the disclosure by naming the “leading big brother.”

His appearance also resonates later in Xiao Feng’s investigation. At the Ma residence, Xiao Feng remembers that Zhiguang had torn the signature from the letter sent to Chief Wang and swallowed it, preventing him from identifying its writer. That recollection becomes part of Xiao Feng’s comparison of the letter’s handwriting with Duan Zhengchun’s calligraphic scroll; he concludes that the two were written by different people and begins to doubt the accusation he had accepted. Much later, Madam Ma says she secretly read the letter in Ma Dayuan’s safe and used its information to arrange Xiao Feng’s public disgrace. Zhiguang’s earlier handling of the letter thus exemplifies both the preservation and suppression of evidence: he helped conceal a name, while his surviving testimony about the past corrects another consequential falsehood.