Dongya Men

The Deaf-Mute Sect is the community formed around Su Xinghe after his struggle with Ding Chunqiu, and its defining silence is a strategy shaped by their master’s betrayal and the threat of further conflict. Though outsiders believe Su was born deaf and mute and that the sect’s followers share those impairments, Xue Muhua explains that the practice began only about ten years earlier. Su was not naturally deaf or mute; he adopted the appearance of both after a pact with Ding, while his disciples were made to conform to the same concealment.

Origin and Public Identity

Outsiders know Su by the name Mr Intelligent and regard him as the Deaf-Mute Old Man. His followers’ silence reinforces that reputation: Xue Muhua says Su’s disciples and adherents had their eardrums pierced and tongues cut, and that the group consequently became known as the Deaf-Mute Sect. The arrangement was not an inherited condition of the community but a practice introduced after Su’s conflict with Ding Chunqiu.

The sect’s public identity is therefore a cover for a complicated history of loyalty and danger. Xue Muhua tells the people gathered at Xue Muhua’s residence that Su was not deaf or mute and that his condition followed the confrontation with his junior brother. The revelation unsettles the listeners because it overturns what they had taken to be a widely known fact: the group’s defining silence had been deliberately maintained.

The Conflict Behind the Silence

Su Xinghe and Ding Chunqiu were the two disciples of the same grandmaster. According to Xue Muhua, they were initially comparable in martial ability, but their paths diverged. Su divided his attention between martial arts and other pursuits, including music and the zither, while Ding concentrated on martial training. The difference becomes part of the explanation Xue gives for Su’s eventual disadvantage, although it does not resolve the deeper cause of their break.

Xue also recounts that Ding betrayed their grandmaster by seducing the grandmaster’s beloved. The grandmaster attempted to kill Ding, but Ding struck first and seriously injured him. Su came to the grandmaster’s aid; after a fierce fight, Su was injured and the grandmaster fell into a deep ravine, with his fate unknown. Ding’s power and the threat he posed left Su unable simply to defeat or remove him.

Su’s varied learning nevertheless gave him a way to resist. Xue says that Su used the Eight Trigrams and intricate metaphysical methods to disrupt Ding’s sight and hearing, leaving the two at a stalemate. Ding could not break through Su’s formation or kill him. He also believed the grandmaster had withheld valuable martial arts manuals and expected Su to obtain them, which gave Ding a reason to preserve the impasse rather than end the conflict outright.

The Pact and Its Consequences

Ding and Su made a pact: Su would remain silent and not speak, and Ding would leave him alone. Su then wrote to the Eight Friends of Hangu and expelled them. From that point, he presented himself as deaf and mute; later disciples and followers were likewise made to remain silent. The group’s unusual outward condition thus served a practical purpose within the limits imposed by Ding’s threat and their agreement.

The pact extended beyond Su’s own conduct. The silence of subsequent followers helped sustain the public image of the Deaf-Mute Sect, while concealing the circumstances that had produced it. Xue interprets Su’s decision as a response to regret: believing that his attention to miscellaneous skills had weakened his martial arts, Su may have chosen deafness and muteness to prevent further distraction. This is Xue’s explanation, rather than a separately confirmed statement of Su’s own motive.

Disciples and Distinctive Learning

The Eight Friends of Hangu were not originally forbidden to pursue interests beyond martial arts. Xue explains that, before Ding’s betrayal, Su encouraged the disciples to develop individual miscellaneous skills and personally instructed them. Kang Guangling, the senior apprentice among them, studied the zither under Su. His musical training reflects the earlier period when Su’s varied knowledge was something he shared with his students, rather than a source of shame or a danger requiring silence.

That contrast gives the sect’s story its particular tension. The silence later associated with Su and his followers followed an earlier world of teaching, music, and varied study; it arose from a conflict that the disciples did not openly disclose. The Deaf-Mute Sect’s name records the visible result of that choice, while Xue’s account reveals the concealed pact and unresolved history behind it.