Introduction

Do you believe in ghosts? Have you ever been told about forbidden taboos in folklore? Have you ever heard that earthbound spirits would seek and seize their replacements, or did you have psychic experiences such as eerie spirit encounters? There are a sequence of weird and obscurely mysterious happenings in Southern Taiwan: a murderer, while attempting to dump the dismembered body parts, spots the severed head change gender from male to female, whose eyes then inconceivably turn wide open, back alive, glaring at her killer; a little girl who will have a new father, is oddly becoming awfully sick, saying that she has something stuck in her throat, and no one can diagnose the reason why; and a young boy, when deep darkness falls, will run an unexplained high temperature, mumbling to his mother that he sees dirt-clad hands of an old man creep in through the windowpane, but his room, bewilderingly, is situated right on the 11th floor of the tall building. All the mysteries remain unfathomable till an eccentric named Jian-xuan Song turns up to unravel the intricate thread. Song is a slovenly maverick often dressed in horse-riding hakama, with unkempt hair and beard, always pulling a long face to everybody. He possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of everything ranging from celestial bodies to microorganisms to quantum physics, even to moral philosophy. He behaves like a loner, a brilliant recluse and a Taoist-Buddhist hermit who is said to excel at spell casting, traditional Chinese medicine and herbology, and above all, performing the unorthodox siu-kiann, a ritual intended to remove people's misfortunes and sufferings. His magic spells are his deadly weapon, and the antique figure painting in his house, The Sixth Patriarch Cutting the Bamboo, will reveal a profound insight into a staggering universal truth.