On Duan Chengshi and the Youyang zazu, see source 4.15.

This version of the “flying head” myth adds some details and notes its existence in both the Lingnan region and Indonesia, citing an Indian Buddhist monk as informant for the latter.

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In the mountain valley settlements (xidong 溪洞, literally “streams and caves”) of Lingnan, one often finds men whose heads can fly. That is why the natives are called Flying Head Lao (Feitou Laozi 飛頭獠子).¹ The day before a man’s head takes off, a line appears on his neck, circling it like a red thread. His wife and children keep watch over him. When night falls, the man seems to fall ill, and his head suddenly sprouts wings, detaches from his body, and flies off to the riverbank, where it digs up crabs and earthworms from the mud and eats them. Close to dawn, the head returns home and reattaches itself, and the man feels like he is waking from a dream, but his stomach is full.

The Indian monk Pusasheng also says that in the country of Shepo, there are people with flying heads who have no pupils in their eyes.² One such person will appear in a settlement from time to time. According to Gan Bao’s anomaly account, there are Head-dropping People in the south whose heads can fly.³ Their custom is to make offerings to such people, called “insect drops” (chongluo), and so these people were called Head-dropping People. Zhu Huan of Wu had a female servant whose head took flight at night.

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1. During the early medieval and Sui-Tang periods, “Lao” 獠 was a label applied by the Chinese to upland indigenous peoples of Sichuan and Guangxi (see source 5.5 and source 5.6). ↩︎
2. Shepo was the Chinese transliteration of Zabaj, the Arabic name for the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra; after the Tang, it came to refer only to Java. ↩︎
3. See source 4.38. ↩︎