Bai Ze

In classical accounts summarized from historical tradition, Bai Ze appears in the legendary age of the Yellow Emperor: the creature, described as knowing all matters concerning ghosts and gods, was entrusted by the Yellow Emperor to draw and annotate the various ghosts and spirits it knew. Those drawings and notes form the legendary Bái Zé Tú, a compendium said in legend to contain 11,520 drawings of spectral forms; surviving manuscript witnesses (e.g., a Dunhuang copy titled Baize-jing guai—tu, P2682) are incomplete but testify to the tradition of a Bai Ze diagram corpus.

Descriptions vary across time and place. Classical and later accounts present divergent iconography: Ming SanCai TuHui describes green hair on a loong (dragon) head with a horn and flight ability; the History of Yuan describes a tiger head, red mane, loong’s body, and a horn. Japanese representations (Hakutaku) include depictions with an ox/cow-like body and a human bearded head (Tiandi ruixiang zhi), multi-faced/three-eyed images in paintings such as a Fukuhara Gogaku work, and other variant portrayals summarized in later sources. Sources emphasize that these are differing artistic and regional renderings rather than a single canonical anatomy.

Culturally Bai Ze’s principal power is encyclopedic knowledge of the spirit world: it purportedly knows ghosts and gods, their appearances, the disasters they cause, and methods to avoid those calamities. The legendary compendium attributed to it is the source for identifying spirits and prescribing preventive measures. In popular Japanese tradition the Hakutaku image was believed to absorb or 'eat' bad dreams and misfortune; more recent game and fandom sites expand attributes, but classical attestations emphasize documentary/diagnostic authority and the protective efficacy of its images.