Fa Hai 法海
Fa Hai (法海) appears in The Legend of White Snake, when Bai Suzhen has already become Xu Xian's wife. To Xu Xian she is the woman he wants to spend his life with; to the monk, she is a snake spirit that has no place among humans. On the monk's advice, Xu Xian gives his wife wine laced with realgar, and the family celebration turns into disaster. In Peking opera, Fa Hai summons heavenly warriors to defend his monastery, while in Tsui Hark's Green Snake the young monk must himself experience the power of the feelings that drove him to separate the couple.
In the legend, Fa Hai serves at the Jinshan Buddhist monastery. By the time he intervenes in Xu Xian's life, the White Snake has already taken human form, called herself Bai Suzhen and married Xu Xian. Fa Hai believes that a human and a spirit cannot live together. In the Peking opera version that the China National Troupe performed in Macau, he persuades Xu Xian to give his wife wine laced with realgar on the Dragon Boat Festival. Bai Suzhen drinks the wine and turns back into a snake. Xu Xian dies of fright, and his wife has to obtain a miraculous herb to bring him back to life.
Hardly has Xu Xian recovered than he again falls into Fa Hai's clutches. The monk keeps him at Jinshan and will not let him see his wife. Bai Suzhen and her companion Xiaoqing, the Green Snake, raise the waters and flood the monastery. Fa Hai summons the heavenly warriors, and Bai Suzhen, who is soon to give birth, weakens in the battle and retreats. In the Macau production, the couple meet on the Broken Bridge and return home. In another well-known retelling, Fa Hai imprisons the White Snake beneath the Leifeng Pagoda by West Lake. Only many years later, when her son takes first place in the imperial examinations and makes an offering to his mother at the pagoda, does it collapse and the family is reunited.
The name Fa Hai also appears in Buddhist texts. In the Platform Sutra, it belongs to a monk from Qujiang in Shao district, a disciple of Huineng, the sixth patriarch of the Chan school. According to the Dunhuang version of the sutra, it was he who recorded the master's sermon. This testimony dates from the Tang era, and the connection between the Fa Hai mentioned there and the hero of the legend remains unproven.
On Taiwanese television, Fa Hai was played by Chien Te-Men in the fifty-episode The Legend of White Snake (1992). A year later, Tsui Hark directed Green Snake, based on the novel by Lillian Lee. Here the story centres on Xiaoqing, played by Maggie Cheung, while Fa Hai, played by Vincent Zhao, is a young demon hunter convinced that he can rid the world of them. Xiaoqing sets out to test his self-control, and the monk has to come to terms with the very desires he so readily condemns in others. In The Sorcerer and the White Snake (2011) by Tony Ching, Fa Hai was played by Jet Li. The film opens with Fa Hai's battle against an ice witch. Before he meets Bai Suzhen, the monk and his disciple hunt down evil spirits.
In You Ignorant of Love (2018), starring Xie Miao, the monk's name is in the title. And in the animated film White Snake 2 (2021) we again see him through Xiaoqing's eyes. Trying to free her sister from Fa Hai's grasp, Xiaoqing finds herself in a fantastical city, where most of the film's action unfolds.
