The proverb is attested in the Ming novel Water Margin and in folk usage far older: money can make a ghost push the mill, you qian neng shi gui tui mo. The ghost is not an honored ancestor but a spirit of the underworld, beings imagined as condemned to eternal labor, and the point is escalation: if even those can be hired, no door in the mortal world is closed. Legalist logic underwrites it: Han Fei argued people respond to incentives, not virtue. The proverb just extends the incentive past death.
Where Matthew's gospel warns you cannot serve God and mammon, the Chinese proverb merely observes: money talks, even downstairs. No prohibition, just recognition. It is the idiom of a civilization that watched dynasties, exams, and punishments all quietly bend to silver, and concluded the only honest thing to say about money is that it works. The companion saying completes the cynicism: people die for wealth as birds die for food.
The claim: the proverb predicted platform labor, millstones pushed by invisible hands for money, the worker unseen as a ghost, the payer never present; the underworld was just the first gig economy with perfect information asymmetry. Verdict: flippant but structurally exact, invisible labor for distant payers is the modern default. The proverb's real endurance test: it has survived barter, silver, paper, and apps without changing a word. Money talks. The language it speaks never needed updating.
If the underworld takes bribes, what exactly is sacred?