Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and Religion East and West 9780231512503

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COMPARATIVE JOURNEYS

masters of chinese studies

comparative journeys  essays on literature and religion east and west  Anthony C. Yu

columbia university press new york

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange in the publication of this book.

Columbia University Press Publishers Since  New York

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Copyright ©  Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yu, Anthony C., – Comparative journeys : essays on literature and religion east and west / Anthony C. Yu. p.

cm. — (Masters of Chinese studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn ---- (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn ---- (electronic) . Literature—History and criticism. . Chinese literature—History and criticism. . Religion in literature. I. Title. pn.y



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Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book was printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c           References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Jonathan Z. Smith C. T. Hsia Ying-shih Yü



Il faut accommoder mon histoire à l’heure. Je pourray tantost changer, non de fortune seulement, mais aussi d’intention. —Montaigne, Du repentir



CONTENTS

Preface xi Acknowledgments

xvii

. Literature and Religion  . New Gods and Old Order: Tragic Theology in Prometheus Bound  . Life in the Garden: Freedom and the Image of God in Paradise Lost  . The Order of Temptations in Paradise Regained: Implications for Christology  . Problems and Prospects in Chinese-Western Literary Relations  . Narrative Structure and the Problem of Chapter Nine in the Xiyouji  . Two Literary Examples of Religious Pilgrimage: The Commedia and The Journey to the West 

x contents

. Religion and Literature in China: The “Obscure Way” of The Journey to the West  . The Real Tripitaka Revisited: International Religion and National Politics  . “Rest, Rest, Perturbed Spirit!”: Ghosts in Traditional Chinese Prose Fiction  . Cratylus and the Xunzi on Names  . Reading the Daodejing: Ethics and Politics of the Rhetoric  . Altered Accents: A Comparative View of Liberal Education  . Readability: Religion and the Reception of Translation  . Enduring Change: Confucianism and the Prospect of Human Rights  . China and the Problem of Human Rights: Ancient Verities and Modern Realities  Index



PREFACE

A

ccording to one ancient commentary of the Yijing, “how Change works as the Way shifts frequently.” Considering my life as a student and later also as a teacher, I think there is much wisdom in this observation, for it implies an understanding that the experience of difference can be processual. As I reflect on the past, my first encounter with Change so loftily conceived had to do with the experience of language. Having returned in  to my birthplace of Hong Kong after the SinoJapanese War, during which five plus years I was a toddler following my extended family of three generations in sporadic flight across south China from the brutal conflict, I was enrolled in a combined class of third and fourth graders, an accommodation to both the scarcity of teachers and the abundance of children like myself deprived of formal schooling during the war. Well into the first semester, I received my first shock of Change when a failing grade in an elementary Chinese composition class accompanied the teacher’s curt remark: “You don’t know how to write Chinese!” My tearful protest to my mother back home that I was transcribing exactly how I thought and spoke was greeted with a less than illuminating consolation: “Yes, now that you’re in school, you must learn that you can’t write like the way you speak Cantonese! You will have to make an effort to learn how to write Chinese in the vernacular style [ yutiwen, literally, the writing of the spoken style, or baihuawen, the writing of colloquial speech].” To this day, I remember my hurt and bewilderment as I pondered such questions as: If I am a Cantonese but still not a Chinese, then who is a Chinese? Why

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am I not allowed to communicate in the manner I think and speak? And, how could I write in a manner of speech that I do not use or even know? A few years later, when I accompanied my parents to Taiwan and quickly learned to speak Mandarin (now universally designated as putonghua [common speech]), I discovered that its ordinary syntax and vocabulary were indeed closer to the “vernacular” style that I was now obliged to memorize by rote. In Taiwan’s society, moreover, I could not make myself known readily by speaking as a Cantonese, and I had to learn (but, alas, never with the facility equal to what I could do in Cantonese) to recite passages of classical Chinese history, poetry, and thought that I was studying with a private tutor in a different “language.” Contacts with friends and schoolmates on that island exposed me further to such other “tongues” as Shanghainese and variants, Sichuanese, Hunanese, Zhejiangese, and different forms of the Minnan and Hakka dialects, the whole experience of which served to instill in me since my early teens a persistent doubt about the alleged “unity” of the Chinese language. For the nearly ten thousand graphs in common modern usage, one may affirm more or less a conventionalized agreement between written signs and meanings, even with due allowance for the now accepted division between traditional and simplified graphs, the latter of which, in quite a few cases, have deliberately collapsed semiotic distinctions by reducing further the variety of graphs but augmenting homophonous usage. Such an agreement, however, still requires continually visual or other tactile (e.g., in the case of the blind) confirmation of the graphic representation, and the graph’s alleged ability to preserve meaning against temporal erosion or cultural subversion, as I would discover later, seems no more effective than that of other forms of linguistic sign. Thus the matter of linguistic unity in China seems to me to be part of a huge cultural myth that may continue to vex, because there are still manifestly lacking a stable agreement between sound and sense and between sound and graph, an easily sharable or transferrable system of grammar and syntax among numerous regional groups of language users, and—whether written or spoken—a dominant mode of linguistic expression meaningfully accessible to all Chinese. To complicate a bit further my attempt to swim in this sea of signs, I was born into a virtually bilingual family. Intense schooling in English together with literary and modern Chinese in those postwar years thus became another constitutive part of this Change that would affect crucially my intellectual development. If Cantonese had posed for me the difficulty of matching thought and speech to writing, English swiftly exerted an opposite effect, because this first “foreign” language I studied eventually

preface x i i i

revealed itself as a comforting system of grammatical, syntactical, and representational stability (e.g., the verb in the third person singular present almost always ends in an “s”). Even with exceptions, the rules reassured by their relative regularity that, in turn, provided tremendous inducement to learn. For all the scholarly denunciation on the bias of extolling IndoEuropean languages that I would encounter much later, I discovered that alphabetical syllabification did assist me in construing the approximate vocalization of a new word before lexical consultation, while growing familiarity with grammar and syntax not only sped up comprehension of new texts but also spurred me to experiment in thought and writing through this newly acquired medium of self-expression. At the Taipei American School, the pleasure and proficiency of English were enhanced by classes in Latin and Spanish. College and graduate studies in the United States beginning in  brought additional acquaintance with French, German, Italian, Greek, and Hebrew. In an oft-quoted sentence from The Variety of Religious Experience, William James asserted that “the first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else.” On reflection, an exactly opposite move may also be a possibility. The Change of perception and understanding brought by my struggle with an elementary lesson on accepted styles of Chinese writing and speaking persuaded me that my native tongue could not be made to coincide neatly with my native language, especially if language means inclusively both speech and writing, notwithstanding the venerable debate stretching from Plato to Derrida on which expressive mode constitutes the defining attribute. In Jamesean terms, the object I sought to classify and make it one with me carried within it an irreducible difference that stubbornly resisted such a taxonomic overture. Painful as that discovery might have been, it also aroused in me—ironically but perhaps also usefully—a lifelong interest in investigating the similarity and difference of languages and their artifacts. By , when I sailed in a merchant marine steamer for higher education in the United States, I knew I was heading for some form of humanistic studies that would be more or less language-based. Majoring in English and history in college brought also escalating contacts with other European texts ancient and modern that, in twofold consequence, would affect the direction and choice of further scholastic specialization and my later career. First, I soon realized that the unity of Western culture, just from a linguistic point of view, was as mythical as the one ascribed to my native civilization. What I needed, I further realized, was to acquire some perspective, even if only in a rudimentary fash-

x iv preface

ion, some outline of continuity and change in Western culture that could enable an effort in “comprehending Change” (tongbian) so frequently encouraged by the cited commentary of the ancient Chinese classic. In this endeavor, I was happily served by both my own interest and the generous opportunities for serious language study throughout my schooling, leading almost inevitably to a deepening acquaintance with many of the canonical works of those languages so engaged. Second, the study of English and European literatures persuaded me early that one potent cultural force animating and shaping virtually the entire Western tradition has to be religion, because no obsession as keenly emotional and ideological as the religious one can dispense with representational expressivity, of which the verbal variety is but one of several options. This phenomenon, however, need not be understood only in strict doctrinal terms of the three major theistic traditions. The advancing awareness of religion as the latent or manifest quest for transcendence through ritual, institution, language, or symbol, or as the supernaturalism to be naturalized by the literary imagination, or as the power of cosmic governance ironically displaced and immanentalized in works of art became, for me at least, one way to comprehend the linkage and diversity of Western letters. This awareness also explains my decision to take up the interdisciplinary study of religion and literature in graduate school and my abiding gratitude for the opportunity to further my interest through teaching and research at my alma mater. As well, it will help to explain why I have selected a midcareer essay, “Literature and Religion” (published in the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Religion), to head this collection of disparate essays organized otherwise in rough, chronological order, for the two titular disciplines obviously are of central importance to much of my work. For my doctoral dissertation at Chicago, I wrote on “The Myth of the Fall” in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Camus’ La chute. Portions of two chapters, revised, are reprinted in this volume. Although I thought of my scholarship at the time largely in terms of religious and literary studies, I was also engaged clearly in comparative inquiry without much conscious reflection on its implications for me. The second academic “boss” I had in Chicago was Joseph Kitagawa, late dean of the Divinity School. Like me, he had come from East Asia for schooling and had been invited to remain at his alma mater to teach. His friendship, which always included blunt advice, sagacious perception, and thoughtful support, compelled and enabled me, eventually, to resume scholarly engagement with Chinese studies even as I continued to work on selective

preface x v

figures and issues in the Western tradition. That was another momentous experience of Change that would transform significantly my intellectual orientation and my career. As Kitagawa rightly sensed, neither my youthful puzzle over Chinese composition nor my formal academic experience in the States had reduced, let alone removed, my fundamental attachment to the canonical and noncanonical works of literary Chinese, which I was fortunate enough to have been taught by my grandfather and traditionally trained tutors before going abroad. If the linguistic problems surfacing in thought and expression attracted and stimulated early in my career, so Kitagawa argued, why not make that concern more focused in all my prospective scholarship, including translation? If I was lucky enough to have acquired a working knowledge of several Western languages, why not exploit this learning experience as well in the study of the Chinese tradition? In his essay “What Is a Classic?” T. S. Eliot astutely remarked that “consciousness of history cannot be fully awake, except where there is other history than the history of the poet’s own people: we need this in order to see our own place in history.” I hardly qualify as “the poet” so mentioned, but the enlightened provision I received from Chicago’s collegial and institutional context has been this privilege of regaining, however modestly, such consciousness of my own history even as I experience my place in the other history. These autobiographical musings are not meant to articulate a full-blown organizing principle for a group of previously published pieces obviously varied in subject and method. Chapters – are related to my larger project of translating and studying The Journey to the West, whereas other essays are occasional pieces of specific commissions or conferences. Reflective of my own experience of Change begotten by language and culture, their diversity may also corroborate the insight of the ancient commentary that “the motions of Change cannot be canonized as law, for they attend only to Change as such.” Even without the proverbial figure, however, I hope the carpet so woven by this collection will be useful and pleasing. The three colleagues to whom this book is dedicated are among my oldest friends in the academy. Jonathan Z. Smith and I got to know each other while we were still in graduate study, before we both accepted appointments from the same university we have since served for life. More than any other scholar, he has taught me the fundamental import of comparison in intellectual inquiry. When I made my first submission on Chinese literature to a major journal for consideration of publication, C. T. Hsia was one of my “blind reviewers.” Soon thereafter, he took the initiative

x v i preface

to contact me, and the friendship he instantly bestowed almost four decades ago has remained steadfast, warm, and ever supportive. His own life and writings have shown me how a deep and abiding love for literatures Chinese and Western need never be partisan or competitive. As far as we know, Ying-shih Yü and I are no kin, for our native regions in China are separated by great distances. But his munificent scholarship has fed and enriched my own thinking for the better part of my career. By precept and example, he has demonstrated to me that the outlook of a committed Confucian is not only humane but can also be modern, cosmopolitan, and democratic.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A

ll of the essays in this volume have been previously published and appear here with occasional minor revisions (e.g., the supply of Chinese graphs where needed and the adoption throughout of the pinyin system of romanization). Chapter , “Literature and Religion,” appeared in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, ), :–. Reprinted by permission of Gale, a division of Thomson Learning. Chapter , “New Gods and Old Order: Tragic Theology in Prometheus Bound,” appeared in Journal of the American Academy of Religion  (): –. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Chapter , “Life in the Garden: Freedom and the Image of God in Paradise Lost,” appeared in Journal of Religion  (): –. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. Chapter , “The Order of Temptations in Paradise Regained: Implications for Christology,” appeared in Perspectives on Christology: Essays in Honor of Paul K. Jewett, ed. Marguerite Shuster and Richard Muller (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, ), pp. –. Reprinted by permission of Zondervan. Chapter , “Problems and Prospects in Chinese-Western Literary Relations,” appeared in Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature  (): –. Reprinted by permission of the University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature.

x v i i i ack nowledgments

Chapter , “Narrative Structure and the Problem of Chapter Nine in the Xiyouji,” appeared in Journal of Asian Studies  (): –. Reprinted by permission of the Association for Asian Studies. Chapter , “Two Literary Examples of Religious Pilgrimage: The Commedia and The Journey to the West,” appeared in History of Religions  (): –. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. Chapter , “Religion and Literature in China: The ‘Obscure Way’ of The Journey to the West,” appeared in Tradition and Creativity: Essays on East Asian Civilization, Proceedings of the Lecture Series on East Asian Civilization (Rutgers, State University of New Jersey), ed. Ching-I Tu (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, ), pp. –. Reprinted by permission of Transaction Publishers. Chapter , “The Real Tripitaka Revisited: International Religion and National Politics,” appeared in ASIANetwork Exchange , no.  (winter ): –. Reprinted by permission of ASIANetwork Exchange. Chapter , “ ‘Rest, Rest, Perturbed Spirit!’: Ghosts in Traditional Chinese Prose Fiction,” appeared in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies , no.  (December ): –. Reprinted by permission of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. Chapter , “Cratylus and the Xunzi on Names,” appeared in Early China/ Ancient Greece: Thinking Through Comparisons, ed. Steven Shankman and Stephen W. Durrant (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), pp. –. Reprinted by permission of the State University of New York. Chapter , “Reading the Daodejing: Ethics and Politics of the Rhetoric,” appeared in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews  (Festschrift for Robert Hegel) (): –. Reprinted by permission of William N. Nienhauser Jr., editor of CLEAR. Chapter , “Altered Accents: A Comparative View of Liberal Education,” appeared in Criterion (Chicago, University of Chicago Divinity School) , no.  (): –. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Chapter , “Readability: Religion and the Reception of Translation,” appeared in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews  (Festschrift for Eugene Eoyang) (): –. Reprinted by permission of William N. Nienhauser Jr. Chapter , “Enduring Change: Confucianism and the Prospect of Human Rights,” appeared first in Lingnan Journal of Chinese Studies, n.s.,  (October ): –. It was reprinted with minor revisions without Chinese graphs in Human Rights Review , no.  (April–June ): –. Finally,

acknowledgments x i x

it was published with further revisions in Does Human Rights Need God? ed. Elizabeth M. Bucar and Barbra Barnett (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, ), pp. –; –. The text of the present chapter collates all three versions with further minor revisions and the restoration of Chinese graphs. Reprinted by permission of Lingnan University, Transaction Publishers, and William B. Eerdmans Publishing. Chapter , “China and the Problem of Human Rights: Ancient Verities and Modern Realities,” appeared in Culture & Religion , no.  (March ): –. Reprinted by permission of the Taylor and Francis Group.

COMPARATIVE JOURNEYS

1 LITERATURE AND RELIGION

T

he most apparent and apposite justification for the inclusion of literary materials in the study of religion is the historical one. What is most obvious, however, is often overlooked, and thus even the familiar in this case bears rehearsal. In virtually every high-cultural system, be it the Indic, the Islamic, the Sino-Japanese, or the Judeo-Christian, the literary tradition has, though in vastly different forms and guises, developed in intimate—indeed, often intertwining—relation to religious thought, practice, institution, and symbolism. Without paying due heed to Greek myth and thought, to Hebrew saga and wisdom, and to Christian symbolism and piety, the ,–year “drama of European literature,” as Erich Auerbach calls it, simply cannot be understood. Conversely, our knowledge of these three religious traditions, of their self-expression and cultural impact, would be grossly truncated without specific consideration of their literary legacy in both canonical and extracanonical writings. In a similar way, Daoist rituals, Buddhist dogmas, and Confucian ethics joined, in imperial China, to shape and sustain the classic forms of Chinese lyric poetry, drama, and prose fiction. The itinerant Buddhist priest and his exorcistic exploits in medieval Japan provided numerous plots for Noh drama, while subtle debates on the Buddhahood of trees and plants (sōmoku jōbutsu) underlie many of the exquisite waka of Saigyō, the twelfth-century poet. In Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and several major divisions of Buddhism, sacred and secular hermeneutics have developed, at various periods, in a parallel or mutually influential manner. To ignore this interrelatedness of holy and profane texts and the interdependence of their

2 liter ature and religion

interpretive sciences is to distort large segments of the world’s literary and religious history.

the testimony of literature Scholars have frequently suggested that certain genres of literature, notably poetry and drama, may have arisen directly from religious rituals. Although such a view may not be applicable to all forms of literature, there is little question that the origin of some types of epic is traceable to the practice of shamanism.1 One of the most important and conspicuous features of literature’s relation to religion is thus that of affirmation, in the sense that literature—both oral and written, both elite and demotic— functions to preserve and transmit religious ideas and actions. Witness the detailed description of sibylline prophecy in Virgil (Aeneid .–) or haruspicy in Seneca (Oedipus ff.). Sometimes in a particular culture, as in the case of ancient India, literature may be the principal record of a religious tradition. It is commonly recognized that “the question of the relation between gods and men is central in the world of Homer,”2 but to an even greater extent this observation is relevant to a vast amount of ancient Near Eastern and Indian literature. Dubbed “une initiation manquée” by Mircea Eliade, 3 the Epic of Gilgamesh, in its Sumerian and Old Babylonian versions, is already a classic example of religious materials commingling with entertainment and adventure, the accepted hallmark of secular literature. Although its action is concerned with the ostensibly human quest for knowledge and escape from mortality, and though there is no firm evidence that the poem was ever recited as part of religious ritual (as was the Enuma elish, the Babylonian poem of creation), Gilgamesh itself nonetheless provides its readers with a full and intricate view of Mesopotamian cosmology and theogony. As the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu unfolds through its several extant episodes—the siege of a city, a forest journey, the routing of a fickle goddess, the lamented death of a tutelary companion—we encounter at the same time the character and activity of a host of deities. The vast pantheon and the important role these deities play in the poem serve to reveal to us important conceptions of the divine in this ancient civilization. Moreover, the story of the Deluge and vivid accounts of the underworld have, understandably, elicited illuminating comparison with Hebraic notions of creation and eschatology.4 To students of the Indian tradition, it is entirely appropriate, indeed even commonplace, to assert that religion provides both form and substance

liter ature and religion 3

for virtually all of its classical literary culture. So indivisible are the two phenomena that the authors of a modern introduction to Indian literatures feel compelled to state that “until relatively modern times in India— meaning by India the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent—it is sometimes difficult to distinguish literature from religious documentation. This is not because there has been an imposition of a system of religious values on the society; it is rather because religion in India is so interwoven with every facet of life, including many forms of literature, that it becomes indistinguishable.”5 The truth of such a sweeping declaration is to be found first and foremost in the exalted doctrine of the spoken word in Indian antiquity, in every sense a potent equal to the Hebraic davar or the Johannine logos. This is the view that literary speech, not that of home or court but one deliberately cultivated, is virtually identical with divinity, “the Goddess herself, the first utterance of Prajāpati, Lord of Creation, and herself coterminous with creation.”6 Literary speech is the language enshrined in the Vedas, four collections of hymns with origins harking back to the second millennium b. c. Although these hymns are themselves magnificent and majestic ruminations on man’s place in the cosmos, on his relation to his fellow creatures, and on the great questions of life and death, it is the language itself that was supremely revered long before the texts were transcribed. It is as if the serene sublimity of the text, called śruti (revelation, or that which one has sacramentally heard), demands of its earthly celebrants a method of transmission that would defy the corrosive power of time. To the long line of priests entrusted with this awesome responsibility, this means the obsessive concern for letter- and accentperfect recitation of these sacred hymns and sacrificial incantations. This profound respect for the word not unexpectedly gave rise also to a science of linguistic analysis, in which detailed etymological investigation complements the exhaustive, minute dissections of words and their linguistic components. The grammar of Pān.ini (fl. ca.  b.c.), comparable in effect to the minister Li Si’s codification of the Chinese radical system (ca.  b.c.) and Xu Shen’s compilation of the first great dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi (Elucidating Patterns, Explaining Graphs] (ca. ), was a culmination of this science and served to standardize Sanskrit as a national literary language. That language, of course, is also the mother tongue of many of India’s major literary monuments. As the texts of the Vedas led to the development of philosophical speculations later embodied in the Āran.yakas and the Upanis.ads, so the literature in Sanskrit, as defined according to Pān.ini’s grammar, encompasses the two monumental epics the Mahābhārata (com-

4 liter ature and religion

piled between  b.c. and  a.d.) and the Rāmāyan.a, authored by the poet Vālmīki in the first century. The length of the former is unique in world literature; it is a ,–line poem about the protracted conflict between two rival brothers, Dhr. tarās.t.ra and Pān.d.u, and their descendants, the Kauravas and the Pān.d.avas. Sometimes called the fifth Veda, it is also a massive compendium of mythologies, folk tales, discourses, and dogmas (the Bhagavadgītā is an insertion in the sixth book of the poem) that exhibits more than any other of its genre what Northrop Frye has termed “the encyclopedic form.” Unlike its companion, the Rāmāyan.a is a shorter work with a more unified perspective, a romantic tale in which the hero, Rāmā, assisted by a host of magical monkeys led by Hanuman, their simian leader, routs the god Rāvan.a, abductor of Rāmā’s wife. Similar to the compendious nature of the two epics are the Purān.as, a repository of “stories and tales and sayings that document the thoughts, the religious attitudes, and the perceptions of self and world of the Indian peoples.” 7 The first century a.d., which saw the Rāmāyan.a’s composition, also witnessed the birth of the kāvya style of writing, the poetic expressions of which include both the longer narrative form (the mahākāvya) and the short lyric (the subhās.ita). It should be remembered that Sanskrit is but one of the major linguistic and literary currents in the history of India. Other significant tributaries that must be mentioned even in so brief a survey include the Dravidian literatures, of which the four primary languages are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, each having its own forms and conventions and its own epic, lyric, and narrative works. There are also rich and varied specimens of Hindi and Bengali religious lyric, and for students of Buddhism, Pali and Prakrit literatures constitute the indispensable vehicle for both canonical and extracanonical writings. Though the scholar of Indian religions, like all scholars of religions, must perforce study art and architecture, rites and institutions, icons and cults, social structures and cultural patterns, the length and breadth of that nation’s literary history offers a magnificent panoply of virtually all the salient topoi of religion: cosmology and eschatology, theogony and theomachy, dharma and karman, sin and redemption, pollution and purification, fertility and immortality, initiation and apotheosis, Brahmanical austerity and bhakti piety, and the thousand faces of the divine. The studies of Georges Dumézil demonstrate the inextricable link between the gods and heroes in an epic like the Mahābhārata.8 The five Pan.d. ava heroes primarily, but also countless others, are bonded to the mythic by divine parentage. These heroes replicate on earth the tripartite function of their parents: sovereignty, force, and fecundity.

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Moreover, whole mythological scenarios have been “transposed,” according to Dumézil, onto the human level to undergird the characters and their actions in the epic. The eschatological conflict at the end of the world becomes the great battle of the Mahābhārata and numerous other IndoEuropean epics. The ancient opposition between the Sun and the Storm God in the Vedas is transplanted in the famous duel between Karna (son of the Sun) and Arjuna (son of Indra). To understand this aspect of the epic characters and their exploits is therefore to recognize “an entire archaic mythology,” displaced but nonetheless intact. For this reason also, Dumézil can claim that what we know of the formation of such epics is equivalent “to the same thing in many societies, the formation of ‘the history of origins.’”9 India is not, of course, the only culture wherein a developed body of literary texts serves as a fundamental datum for the scholar of religion. In a well-known passage Herodotus observed that “Homer and Hesiod are the poets who composed our theogonies and described the gods for us, giving them all their appropriate titles, offices, and powers” (Histories .). This claim is not in dispute, though the picture drawn by these two poets must be supplemented by the Homeric Hymns and the works of Stesichorus, Pindar, and the tragedians. Theogony, a work attributed to Hesiod and composed soon after  b. c. contains meticulous descriptions of the underworld. Not only does this feature indicate the Greeks’ deep interest in the condition and physical locale of the departed, but also the thematic resonance of the subject would, through book  of the Odyssey, spread beyond Hellenic culture to touch such subsequent Western poets as Virgil and Dante. As befits its name, however, Theogony is centrally concerned with the process of divine emergence, differentiation, and hierarchy. Since it purports to trace the successive stages by which Zeus (a sky and storm god of unambiguously IndoEuropean origin) attained his unchallenged supremacy, the poem devotes greater attention to those immediately related to this deity and his dynastic struggles (Kronos, Hekate, Prometheus, and a motley crew of monsters and giants) than to other prominent members of the Olympian circle of Twelve Gods. While the earlier portion of the work focuses on cosmogonic development in which Ouranos and Gaia, sky and earth, were first enveloped and then separated by Chaos, the latter part chronicles among other events the series of Zeus’s marriages—to Metis, Themis, Eurynome, Mnemosyne, and Hera. The significance of these multiple unions and erotic adventures is discernibly both religious (hierogamy) and political. “By taking to himself the local, pre-Hellenic goddesses, worshiped since time

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immemorial, Zeus replaces them and, in so doing, begins the process of symbiosis and unification which gives to Greek religion its specific character.”10 This portrait of Zeus’s growth and triumph has its literary counterpart in the depiction of the central heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey, who are also transformed by Homeric epos from local cultic figures to the Panhellenic heroes of immortal songs.11 The Homeric poems offer what may be the earliest and is certainly the fullest account of the gods once they have achieved their permanent stations and functions. Throughout the two epics the presence is felt not only of Zeus but also of martial and tutelary deities like Athena, Hera, Apollo, and Poseidon and of gods with particular functions like Hermes and Hephaistos. The critical roles such deities assume and their unpredictable behavior confer on the relation between gods and men its characteristic antinomies: distance and nearness, kindness and cruelty, justice and self-will.12 Of the heroes of Greece, Herodotus said that they “have no place in the religion of Egypt,” implying that the worship of noteworthy dead men and women, real or imaginary, is peculiar to Hellenic culture. Though we know now that such a class of individuals does populate other Indo-European literatures, their presence in Homer sheds an odd, distinguishing light on these poems as both literary masterpieces and religious documents. The fact that they are local cultic figures celebrated by a Panhellenic epic tradition means that the central heroes “cannot have an overtly religious dimension in the narrative.”13 On the other hand, it is not the near divinity of the Greek heroes—their cultic background, their fully or semidivine parentage, their elicitation of subsequent speculation on how virtuous humans can become gods (Plutarch, De defectu oraculorum b)—that makes them impressive. It is, rather, the “disconcerting ambiguity” of their humanity— “to be born of gods, and yet to be human”14 —that sets apart figures like Achilles and Prometheus (in Aeschylus’s trilogy) and endows them with problematic magnitude. The Homeric poems are famous for their portrayals of the deities in the image of human virtues and vices, of precipitous actions and petulant emotions. This anthropomorphic feature, however, cannot obscure the one profound feeling pervading all classical Greek literatures, that between gods and men there is indeed a great gulf fixed. Whereas the blessed Olympians are immortal (aphthitoi, athanatoi), humans are miserable creatures of a day (brotoi, ephemeroi) who, in the words of Apollo, may “glow like leaves with life as they eat the fruits of the earth and then waste away into nothing” (Iliad .).

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Only against this background of life’s brevity and human insignificance can the strivings of heroic virtue (aretē) be seen in their greatest intensity and special poignance. Only in the light of the constant injunction against excess and aspiration to divinity, that one should not forget one’s mortality (mē thnēta phronein), can the heroic epithet godlike (theoides, theoeikelos) exert its fullest ironic impact. In Homer and in the tragedians, the gods are free to uphold or to dispose, to confirm or to deceive, to enable or to destroy. They may even be tied to particular individuals (Apollo and Hector, Athena and Odysseus) by means of an affinity that is both natural and ideal; yet at no point in this “divine-human encounter” are the gods to be trusted. “The gods have made us suffer,” declares Penelope to her husband at their long-awaited reunion, “for they are jealous to think that we two, always together, should enjoy our youth and arrive at the threshold of old age” (Odyssey .–). The pathos of this utterance notwithstanding, the mood of this epic is not one of bitter regret for what fulfillment life might have brought had the divine powers been more benign. The Odyssey is, rather, a celebration of the exercise of human intelligence, resourcefulness, courage, and loyalty in the presence of overwhelming odds, as is the Iliad also in Hector’s farewell and departure for battle, or in Priam’s solitary confrontation of Achilles. For this reason we can justly cherish “the totality of Homer, the capacity of the Iliad and Odyssey to serve as repertoire for most of the principal postures of Western consciousness—we are petulant as Achilles and old as Nestor, our homecomings are those of Odysseus.”15 To speak of the gods’ jealousy and self-will is to confront the character of their morality, already a problem disturbingly felt in the Homeric poems but reserved for the keenest scrutiny by the tragic dramatists. At bottom the issue is whether human suffering is an affair of crime and punishment, as when Paris in his sin brought down divine wrath on his city (Iliad .), or whether the gods themselves are arbitrarily complicitous. Tragedy’s enduring bequest to Western civilization is the arresting but troubling spectacle of the failure of an extraordinary individual. This is its first paradox. Men and women like Ajax, Philoctetes, Oedipus, Antigone, Medea, and Deianira, because of their exalted station in life and nobility of character, should in all likelihood enjoy success. Tragedy, however, disabuses us of that expectation by showing us that “virtue is insufficient to happiness.”16 Its second paradox stems from our recognition that such a spectacle can be intensely pleasing. Aristotle’s Poetics, attempting to explain both these phenomena, concentrates on the ideal properties of tragedy’s internal structure and its designed effect on the audience. Whatever its precise meaning, catharsis, in the view of modern interpreters, is

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to be regarded as the key to the Aristotelian understanding of tragic pleasure. The aesthetic appeal of tragedy lies in its capacity to neutralize or purge the tragic emotions of pity and fear aroused by the incidents in the plot, much as the mimetic medium itself delights by working to remove the repugnance caused by certain natural objects (Poetics b). The realization of tragedy’s aesthetic power, however, hinges on the proper resolution of the first paradox. Hence Aristotle brings to the fore the concept of hamartia: an essentially good man, not perfect, fails not out of his own vice or crime but through error or ignorance. Such a formulation clearly reflects the philosopher’s perception of the necessarily unequal balance between culpability and consequence. The protagonist must not be wholly innocent or wholly wicked, for his suffering should neither revolt nor exhilarate. Only undeserved suffering or the kind that is disproportionate to one’s offense can arouse the requisite tragic emotion of pity (Rhetoric b). The audience’s cognitive and emotive response thus depends on its accurate assessment of the hero’s situation, which in turn depends on how a drama unravels the causes (aitia) of faulty knowledge or ignorance of circumstance that can initiate a disastrous sequence of action. Although Aristotle’s explanation stresses human motivation and action, the literary texts themselves are more ambiguous, for they frequently point to the complementary image of divine interference as the ultimate cause of evil in human existence. Whereas atē in Homeric religion invariably implies the awful delusion instigated by capricious deities, writers such as Hesiod, Solon, Theognis, and Pindar tend to see it also as a form of punishment for human arrogance and violence. Both strands of emphasis converge in the theology of the dramatists. In Aeschylus’s The Persians, for example, Xerxes is both victimized by a daemon, which exacerbates his actions, and guilty of hubris, for which he is afflicted by atē. In the Oresteia, Zeus is extolled as the all-seeing, the all-powerful, the cause of all, and the bearer of justice. Against such a high view of the godhead, nonetheless, there is at the same time the discordant and jarring emphasis, notably in Prometheus Bound, on Zeus as a cruel and truculent despot, one who is hard-hearted () and not open to reason or entreaty (–). The string of testimonies on divine malevolence extends even further in the plays of Sophocles and Euripides. Perhaps the extreme expression of the god who blinds and dooms is to be found in the latter’s Heracles when Lyssa, at Hera’s command, appears in palpable form to madden the pious hero, who kills his wife and children, mistaking them for the sons of Eurystheus. Even in the dramas that make no use of such sensational devices as the

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deus ex machina, there is a constant depiction of “an arbitrary and malicious interference of the gods with human action, causing infatuation in man and resulting in disaster.”17 Atē in the language of the dramatists has consequently been interpreted by contemporary scholars (Bremmer, R. D. Dawe, T. C. W. Stinton) as the counterbalance to Aristotle’s concept of hamartia.18 Though it neither exculpates the guilty nor exempts the person from accountability, atē functions to help us think the unthinkable. The momentous error leading to disaster cannot be “explained” fully by human irrationality, excess of passion, or finitude of knowledge alone. “When adverse circumstance seems to give evidence of a hidden pattern hostile to man,”19 the dramatists invariably invoke the deed of the striking god ( plēges dios) for producing the ironic perversion of purposive action (Oedipus’s desperate moves to save his city, Deianira’s gift to her husband, Phaedra’s tactics under the influence of Aphrodite). This aspect of tragedy is what shocks Plato, for its explicit formulation, as Paul Ricoeur succinctly points out, “would mean self-destruction for the religious consciousness.”20 Therefore, the notion of evil’s divine origin cannot be adumbrated and made explicit in reflective wisdom, cultic worship, or the reasoned discourse of formal theology. It can come into thought, as it were, only through the concrete, albeit circuitous, medium of art. That the figure of the wicked god is not, however, an isolated cultural aberration of ancient Greece may be seen in the fact that the Indian tradition also embodies many paths of theodicy and antitheodicy.21 The literary data that enshrine tragic theology, scandalous though its implications may be, will therefore always be pertinent to the study of certain types of religious phenomena—from primitive sacrifices to the modern anomaly of a Jonestown.22 If Greek religion has had a lasting impact on major genres of classical literature, the effect of the Christian religion on the Western literary tradition is even more pronounced and far-reaching. In the incisive observation by E. R. Curtius, “it was through Christianity that the book received its highest consecration. Christianity was a religion of the Holy Book. Christ is the only god whom antique art represents with a book-scroll. Not only at its first appearance but also throughout its entire early period, Christianity kept producing new sacred writings—documents of the faith such as gospels, letters of apostles, apocalypses; acts of martyrs; lives of saints; liturgical books.”23 There is, however, one crucial difference between classical Greek literature and Christian writing. Whereas the former is largely reflective of a religious ethos peculiar to one culture, the latter is by no means the unique product of one solitary community. Even the language and form of Christian canonical writings bear the imprint of

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antecedent religious milieus, notably the Jewish and the Greco-Roman. In his zeal to defend Christian particularism, the second-century apologist Tertullian once posed the famous question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”—thereby conveniently forgetting that Jerusalem as a sacred city and a symbol of faith was hardly a Christian creation alone. Throughout its long history, Christianity and its environing culture have always developed in a dialectical fashion of discreteness and syncretism, invention and adaptation, disjunction and harmony. Such a process is apparent at the outset of Christian literary history, in those twenty-seven documents that make up the New Testament. Virtually all four major literary types found in the canon—gospel, acts, letters, and apocalypse—possess the paradoxical features of distinctiveness and newness in utterance on the one hand and affinity and alliance with local literary cultures on the other. In its formal totality the gospel may be regarded as a novel genre created by the early Christian community, since its synthetic amalgamation of narrative, biography, history, dialogue, and sermonic materials defies easy classification. When analyzed in the light of historical and form criticism, however, many of the gospel’s smaller, constitutive units are demonstrably comparable to other verbal forms and expressions found in the religious and philosophical movements of the Hellenistic world. There are, for example, elements of the biographical apothegm, which chronicles the life of a sage, climaxing in pregnant sayings or dramatic dialogues; and there are tales of the miracle worker or healing hero common to Mediterranean religions of that era. The permanent legacy of Jesus as master teacher may well have been his highly individualized use of the parable, but the form itself was long known in rabbinic instruction. The content of Jesus’ teachings on many occasions again may show striking originality or deviation from tradition, but the language in which his teachings and actions are cast (e.g., the marked series of anaphoras that introduce the beatitudes, the deliberately crafted introduction to Luke and Acts) can also significantly reveal the author or redactor’s familiarity with classical rhetoric and literary form. This phenomenon of originality joined with conventionality also characterizes the named, anonymous, or pseudonymous epistolary writings of the New Testament. Students of the apostle Paul’s letters are understandably prone to stress their distinctive features: the Christian transformation of the opening and address; the special use of the diatribe; the vivid autobiographical accounts; the intimate, personal tone of his concerns; and the powerful texture woven out of both kerygmatic and paraenetical elements of his faith. To balance such an emphasis, it must be pointed out that these

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apostolic documents are not isolated instances of letter writing. Letters in the ancient world were used, among other purposes, as a medium for the exposition of ideas, and such writings as those of Epicurus on philosophy, Archimedes and Eratosthenes on science, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus on literary criticism still provide an illuminating context for the study of Christian epistolary achievement. 24 Increasingly, contemporary New Testament scholarship has come to recognize that Paul’s education may well have included exposure to the rhetoric of Roman law courts, the practices of itinerant Greek philosophers, and the conventions of Greek letter writers. While one scholar has analyzed the letter to the churches in Galatia in terms of the classical “apology,” with exordium, narration, proposition, proof, and conclusion, another sees in  Corinthians  a possible imitation of a Greek encomium on virtue, and in the peristasis catalog of  Corinthians  traces of the Cynic-Stoic diatribe and the imperial res gestae.25 As one moves into the subsequent centuries of the Christian era in the West, the tension between “pagan learning” and an emergent Christian literary culture continues to be evident. Anticipating by more than a millennium some of the sentiments of Milton’s Christ in Paradise Regained, the Didascalia apostolorum (Teachings of the Apostles, ) solemnly instructs the faithful: But avoid all books of the heathen. . . . If thou wouldst read historical narratives, thou hast the Book of Kings; but if philosophers and wise men, thou hast the Prophets, wherein thou shalt find wisdom and understanding more than that of the wise men and philosophers. And if thou wish for songs, thou hast the Psalms of David; but if thou wouldst read of the beginning of the world, thou hast the Genesis of the great Moses; and if laws and commandments, thou hast the glorious Law of the Lord God. All strange writings therefore which are contrary to these wholly eschew.

The persistence of Greco-Roman paideia in the schools and the gradual increase of educated converts, however, rendered it inevitable that a narrow parochialism had to modify itself. Augustine epitomizes the alternative attitude in a rhetorical question: “While the faculty of eloquence, which is of great value in urging either evil or justice, is in itself indifferent, why should it not be obtained for the uses of the good in the service of truth?” (On Christian Doctrine .). Once Christians had settled on this prosaic but potent justification for art, realizing that beauty could be enlisted for the cause of faith, incentive for both adaptations of alien cultural forms and

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original productions multiplied. Echoing Augustine’s sentiments, George Herbert, in the seventeenth century, asked of his God: Doth poetry Wear Venus’ livery, only serve her turn? Why are not sonnets made of thee, and lays Upon thy altar burn?

In view of such zealous concern, it is not surprising that Catholic meditative techniques and Protestant biblical poetics combined to produce in the late English Renaissance an abundance of the finest Christian devotional lyrics. Although the bulk of patristic prose literature remains in the categories of dogmatic treatises, apologetics, exegetical and hermeneutical writings, homiletics, and pastoral disquisitions, Christian writers of the early centuries also contributed to noteworthy and lasting changes in literary language. While the likes of Minucius Felix (d. ca. ) and Cyprian (d. ) faithfully and skillfully emulated classical models, Tertullian forged a new style through translation, word borrowing (Greek to Latin), and the introduction of new Latin diction based on vernacular usage.26 By means of extensive translations (of both sacred scriptures and other Christian writers), letters, lives of saints, travelogues, and the continuation of Eusebius’s chronicle, Jerome (ca. –/) also mediated between classical antiquity and Christian letters. Within this context of continuity and change, Augustine of Hippo (–) justifiably occupies a place of pivotal importance. Not only did he set forth a profound and mature theological vision that across the centuries has exerted abiding influence on both Catholic and Protestant thought in the West, but his mercurial mind and voluminous speculations also directly funded such divergent developments as medieval literature, science, and aesthetics. More than any other figure in early Christian history, Augustine exemplifies the near-perfect fusion of pagan wisdom and Christian invention, of thought and style, of ideology and language. As the astute analysis of Erich Auerbach has shown, the sermons of Augustine are masterful transformations of the Ciceronian model of oratory. To the ornate abundance of rhetorical figures and tropes at his disposal, the bishop of Hippo brought new depths of passion, piety, and inwardness. Of the three styles (magna, modica, and parva) that defined the ancient gradations of writing, the last and the lowliest became endowed with unprecedented dignity and was employed with new flexibility, precisely because the sermo

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humilis was structured to mirror the threefold humilitas of the Incarnation, the culture of the Christian community, and the relative linguistic simplicity of scripture.27 Just as Augustine’s Confessions exists for all posterity as the undisputed prototype of both spiritual and secular autobiographies, and his City of God as an unrivaled exemplum of Christian philosophy of history and historiography, so his On Christian Doctrine remains a milestone in the history of semiotics, interpretation theory, and homiletics. The Augustinian understanding of rhetoric, hermeneutics, poetry, and allegory pervades medieval formulations of literary theory, notable in the works of Isidore of Seville (ca. –), Virgil of Toulouse (fl. seventh century), Bede (ca. –), Alcuin (/–), Rabanus Maurus (ca. –), John Scottus Eriugena (fl. –), and Thomas Aquinas (ca. –). The grand themes of his theology—creation, the human image as analogy to the divine, the Fall, the Incarnation, election, redemption, history, providence, temporality, and eternity—and his particular mapping of the ordo salutis find reverberations and echoes not only in such specifically Christian poets as Spenser and Milton but also in some of the Romantics and moderns. Unlike writing in prose, poetry had a discernibly slower development within Christianity. Although three of the largest works in the Hebrew canon are essentially poetical—Job, Psalms, and Proverbs—and long passages of poetry stud the historical and prophetic books, what can pass for verse in the New Testament amounts to no more than bits and fragments. Christians had to wait for over a thousand years before they can be said to have produced devotional and liturgical verse of comparable intensity and complexity to the songs of David. The author of Colossians in a wellknown passage (:) bids his readers to sing “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs,” and hymn singing was apparently a common act of worship among the early Christians ( Cor. :, Eph. :, Mark :, Acts :). But the texts of such hymns or songs are all but unknown. Even the so-called Magnificat preserved in the first chapter of Luke displays greater indebtedness to Hebraic sentiment and diction than to Christian feeling. Beyond the canonical corpus, examples of early Christian versification in classical languages can be found in such diverse contexts as the pseudo-Sibylline Oracles (additions by Judaic Christians in the late first to third centuries); an anonymous poem at the end of Paidagōgos, by Clement of Alexandria (early third century); the partly allegorical Symposium of the Ten Virgins, by Methodius (fourth century); the Peristephanon, Cathemerinon, and Psychomachia, by the Spaniard Prudentius (late fourth century); the Carmen Paschale, by Sedulius (mid-fifth century); and in such verse paraphrases of

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the Bible as Juvencus’s Historia evangelica (fourth century) and Marius Victor’s Alethia (fifth century). With the possible exception of those by Prudentius, these works are now read more for their historical than for their literary merit. The ensuing Carolingian age produced verse (both accentual and quantitative) on a variety of subjects, which would eventually fill four massive volumes (in Monumenta Germaniae Historica), but no poet ranking with the immortals. As for vernacular literature, such poems as the Chanson de Roland, Beowulf, and the Víga-Glímssaga continue to fuel scholarly debate about the extent to which Christian conceptions of virtue and piety colored pagan notions of heroism and fate. In contrast to the relative crudity and simplicity of their predecessors’ accomplishments, the poetic genius of Dante, Spenser, and Milton seems all the more remarkable, for the Christian tradition would be immeasurably impoverished if it did not possess their writings. These eminent poetae theologi, however, are so well known and their works have been the subject of so much sustained commentary that any utterance one may presume to make about them risks superfluity. Yet, their permanent greatness in the annals of Western religious poetry surely rests on their creation of original, large-scale works of art that are at the same time monuments in the history of religions. Neither ponderous paraphrases of scripture or doctrinal treatises nor the unassimilated union of poetic forms and religious substance, the texts of the Commedia, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost represent the fullest, most systematic exploration and embodiment of the poets’ faith. Each in its respective manner is, as Dante said of his own masterpiece, “a sacred song / To which both Heaven and Earth have set their hand” (Paradiso .–). Their luminous, mellifluous sacrality is to be measured not simply by the extent to which they faithfully reflect or document tradition but by the creativity and acuity wherewith they challenge and revise tradition. Dante, for example, claims for his poem “the cognitional function Scholasticism denied to poetry in general” 28 and reverses the summa by disclosing “divine truth as human destiny, as the element of Being in the consciousness of erring man.” 29 Milton’s attempted theodicy significantly alters patristic and reformed dogmas (Christology, election, creation, hamartology) to stress a dynamic conception of the imago dei and the import of free will and human love in the drama of fall and redemption. Their distinctive elucidation of scripture and embroidery of tradition render these articulate canticles part of Christian exegesis and theology, for they participate as much as any work of “the doctors of faith” in seeking to comprehend and interpret the original mystery of faith, of revelation itself.

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the study of literature The foregoing survey of religious and literary history has sought to demonstrate how individual texts, figures, genres, movements, and periods may provide crucial data for the student of religion. The survey has been deliberately focused on more traditional materials, since the applicability of its principal thesis is manifestly more restricted in the modern era, given the undeniable shifts in historical development and cultural climate. However, inasmuch as the study of religion frequently, if not exclusively, involves the study of verbal texts, the discipline is even more indissolubly bound with the study of literature. Both disciplines at that juncture entail the deepest and most wide-ranging engagement with the analysis of language, and this engagement implicates all the concerns expressive of the human sciences. Prior to any textual interpretation there must be an acceptable text. This truism forcefully reminds us that textual criticism, the science developed since the Renaissance for the establishment of the so-called proper text, already locates the unavoidable convergence of classical scholarship, biblical criticism, and the techniques of literary analysis. Most religious communities are not so fortunate as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which has in its possession both partial and complete versions (the latter in the church’s reorganized branch) of the Book of Mormon’s original manuscript. For Jews, Christians, and Buddhists, to cite obvious examples, the original documents of revelation exist only in a scholarly construct called the urtext and, if even that seems an impossible ideal, in a family or group of the best texts, critically ascertained and adjudged to approximate the original form. Of necessity, therefore, the study of sacred texts at its most fundamental level already utilizes procedures and methods that transcend the provenance of any particular religious tradition or community. The author of  Timothy may claim that “all scripture is inspired by God” (:), but all scripture is not thereby protected from wayward readings by errant mortals or the corruptions of temporal transmission. “To repair the wrecks of history” requires the use of “a historical method,”30 and any religion of the book or books must rely on this most venerable of humanistic disciplines (that is, textual criticism, which for McGann depends on the historical method) for its continuance and propagation. Were textual criticism merely an affair of the mechanical activities of editing, collation, and application of the canons of textual criticism, the consequence of its pursuit might not appear to be immediately relevant. But scholars have long recognized that in many instances textual criticism

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does bear powerfully on textual interpretation, that stemmatics inevitably intrudes upon hermeneutics. 31 On the one hand, the modes of critical reasoning employed in the determination of variant readings are identical with or similar to those engaged in the determination of verbal meaning, in exegesis, and in translation. On the other hand, the difference of a single word or of an entire edition can drastically alter the construal of textual meaning. Whether Christians, as a result of their “justification by faith,” are told that they in fact have peace with God or that they are to have peace with God depends on the selection of either the indicative (echomen) or the hortatory subjunctive (echōmen) found in different manuscript traditions of Romans :. “Soiled fish of the sea,” a phrase lodged in the Constable Standard Edition of Melville’s Works, has led the great American critic F. O. Matthiessen to speak unwittingly of “the discordia concors, the unexpected linking of the medium of cleanliness with filth, [which] could only have sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors of the deep,” only to have such eloquence vitiated by the cruel discovery of a typesetter’s oversight, when “coiled,” not “soiled,” is proved to be in both the English and American first editions. The publication in  of Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, with , corrections and additions heretofore unavailable, has led critics to reexamine and revise many previous interpretations of this modern classic. Because textual criticism wishes to retrieve a text as free as possible of historical corruptions, its goal is often taken as the starting point for textual interpretation. Paradoxically, however, such criticism can also set one kind of limit for interpretation. The “pure” authoritative text in such a discussion means that which is closest to the author’s final intentions, whether those intentions are perceived to be identified with a manuscript or one of the first printed editions. Although such considerations are germane to many modern texts, they become unsuitable for editing (and thus a fortiori for interpreting) many medieval and older texts, particularly those with polygenous stemmas. In A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, Jerome J. McGann notes: In their earliest “completed” forms these texts remain more or less wholly under the author’s control, yet as a class they are texts for which the editorial concept of intention has no meaning. These texts show, in other words, that the concept of authorial intention only comes into force for criticism when (paradoxically) the artist’s work begins to engage with social structures and functions. The fully authoritative text is therefore always one which has been socially produced; as a result, the critical standard for what

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constitutes authoritativeness cannot rest with the author and his intentions alone. 32

In the example from Romans  cited above, even the recovery of the original manuscript may not be decisive enough to decipher authorial intention, since the fact that the Greek words are homonyms could easily have dictated the particular spelling of the amanuensis known to have been used by the apostle. Short of questioning Paul himself, we are left with two perhaps equally plausible readings, but with definitely different meanings. We can recover, independently and without difficulty, the meaning of these two Greek words, but no amount of attention paid to “shared experiences, usage traits, and meaning expectations”33 can now tell us exactly what it is that Paul wished to convey by this particular sequence of linguistic signs. Inability to discern final intention in this instance is also synonymous with inability to discern original intention, but the indeterminacy of textual meaning is not caused so much by the historicity of our understanding as it is by the historicity of the text. In his effort to elevate the discourse of contemporary literary criticism, Geoffrey Hartman wants to make it “participate once more in a living concert of voices, and to raise exegesis to its former state by confronting art with experience as searchingly as if art were scripture.” 34 This noble proposal unfortunately does not make clear how searchingly scriptural exegesis, in whatever former state, has been confronted with experience. More importantly, it overlooks the fact that scriptural exegesis itself throughout its history, much as any other kind of exegesis, has always had to struggle with the question of how a verbal text is to be read, how its language—from a single word to an entire book—is to be understood. If biblical critics of late “have been looking over the fence and noting the methods and achievements of the secular arm,”35 this tendency is not radically different from the Alexandrian school’s appropriation of Philonic allegory to interpret Christian scriptures or the Protestant reformers’ use of humanistic philology to advance their own grammatical-historical mode of exegesis. Wary of misreadings through willful or unintended anachronism, some contemporary biblical scholars are justifiably skeptical of the current movement in certain quarters to read the Bible as literature, to expound sacred writ by means of secular norms and literary classifications. While it may be true that the comparison of Hebrew narrative with Homeric epic or the analysis of a parable of Jesus in terms of plot and character can lead only to limited yields, the reverent affirmation that

18 liter ature and religion

scripture must be read as revelation or the word of God does not itself explain how language is used in such divine literature. The confusion here arises from the too ready identification of literature with fiction or fictionality, itself a common but nonetheless a particular view of the nature of literature. The rejection of this view, on the other hand, in no way absolves the biblical reader from wrestling with the linguistic phenomenon that is coextensive with the text. Does the Torah or the New Testament or the Lotus Sūtra use language as human beings do, and if not, what other contexts are there for their readers to consider and consult? What sort of literary competence or what system of conventions ought to be operative in reading sacred texts? The history of Christian biblical exegesis is filled with examples of how interpretation changes along with different reading assumptions and conventions. A particular view of language has led patristic writers to understand in a certain way the terms “image” and “likeness” (Heb., tselem, demut; Gr., eikona, homoiōsin; Lat., imaginem, similitudinem), used in the first creation narrative of Genesis. For Irenaeus, in the second century, the former has come to signify the anima rationalis in human nature, whereas the latter refers to the donum superadditum supernaturale that will be lost in the Fall. Later interpreters, notably the Protestant reformers, have challenged this developed Catholic doctrine of the imago dei on the ground that it has missed the Hebraic convention of linguistic parallelism, though the reformed interpretation itself is by no means free of dogmatic presupposition. The precise meaning of one fundamental Christian assertion— the Eucharistic formula “This is my body . . . this is my blood”—has eluded interpreters and divided Christendom for centuries because the issue of whether it is a literal or a figurative statement is as much a linguistic one as it is a theological one. These examples of biblical exegesis serve to reinforce one basic insight of Friedrich Schleiermacher: namely, that special or sacred hermeneutics can be understood only in terms of general hermeneutics.36 For this very reason, every significant turn or development in literary theory and the culture of criticism should, in principle, be of interest to scholars of religion. Because verbal texts are more often than not the objects of their inquiry, they must know “the manifold varieties of minutely discriminating attention to the artful use of language, to the shifting play of ideas, conventions, tone, sound, imagery, syntax, narrative viewpoint, compositional units, and much else.”37 That last amorphous category, in the light of the American and European critical discourse of the last three decades, would certainly include such large and controversial subjects as phenomenology,

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philosophical hermeneutics, feminist criticism, genre theory, reception theory, communication and information theory, linguistics, structuralism, deconstructionism, and psychoanalysis. Although space does not permit extensive treatment of any single facet of this new “armed vision,” a brief review of the problem of where to locate textual meaning may be instructive. In the heyday of New Criticism, distinguished by its apologetic zeal to honor literature’s intrinsic worth and mode of being, meaning was virtually identical with the text. In contrast to scientific denotative language, literary language was held to be reflexive and self-referential; hence the perimeters of a single text constituted its most proper context. Meaning was generated by the text’s essential form or verbal structure, which was said to resemble “that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses.”38 Because the poem represented the most felicitous union of ontology and praxis—“it is both the assertion and the realization of the assertion”—its meaning was thus paradoxically comprehensible but supposedly could not be paraphrased. Similarly, the act of interpretation was itself something of a paradox. On the one hand, the aim of interpretation was to ascertain “the way in which the poem is built . . . the form it has taken as it grew in the poet’s mind.” Since interpretation was thought to be determined by no factor other than that single object of the text, even the consideration of its origin or effect (the celebrated “intentional” and “affective fallacies”) was deemed extraneous and irrelevant. Because the text was taken as the privileged vehicle of meaning, its integrity could be preserved only if the interpreter were purged as much as possible of his or her own assumptions, prejudices, beliefs, and values. Despite such noble effort, the New Critics confessed, the interpreter’s act carries the pathos of a quixotic quest, for the adequacy of criticism will always be surpassed by the adequacy of the poem. In various ways the history of literary theory over the past thirty years may be regarded as a steady and increasingly stringent attack on such New Critical doctrines of the text and the interpreter. The Heideggerian notion of Vorverständnis (preunderstanding), mediated by the translated writings of Rudolf Bultmann and Hans Gadamer, demonstrated the impossibility of unprejudiced, objective interpretation, because no act of knowing can be undertaken without a “preknowing” that is necessarily bound by the person’s history and culture. In fact, both texts and the historical “horizon” of the interpreter, when scrutinized by such hermeneuticians of suspicion as Marxists, neo-Marxists (see Jürgen Habermas’s critique of Gadamer), and Freudians ( Jacques Lacan and followers), are inevitably obscured by

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ideology, false consciousness, or the subversive language of repression. In place of the “closed readings” in which purity and objectivity are ensured by an innocent, submissive critical consciousness, the languages of both text and critic seem more likely to wear the masks of deceit and desire (René Girard), as well as of domination and violence. Instead of the text being the bearer of authorially structured meaning (E. D. Hirsch), textual meaning is regarded as a product either of readers or communities of readers (Stanley Fish, Frank Kermode) or of the dialectical interplay of the text and the reading process (H. R. Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, the later writings of Roland Barthes). Meaning may be actualized by uncovering the deep structures—the equivalences and oppositions—buried within a poem’s semantic, syntactic, and phonological levels (Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss), by the delineation of the vision and world projected “in front of” the text (Paul Ricoeur), or by the perception of generic codes that at once familiarize and defamiliarize (Viktor Shklovsky). The most radical treatment of the problem of text and meaning is certainly that fashioned by Jacques Derrida and his followers. The traditional view of language in Western civilization has been essentially a mimetic one: language can faithfully and fruitfully mirror the interchange between mind, nature, and even God. The agenda of deconstructionism, however, is to undertake the most trenchant and skeptical questioning of the symmetrical unity between signifiers and signifieds posited by Saussurean linguistics. “For the signified ‘boat’ is really the product of a complex interaction of signifiers, which has no obvious end-point. Meaning is the spin-off of a potentially endless play of signifiers, rather than a concept tied firmly to the tail of a particular signifier. . . . I do not grasp the sense of the sentence just by mechanically piling one word on the other: for the words to compose some relatively coherent meaning at all, each one of them must, so to speak, contain the trace of the ones which have gone before, and hold itself open to the trace of those which are coming after.”39 For this reason meaning in the Derridean view must be qualified by the characteristics of différance (in the sense of both difference and deferral), absence (in the sense that signs are forever inadequate to “make present” one’s inward experiences or phenomenal objects), and decentering (in the sense of rejecting the “transcendental signified” and reconceptualizing any notion of the fixed origin or metaphysical Urgrund as the product of desire). To speak of the stability and determinacy of textual meaning is therefore meaningless, just as it is futile to refer to a poem’s language as its proper context. The context of a poem, rather, is the entire field of the history of its language, or, in Jonathan Culler’s apt dictum, “Meaning is context

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bound, but context is boundless.”40 Meaning is thus finally coincidental with the Nietzschean concept of free play, both labyrinthine and limitless; and interpretation, far from being an affair of passive mimesis, is another form of mediation and displacement, of substituting one set of signifiers for another.41 The merit of deconstructionism for literary study is already hotly debated; whether it is of use to the study of religion must await scholarly lucubrations. To a discipline committed to investigating the infinite varieties and morphologies of “the irreducibly sacred,” a program replete with logocentrism, the challenge posed by the uncanny, Cassandra-like utterances of Derrida seems all too apparent. bibliography Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953. Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Fairchild, Hoxie N. Religious Trends in English Poetry. 6 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939–1968. Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt, 1982. Gunn, Giles B. The Interpretation of Otherness: Literature, Religion, and the American Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Handelman, Susan A. The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1982. Kennedy, George A. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. LaFleur, William R. The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. Lieb, Michael. Poetics of the Holy: A Reading of “Paradise Lost.” Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Miner, Earl, ed. Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, ed. The Critical Study of Sacred Texts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Poland, Lynn M. Literary Criticism and Biblical Hermeneutics: A Critique of Formalist Approaches. Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985. Ramsaran, John A. English and Hindi Religious Poetry. Leiden: Brill, 1973. Redmond, James, ed. Drama and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984– 1988. Scott, Nathan A. Jr. The Poetics of Belief. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Shaffer, E. S. “Kubla Khan” and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical

22 liter ature and religion Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Sternberg, Meir. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1984. Strier, Richard. Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Wilder, Amos N. Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.

notes 1. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Bollingen, 1964). 2. Albin Lesky, A History of Greek Literature, trans. James Willis and Cornelis de Heer, 2nd ed. (New York: Crowell, 1966), p. 65. 3. Mircea Eliade, Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses (Paris: Payot, 1976), 1:27. 4. Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976); Jeffrey H. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). 5. Edward C. Dimock Jr. et al., The Literatures of India: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 1. 6. Ibid., p. 7. 7. Ibid., p. 35. 8. Georges Dumézil, Mythe et épopée, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1968–1971). 9. Georges Dumézil, Du mythe aux roman (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), p. vii. 10. Eliade, Histoire, 1:48. 11. L. R. Farnell, Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921); Erwin Rohde, Psyche, trans. W. B. Hillis, 2nd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1925). 12. Lesky, History, pp. 65–76. 13. Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Acheans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 115. 14. Paolo Vivante, The Homeric Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970). 15. George Steiner, After Babel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 22. 16. James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the “Iliad” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 62–63. 17. Jan M. Bremmer, Hamartia: Tragic Error in the “Poetics” of Aristotle and in Greek Tragedy (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1969), pp. 111–112. 18. Ibid.; R. D. Dawe, “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72 (1967): 89–123; T. C. W. Stinton, Collected Papers on Greek Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 19. Redfield, Nature and Culture, p. 86. 20. Paul Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 226; see also p. 212. 21. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

liter ature and religion 23 22. René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972); René Girard, Le bouc emissaire (Paris: Grasset, 1982); Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 23. E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 310. 24. H. Koskenniemi, Studien zur Idee und Phraseologie des griechischen Briefes bis 400 nach Christentum (Helsinki, 1956). 25. Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979); Wayne A. Meeks, The Writings of St. Paul (New York: Norton, 1972). 26. Eduard Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa, 2 vols. (1909; repr., Stuttgart: Teubner, 1983). 27. Erich Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965). 28. Curtius, European Literature, p. 225. 29. Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 94. 30. Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 94. 31. New Testament Textual Criticism: Its Significance for Exegesis, ed. Eldon Jay Epp and Gordon D. Fee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). 32. McGann, Critique, p. 75. 33. E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 178–189. 34. Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 57. 35. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. viii. 36. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. H. Kimmerle, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977), “Manuscript 1,” pp. 62–93. 37. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 12. 38. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt, 1947), p. 203. 39. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 127–128. 40. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstructionism: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 123. 41. See the works by Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

2 NEW GODS AND OLD ORDER tragic theology in prometheus bound

I

n his learned and famous study of Greek culture, Paideia, Werner Jaeger has made the categorical declaration that the plays of Aeschylus “are built upon that mighty spiritual unity of suffering and knowledge.” What Aeschylus teaches through suffering, according to him, is the splendour of God’s triumph. None can truly know that suffering and that triumph until, like the eagle in the air, he joins fullheartedly in the cry of victory with which all living things salute Zeus the conqueror. That is the meaning of the “accord set up by Zeus,” in Prometheus, the harmonia which mortal wishes never overstep, and to which even the Titan-made civilization of mankind must end by adapting itself. 1

That Aeschylus is often concerned with the nature of cosmic order is familiar enough to all readers of Greek dramas; however, Jaeger’s reading of Prometheus Bound seems one-sided in its insistence on the positive value of suffering. His interpretation takes the experience of pain to be ultimately a blessing because with it comes a deeper knowledge of Zeus’s mighty and orderly rule. In this interpretation of Aeschylus, Prometheus, or what he represents, although he is not lacking in heroic stature, belongs in the last analysis to “the primitive world of Titans and their challenging arrogant hybristic strength” that must be brought finally under the subjection of Zeus. Because suffering reveals (as supposedly it does in Job’s experience) the power and wisdom of God, suffering is theodicy. The criticism of many other students of Greek literature, on the other

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hand, has discovered in Prometheus Bound a more balanced emphasis: namely, that both Zeus and Prometheus are guilty in the play. Far from justifying God’s way to men, this tragedy has been thought to call powerfully into question the freedom of man as well as the freedom of God. To be sure, the portrait of Zeus as tyrant, which is so at variance with the theme of other Aeschylean dramas, has been a subject of sustained controversy. In the present study of the play’s structure and certain key patterns of imagery, therefore, the theology of Prometheus Bound will be taken up again with the examination of two related problems: the causes of Prometheus’s suffering and the nature of the knowledge that the play seeks to impart. It is my contention that the essence of the play’s tragic theology is its vehement protest against serious flaws in divinity, out of which arises a mandate for change as well as a distant hope of reconciliation. In speaking of the play’s structure, we, first of all, have to consider the problem of its formal imperfection; for of the original trilogy that Aeschylus wrote on the myth of Prometheus, the only extant part we have is the desmôtēs, now generally taken to be the first of the three plays.2 The truncation of parts presents difficulty in interpretation, because the trilogical form, with its possibility of extending dramatic time and action, appeared to be the poet’s favored mode of composition. 3 Without the other plays, therefore, we are left to conjecture as to the outcome of the dramatic action initiated in Prometheus. There has been no want of suggestion, of course, that the incidents sequent to the first play may be partially reconstructed by analogizing from another group of plays such as the Oresteia. Because the only complete trilogy we possess ends in the cessation of conflict, this interpretation takes it as not unlikely that the Prometheia, too, will terminate with some sort of reconciliation. Implicit in such a hypothesis is the notion that Zeus will undergo a moral transformation in the Prometheia that will make him consistent with the exalted conception found in other Aeschylean dramas.4 Against this idea of an “evolutionary” theology or an “emergent” deity, however, is the  essay of Hugh Lloyd-Jones in which is set forth the vigorous argument that there never was any “advanced” conception of Zeus in Aeschylus at all. The God of The Suppliant Maidens, the Oresteia, and the Prometheia, according to Lloyd-Jones, remains the brutal, callous deity whose essential character can only be termed “primitive.” 5 Although it is perhaps undeniable that the use of analogy can never quite resolve the interpretative difficulties in Prometheus, a play remarkable for its unique features, I suggest that Lloyd-Jones’s objection to the idea of Zeus’s ethical development is too strenuous to be entirely convincing.

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What is of immense interest and significance in the desmôtēs is not whether there is a “Zeus-religion” or whether Zeus may be summarily labeled advanced or primitive, but how the poet’s criticism of and expectation for the deity function as part of the drama itself. As I hope to demonstrate in analyzing the play, the resolution of dramatic conflict, which is clearly anticipated and implied in the action, is inextricably tied to the hope for a change in the characters both of Zeus and of Prometheus. The second problem that must occupy our attention briefly has to do with the peculiar condition in which Aeschylus has situated his hero. With the only protagonist chained and bound, Aeschylus, as one critic has observed, “gives us a hero who literally cannot move.”6 This severe curtailment of physical action, together with the relatively simple progression of events, gives to the play a seemingly static quality. Prometheus is visited consecutively by the chorus and three other persons who provide him with dialogues of revelatory significance—a technique that Milton later uses with great effectiveness in Samson Agonistes—but nothing more happens, in the crude sense of the word, between Prometheus’s initial binding and the final catastrophe. The simplicity and immobility of the plot have led many scholars to wonder whether it is amenable to the kind of formal, structural criticism proposed by Aristotle and his modern disciples and whether its dramatic movement, if any, may be apprehended best by such categories as anagnorisis and peripeteia. Because the essential conflict ranges itself around the wrath of Zeus and the defiance of Prometheus, it is almost a critical commonplace to assert that the play is a drama of mind and emotion.7 This last generalization, however, provokes the question, Does it do justice to all aspects of Prometheus Bound? Although obviously our attention is directed constantly toward the thoughts and feelings of the hero, it is grossly myopic to view the play only as the spectacle of Prometheus’s reactions to certain situations; nor is it adequate to think of Prometheus and his opponents as, in reality, the representation of something else. The trouble with much of the criticism that stresses the philosophic bent of Aeschylus’s mind or the symbolic resonance of his characters is that it often, unintentionally, leaves the impression that the plays are not much more than doctrinal or allegorical documents. Without undermining the speculative tendency of the poet’s intellect or the piety of his belief and without, I hope, assuming an unnecessarily doctrinaire position in critical method, I wish to suggest in what follows that the play has a perceptible dramatic structure. The religious and philosophical questions gain poignancy precisely because they

new gods and old order 27

arise from the concrescence of events enacted and witnessed. It is possible to discern in the casual series of encounters between protagonist and visitors some form of the principle of probable sequence. 8 Further, it is possible to see that the dramatic development is determined not simply by Prometheus’s emotions but, in a quite real sense, by his action as well.

the word is the deed When the play opens on the scene of a desolate wasteland, Kratos and Bia, together with Hephaestus, arrive to execute their punitive assignment. Prometheus’s offense (ἁμαρτία) and its penalty are disclosed in the first speech of Kratos.9 Charged with the crime of conferring on mortals fire, the glory (ἄνθος) of the gods, Prometheus is further accused of displaying the detestable disposition of loving humanity (φιλανθρώπου τρόπου; see also ). The rebellious but defeated Titan is thus immediately linked to the cause of mankind, although from the point of view of someone like Kratos, such a trait in Prometheus deserves nothing but contempt. The purpose he therefore assigns to the process of physical torture, presently described by him and Hephaestus with excruciating vividness, is to teach Prometheus to respect divine sovereignty (ὡς ἄν διδαχθῇ τὴν Διὸς τυραννίδα/ στέργειν, – ), and to realize that his cleverness is no match for Zeus (ἴνα / μάθῃ σοφιστὴς ὢν Διὸ νωθέστερος, –). Whether this is, in fact, the tragic mathos that Prometheus should learn becomes an increasingly more urgent and weighty question as the play progresses. Prometheus’s entrance is postponed for some eighty-seven lines; the gradual confirmation of his identity through the words (Θέμιδος αἰπυμῆτα παῖ) and gestures (nailing and binding) of the other players is not an uncommon technique, but it creates enormous suspense and anticipation. The deliberations of Kratos and Hephaestus do not only introduce such thematic materials (which are to develop later) as the cruelty of Zeus, the absolutism of his reign, and the feeling of insecurity among his subjects (e.g., Kratos’s question to the smith, οὐ τοῦτο [i.e., Zeus’s command] δειμαίνεις πλέον; and his warning, ὡς μή σ᾿ ἐλινύοντα προσδερχθῇ πατήρ;). More importantly, they serve to dramatize the contrasting attitudes toward the protagonist. Whereas Hephaestus is filled with pity for Prometheus because of kinship, Kratos’s captious tongue is matched only by his vicious appearance (note Hephaestus’s remark: ὄμοια μορφῇ γλῶσσά σου γηρὐεται). They thus embody the opposing emotions of sympathy and hostility that characterize all subsequent visitors. In the series of visitations, we have accordingly the friendly but unenlightened chorus, the garrulous and obsequious

28 new gods and old order

Oceanus, the pathetic and partially deranged Io, and finally the lackey Hermes. This juxtaposition of forces friendly and hostile in relation to the hero and his response to them define the principle governing the sequence of dramatic action. After his crucifixion, Prometheus is left alone to lament his suffering. Stressing its unjust but unavoidable nature, his soliloquy gives voice to a paradoxical idea constantly heard in the play. By his very name, Prometheus is supposed to foreknow what will befall him. Yet, despite having this advantage, he still cannot resist the force of necessity (τὸ τῆϛ ἀνάγκηϛ ἔστ᾿ ἀδήριτον σθένοϛ, ). He does not deny that his punishment is selfinduced (–); at the same time, however, it is a penalty harsh beyond his expectation (–), an arbitrary blow that greatly affronts his divine status. As the epanodos in line  has it, his hurt is the god’s but wrought by gods (μ᾿ οὶα πρὸϛ θεῶν πάσχω θεόϛ). Because his suffering is both foreknown and yet beyond anticipation, Prometheus is caught in a dilemma. He has little reason to complain because, as he puts the matter, no new affliction may come to him unforeseen (οὐδέ μοι ποταίνιον / πῆμ᾿ οὐδὲν ἥξει). On the other hand, the deep sense of outrage compounded with the gnawing presence of pain makes it impossible for him to be silent. “I cannot speak about my fortune,” he protests a little later to the chorus, “cannot hold my tongue either.” As we shall see, this struggle to keep silent or not (οὔτε σιγᾶν οὔτε μὴ σιγᾶν) constitutes the central conflict in Prometheus’s character; and, in the course of the drama, his silence and his speaking both entail fateful consequences. The entrance of the chorus initiates Prometheus’s encounter with his visitors. Conversation between the inquisitive chorus and the hero helps bring to light the past guilt of Prometheus, his present misery, and the fears and hopes for the future. If we accept Thomson’s thesis that Prometheus Bound is the first play of the trilogy, the necessity for this conversation becomes clear; for Prometheus’s dialogue with the chorus constitutes the needed exposition of his former activities that have led to his present condition. In addition to eliciting from Prometheus the necessary background information, the chorus assumes the classic role of a foil for the emotion of the audience. Its frequent expressions of fear and tearful lamentations (lines –, –) are appropriate to the feelings created by the sight of Prometheus; and as a “pitiful onlooker,”10 it continues the part begun by Hephaestus. Conversation with the chorus, moreover, marks for the first time Prometheus’s allusion to Zeus’s weakness and his eventual downfall. This

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disclosure is understandably shocking to the chorus, which has just made the assertion that the hardened heart of Zeus (ἄγναμπτον νόον) is determined to subjugate the race of the Titans relentlessly (οὐδὲ λήξει) unless his power is usurped by someone’s crafty device (παλάμᾳ). The last condition is, of course, from the chorus’s point of view, plainly unimaginable; and it is so stipulated only to underscore the endless nature of Prometheus’s imprisonment. There is, therefore, only incredulous surprise when Prometheus picks up an idea from an ostensibly contrary-to-fact statement and turns it into a prophecy of his own victory and release. The very mention of Zeus’s unbending to give satisfaction (ποινάϛ) for Prometheus’s outrage at once induces the chorus to chide: You are stout of heart, unyielding to the bitterness of pain. You are free of tongue, too free (–).

Its sympathy notwithstanding, the chorus at this point can only conclude that Prometheus is unquestionably in the wrong. It holds the sentiment of the common man, who, almost instinctively, would take the side of the reigning power against all rebels and revolutionaries; and it provokes from Prometheus at one point the bitter taunt to worship, beseech, and flatter whoever happens to be ruling at the time (σέβου, προσεύχου, θῶπτε τὸν κρατοῦντ᾿ ἀεί, ). Many words must be spoken, many secrets revealed, and many events witnessed before the chorus reverses its position to fall with the condemned hero. Discarding Prometheus’s prophecy of future triumph, the chorus urges him instead to recount the reason for his arrest and punishment. The long speech that follows (–), in which Prometheus recalls how his assistance to man incurred the wrath of Zeus, ends once more with the complaint against the injustice of his present treatment. The chorus remains unmoved; Prometheus is simply guilty, but dwelling on his past benevolences bestowed on humanity is hardly an adequate remedy for him. Realizing that the chorus is far from persuaded by his words, Prometheus admits his error (ἑκὼν ἑκὼν ἥμαρτον, οὐκ ἀρνήσομαι) but begs the chorus to try to participate in his woes (πίθεσθέ μοι, πίθεσθε, συμπονήσατε / τῷ νῦν μογοῦντι, –). Oceanus’s arrival introduces the second visitation and a marked change of feeling and tone in the drama. He comes, as he says, from a long journey (δολιχῆϛ) and out of sympathy (συναλγῶ) for Prometheus’s fate. Unlike Hephaestus, however, his disingenuous claim of kinship and loyal friend-

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ship (φίλοϛ βεβαιότερόϛ) as well as his breathless verbosity arouse at once the latent violence in the hero’s character. The rhetorical question of Prometheus, Have you, too, come to gape in wonder at this great display, my torture?

rings with sarcasm and scorn. On the thematic level, the visit of Oceanus apparently extends the idea mentioned a little earlier by the chorus that some means of release must be sought (ἄθλου δ᾿ ἔκλυσιν ζήτει τινά) for Prometheus. Oceanus is confident that Zeus will grant Prometheus’s freedom to him as a gift (αὐχῶ γάρ, αὐχῶ, τήνδε δωρειὰν ἐμοὶ / δώσειν Δί, ὥστε τῶνδέ σ᾿ ἐκλῦσαι πόνων, –) if the rebel will curb his dangerously immodest behavior. Significantly, it is in this advice of Oceanus and Prometheus’s steadfast rejection of it that we can most clearly discern the nature and direction of the hero’s tragic development. For those who have pondered the crucial question of wherein is the tragic deed that brings about the play’s final catastrophe, the usual answer is found either in Prometheus’s defiance of Zeus or in his theft of fire.11 The last explanation is plainly unsatisfactory, for Prometheus’s act of stealing fire and thereby preventing Zeus from the destruction of mankind is prior to the action of the drama. That act is similar to Samson’s disclosure of his secret to Delilah that involves him in medias res when Milton’s play begins. As far as the myth is concerned, Prometheus’s theft may certainly be considered the cause of his immediate and subsequent suffering, but within the play itself, his crime is the incident given to set in motion the dramatic action; it is not the direct cause of his final doom. The stubborn and proud defiance of Zeus comes closer to the real answer.12 Throughout the play, the word “obstinacy” (αὐθαδία) is used again and again to characterize both Prometheus and his unseen enemy. Attitudes and emotions, however, are by themselves nondramatic elements in the sense that they cannot be readily perceived by the audience until they are made known through concrete action or word. In fiction or poetry, the revelation of emotional conditions may be accomplished by narration; but in a drama such as we have here, the disclosure must be effected by means consistent with the artistic form. We remember that Aeschylus has so designed his play that the hero is literally immovable. What is there remaining for him to perform that can qualify as some kind of dramatic action? The answer is so obvious that it eludes most commentators, for the

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one thing that the enchained hero still can use to both his advantage and disadvantage is his tongue. One may immediately argue, of course, that this reasoning is tautological, because the artistic form in use indisputably presupposes this kind of action, the speech of dialogue. To build a reading of the play upon an element so native to the form may appear to be indulging in criticism overly subtle and tenuous. Nevertheless, the hypothesis that the words of Prometheus in his particular situation tend to transcend their normal aesthetic function deserves to be heard and examined. As in many other Greek tragic dramas, Prometheus’s final condition is a result of the choices he makes; but these choices, on account of his peculiar situation, are realized solely by means of what he says. That his words may be taken as a form of action can be seen in the way they are employed in the presence of either friend or foe. To someone like Io, Prometheus promises that he will tell her distinctly (τορῶϛ) all she desires to know, not with the riddling language of oracles (οὐκ ἐμπλέκων αἰνίγματ᾿), but in simple speech, because it is meet to open the lips to friends (ἀλλ᾿ ἁπλῷ λόγῳ, / ὥσπερ δίκαιον πρὸϛ φίλουϛ οἴγειν στόμα, –). To his enemies, however, Prometheus’s utterances are either pointedly insulting or darkly enigmatic. For this reason, Hermes later orders Prometheus to divulge his secret “in clear terms and no riddles” (καὶ ταῦτα μέντοι μηδὲν αἰνικτηρίωϛ, / ἀλλ᾿ αὔθ᾿ ἕκαστα φράξε, –). The words of Prometheus in the play thus literally decide his destiny because they serve to precipitate the tragic denouement by defining and developing both his action and his character. In the chorus’s very first meeting with Prometheus, it already accuses him of being too free with his tongue (ἐλευθεροστομεῖϛ). When Oceanus is present, he rebukes Prometheus for his sharp and flinty words (τραχεῖϛ καὶ τεθηγμένουϛ λόγουϛ, ), his haughty tongue (ὑψηγόρου γλώσσηϛ, –), his reckless speech and his idle eloquence ( λαβροστόμει . . . γλώσσŋ ματαία, –). As Oceanus sees the matter, Prometheus, despite his humiliation, still possesses in his words a powerful weapon for antagonizing Zeus. Hence, Oceanus is afraid that once such inordinate expressions reach the ears of the Olympian monarch, greater disaster will be forthcoming. Attempting to pacify Prometheus’s anger and change his obstinacy, Oceanus confronts him with the question, “Do you not know, Prometheus, that words are healers of the sick temper?” This question is deliberately phrased, since it follows Prometheus’s declaration that he will exhaust himself in his present lot until anger shall quit the mind of Zeus (έγω` δe` τη`ν παρουσ` αν ἀντλήσω τύχην,ἔστ᾽ ἀν Διὸς φρόνημα λωφήσῃ χόλου, –). Oceanus’s point is that Prometheus can perhaps ameliorate his condition if he would be

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more compliant in his speech. The reply of Prometheus, however, shows that he is even more aware of the therapeutic or subversive power of words (–), but he also knows that they are effective only when they are spoken in due season (ἐn kαιρῳ)` ; at the present moment, he simply cannot bow to Zeus’s tyranny. This entire episode with Oceanus decidedly reveals which of the speakers possesses a more profound understanding of the cosmic situation and, consequently, a more authoritative and effective use of language. It is ironical that Oceanus comes as a tutor of the prisoner (ἔμοιγε χρώμενοϛ διδασκάλῳ), but in reality, he can offer only platitudes (άρχαι ’` . . . λέγειν) and banal aphorisms (note his use of what must have been an old proverb, πρὸς κέντρα κω` λ ον ἔκτενει ς` , to argue for the logic of submission). Before too long, he is forced to acquire a chilling lesson about his own precarious existence under the shadow of Zeus (–, ). Again, ironically, in his proposal to intercede on behalf of Prometheus, Oceanus declares that he forms his judgment on the basis of deeds and not words (έργῳ κου’ λόγῳ τεκμαίρομαι), implying, by the certainty he expresses immediately thereafter, that his utterance will be supported by accomplishment. In the course of the drama, however, it is actually Prometheus whose words achieve some amazing results.13 Prometheus’s main struggle may be seen as revolving around one basic issue: will Prometheus submit to Zeus by telling his secret or not? In this contest of will and endurance, his words are pitted against the immutable oracles of Zeus. Hermes later declares that “the mouth of Zeus / does not know how to lie, but every word brings to fulfilment” (–). In sum, Zeus’s proclamations are as good as his deeds, but so, too, are those of Prometheus. When the Titan persists in the announcement that Zeus will fall and suffer more than he (), the chorus is moved to ask: “Have you no fear in saying such things?” And when Prometheus maintains near the end that no threat or torture of Zeus can alter his stand, Hermes is led to exclaim, “These are a madman’s words; a madman’s plans.” Little does he realize, of course, that Prometheus’s raving has a double edge; it not only confounds his adversary but wins over the final allegiance of the chorus as well. When these abundant verbal images are brought properly into view, is it not plausible to suggest that Prometheus’s words, so fraught with fearful consequences in this instance, constitute in truth his tragic deed? As the drama advances, the question about which we are made to care most intensely is whether the hero will speak or not, for that is the conflict, arising from the clash of external condition and inward conviction, that de-

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mands some form of resolution. In the speeches of Prometheus, the destiny of both the protagonist and his invisible antagonist moves from cryptic hints, through partial disclosure, to full revelation. Correspondingly, Prometheus’s danger of inciting further the wrath of Zeus increases from his initial lament to the final baiting of Hermes. From the point of view of Zeus, moreover, the speech no less than the silence of Prometheus is provocative. When he speaks, Prometheus’s bold invectives for his foe are the very epitome of his defiance. Even the heaviest thunderbolts are rather mild and colorless when compared with the violent and vituperative denunciations that Prometheus hurls (ῥίψεις) against his oppressor. On the other hand, his silence about his secret also spells insubordination, and it is this act of speaking and not speaking that finally calls down the ire of Zeus. With Oceanus’s departure, Prometheus resumes his narration by enumerating the manifold gifts he gave to man. The impressive claim that every art possessed by mortals comes from Prometheus (πα`σαι τέχναι βροτοι σ` ιν ἐκ προμηθέως) serves a double purpose. In the first place, it substantiates the noble motivation of Prometheus’s action, for he was moved to come to man’s assistance by human miseries (πήματα) as well as by his own kindly disposition (εὔνοια). Such qualification, in fact, challenges implicitly the accusation of his enemies that it was hubris that turned him into a philanthropos. Secondly, Prometheus’s lengthy discourse heightens the pitifulness as well as the irony of his predicament. He who has devised marvelous inventions for mankind has no means wherewith to cure the troubles of his own (–). Echoing the sentiment expressed by Hephaestus earlier, the chorus once more warns him not to care for mortals beyond due measure, for it is still of the opinion that Prometheus would have a better chance to gain his freedom if he were less obdurate. Prometheus’s stunning and completely unexpected reply to this admonition is that not only is his own craft, great as it may have been to mankind, no match for Necessity (τέχνη δ’ ἀνάγκης ἀσθενεστέρα μακρῳ)` , but even Zeus is also subject to its powerful sway. That such an audacious assertion is beyond the ken of the chorus is clear from the ensuing response. The chorus, which has accepted without question Zeus’s power, can envisage no higher Necessity in the universe except that Zeus is foreordained to rule eternally (τί γàρ πέπρωται Ζηνὶ πλὴν ἀεὶ κρατει ν` ). Urging submission to Zeus, it can say in effect to Prometheus that they are wise who do homage to Necessity (οἱ προσκυνουν` τες τὴν ’Αδράστειαν σοφοί, ). For Prometheus to insist that he possesses a secret weapon that will ensure his ultimate victory (–) is, therefore, to transgress in

3 4 new gods and old order

speech, a fearful offense from which the chorus prays to be spared (μηδ’ ἀλίτοιμι λόγοις, ). Furthermore, for Prometheus to persist in his reverence for mortals (σέβῃ θνατοὺς) in opposition to Zeus’s will is itself foolish. The Titan’s effort can only be unrequited kindness (ἄχαριϛ χάρις), for what help (ἀλκά) can come now to Prometheus from such puny creatures as men? Therefore, the moral lesson that Prometheus and his spectators should learn (ἔμαθον) from his plight, as the chorus piously concludes, is that Zeus must be feared, and this high regard for humanity must be abandoned, for no plan of mortals can ever disrupt the harmony of Zeus (οὔποτε— / τàν Διὸς ἁρμονιαν θνατω` ν παρεξίασι βουλαί). The choral stasimon is succeeded by the appearance of Io in the form of a half-cow, half-human figure chased by a gadfly. To the chorus, which hitherto seems to think that Zeus can do no wrong, the sudden intrusion of Io’s hideous presence and her story of heaven-sent calamity (θεόσσυτον χειμω` να, ff.) provide a shattering example of innocent suffering. At the end of this episode, to be sure, the thoroughly shaken chorus lapses into the rather silly aphorism about how one should not marry above one’s pedigree (ὡς τὸ κηδευ`σαι καθ’ ἑαυτὸν ἀριστεύει μακρῳ`, ); but undeniably, Io’s experience magnifies Zeus’s cruelty and reinforces Prometheus’s accusation that the tyrannical deity is violent in all his ways (ὁ τω` ν θεω` ν τύραννος ἐς τὰ πάνθ’ ὁμως / βίαιος εἴναι, –). Her rehearsal of divine seduction indeed moves the chorus to terror and pity. It should be noted, however, that Io’s role is designed not merely to reflect the wickedness of Zeus, or, as Prometheus says, to win a tear from the audience by weeping over her misfortunes. Positively, she comes to provide comfort for the suffering hero because she, of all the visitors, is the only person who participates in his suffering by being herself a sufferer. Prometheus can mock the chorus, and implicitly everyone who visits him, that “it is an easy thing for one whose foot / is on the outside of calamity / to give advice and to rebuke the sufferer”; but he obviously cannot say this to Io, for she, too, is a victim of Zeus. Concern for a friend in distress helps him momentarily to forget his own troubles and assume the role of a comforter. Moreover, Io’s faith in Prometheus’s knowledge of the future, evident in her desperate pleading with him to reveal what cure there may be for her affliction (τί μηχ` αρ, ἢ τί φάρμακον νόσου; δει ξ` ον), both strengthens Prometheus’s position and arouses the curiosity of the chorus. Responding to their request, Prometheus tells at length the painful wanderings still awaiting Io as well as her eventual restoration by Zeus. That he can describe her past and future experience in such intimate details is not only, as he says, a positive proof

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(τεκμήριον) of his words’ truthfulness, but it also gives credence to his own claim concerning his future deliverance from Io’s descendant. When Io is gone, Prometheus proceeds to explain how Zeus will finally be toppled because of an ill-fated marriage. The half-believing chorus is still afraid that Prometheus’s boast has not much more validity than wishful thinking (). The arrival of Hermes, Zeus’s footman, intensifies the dramatic tension to the breaking point. Zeus’s command for Prometheus to divulge his secret is met with an equally fierce and obstinate refusal. At the brink of the final terror, the chorus is warned to stay away. Instead of imitating the caution previously exercised by Oceanus, the chorus dramatically reverses its stand and falls with the condemned hero. Having counseled hitherto compromise and submission, the chorus suddenly deems it a better lot to perish with the rebel. Such a profound reversal of the chorus, to my knowledge, is unparalleled anywhere in Greek literature. The change, furthermore, illustrates a kind of peripeteia and anagnorisis that markedly differ from Aristotle’s conception. From the dramatic examples given in his discussion of these terms in the Poetics (chap. ), Aristotle apparently thought of change and discovery as events in the action closely associated with the protagonist (e.g., Oedipus). Yet in the case of Prometheus Bound, it is the chorus that gains at last the profound knowledge that Prometheus is speaking the truth; and on the basis of this discovery, it chooses to suffer with the hero. Such a momentous change signals the chorus’s transformation from a dull and imperceptive spectator of tragedy to its enlightened and courageous participant. Its action is a direct answer to the earlier plea of Prometheus (–), and its description of Zeus’s treachery echoes the Titan’s very word (i.e., νόσος []; see also lines –). If the comments of the chorus have often been banal and insensitive, the final speech to Hermes, say something else different from this: give me some other counsel that I will listen to: this word of yours for all its instancy is not for us. How dare you bid us practise baseness? We will bear along with him what we must bear. I have learned to hate all traitors: there is no disease I spit on more than treachery.

displays such overwhelming conviction, courage, and compassion that we can best interpret it, perhaps, as Aeschylus’s own voice of commendation

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for Prometheus also. As such, it becomes a subtle sign of what should be our response to the protagonist. Seen in this light, the ending of the play is drama of the highest order. Like all great tragic heroes, Prometheus leaves the stage accompanied paradoxically by gain and loss. The loss, of course, comes in his savage overthrow. Making good his word with action (καὶ μὴν ἔργῳ κοὐκέτι μήθῳ), Zeus dispatches a violent storm to hurl him into the abyss, yet his gain, even more tremendous, is the friendship of the universe itself. At the play’s beginning, Prometheus has called on the elements of nature to witness how unjustly (ἔκδικα) he suffers, a call that he repeats in his exit. There is now, however, a decisive difference. The chorus, which as the offspring of Oceanus forms part of nature (i.e., water, the “sleepless current” encircling the earth, –), has not only seen the injustice of his pain; but seeing, it has been converted to the rightness of his cause.

the twin masks of zeus Of the characters in Prometheus Bound, the one who, apart from the protagonist, continually engages our attention is paradoxically one who is physically absent from the stage. Nevertheless, his personality and his influence are so ubiquitously felt that, without him, the drama would collapse. This invisible person is Zeus, and the most astonishing thing about him is that he is represented as the antagonist, the unrighteous and unjust God whose tyrannical nature is emphasized throughout the drama. That Zeus is capable of being the author of various evils is certainly an idea not foreign to the theology of Greek poets and dramatists. We have but to remember that Pandora was designed specifically as a gift of ruinous trouble (κήδεα λυγρά) for men (Hesiod, Works and Days ) to feel the venom of divine intrigue. Nonetheless, what distinguishes Prometheus Bound from works of Aeschylus’s contemporaries no less than those by Homer and Hesiod is the unremitting vision of a wicked Zeus. Not even in Euripides’ Herakles, a play almost without parallel in its exploitation of the theme of antitheodicy, do we find such abundant images of divine truculence and savagery. With oppressive frequency, the speeches in the play allude to Zeus’s despotic rule: he is cruel and hard-hearted (τλησικάρδιοϛ, ); he has a mind not open to reason or entreaty (ἀκίχητα γὰρ ἤθεα καὶ κέαρ / ἀπαράμυθον, –); his authority is based not on moral supremacy but solely on material force. To dramatize this hateful character of Zeus, Aeschylus significantly departs from his sources in his treatment of Io, Prometheus, and what

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befalls mankind. In the case of the Titan, the malignity of Zeus manifests itself primarily in his ingratitude; for in his struggle to become the Olympian monarch, Zeus was indebted to the help of Prometheus. Hesiod, in the Theogony (–), attributes Zeus’s victory over the old gods to his sheer power (καρτεϊ νικήσαϛ πατέρα Κρόνον), but Prometheus claims in the play that he is finally responsible for helping Zeus to win (–) and to apportion the honors and the limits of the gods (–, with the rhetorical question of lines –: καίτοι θεοῖσι τοῖϛ νέοιϛ τούτοιϛ γέρα / τίϛ ἄλλοϛ ἤ ’γὼ παντελῶϛ διώρισεν;). Once having consolidated his authority, however, Zeus turns against his friend and repays his service (ὠφελημένοϛ) with foul return (κακαῖσι ποιναῖϛ, ), justifiably forcing Prometheus to describe such faithlessness to friends as a disease inherent in tyranny (–). As far as man is concerned, Zeus’s malice comes in the form of the harshness (τραχύϛ) and hard-heartedness (τλησικάρδιοϛ) of his reign. Above all, it is his indifference to human happiness and welfare that characterizes his attitude toward man as downright hostility. Prometheus’s suffering on account of his compassion for man and the misfortunes of Io both point up the terrible defect in the character of Zeus—his lack of any feeling of pity (ἔλεοϛ, οἶκτοϛ) for anyone. Through the choral comments, the poet has made it clear that the normal “human” reaction to the sight of Prometheus and the plight of Io cannot be anything but pity and compassion. As the chorus says at one point, only a heart of iron and one carved out of stone (σιδηρόφρων τοι κἀκ πέτραϛ εἰργασμένοϛ, ) can withhold sympathy when looking at Prometheus. Yet Zeus is precisely of that disposition that exults (ἐπιχαρῆ,  and ) in the suffering of others, making his government despicable and his nature odious. Such an infamous portrayal of Zeus is not without its perplexing feature, for there seems to appear in the other plays of Aeschylus a radically different Zeus. It is well known that in The Suppliant Maidens, for example, Zeus is not only the final judge of human iniquity, but he is hailed as perfect (τέλειοϛ), protective toward the earth (γαιάοχοϛ), and omnipotent. With an incandescent eloquence that has been compared with Hebraic poetry and prophecy, the chorus extols Zeus as lord of lords, the most blessed of the blessed, the most perfect of the perfect, all happy Zeus (ἄναξ ἀνάκτων, μακάρων / μακάρτατε καὶ τελέων / τελειότατον κράτοϛ, ὄλβιε Ζευ,` –). The most notable attribute of Zeus in that play, however, is not that he is mighty to accomplish what he purposes,14 but that he is himself pitiful and solicitous toward the needy and the oppressed. “Any other Olympian,” writes Lloyd-Jones, “might have had the protection of suppliants as a special charge,”15 but Zeus in the Suppliants is credited with much more than

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a perfunctory title of guardianship. In several places, Zeus himself is called the Suppliant (Ζεὺϛ Ἱκετήσιοϛ, Ἀφίκτωῤ) whose anger awaits those untouched by the sufferer’s cry (μένει τοι Ζηνὸϛ ἱκταίου κότοϛ / δυσπαραθέλκτουϛ πανθόντοϛ οἴκτοιϛ, –; see also lines , , ). The theology of Aeschylus in this play thus reaffirms and refines the traditional Homeric belief that Zeus indeed gives peculiar attention to the aged, the stranger, and the suppliant—all who are manifestedly helpless and in need of protective care.16 In the Oresteia, too, Zeus is described as all-seeing (πανόπτηϛ), all-powerful (παγρατήϛ), the cause of all (παναίτιοϛ), and the bearer of justice (δικηφόροϛ). It is because the supreme deity is seen not only as all-powerful but also all-just that Electra invokes for Orestes the blessing and assistance of Strength and Justice, and Zeus the third (i.e., Ζεὺϛ σώτηῤ, supreme over all). The precise nature of justice (δίκη) in Aeschylus is undoubtedly difficult to determine, for its meaning varies in different contexts. In the words of the suppliant maidens (–), the just cause (τὸ δίκαιον) is one that does not go beyond what is right (παῤ αἶσαν), while the content of justice, as inscribed on Polyneices’ shield, has to do with the restoration of rights (The Seven Against Thebes –). In the Oresteia, the concept dikê often may refer to an evenhanded payment of evil for evil (Agamemnon ; The Libation Bearers ff.), and in this sense, the Zeus who champions justice has perhaps the same juridical function in both Aeschylus and Hesiod. Even granting a minimal view of the deity’s goodness, however, it is difficult to see how a Zeus who rewards the lowly and punishes the violent (Works and Days –, –) is essentially no different from one almost totally devoid of redeeming virtue. Can we really believe, with Lloyd-Jones, that the Zeus who presides over public assemblies and speeches, and hence who prevails by reason and persuasion (ἐκράτησε Ζεὺϛ ἀγοραῖοϛ [Eumenides ]), is to be identified with a tyrant who keeps his own standard of justice (παῤ ἑαυτῷ / τὸ δίκαιον ἔχων Ζεύϛ [Prom. –])? Moreover, the closing choral verdict in the Eumenides refers to Zeus and Moira jointly working for the final establishment of peace (Ζεὺϛ . . . / ὅυτω Μοῖρά τε συγκατέβα), whereas the deity of Prometheus Bound has yet to learn of his own limitation in terms of his fate. Indeed, one study has thoroughly demonstrated that the Zeus of Prometheus is a near-perfect epitome of the reckless and ruthless tyrant in classical conception,17 and tyranny (δεσποτούμενον), as the chorus in the Eumenides reminds us, is just as undesirable as an ungoverned life (ἄναρκτον βίον, –). How are we to reconcile these two portraits of Zeus? For some scholars,

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a solution is virtually impossible.18 The scandalous picture of Zeus has led Wilhelm Schmid in fact to deny Aeschylean authorship of Prometheus Bound.19 For others, the twin masks of Zeus have given them impetus to probe the theology of Aechylus in relation to its social milieu. Expanding the thesis of a previous essay,20 Leon Golden has argued that the Zeus of the Suppliants and the Oresteia is “a grand symbol of all the spiritual forces that reach majestic fulfilment in the creation of the polis,” while “the cruel and tyrannical Zeus of the Prometheus Bound is the unleashed, uncontrolled brute power of nature which often threatens man.”21 The concord reached eventually between Prometheus and Zeus is taken to mean that “amoral nature” will yield gradually to “the forces of human intellect and civilization.” This is a tidy solution, and to the extent that it unmistakably distinguishes the Zeus of the Prometheia from that of the other plays, it is not without merit. The question is, will it outweigh the liabilities? For, although the might of Zeus is often compared in the play with volcanic eruptions and violent storms, what makes Golden’s highly symbolic interpretation questionable is whether nature can be said to have such personal (and, therefore, moral) attributes as does the dramatic Zeus. Does it make any sense to say that nature will learn wisdom through suffering as it is predicted of Zeus? In the work of Podlecki already alluded to, a more reasonable view is set forth, supported by impressive evidence. The full-length portrait of Zeus Tyrannos, according to the author, is, among other things, a powerful indictment against all forms and figures of political tyranny, a specific example of which might well have been Hiero of Syracuse.22 Friedrich Solmsen, too, in his celebrated study of Hesiod and Aeschylus, has suggested that the dramatist might have been inspired by contemporary historical events. The strange succession of brutal deities, so vividly chronicled for the reader in the Theogony, could have been taken by Aeschylus as a reflection of the human struggle for a more adequate realization of justice, “and what happens to the Olympian dynasty is found to have a far-reaching effect upon the development of mankind.”23 In addition to the perceptive criticism of Solmsen and Podlecki, it must be pointed out that political and historical analogies do not exhaust the meaning of Prometheus Bound. For Aeschylus, what may be the experienced realities of history provokes queries of religious urgency, because suffering raises the ultimate question of whether this world may be said to be governed justly by Zeus. The character of the divine government in turn has important implications for assessing the divine nature itself. Within the context of the drama, the specific excuse for the cruelty and

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harshness of Zeus’s reign, at least according to a compliant chorus or Oceanus, is its newness. Zeus is a neos tyrannos, and, therefore, he must govern gods and men arbitrarily (παρ ἑαυτῷ, ἴδιοϛ νόμοϛ). Newness breeds insecurity, and a tyrant parvenu must show his strength with no indecisiveness lest his scepter be wrested from him by the hands of insubordination (note also Hephaestus’s remark: ἅπαϛ δὲ τραχὺϛ ὅστιϛ ἄν νέον κρατῃ`). So, the counsel of Oceanus to Prometheus is that he must learn to adapt to this new situation and yield to Zeus, but the very fact that this is the reasoning of Oceanus shows how unsatisfactory it must have been to Prometheus as well as to Aeschylus. No moral justification can be found for the treatment of Prometheus, because that punishment is a payment of evil for good, and the severity of the penalty far exceeds the weightiness of the crime. In this sense, Zeus’s action must be judged also as beyond due measure, for his hostility toward Prometheus and mankind is irrationally excessive. Prometheus’s caustic remark to Hermes (νέον νέοι κρατεῖτε καὶ δοκεῖτε δὴ / ναίειν ἀπενθῆ πέργαμ’, –) may serve as an even more fitting rebuke for the master, for Zeus’s behavior bespeaks the nervous arrogance of youthful power, not the majestic authority of a seasoned monarch. In this regard, too, Aeschylus’s conception of Zeus in Prometheus Bound is more severe than the common Greek notion, expressed succinctly by Herodotus a little later, that God is always jealous and interfering (φθονερόν τε καὶ ταραχῶδεϛ).24 For in the idea of the jealous god, the main emphasis is on the wisdom and power of the deity to hold man down lest he should rise above his mortal station. The stress on human insecurity and human helplessness (ἀμηχανία) serves conveniently as a correlative check on human hubris—that arrogance that comes from the accumulation of wealth, fame, and success (see the choral debate in Agamemnon –). Divine phthonos, according to such an etiology of disaster, does not necessarily implicate the deity as wholly wicked.25 In Prometheus Bound, which reverses the Hesiodic emphasis on primal human happiness (Works and Days –, –), man before receiving the gifts of Prometheus is utterly wretched (ταλαίπωροϛ). Zeus has no basis whatever to be jealous or vindictive toward man. It is not man who is successful; it is Zeus. Apart from sheer cruelty, there is no possible explanation for the action of Zeus, who, having enjoyed the spoils of victory, turns to seek the destruction of man. That the deity should be so villainous and loathsome is a fact freighted with meaning in regard to the issue of human suffering; for, if righteousness is to be attributed to the Supreme, then suffering in human existence

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must be explained by man’s guilt or sinfulness. To make man responsible for his pain and misery is in fact to absolve God from his responsibility (it may be interesting to recall that this has always been the Grundgedanke beneath the traditional Christian interpretation of the fall of man), but this attempt is not always successful or even plausible. As E. R. Dodds has put the matter so well, Sooner or later in most cultures there comes a time of suffering when most people refuse to be content with Achilles’ view that “God’s in his Heaven, All’s wrong with the world.” Man projects into the cosmos his own nascent demand for social justice; and when from the outer spaces the magnified echo of his own voice returns to him, promising punishment for the guilty, he draws from it courage and reassurance.26

The boldness of Aeschylus’s art is to be found precisely in this kind of audacious quest for justice. When Prometheus tellingly says that the spectacle of his own chastisement (ἐρρύθμισμαι) brings dishonor to Zeus’s name (Ζηνὶ δυσκλεὴϛ θέα , ), he is saying, in other words, that the facts no longer fit the theories, that he is more sinned against than sinning. Because no adequate explanation can account for the suffering of Prometheus and, by extension, of Io and of mankind as well, Zeus’s righteousness and justice now appear highly dubious. Man’s innocent suffering, in this case, establishes the logical corollary of divine guilt. Zeus, therefore, must change. That change is a motif of fundamental import may be discerned in the way Zeus is thought and spoken of in the drama. From the perspective of Prometheus’s visitors, Zeus is not only fated to rule eternally, but he is also changeless in the sense that his mind is inexorable. He is a god who cannot be reached by prayer or entreaty (φρένεϛ δυσπαραίτητοϛ, ἀχίχητοϛ).27 Moreover, he possesses the power to accomplish what he wills. Because his purpose supposedly cannot be frustrated, Kratos can say that no one but Zeus is free () and Hermes can claim that “alas” is a word unknown to Zeus (). The only act of discretion for Prometheus in his condition, therefore, is to change and bend his mind to subjection (e.g., Hermes’ advice: τόλμησον, . . . τόλμησόν ποτε / πρὸϛ τὰϛ παρούσαϛ πημονὰϛ ὀρθῶϛ φρονεῖν). Against such a view of the deity stands Prometheus’s stubborn vision of the future. At their very first meeting, Prometheus startles the chorus by announcing that Zeus one day will enter into league and friendship (εἰϛ ἀρθμὸν . . . καὶ φιλότητα) with himself. However incredible it may sound in his listeners’ ears, Prometheus’s prediction gains clarity and cogency as

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the drama unfolds. The change in Zeus is predicated first upon political expediency: he has need (χρείαν) of Prometheus’s secret knowledge in order to ward off a disastrous marriage that will lead to his overthrow (–, –, –). More important than that advantage, however, is the possibility of moral transformation that Prometheus gradually but unmistakably links to the suffering likely to be encountered by Zeus. The softening and smoothing of his anger (ἀτέραμνον στορέσαϛ ὀργὴν) is a result of being crushed (ῥαισθῇ—literally, pounded with a hammer) by adversity. Repeatedly, Prometheus promises that Zeus will be stripped of his sovereignty (, , –, –, , –), and having fallen on his evil day, Zeus will learn the difference between being a ruler and being a slave (πταίσαϛ δὲ τῷδε πρὸϛ κακῳ` μαθήσεται / ὅσον τὸ τ’ἄρχειν καὶ τὸ δουλεύειν δίχα, –). Although Prometheus does not reveal exactly how the marriage will prove fatal to Zeus, there are intimations that when it comes, it will be the complete fulfillment of a father’s parting curse (πατρὸϛ δ’ ἀρὰ / Κρόνου τότ’ ἤδη παντελῶϛ κρανθήσεται, / ἣν ἐκπίτνων ἠρᾶτο δηναιῶν θρόνων, –). In other words, Zeus must atone for the guilt of his sire’s overthrow, and his destiny thus involves the question of how to undo a crime that entangles the generations (–).28 When such major thematic affinities with the Oresteia are considered, is it too improbable to see as part of the play’s final objective the education of Zeus? To Hermes’ boastful assertion that “alas” is unknown to Zeus, Prometheus can pointedly reply that time ever growing teaches all (ἐκδιδάσκει πάνθ’ ὁ γηράσκων χρόνοϛ, ), for in the Aeschylean order of things, he who decrees that wisdom shall come from suffering (Agamemnon) must surely learn the lesson himself.29

the rebellious god and the lover of man If Zeus undergoes profound transformation under the deft artistry of Aeschylus’s pen, this is no less true of Prometheus. Originally “a local fire god, patron of certain trades,” he was one among the several “phallic demons.”30 In the poet’s creation, however, Prometheus becomes someone dark and great, and his struggle with Zeus expands from the petty squabbles of theomachia into a conflict of cosmic magnitude. To appreciate fully the scope of the drama we must take a final look at the significance of Prometheus as a dramatic character. The most obvious peculiarity of Prometheus in the play is the fact that he is a god, a theos. Indeed, what is conspicuously unusual about the

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play—that all its personae are nonhuman—has received frequent notice. However, what sets Prometheus apart is not his divine status as such, but the effect that the attribute of immortality has on his person and his experience. Because he is virtually indestructible, Prometheus in fact can ask at one point: Why should I fear, I whose destiny is not to die (τὶ δ’ ἄν φοβοίμην ᾦ θανεῖν οὖ μόρσιμον, )? The immediate purpose of this question, assuredly, is to remind an alarmed chorus that his own being is immune to the ultimate threat of Zeus. Yet within the larger dramatic context, Prometheus’s seemingly audacious words have a noteworthy ramification, for his immunity also renders inappropriate and irrelevant the kind of maxim so often dispensed in Greek dramas to their human heroes—that the mortal must be mortal-minded (ὄνταϛ δε θνητοὺϛ θνητà καὶ φρονεῖν χρεών). Such respectful regard for one’s mortality, long held to be an attitude essential to the attainment of prudence or self-control, 31 is hardly to be possessed by someone like Prometheus. The recognition of this extraordinary feature in the Titan further modifies our understanding of his tragedy, for the fact that he is immortal also enlarges immeasurably his suffering. What may be misconstrued as an egocentric tendency to self-pity in his soliloquy See with what kind of torture worn down I shall wrestle ten thousand years of time— such is the bond of despite that the Prince has devised against me, the new Prince of the Blessed Ones. O woe is me! I groan for the present sorrow, I groan for the sorrow to come, I groan questioning when there shall come a time when He shall ordain a limit to my sufferings . . .

actually points up the almost impenetrable paradox of an infinite being subjected to the agonies of time. What Prometheus is ever conscious of is the present moment of pain that, insofar as he is immortal, has no prospect of termination by death or destruction. That this plight of his receives recurrent emphasis is perhaps Aeschylus’s way of indicating to us that his hero is extraordinary, that some of the expectations normally held for the human protagonist must be waived. Despite those characteristics of him that boggle the imagination, however, Prometheus makes his strongest impact and appeal not because he

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is endowed with superhuman qualities, but because he has identified himself with the cause of mankind. Throughout the play, Prometheus is shown to have a far more intimate relation with man than with the gods. 32 He is, in the words of Kratos, a god utterly hateful to the gods (τὸν θεοῖϛ ἔχθίστον . . . θεόν) for being the champion of man. This characterization of Prometheus reveals that not only Aeschylus’s theology but also his anthropology depart from Hesiod. In the Theogony, Prometheus is, most of all, a trickster; he is called crafty and full of various wiles (ποικίλον αἰολόμητιν), the expert in the art of deception (δολίηϛ τέχνηϛ). The contest with Zeus stresses Prometheus’s devious intent to deceive as well as Zeus’s ability to avert his treachery. Man in such a situation is hardly more than a pawn in the midst of a duel of Olympian wits. In Aeschylus, however, there is far less emphasis on Prometheus’s cunning, for the entire weight has now been shifted to the portrayal of the Titan as a lover of man. To be sure, Prometheus’s motive is variously interpreted, and in the eyes of his opponents, this inordinate passion is a sure sign of his hubris (); but Prometheus’s movingly eloquent description of precivilized humanity (note the phrase βλέποντεϛ ἔβλεπον μάτην, / κλύοντεϛ οὐκ ἤκουον, which, curiously, has parallels in both the Old and New Testaments) lends substance to his claim of genuine affection for mankind. In this fashion, Prometheus differs again from most other Greek tragic heroes, who, at least according to much traditional interpretation, are doomed because of their hubris or not thinking mortal thoughts. On the other hand, Prometheus offends the gods and suffers for exactly the opposite reason—an excessive regard for man. Furthermore, the note constantly sounded in Prometheus’s depiction of the human situation does not dwell on man’s achievement in the arts and sciences. His lengthy speeches are, rather, documentations of man’s “weakness and nothingness, his absolute insignificance.” 33 What the poet has done in the play is to sharpen the characteristic tragic distinction drawn by the Greeks between divinity and humanity, the latter being at once δειλοὶ βροτοὶ and δεινόν in contrast to the blessed immortality of the gods.34 This accentuation of human wretchedness makes Prometheus’s love for man all the more noble and magnanimous, for he alone refuses to accept the orthodoxy of the gods that man deserves no more than contemptuous toleration because he is merely the creature of a day (ἐφήμεροϛ). That he should deign to help someone who, from a realistic point of view, does not seem to be worthy of his efforts and who certainly cannot come to assist him in his hour of defeat is an act that draws Prometheus still

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closer to the side of man and wins for him deeper sympathy and admiration from a human audience. Besides thwarting the murderous intent of Zeus, Prometheus’s kindness is concretely manifested in his gifts. Blind hopes, fire, and the various arts and sciences all contribute toward the improvement of the human condition. Before receiving them, man does everything without intelligent calculation (ἄτερ γνώμηϛ, ), but the revelation of fire, as Prometheus himself observes, is a means to great ends (μέγαϛ πόροϛ, ). Reversing his emphasis elsewhere that it is Zeus who “leads man upon the way to thought (φρόνημα),”35 Aeschylus makes Prometheus specifically responsible for endowing childlike humans with sense and reason (ὥς σφας νηπίουϛ ὄνταϛ τὸ πρὶν / ἔννουϛ ἔθηκα καὶ φρενῶν ἐπηβόλουϛ, –). The meaning of the phrase τυφλὰϛ ἐλπίδαϛ is somewhat enigmatic; but taken together with the sentence of Prometheus (“I caused mortals to cease foreseeing doom”) spoken immediately before it, blind hopes may signify that man is preserved in this world of suffering by a sense of motivation, although his aspiration will ultimately come to naught because of his mortality. 36 What Aeschylus seems to be saying here is that man can enjoy the other gifts of Prometheus—fire and the arts—and thereby rise above his dreamlike state of existence () only through a delusion granted by Prometheus paradoxically as a boon. Science and civilized life cannot be achieved by man unless he transcends the haunting sense of his own mortality. Read in this manner, the Aeschylean interpretation of human civilization and human destiny provides an interesting commentary on the Hebraic myth of the fall of man with which it has often been compared. Whereas man in the Genesis story is doomed to die on account of his acquisition of knowledge and his aspiration to be like Yahweh himself, Aeschylus seems to imply that man cannot lead a specifically human life, in the sense of being an inventive maker of culture and an intelligent controller of natural forces, unless he deliberately defies his own ontological limitation. Whether these two views are representative of Hebraic “pessimism” and Greek “optimism” about man is too controversial and complicated a subject to be taken up here. What is germane to our discussion is that this kind of human action inevitably threatens the divine powers, thus provoking, in both strands of religious mythology, the hostility of the deity. A study of Prometheus’s “humanity” must therefore conclude with some appraisal of the meaning of his rebellion. Prometheus has been punished not only because he has stolen fire from heaven and given it to man on earth, but because, in doing so, he has remained unrepentant and defiant to the end. His action is thus usually taken

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to mean that he has overstepped his boundary and transgressed his limit by being a rebel of the gods. His person and his deeds engender the crisis in the Olympian hierarchy. Although his punishment is unjust and overly severe, even the most sympathetic critic today is not inclined to adjudge Prometheus wholly innocent.37 And on the surface of the matter, it is relatively easy to quote a poet like Pindar or Aeschylus himself to maintain that Prometheus, when weighed by the norms of accepted Greek morality, will be found guilty of certain excesses. 38 In sum, he has violated the classic maxim of μηδὲν ἄγαν in thought and in speech. Yet going deeper into the implication of this kind of reasoning, one begins to wonder whether the golden rule of moderation in all things can be an appropriate canon for measuring the hero’s conduct in the play. Those who apply this criterion seldom seem prepared to risk such questioning as: What kind of alternative is really open to Prometheus? Should he beg for Zeus’s pardon? Should he comply with Hermes’ command and reveal the secret? Should he cease from his vociferous complaining about his pain? The answers to these questions should be self-evident, for the drama is built irreversibly on the premise that the hero’s action cannot be anything but in accordance with “probability and necessity.” This is not to engage in any special pleading for Aristotelian principles so much as simply to acknowledge the truth of the dramatic situation. For, what is it to speak of probability but to indicate a narrowing of choices, and of necessity but to denote an absence of alternatives? In the drama itself, it is quite clear that Prometheus has little choice but to resist Zeus. Of course, the impious defiance of the gods can have its dire consequence, and the poet makes that point with no uncertainty in a play like The Persians; but the Zeus of Prometheus Bound is a god in whom there is more to blame than to praise. “In a single word,” says Prometheus to Hermes, “I am the enemy of all the gods that gave me ill for good.” To prostrate himself in submission will mean only the further perpetuation of an unjust condition as well as the violation of his own integrity. On the other hand, to suffer evil from one’s enemy, as he tells Hermes, is surely no disgrace (πάσχειν δὲ κακῶϛ / ἐχθρὸν ὑπ’ ἐχθρῶν οὐδὲν ἀεικέϛ, – .) In that sense, his suffering in fact is the least tragic because it has the simplest of explanations. That which wants explanation, and even justification, is the savage manifestation of what Paul Ricoeur has called the “hostile transcendence” against which Prometheus cannot hope to prevail in open warfare nor to which he can yield in abject submission. Thus, to read the play as I have attempted to do, and to interpret his words as constitutive of his action, is to recognize the fact that Aeschylus has

new gods and old order 47

developed his hero with consistency (τὸ ὁμαλόν). Like many other tragic protagonists, Prometheus is placed in a situation in which the circumstances— indeed, the structures and institutions of the cosmos—are strangely at odds with his personal being. To affirm himself, his dignity as a god and his regard for humanity, he must speak as he has done, even though his action may prove to be finally self-defeating if not self-destructive. If such an understanding of the play is not far off the mark, does it mean that Prometheus is a martyr? A writer like Simone Weil has indeed thought of Prometheus’s love for man and his passion as a kind of prefiguration of the Christian Christ.39 With a different accent, Albert Camus also has discovered in the Titan “a touching and noble image of the Rebel and . . . the most perfect myth of the intelligence in revolt.”40 Lest we should be tempted to treat the play as merely a glorification of romantic titanism, however, we must take note of its ambiguity in the way the poet seeks to transcend the purely tragic condition of the hero. With the hope of future change, the finality of the protagonist’s doom is at least partially mitigated. Already the prophecy concerning Io’s restoration hints at a change in Zeus by referring to the touch of his harmless hand (ἀταρβεῖ χειρί). In the prediction of his own release, Prometheus mentions not only the abatement of Zeus’s anger, but also union and friendship, a state of affairs that must presuppose some reciprocity of goodwill. How this will come about is unfortunately lost to us. What is usually taken to be Prometheus’s address to Heracles, his deliverer, preserved in the fragments (ἐχθροῦ πατρόϛ μοι τοῦτο φίλατατον τέκνον) certainly does not amount to the grandiloquent concession of Shelley’s “I hate no more. . . . The curse / Once breathed on thee I would recall.” Yet this and other tantalizing glimpses of what is to come do hold out to the audience a thread of expectancy for moving beyond the disaster of the final scene when the next play of the trilogy begins. Such courageous longing for a better future is the essence of the play’s tragic theology, for the undaunted defiance against the necessary order of time is the measure of both the audaciousness of Prometheus’s aspiration and the grandeur of his hope. In the words of one Christian theologian: The hope for the future, in which God is God and a new creation his dwelling place, the expectation of that home of identity in which man is at one with God, nature and himself, radically anew confronts the unfulfilled present with the theodicy question. Where freedom has come near, the chains begin to hurt. Where life is close, death becomes deadly. Where God proclaims his presence, the god-forsakenness of the world turns into suffering. Thus the theodicy question, born of suffering and pain, negatively mirrors

48 new gods and old order

the positive hope for God’s future. We begin to suffer from the conditions of our world, if we begin to love the world. And we begin to love the world, if we are able to discover hope for it. And we discover hope for this world, if we hear the promise of a future which stands against frustration, transiency and death.41

In Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus is very much interested indeed in confronting “the unfulfilled present with the theodicy question,” but in place of promising the eschaton of a new earth and a new heaven, he offers perhaps a more daring vision of a new humanity and a new God.

notes 1. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet from the 2nd German ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1939–1944), 1:266. 2. H. J. Rose denies the existence of any trilogy (A Commentary on the Surviving Plays of Aeschylus [Amsterdam: N. V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1957– 1958], 1:9–10). Gilbert Norwood takes the traditional view that Prometheus Bound is the second play (Greek Tragedy [New York: Hill & Wang, 1960], p. 93), but George Thomson seems to me to have given the most convincing arguments for considering Prometheus, The Firebearer the last play (The Prometheus Bound [Cambridge: The University Press, 1932], pp. 32–38). 3. D. W. Lucas, The Greek Tragic Poets (Aberdeen, Scot.: The University Press, 1950), p. 62. J. B. Bury contends that the Grundgedanke of the Aeschylean trilogy often has to do with three moments of a moral doctrine: (1) an ἔργμα (crime) has been committed, for which (2) the transgressor must endure πάθοϛ (suffering), out of which (3) a learning experience (μάθοϛ) is attained (“Notes on (I), The Trilogy and (II), Certain Formal Articles of Aeschylus,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 6 [1885]: 167–175). Thus, in the Oresteia, “the Agamemnon contains the ἔργμα , the Choephoroi contains the πάθοϛ, the Eumenides the μάθοϛ.” The problem with Bury’s thesis is that it works well for the Oresteia but not for the Prometheia. From what we know of the surviving fragments, the Firebearer will almost have to be the first play if his theory is adopted. For a more recent attempt at reconstruction based on the theme of the four elements and parallels in Aristophanes’ the Birds, see C. J. Herington, “A Study in the Prometheia,” parts 1, 2, Phoenix 17 (1963):180–197, 236–243. 4. Thomson, Prometheus Bound, p. 4. 5. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, “Zeus in Aeschylus,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 76 (1956): 55–67. 6. H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1939), p. 54. 7. Lewis Campbell, Tragic Drama in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare (London: Smith, Elder, 1904), p. 138; B. H. Fowler, “Imagery of the Prometheus Bound,” American Journal of Philology 78 (1957): 175; Kitto, Greek Tragedy, p. 33; Lucas, Greek Tragic Poets, pp. 113–114. David Grene argues that “the most striking difference, formally, between the Aeschylean drama and dramas subject to the Aristotelian criticism centers in their treatment of probability” (Three Greek Tragedies in Translation [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942], p. 21). The difference lies in the fact that dramas “subject to the Aristotelian criticism” have an internal and auto-

new gods and old order 49

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

telic view of probability; incidents and characters are to be manipulated “in terms of the play itself.” Aeschylean dramas, on the other hand, draw their probability “from the community of man’s experience” (pp. 22–23); so that what was a familiar mythological story of the “Zeus-lygdamis versus Prometheus-rebel struggle” is transformed by the poet into a high tragedy having multiple levels of symbolic significance. Prometheus is at once the symbol of the rebel against the tyrant, of Knowledge against brute Force, of the champion of man against man’s persecutor, and of Man in opposition to God. Though in substantial agreement with Professor Grene, I would maintain that the rich overlay of symbolic meanings in the Prometheus Bound is not painted at the expense of structural beauty and symmetry, aspects of the drama that I hope to bring out in my own analysis. For further discussion of the Aeschylean symbolic dramas, see F. M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus (London: Edward Arnold, 1907), pp. 140–149; and, more recently, E. A. Havelock, The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951), pp. 3–112. For example, there is no better evidence of Zeus’s cruelty than the appearance of Io, and her entrance is all the more startling and shocking because it comes when the unbelief and skepticism of the chorus is at its height (526–560). Io’s arrival cannot be earlier, for Prometheus’s suffering must first have our undivided attention. It is only when he has rejected the seemingly good-natured intercession of Oceanus, which leads the chorus to berate him for his lack of reverence and for his stubbornness, that Io’s entrance achieves its stunning impact. The Greek text is that edited by Gilbert Murray (Aeschylus: Works, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955]). Most of the translations in the course of the discussion are my own, but those in formal quotations are by David Grene (Three Greek Tragedies). H. J. Rose thinks that hamartias must indicate “error” and not “sin” in a document of this date (Commentary, p. 247). That may well be the case, but I fail to see how Hermes’ accusation later in 945 could only have the meaning of an intellectual mistake. Louise E. Matthaei, Studies in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: The University Press, 1918), p. 16. A convenient summary of the various functions of the chorus may be found in Grene, Three Greek Tragedies, pp. 5–10. Herbert W. Smyth, Aeschylean Tragedy, Sather Classical Lectures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1924), pp. 107–109. E. E. Sikes and J. B. W. Willson, The Prometheus Vinctus of Aeschylus (London: Macmillan, 1898), p. xxvi; W. C. Greene, Moira: Fate, Good, and Evil in Greek Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1944), p. 121. For a comprehensive study of the “word-deed” antithesis in Greek drama, see Gino Salciccia Di Raimondo, “Word and Deed in Greek Tragedy” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1958). This is how Lloyd-Jones translates the epithet teleios (“Zeus in Aeschylus,” p. 59). Ibid., p. 57. On Zeus himself as suppliant, see Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 86, 275–276. Cf. Odyssey, IX, 270–271: Ζεὺϛ δ᾿ ἐπιτιμήτωρ ὶκετάωυ τε ξείνων τε ξείνοϛ, δϛ ξείνοισιν ἄμ᾿ αἰδοίοισιν ὀπηδεῖ. XIII, 213–14: Ζεύϛ σφεαϛ τίσαιτο ἱκετήσιοϛ, ὅϛ τε καὶ ἄλλουϛ ἀνθρώπουϛ ἐφορᾷ καὶ τίνυται ὄϛ τιϛ ἁμάρτῃ XIV, 57: πρὸϛ γὰρ Διόϛ εἰσιν ἄπαντεϛ / ξεῖνοί Anthony J. Podlecki, The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 101–122.

50 new gods and old order 18

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

L. R. Farnell, “The Paradox of Prometheus Vinctus,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 53 (1933): 40–50; W. J. F. Knight, “Zeus in the Prometheia,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 58 (1938): 51. Otto Stählin and Wilhelm Schmid, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur, Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, 6th ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck’sche, 1912– 1924), 1:296. For defenses of its authenticity, see Thomson, Prometheus Bound, pp. 38–46; C. J. Herington, The Author of The Prometheus Bound (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970). Leon Golden, “Zeus the Protector and Zeus the Destroyer,” Classical Philology 57 (1962): 20–26. Leon Golden, In Praise of Prometheus: Humanism and Rationalism in Aeschylean Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), pp. 111, 125. Podlecki, Political Background, pp. 107–109. Friedrich Solmsen, Hesiod and Aeschylus, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 30 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1949), pp. 152–153; see also O. J. Todd, “The Character of Zeus in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound,” Classical Quarterly 19 (1925): 67. Solon 1.32, Artabanus 7.10. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), pp. 29–31. Ibid., pp. 31–32. This defect in Zeus may be best discerned if it is contrasted with the scene in book 9 of the Iliad. There, it is on the basis that the immortals themselves are not impervious to entreaty and supplication and that the spirits of prayer are the daughters of Zeus that the aged Phoenix begs Achilles to beat down his great wrath (9.495ff.). J. A. K. Thomson thinks that Zeus will eventually release Kronos and the Titans, and he quotes Pindar (Pyth. iv.518) to that effect (“The Religious Background of the Prometheus Vinctus,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 31 [1920]: 34). See also Solmsen’s lengthy discussion of this problem (Hesiod and Aeschylus, pp. 155–177); E. T. Owen, The Harmony of Aeschylus (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1952), p. 61; G. Glotz, La solidarité de la famille dans le droit criminel en Grèce (Paris: Fontemoing, 1904), pp. 08–413. A comprehensive study of this theme in the Oresteia can be found in Richard Kuhns, The House, the City and the Judge: The Growth of Moral Awareness in the Oresteia (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). Louis Séchan, Le mythe de Prométhée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), pp. 56–58. Gilbert Murray, Aeschylus, the Creator of Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), p. 20. Karl Reinhardt has the interesting argument that Prometheus attains the full stature of a Titan only in Aeschylus (Aischylos als Regisseur und Theologe [Bern: Francke, 1949], pp. 27–41). Helen North, Sophrosyne: Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 35 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966). Sikes and Willson, Prometheus Vinctus, p. xxvi; Jaeger, Paideia, p. 261; Havelock, Crucifixion, pp. 48–53. Solmsen, Hesiod and Aeschylus, p. 144. The difference between humanity and divinity is put this way by Karl Kerényi: “Die Verwundbarkeit gehört danach ebenso zu den Eigenschaften der Götter, wie sie für die menschliche Existensweise charakteristisch ist. Der Unterschied der beiden

new gods and old order 51

35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

Pole—der Sterblichkeit, in der der Mensch umfangen steht, unter der Unsterblichkeit, die jene umfängt—ist ungeheuer. Ein Gott kann verwunden und ist verwundbar, heilend und heilbar: der Mensch verwundend und verwundbar, als Arzt heilend und als Verwundeter wohl auch heilbar, doch als Mensch unheilbar” (Prometheus: Die menschliche Existens in griechischer Deutung [Zurich: Rhein, 1946], pp. 35–36). Perhaps the difference may be most keenly felt in the pathos of a single line in the Odyssey. Contrasting his own wife with the queen, Kalypso, Odysseus confesses to the goddess: ἡ μὲν γὰρ βροτόϛ ἐστι, σὺ δ᾿ ἀθάνατοϛ καὶ ἀγήρωϛ (5.218). Solmsen, Hesiod and Aeschylus, p. 136. Zygmunt Adamczewski, The Tragic Protest (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), p. 35. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 224; John H. Finley Jr., Pindar and Aeschylus, Martin Classical Lectures 14 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 226–233; Adamczewski, Tragic Protest, pp. 37–38. For Pindar, see the saying contained in fragment 235: Σοφοὶ δὲ καὶ τὸ μηδὲν ἄγαν ἔποϛ αὶνήσαν περισσῶϛ; and for Aeschylus, the Eumenides 529: παντὶ μέσῳ τὸ κράτοϛ θεὸϛ ὤπασεν, ἄλλ᾿, ἄλλᾳ δ᾿ / ἐφορεύει. Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks, trans. E. C. Geissbuhler (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), pp. 60–73. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 26. Jürgen Moltmann, “Resurrection as Hope,” Harvard Theological Review 61 (1968): 146–147.

3 LIFE IN THE GARDEN freedom and the image of god in paradise lost In memoriam George Williamson

I

i

n his particular effort to justify the ways of God to man, Milton knows full well that it is not sufficient merely to demonstrate the proper origin of evil, though a satisfactory treatment of the subject that has so exercised some of the best minds throughout Christian history is itself no mean or easy accomplishment. In order to magnify the seriousness of the Fall and its terrible consequences, Milton, like most Christian apologists since Ambrose, realizes the value of emphasizing the original perfection of the first couple. Though Milton chooses to use the theme of the Fortunate Fall later in his epic as one of his apologetic devices, the argument by Lovejoy and others that felix culpa has been elevated to a cardinal operative principle in the poem is less than convincing.1 As one critic has remarked, “It is one thing to say that Adam is, as a result of the Atonement, better off than he was in Paradise, but something altogether different to suggest that he is better off than he would have been if he had stayed obedient.”2 Part of Milton’s strategy, therefore, must be a persuasive presentation of how genuinely attractive life can be and what promises it holds before Adam and Eve commit their fatal transgression. The success of the poet’s self-appointed task thus turns on his understanding and portrayal of primal perfection. This consideration in turn imposes certain restrictions on what Milton can do with his subject. He cannot, for example, make use of what N. P. Williams has called “the minimal interpretation” of the Fall advocated by a number of patristic writers—including Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria—and regard the first couple as childlike, imperfect creatures and their offense as a sort of

life in the garden 53

péché d’enfant.3 Nor would he be able to subscribe to a modern view that the first chapters of Genesis are a story about “the perfect form of manhood waiting for the introjection of personality,”4 since Milton has little doubt about the historicity and genuine humanity of Adam and Eve. Although they are the head of the race and are expected to embody certain universal traits of humankind, Adam and Eve are no abstract archetypes. The Fall does not “humanize” them, as another interpretation would have it. It is by no means “the liberation of man from the beneficent determinism of Jehovah, and the birth—accompanied, indeed, by the throes of sin and suffering—of his capacity for true ‘liberty.’”5 To provide the proper and most effective doctrinal underpinning for his depiction of the first couple and their noble condition Milton has no better or more convenient means than the scriptural declaration that man was made in the image of God, an assertion that has served as the foundation of countless treatises on human excellence and dignity by Christian theologians and humanists alike through the centuries.6 It is only natural that this theme is prominently heard the moment the first couple come into view in the poem:7 Two of far nobler shape erect and tall, Godlike erect, with native Honour clad In naked Majestie seemd Lords of all, And worthie seemd, for in thir looks Divine The image of thir glorious Maker shon, Truth, Wisdome, Sanctitude severe and pure, Severe, but in true filial freedom plac’t; Whence true autoritie in men; though both Not equal, as thir sex not equal seemd; For contemplation hee and valour formed, For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace, Hee for God only, shee for God in him. (.–)

It is well known that the complex of ideas with which Milton explicates the meaning of the imago closely parallels opinions he has expressed elsewhere in his prose works, particularly the Tetrachordon (), one of the four divorce tracts, which contains his lengthiest comment on the subject. Those opinions in turn echo various motifs developed throughout an extensive tradition of the theology of the image. There is the Christian appropriation of Ovid’s emphasis on the human erecta statura, and there

5 4 life in the garden

is the affirmation of the dominium terrae, the lordship over nature and other creatures, as part of the original endowment linked with the image. Following the essential drift of Reformed theology, Milton rejects the distinction between “image” and “likeness” (Heb. tselem and demuth; Sept. eikona kai homoioosin; Vulg. imaginem et similitudinem). In scholastic theology, the former word since Irenaeus has come to signify the anima rationalis in man’s nature, while the latter refers to the donum superadditum supernaturale that is lost with the fall of man. In this view, Adam’s fall is in effect a fall from a state of supernature to nature, and the sense of original sin may be said to be weakened, since Adam’s apostasy is viewed as a defectus from supernature rather than a depravatio of his essential human nature. Milton, however, describes the imago dei in the Tetrachordon as “Wisdom, Purity, Justice, and rule over all creatures,”8 and in De Doctrina Christiana as “natural wisdom, holiness, and righteousness.”9 Although the poet firmly subscribes to Pauline notions of long standing in Christian theology ( Cor. :–) by arguing that “the woman is not primarily and immediately the image of God, but in reference to the man,”10 he is also in accord with the Reformed view that the woman is in all respects the equal of man insofar as the image is understood in terms of original righteousness.11 In addition to these traditional elements in his conception of the image, Milton, I would like to argue, brings his own distinctive contribution. It is significant that in the poetic passage quoted above, the noble character of the imago is said to be placed “in true filial freedom.” In introducing this characteristic and all-important word, freedom, Milton alerts us to the direction the poetic enactment of the meaning of the image will take.12 According to the poet, Adam is created “sufficient to have stood though free to fall” (.). Primal freedom of unfallen man thus must mean first of all the freedom to obey, the posse non peccare of Augustine, for it is only on this basis that Milton can argue that Adam’s sin is not only a sin against God, but one also against his own better self. The power of contrary choice, however, does not wholly define the significance of “true filial freedom.” From Milton’s own prolonged ruminations on the meaning of marriage no doubt has come the passionate insistence on man’s liberty and its expression as the capacity for “fellowship” (Milton’s word) with other personal beings, human or divine. Freedom in this sense means the freedom for another, to use contemporary theological language, and it is dramatized in the poetic action as Adam and Eve’s growing sense of their selfhood and their propensity for the “divinehuman encounter.” Such a treatment of the imago, as I hope to show, reflects both Milton’s development of traditional image theology, which to

life in the garden 55

a great extent stresses the intellectual prowess of man, and the poet’s anticipation—to an extraordinary degree—of certain strands of modern Protestant thought.

ii C. S. Lewis said that Adam and Eve “were never young, never immature or undeveloped. They were created full-grown and perfect.”13 But the truth of the matter is that Adam’s maturity is unlike that of any other full-grown human being. He is unique because his entrance into the world is abrupt and sudden, a result of the divine fiat of creation. When Adam recalls and recounts his first moment of consciousness to the angel Raphael (.–), his words reveal that the kind of maturity he possesses is one that allows the full use of his senses and intellect, but not one that comes from the experience of living. He is a man who has been created in time but he is completely devoid of any sense of the self as a participant in time and history (“For Man to tell how human Life began / Is hard; for who himself beginning knew?”). He acquires that sense of the self only when he begins a series of experiences in life, moving “from the spontaneous instinctual into the conscious.”14 And much of the beauty and drama in Adam’s narrative consists precisely in its enacting for us that process of self-realization. The Genesis account of creation does not tell of Adam’s behavior when he was newly created. The first chapters give but the barest information on the psychology of the human couple. They are totally inadequate when it comes to the question naturally asked by any reader: why did Adam and Eve respond to temptation and fall into sin if they had been created in the image of God and, presumably, were perfect, and why did the period of Edenic innocence seem to be so brief in the biblical record? Saint Augustine, for one, thought that the first couple stood for only six hours!15 In order to answer these questions, Milton realizes that the transition from innocence to culpability in the human protagonists must be properly motivated and carefully prepared for in the epic action. He must show us not only the external agent of evil in the figure of Satan, but also the internal disposition of Adam and Eve that would help explain, if not completely in a satisfactory manner, at least in great part why they would fall. Adam’s conversation with Raphael in books –, which by its sheer length creates the illusion of time passing, functions to soften the transitoriness of Paradise. In the words of George Williamson, the epic action thus has to be “suspended both for the education of Adam and for the preparation

56 life in the garden

of the audience. While the didactic purpose is being served, dramatic tension is developed by our growing insight into Adam and Eve.”16 In that very process Adam and Eve are also shown to be exploiting those faculties with which they were originally endowed in creation—including memory, will, and intellect—and which have long been regarded as the elements that make up the image of God in man. In the recollection set down in book , Adam’s developing selfhood is progressively made more apparent, from his first awareness and experimentation with his physical attributes, through the discovery of voice and speech, to the deliberate exercise of his rational faculties (“On a green shadie Bank profuse of Flours / Pensive I sate mee down”). Concurrent with this development comes the more profound questioning of his own existence (“who I was, or from what cause, / Knew not”), which, as the late Charles Coffin observed, “signifies Adam’s sense of the mystery of his being, wherein the moment of the awakening of the self is crossed by a feeling of its limitation. Here is the self’s complex awareness that being implies the Other than itself as a condition of existence and that its complete identity somehow requires at least the acknowledgement of the fact.”17 It is in such questioning, too, that Adam’s sensus divinitatis begins to grow, for the survey of nature and of his own person brings to himself both the sense of his limitation and illumination. Adam very quickly perceives that he is not self-generated, but he further infers, and correctly, the cause of his own origin (“Not of myself; by some great Maker then, / In goodness and in power preeminent”). In language that deliberately paraphrases Rom. :–,18 the locus classicus of Christian natural theology, the recitation of Adam dwells upon “his sense of connection with the Deity even before it is confirmed by revelation.”19 That connection, moreover, is not confined to the realm of the intellect, for it involves Adam’s entire person. With a specific allusion to Paul’s sermon on Mars’ Hill (Acts :), Adam’s entreaty to Nature shows how his whole being seems to have been impelled toward an encounter with the divine (“Tell me, how may I know him, how adore, / From whom I have that thus I move and live, / And feel that I am happier than I know”). It is only appropriate, therefore, that God, who came to Adam first indirectly as a “shape Divine” in his dream and then directly as a “presence,” should calm the inquietum cor of the human creature by revealing himself as “Whom thou soughtest.” Adam’s meeting with the deity, furthermore, arouses “the awareness of his separate existence, felt as the loneliness of ‘unity defective,’ which

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prompts his desire for Eve.”20 In the biblical account, God is the one who makes the decisive observation: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him” (Gen. :). Milton’s epic rendering of this episode, however, puts the emphasis squarely on Adam’s consciousness of his solitary existence (“In solitude / What happiness, who can enjoy alone, / Or all enjoying, what contentment find?”). Though Adam does not yet know what a woman or marriage is, his protest to God identifies his basic need: Among unequals what societie Can sort, what harmonie or true delight? Which must be mutual, in proportion due Giv’n and receiv’d; but in disparitie The one intense, the other still remiss Cannot well suite with either, but soon prove Tedious alike: Of fellowship I speak Such as I seek, fit to participate All rational delight, wherein the brute Cannot be human consort. (.–)

The importance of this utterance of Adam lies not merely in the fact that it echoes vividly Milton’s own ideal on marriage; much more significantly, it sharpens his debate with the deity concerning the meaning of self-fulfillment, which is directly germane to Milton’s formulation of the doctrine of the image. That formulation carries with it an implied but forceful critique of such prior conceptions of the imago in Christian theology as Augustine’s and Aquinas’s, which emphasize Adam’s intellectual powers. In response to Adam’s complaint of solitude, God first advises him to seek solace among the animal kingdom (“With these / Find pastime, and beare rule; thy Realm is large”). Though Milton avoids portraying Adam as a full-blown philosopher of nature endowed with extravagant learning and wisdom, as many seventeenth-century writers did, 21 the first man in the epic is still referred to as a “better Archimedes,” one who has been suddenly “endu’d” with large knowledge of the “Nature,” “wayes,” and even “language” of the creaturely world. When Adam rejects the companionship of animals on the ground that reciprocity is impossible among unequals, God tests him further by inviting him to reflect on the solitary “State” of his Creator. Would not the deity

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be the being most miserable if Adam’s logic holds? The divine provocation, of course, elicits the most passionate response from his creature: Thou in thy self art perfect, and in thee Is no deficience found; not so is Man, But in degree, the cause of his desire By conversation with his like to help, Or solace his defects. No need that thou Shouldst propagat, already infinite; And through all numbers absolute, though One; But Man by number is to manifest His single imperfection, and beget Like of his like, his Image multipli’d, In unitie defective, which requires Collateral love, and deerest amitie. Thou in thy secresie although alone, Best with thy self accompanied, seek’st not Social communication, yet so pleas’d Canst raise thy Creature to what highth thou wilt Of union or Communion, deifi’d; I by conversing cannot these erect From prone, nor in thir wayes complacence find. (.–)

Although the reference to propagation may leave the poet open to the charge of anachronism since the first man has yet to be given the order to “be fruitful and multiply,” albeit that command may also have been implied in God’s announcement of his gift (“all the Earth / To thee and to thy Race I give; as Lords / Possess it”), Adam’s words make clear the crucial difference between the life of divine self-sufficiency and his own. They underscore the paradox central to the Christian affirmation that man who bears the image of God must also live by the realization that he is not like God. If Adam’s delineation of the divine nature at this point reveals demonstrable affinity with Aristotelian notions of simplicity and unity, the description of his own existence indicates also a distinct departure, on the part of Milton himself, from traditional ideas about the image. In Augustine’s De trinitate, for example, the vindication of God’s triune character is based on the fundamental premise that God is self-conscious mind, which in its very act of self-contemplation understands itself to be the object of that contemplation. Thence comes the asseveration that there are three

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modes of a single mind—the perceiving subject, the subject perceived as its own object, and the act of this perception—each distinct from the other, but each also constitutive of the one self-conscious spirit. Man is said to be an “inadequate image” (impari imagine) of heavenly things (supernis), but nonetheless his interior life can be shown to be a direct analogue to this divine reality.22 It is on such a basis that Augustine seeks to argue (De trinitate –) for a kind of trinity structured in the human person—first in the inner reality of mind, the knowledge wherewith it knows itself, and the love wherewith it loves both itself and its own knowledge (mens, notitia sui, amor sui), and further in the mind of man as the faculties of memory, understanding, and will (memoria, intelligentia, voluntas). It should be noted, however, that this correspondence of the human person with the divine is established strictly on mind as a self-sufficient entity. Just as God in his eternity and solitude possesses within his own essence all the means and conditions of self-consciousness and, therefore, delights in his self-contemplation, so also the human subject attains its most conspicuous semblance of the divine when it reflects on the phenomenon that it both knows and loves itself. To be sure, Augustine goes on to say (De trinitate ..) that “this trinity of the mind, then, is not properly called the image of God because the mind remembers, understands, and loves itself, but only because it can also remember, understand, and love Him by whom the mind was made,”23 but the repeated assertions on the need for the mind to be under divine regulation in no way diminish the importance and priority of its being the unique locus of the image. Precisely because the mind embodies within itself the necessary structures to mirror the divine plenitude, Augustine sees little necessity in considering any aspects of human existence other than the solitary being of man as the bearer of that image. His effort, in fact, (..) to harmonize Gen. : with the Pauline declaration in  Cor. :– also betrays his bias: both woman and man can be regarded as the image of God insofar as they are considered to be the one substance of the human mind, but man alone is also the image fully and completely ( plena atque integra), whereas woman in her capacity as man’s helper is not.24 So central is mind to Augustine’s thinking that when he discusses regeneration later (..), he can say that mind is where the image of God is (ubi est imago Dei, id est mente). Milton, of course, does not disparage the rational faculties of the human mind, but some of his reservations about the doctrine of the Trinity may have led him to consider a different way of drawing the analogy between the human and the divine. “Loneliness,” writes Milton in the Tetrachordon, “is the first thing which God’s eye named not good,”25 and Adam’s oxy-

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moronic self-definition (unitie defective) echoes both the poet’s emphasis and the scriptural record of the deity’s pronouncement. Adam’s acknowledgment of his need for “Collateral love” similarly asserts that the affective life of the solitary self does not suffice. His is indeed a bold speech because it is an implicit critique of creation’s imperfection by the most pointed differentiation between the sociality of his nature and the aseity of God. God’s reply— Thus farr to try thee, Adam, I was pleas’d, And finde thee knowing not of Beasts alone, Which thou has rightly nam’d, but of thy self, Expressing well the spirit within thee free, My Image, not imparted to the Brute, Whose fellowship therefore unmeet for thee Good reason was thou freely shouldst dislike, And be so minded still; I, ere thou spak’st, Knew it not good for Man to be alone, And no such companie as then thou saw’st Intended thee, for trial onely brought, To see how thou could’st judge of fit and meet (.–)

is noteworthy for several reasons. It shows in the first place that Adam, by an appropriate use of his freedom, has passed successfully a test of reason and obedience that God has set for him. Recognition of this removes the mistaken notion that Adam later confronts his temptation completely untried and unprepared. Calvin has said that “God provided man’s soul with a mind, by which to distinguish good from evil, right from wrong; and with the light of reason as guide, to distinguish what should be followed from what should be avoided. . . . To this he joined the will, under whose control is choice. Man in his first condition excelled in these preeminent endowments, so that his reason, understanding, prudence, and judgment not only sufficed for the direction of his earthly life, but by them men mounted up even to God and eternal bliss.”26 Milton’s portrayal of Adam may be said to parallel Calvin’s thought in that Adam is shown to be more than capable of using his freedom to “judge of fit and meet.” Second, God’s reply accentuates the importance of man’s having the right knowledge of God and of the self (perhaps another Miltonic echo of the dialectic of twofold knowledge that runs through Calvin’s Institutes).

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Adam’s triumph at this point also provides an ironic commentary on his later failure, for when he falls into sin with Eve, the judgment of the Son of God is that Adam has not known himself aright (.). Third, God’s answer once more illustrates how divine foreknowledge does not abrogate human freedom. God may have already known that “it is not good for Man to be alone,” but Adam still has the responsibility to ascertain that he has the need for a “human consort” before he is rewarded with Eve. In the words of God, moreover, comes the revelation that God’s image and man’s “free spirit” are in fact synonymous. It is in the exercise of his freedom, elsewhere characterized by the poet as identical with reason (., .), that man most resembles his Creator. The kind of freedom that Adam enjoys does not exist in a solipsistic manner, for it finds its fullest expression only in relation to another personal being. Only another creature made in the image of God can provide the “fellowship” suitable for Adam, for only that kind of creature can fulfill the divine promise:27 What next I bring shall please thee, be assur’d, Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, Thy wish, exactly to thy hearts desire. (.–)

The implications of this dialogue between Adam and his maker are both astonishing and far-reaching, for it can be said that Milton here is on the verge of agreement with that position in modern Protestant theology that holds that solitary man does not exhaust the meaning of the imago dei. It is man in community, specifically in the form of the duality of the sexes, that genuine humanity can be realized and fulfilled. Already in his book of , Schöpfung und Fall, Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his theological interpretation of the Genesis story has rejected the analogy of being as an adequate way of conceiving human similitude to the divine. “In man,” says Bonhoeffer, “God creates his image on earth. This means that man is like the Creator in that he is free.” But “because freedom is not a quality which can be revealed” except in a “relationship between two persons,” the created freedom of man comes to expression only in the fact that creature is related to creature. Man is free for man, Male and female he created them. Man is not alone, he is in duality and it is in this dependence on the other that his creatureliness consists. . . . The ‘image . . . after our likeness’ is consequently not an analogia entis in which man, in

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his being per se and a se [an und für sich], is in the likeness of the being of God. . . . The likeness, the analogy of man to God, is not analogia entis but analogia relationis. This means that even the relation between man and God is not a part of man; it is not a capacity, a possibility, or a structure of his being but a given, set relationship: justitia passiva.28

Building on this insight of Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, in his massive dogmatics, further elaborates on this point. He, too, rejects the Thomistic analogia entis and the emphasis on the moral and intellectual attributes of man as a proper description of how the creature resembles the creator. Rather, he seizes on the sentence “He created them male and female” in his exegesis of Gen. : to show that this is precisely what “Godlikeness” is supposed to mean. Man in God’s image is first of all male and female, for in this relationship true confrontation and reciprocity take place as in the divine life. From this most fundamental relation also arises man’s other relation to his human neighbors in general. In his discussion of Gen. :–, the so-called second account of creation, Barth writes so much as if he were paraphrasing a part of book  of Paradise Lost that a lengthy quotation cannot be resisted: In order that he might discover his partner, his Thou, God first brings the animals to man. In so doing He asks him what he thinks of each of them, what he has to say to each of them, and finally what he will say when he sees them. In naming them he will express what they are to him; what impression they make on him; what he expects and hopes and fears of them. In this way—in execution of a well-considered plan of God—it is to be revealed that man cannot recognise any of the animals as belonging to him; that he cannot address any of them as Thou; that he cannot ascribe to any of them the nature of an I. It might almost be said that the completion of God’s creation is conditioned by the fact that man cannot do this; that though he can recognise in the animals objects which are near and lovable and useful, or perhaps strange or even ugly and terrifying, he cannot recognise his helpmeet; that here at the heart of the rest of creation there is a gap which must be filled if man is really to be man and not in some sense to be so only potentially, and in the presence of which, even though surrounded by the superabundance of the rest of creation, man would always be solitary, always in a vacuum and not among his equals.29

Very much in the spirit of the Miltonic Adam, who, having caught sight of Eve first in his dream (.), is moved to confess that he must find her

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“or forever to deplore / Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure,” is also this gloss of Barth on the sentence “this is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. :): “This,” this femininum, indeed this femina—for what distinguishes her from the beast is the fact that she is not only femininum but femina—supplies this need. “This” means the banishment of his want. It makes him what he could not be in his solitariness—a man completed by God . . . because man finds in her a lost part or member of his own body and being; because she is not strange to him but as familiar as he is himself; because he can partake of his lost part again only when he partakes of her; and because he can only fully partake of himself when he partakes of her. He is not himself without her, but only with her.30

iii The foregoing comparison of Barth with Milton is intended not so much to suggest that the Swiss theologian has been influenced by Paradise Lost or that Milton should be read as a theologian of twentieth-century neoorthodoxy, as to elucidate the relative originality in the poet’s theology and art. In spite of the amazing similarity of their thought and even of their language at certain points, the two men also differ quite markedly on the exegesis of Gen. :. Putting all the emphasis on the personal pronoun “him” in this verse as referring only to Adam and reinforcing his interpretation with an appeal to  Cor. , Milton takes the imago in man as “that indelible character of priority,”31 and this assertion of male headship and greater likeness to the divine is repeated in the epic both by the narrator (.–) and by Adam himself (.–). It is equally apparent, however, that Adamic headship or priority in the conjugal order for Milton is never to be construed as a license for the subjugation of the wife. Indeed, one of the remarkable features in the Miltonic depiction of Edenic life is precisely the extent to which the poet, in his invention of episodes, will go beyond his immediate biblical sources to demonstrate to his reader that the difference in original endowments no more implies the inequality of the sexes than the established hierarchy of creation will perforce lead to the violation of individuality and dignity. “Hee for God only, shee for God in him” (.) is Milton’s paraphrase of part of Paul’s discussion of the image in the New Testament.32 But the subordination of Eve to Adam in the epic, as criticism has increasingly pointed out, 33 is freely and lovingly given from the first moment when she

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consents to his solicitation (.–). Before her actual encounter with Adam, she was told—presumably by the deity—that she was Adam’s image (.), but she was neither commanded nor coerced into submission by that revelation. Her first reported conversation with Adam (.ff.) shows her awareness that she had been formed for him and from him, but this recognition in no way undercuts the fact that her yielding is a free, responsible act of self-giving. That she was created ex substantia homini and her voluntary response to Adam, in fact, have led some critics to see in her act an analogue to the Son’s subordination to the Father. 34 Whatever the poet’s intentions may have been on that point, it seems clear that Milton is eager to show us the development of Eve’s selfhood no less than that of Adam’s. Our perception of this poetic design may in turn alter our understanding of those peculiar episodes related to the prelapsarian Eve. The pool passage associated with her creation (.ff.) has long been regarded as an account of her nascent vanity and narcissism. To balance such a view that sees in her inclination only a dangerous harbinger of tragic things to come must be our realization that the poet is interested first of all in emphasizing certain crucial but complementary differences between male and female: Eve’s less precise consciousness of her identity (“What I was?” in contrast with Adam’s “Who I was?”), her greater affinity with sensible things and impressions, and her symbolic association with water and earth as opposed to Adam’s with sun and sky (.–). 35 The most important point about this episode, however, is that she, like Adam, must acquire the knowledge that her existence is incomplete without the presence of another self, though that process of her learning is characteristically different. Whereas Adam arrives at his conclusion by means of articulate conceptualization and rigorous debate, Eve discovers the fascination and frustration of her solitary being (“pin’d with vain desire”) through mute play with her watery image. She has to be told to distinguish between the self and not-self and led out of this confusion, yet even her encounter with Adam, planned and directed by God, is reported not without one of Milton’s more subtle ironies. Having just been assured that she will meet the person whose image she is and whom she will enjoy, she is panicked into flight by the sudden sight of someone “less faire, / Less winning soft, less amiablie milde” than her own reflection. Not merely a deliverance from self-absorption or a fulfillment of her longing to be connected with another self, her union with Adam is in truth the beginning of their education in the meaning of difference in likeness, of oneness despite diversity, in the marital life of man and woman. Her words to Adam—“thy gentle hand / Siesd mine, I yielded, and from that time see /

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How beauty is excelled by manly grace / And wisdom, which alone is truly fair”—betoken more than a generous compliment; they signal her movement away from instinctual reactions to surface, sense impressions and the formation of judgments based on reason and assimilated experience. This is Eve’s way of affirming what she finds “higher” in his society, what is for her “Attractive, human, rational,” and it is an all-important lesson that Adam has also been charged to learn in the course of the epic (.–). The meeting of Adam and Eve, which is God’s answer to the problem of their creaturely solitude, thus eventuates in the establishment of a relationship of love in freedom. The maintenance of that relationship, of course, depends on their proper regard for things temporal and spiritual, on their reason and passion “rightly tempered,” and on choices freely made but in accord with obedience and love. When we first encounter Adam and Eve in book , their attractive physique, in the lyrical celebration of which (–) the poet skillfully combines the themes of image theology with certain strands of the iconographic tradition, acts as the symbol and seal of human life in Paradise. 36 An even more engaging aspect is the vision of their love, which reflects their purity and innocence, the unsullied image of God that even Satan recognizes (.–) and which forms the most poignant contrast to the fallen visitor. Though there is no lack of a measure of rationality in hell (.), freedom and love are what satanic existence wholly wants. Much as his entrance into Paradise is an intrusion, so Satan’s envious insinuation of eventual demonic alliance with the human (“League with you I seek, / And mutual amitie so streight, so close, / That I with you must dwell, or you with me”) is also a parody of the insouciant intimacy between Adam and Eve. Theirs is a life of unconstrained reverence for their maker, of “choice / Unlimited of manifold delights” in nature, of spontaneous gratitude for and enjoyment of each other’s presence, and of a joyous sexuality. Though private and “sequester’d,” their lovemaking, not at all surreptitious or furtive, rebukes the “secret” and incestuous relation between Satan and Sin (.). As the prelapsarian Eve gladly acknowledges Adam’s authority (.–), a point enjoying common agreement among the biblical expositors, so Adam is shown to lend his wife the needed advice and support in both the episodes of her question about the stars (.–) and of her dream (.ff.). Consistent with the poet’s design to dramatize the growth and development of the human couple, the star episode dwells on their freedom to exercise their intellect as well as on the potential danger of such freedom.

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It is true that Eve’s query concerning the stars (“wherefore all night long shine these, for whom / This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes”) may, as Barbara Lewalski has remarked, involve “certain faulty assumptions—that not only the earth but the entire cosmos was made for man, and that it was made somewhat inexpertly.”37 Yet it must be remembered that Eve’s speculation in itself is no more culpable than Adam’s far more excessive rhapsodization of her beauty and his protest against her overendowment by Nature (.–). What these incidents remind us is that their developing intellects are not self-sufficient; both husband and wife stand in need of guidance and correction. In the episode of Eve’s dream, the modern reader may be particularly dissatisfied with the faulty psychology that underlies Adam’s explanation of guilt and responsibility (.–), but Adam does succeed in comforting his wife, thereby lending poignant justification to Eve’s ardent tribute earlier: “With thee conversing I forget all time, / All seasons and thir change, all please alike” (.–). His success in turn adds pathos to the moving Miltonic metaphor later, when Eve leaves her husband’s side just when his presence is most needed. Carnation, Purple, Azure, or spect with Gold, Hung drooping unsustaind, them she upstaies Gently with Mirtle hand, mindless the while Her self, though fairest unsupported Flour From her best prop so farr, and storm so nigh. (.–)

The special bond of intimacy that unites Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian existence also creates a problem when the time comes for the poet to present their temptation and fall. The Genesis account tells of the encounter of the woman with the serpent, but it gives no indication whether Adam is present during the temptation or, if he is present, why he does not come to the help of his wife. The most likely inference one can make is that Eve is alone when she meets her tempter. Milton thus has the task of transforming this inference into an event in the poetic action, an event so motivated that it will ensure dramatic probability without at the same time calling into question either the providence of God or the innocence of the human protagonists. To Satan, who suddenly finds Eve by herself, the meeting seems a piece of pure luck (.–). Consistent with the demonic view of the world that persistently denies God’s providence, Satan believes “in a universe of

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no pattern, a random world.”38 But this is not true on the divine or the human level of the poem. In God’s view, the whole incident of Eve’s separation from Adam is foreseen, of course, but not foreordained. On the human level, the couple who have lived and worked together hitherto but who are separated at the critical hour cannot be allowed to undergo such a change by accident or coercion. The episode, therefore, must be developed by Milton again in terms of human freedom, of the decisions Adam and Eve must make as they live in Eden. In the very exercise of their freedom, Adam and Eve will demonstrate how they may incur the risk of freedom’s misuse. Eve’s choice of leaving Adam to work separately to tend the garden is well motivated, for it is based on an established fact: the profusion and prodigality of its vegetation. Her proposal for a division of labor has its justification, which is immediately acknowledged by Adam (.–), yet his counterproposal for caution and her staying also suggests how well he has learned from Raphael. His speculation on the possible tactic of Satan (“Whether his first design to be withdraw / Our fealtie from God, or to disturb / Conjugal love”) similarly discloses his awareness of the basic relations that must govern their lives and their vulnerability. Eve’s reply and the manner of her reply, reported via the synaeceosis “sweet austere,” at once makes apparent her tendency to reason incorrectly, a tendency also shown to us previously in the poem. Frustrated by Adam’s words, she proceeds to distort their meaning. Adam’s plea at the conclusion of his speech (.–) is based on an appeal to the husband’s legitimate protective role. Eve, however, draws the unnecessarily nasty implication and reproaches Adam for not trusting her and for doubting her “firm Faith and Love.” Adam’s subsequent explanation shows remarkable patience and genuine love. Instead of pointing out to her that although she is free “from sin and blame entire,” she is still the weaker of the two of them (a point of which Raphael emphatically reminds Adam in .–), Adam continues to stress their need for mutual dependence and support in the event of a satanic onslaught (.–), which is unlikely to come if they remain together. Unpersuaded, Eve brings out the argument: “What is Faith, Love, Vertue unassaid / Alone, without exterior help sustained?” (–). Because her words bear startling resemblance to some of Milton’s own polemics against “a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed,” many critics share the opinion of Hanford that “Eve has much of the best of the argument” here. 39 The problem with such an interpretation is that it fails to distinguish between the prelapsarian world of Eden

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and the fallen one of Areopagitica. In the latter, “the knowledge of good and evil [is] as two twins cleaving together,” and Adam’s fall makes necessary the trial of purification for all his heirs, but this sort of ordeal is hardly applicable to the first human couple. Moreover, Eve’s eagerness to win the argument has caused her to commit a reckless error (not unlike Adam’s earlier version for which he was chided by an angel in .) by equating Adam’s presence as an “outside,” an “exterior help.” This is to miss entirely the import of Adam’s words (“I, from the influence of thy looks receave / Access in every Vertue, in thy sight / More wise, more watchful stronger”) and to deny the deepest meaning of their union. Bowing to Eve’s insistence, Adam at last gives his grudging consent (“Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more”). It will not do to argue, as some critics have done, that Adam at this juncture should have exerted his authority to the fullest and compelled Eve to remain, for that would have been obedience acquired through coercion, a complete repudiation of the principle of virtuous action that Milton himself has sought to affirm and defend from Comus to Samson Agonistes.40 If the Miltonic conception of the imago entails distinctive treatment of certain aspects of prelapsarian life, this is no less true of the episodes on the couple’s fall and restoration. The Genesis account concentrates so vividly on the experience and reaction of Eve during the temptation that it has become the favored text of many biblical commentators for the construction of elaborate spiritual psychology. Adam’s transgression, on the other hand, is reported in the most matter-of-fact manner: “she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (Gen. :). To account for Adam’s action, Milton relies on well-established precedent in the exegesis of  Tim. : and ascribes to Adam’s motive the “social love to his wife”:41 Adam will fall “against his better knowledge, not deceav’d, / But fondly overcome with Femal charm” (.–). Yet this particular emphasis on Adam’s “uxoriousness” is no blind following of tradition, for Milton must wrestle again with the problem of motivation. Just as an alert reader may object to the prior revolt in Heaven by asking how it was that so many angels, made presumably wiser and more perfect than man, could be swayed so easily by satanic rhetoric (.ff.), so we might ask what plausible inducement could explain the readiness of Adam’s consent. Milton cannot permit his Adam to stand there for one whole day, as he does in the Caedmonian Genesis,42 while Eve pleads for him to eat the fruit, for if Adam’s fall were solely attributed to the force and persistence of Eve’s persuasion, his supposedly superior

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intellect would be rendered unintelligible. Nor can Adam be allowed to join Eve so speedily as if he were doing that out of sheer instinct, for that would jeopardize the perfection of creation. To steer his course midway between these two dilemmas, Milton gives Adam an unspecified length of time for reflection after he has received the shocking news from Eve (.). When he gives voice to the content of his reflection (ff.), however, he reveals that he has already come to a definite decision: “for with thee / Certain my resolution is to die.” That decision is based on none other than the problem that Eve’s creation was supposed to solve, namely, his solitude. Adam’s decision is momentous, for in the last analysis, his choice to die with Eve constitutes his very act of crossing the boundary between innocence and sin. Because he cannot bear the thought of losing Eve, the possibility of which already transforms Eden into “these wilde Woods forlorne” for him, Adam chooses Eve instead of obedience to God. That choice is, in fact, an act of tragic self-affirmation (“to lose thee were to lose myself”), arising out of the most fundamental need of his being as the bearer of God’s image. Seen in the theological context of the poem, however, it is also an act of self-assertion that leads to final self-destruction. The fatal error of Adam, as Milton’s poetry is careful to make clear, consists in thinking his situation to be “remediless”—that not even God’s omnipotence can recall or undo the past (–). God has solved his problem of solitude once before. Though the present situation is far more serious, is there warrant for Adam to doubt that divine assistance is available or possible? Adam’s words and “calme mood,” however, already reflect a resignation and despair that, far from exemplifying Christian virtue, take on a semblance of the satanic tendency to “arm th’ obdured brest / With stubborn patience as with triple steel” (.–). To preserve his banishment from want, Adam denies the freedom of God. Once the Fall has occurred, many theologians have speculated on whether the imago dei remains in the human person—and if so, how much and in what capacity—or whether it has been wholly obliterated. Milton is unambiguous on this question. “Some remnants of the divine image still exist in us,” he declares in De Doctrina Christiana (.), “not wholly extinguished by this spiritual death. This is evident . . . from the wisdom and holiness of many of the heathen, manifested both in words and deeds.”43 But his responsibility in Paradise Lost cannot stop with the vision of how the vestigial image of God is further “debas’t” by the history of a sinful humanity as a consequence of the fall of Adam and Eve (.ff.). To complete his poetic theodicy, Milton must show how the salvific process

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to bring good out of evil is again set in motion. That is the deepest meaning of Adam’s reconciliation to Eve, another incident not found in the source of his poem. Because the theme of redemption must now be brought to the fore, book  of the poem understandably expands on the motifs already introduced in book  and makes prominent the ministry of the Son of God. It is significant, however, that the work of the judge and savior seems to have little immediate efficacy in moving Adam and Eve beyond their misery, the “vain contest” in mutual recrimination that threatens to destroy entirely their relation. Even the proclamation of the protevangelium (.–) and the merciful provision of covering for their nakedness, which Milton at once translates by typological interpretation to be the imputed righteousness of the Son (–), cannot mitigate the severity of the sentence and the cruel change in nature (–). Overwhelmed by his present plight and the fearful prospects of the future, Adam in his long despairing soliloquy (–) indicates that his faith in God’s providence is all but lost. For Adam and implicitly for the reader, too, the question of God’s justice and wisdom is once more placed under the harshest scrutiny. Adam cannot understand the purpose of his own creation or why he had to face temptation. Knowing intellectually what the penalty of sin is, he cannot comprehend why he is still living and “mockt with death.” Above all, he cannot perceive why there should be a historical process, since mankind will proceed from him “corrupt, both Mind and Will depraved.” His “vigorous self-examination” convicts him of his guilt (“first and last / On mee, mee onely, as the source and spring / Of all corruption”), but of the “Abyss” into which his conscience has driven him he can see no way out, “from deep to deeper plung’d.” Clearly, if Adam is to leave his own hell on earth, someone other than he must provide the assistance, and that assistance must come in the form of both emotional comfort and intellectual enlightenment. This is first provided by the turning of Eve, and in her turning, she moves Adam to reconciliation with her and eventually, with God. Though her initial attempt to console her spouse is met by stinging sarcasm and savage accusation, Eve’s reply to Adam’s venom is one of the most memorable passages in all of Milton’s poetry. Beginning with the tender plea “Forsake me not thus, Adam,” it proceeds through the confession of sorrow and contrition and rises to the passionate outcry at the end: both have sin’d, but thou Against God onely, I against God and thee,

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And to the place of judgment will return, There with my cries importune Heaven, that all The sentence from thy head remov’d may light On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe, Mee mee onely just object of his ire. (.–)

One need not resolve entirely the question of whether the symploce on “me” in this speech of Eve directly echoes the Son’s voluntary offer to suffer for man (.–) or merely parodies the egoism of Satan (.–) or Adam (.–)44 to perceive in her declaration not merely the words of proper subjection but the will to genuine self-giving. While Adam lies on the ground enmeshed in his own misery, it is Eve who first approaches him; her action, more concretely felt than the divine or angelic examples that Adam heard in narration, thus mirrors that divine initiative that seeks the lost and afflicted, just as her words express that spirit of self-sacrifice that, according to the Christ of John :, no other love can surpass. Up to the moment of his conversation with Eve, Adam has never even had the thought of praying to God for forgiveness or for assistance. Accused by Adam as the “serpent,” the origin of evil in beautiful disguise, and the destroyer of human love,45 Eve now overcomes his estrangement from her and from God by breaking the hard shell of his self-centeredness. When we recall the specific words of Milton on the remnants of the imago in fallen humanity (“the will is clearly not altogether inefficient in respect of good works, or at any rate of good endeavors; at least after the grace of God has called us”),46 it is tempting to attribute this action of Eve to some kind of divine prompting, some “means” that the Son has declared grace would find (.) in the divine pity for man. The astonishing thing to be noted here, however, is that Eve’s action precedes the descent of prevenient grace (.). It is as if Milton is saying that the love that brings about such a powerful reversal has no other immediate source than the mystery of the human depth. However we may wish to interpret “this odd event,” this “occurrence both unexpected and altogether out of character,”47 what it establishes unmistakably is that Eve has moved beyond the role of temptress to become the true heroine of the Christian epic. Human reconciliation, to be sure, does not bring about instantaneous deliverance from the couple’s fallen state. Eve’s second speech (.–) reveals more erroneous reasoning when she attempts to placate her husband’s fear for their progeny by recommending either abstinence or suicide. Even with her “recovering heart”

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(.), she is shown to be susceptible to “vehement despaire” ().48 Nonetheless, it is undeniable that just as her words of self-sacrifice move him to “Commiseration” and dispel his “anger” (.–), so even her faulty proposals jolt “To better hopes his more attentive mind” (.). In his ugliest moment of hatred, Adam has parodied the sentiments of Augustine49 by questioning out loud why God did not create all “Spirits Masculine” and why he did “not fill the World at once / With Men as Angels without Feminine” (.–). By enabling her husband to take the first step toward penitence, which makes possible that process by which “the inward man is regenerated by God after his own image,”50 Eve has fulfilled her most important responsibility as helpmeet and thereby justifies the wisdom and goodness of her original creation. notes

1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

A shorter version of this essay was presented at a session on Milton and the Imago, sponsored by the Milton Society of America concurrently with the national meetings of the Modern Language Association (San Francisco, December 26–31, 1979). The author wishes to thank Professors Michael Lieb, Janel Mueller, Bernard McGinn, and Anne Patrick for their comments and criticisms. A. O. Lovejoy, “Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall,” ELH 4 (September 1937): 161–179. C. A. Patrides gives a more balanced view and cites additional materials (“Adam’s ‘Happy Fault’ and XVIIth-Century Apologetics,” Franciscan Studies 23, ann. 1 [1963]: 238–243). See also E. Miner, “Felix Culpa in the Redemptive Order of Paradise Lost,” Philological Quarterly 47 (1968): 43–54; J. C. Ulreich Jr., “Paradise Within: The Fortunate Fall in Paradise Lost,” Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971): 351–366. Dennis H. Burden, The Logical Epic: A Study of the Argument of “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 37. N. P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin: A Historical and Critical Study (London: Longmans, Green, 1927), pp. 165–314; see also J. M. Evans, “Paradise Lost” and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 69–99. J. B. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject: An Essay on “Paradise Lost” (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960), p. 192. Basil Willey, The Seventeenth-Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953), p. 251. The literature on the topic is enormous. For standard historical surveys, see the following: A. Strucker, Die Gottebenbildlichkeit des Menschen in der urchristlichen Literatur der ersten zwei Jahrhunderte (Aschendorf, Ger.: Münster-en-W., 1913); Jacob Jervell, Imago Dei: Gen. 1, 26f. im Spätjudentum, in der Gnosis und in den paulinischen Briefen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960); Stephan Otto, Die Funktion des Bildbegriffes in der Theologie des 12. Jahrhunderts, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und der Theologie des Mittelalters, vol. 40, no. 1 (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlags Buchhandlung, 1963); Robert Javelet, Image et ressemblance au douzième siècle de saint Anselme à Alain de Lille, 2 vols. (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1967); Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Human-

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7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

ist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); David Cairns, The Image of God in Man, rev. ed. (London: Collins, 1973). All quotations of the poem are taken from Frank Allen Patterson, ed., The Student’s Milton, rev. ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1930). Frank Allen Patterson, ed., The Works of John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–1938), 4:74. All quotations from Milton’s prose are taken from this edition, hereafter referred to as Works. De Doctrina Christiana 1.7, in Works, 15:53. Tetrachordon (Gen. 1:27), in Works, 4:76. So Martin Luther wrote in his Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 1–5: “Although Eve was a most extraordinary creature—similar to Adam so far as the image of God is concerned, that is in justice, wisdom, and happiness—she was nevertheless a woman. . . . Thus even today, the woman is the partaker of the future life” (trans. George V. Schick, in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan [St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 1972], pp. 68–69). Calvin is even more emphatic in his assertion of the created equality of woman as the bearer of the imago. In his commentary on 1 Cor. 11:7–10, Calvin writes: “For both sexes were created according to the image of God (ad imaginem dei), and Paul urges women, as much as men to be re-formed according to the image. But when he is speaking about image here, he is referring to the conjugal order (ad ordinem coniugalem). . . . The straightforward solution is this, that Paul is not dealing here with innocence and holiness, which women can have just as well as men, but about the preeminence which God has given to the man, so that he might be superior to the woman” (The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, trans. John W. Fraser, in Calvin’s Commentaries, ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1960], p. 232). In his Commentary on Genesis, however, Calvin has this to say: “But this difficultie also must be considered, why Paul denieth a woman to be the image of God: whereas Moses giveth this honour generally to both kindes. The solution is briefe: because Paul there toucheth the state onely by way of dispensation. Therefore he refraineth the image of God to rule on government, whereby the man hath superioritie over the woman: and verily it signifieth no other thing, but that man hath the excellencie in the degree of honor” (A Commentary of M. John Calvine on The Book of Genesis and The Book of Joshua, trans. Thomas Tymme [London: Harison & Bishop, 1578], p. 45). This opinion is repeated in Institutes 1.15.4. Ira Clark, “Milton and the Image of God,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 68 (1969): 422–431. On the whole topic of freedom in Milton, see Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), chaps. 20–24. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 116. Charles M. Coffin, “Creation and Self in Paradise Lost,” ELH 19 (1962): 6. See also the excellent study by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, “Innocence and Experience in Milton’s Eden,” in New Essays on “Paradise Lost,” ed. Thomas Kranidas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 86–117. Cited by John Calvin in his Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, trans. John King (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Printing Co., 1844), 1:156. George Williamson, “The Education of Adam,” Modern Philology 61 (1963): 98. Coffin, “Creation and Self,” p. 7. “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly

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19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” All quotations of the English Bible are taken from the Authorized Version. Coffin, “Creation and Self,” p. 5. Ibid. Lancelot Andrewes, “106 Sermons on Genesis 1–4,” in Apospasmatia Sacra: Or a Collection of Posthumous and Orphan Letters (London: Hodgkinsonne, 1657), pp. 32–34; Robert South, “Sermon on Genesis,” in Twelve Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions (London: J. H. for T. Bennet, 1692), p. 65. Aurelius Augustinus, De trinitate 9.2.2 (Latin text from Sancti Aurelii Augustine hipponensis episcopi opera omnia, vols. 32–47 [Paris: J. P. Migne, 1841–1877]). “Haec igitur trinitas mentis non propterea Dei est imago, quia sui miminit mens, et intelligit ac diligit se; sed quia potest etiam meminisse, et intelligere, et amare a quo facta est.” “Quomodo ergo per Apostolum audivimus virum esse imaginem Dei, unde caput velare prohibetur, mulierem autem non, et ideo ipsa hoc facere jubetur? nisi, credo, illud quod jam dixi, cum de natura humanae mentis agerem, mulierem cum viro esse imaginem Dei, ut una imago sit tota illa substantia: cum autem ad adjutorium distribuitur, quod ad eam ipsam solam attinet, imago Dei est, tam plena atque integra, quam in unum conjuncta muliere.” Aquinas, in his formulation of the doctrine, also stresses the intellectual aspect of the imago, which then serves as a decisive means in ordering the hierarchy of angels, men, and women: “Proprie enim et principaliter imago intellectualem naturam consequitur; unde oportet quod ubi intellectualis natura perfectius invenitur, etiam ibi sit imago expressior, et sic cum natura intellectualis multo sit dignior in Angelis quam in homine . . . oportet quod in Angelis sit expressior Dei imago quam in anima, et in Angelis superioribus quam in inferioribus, et in viro quam in muliere” (Thomas Aquinas, Commentum in quattuor libros sententiarum 16.1.3, in Opera omnia [Parma, 1852], 6:526) (see also S.T. 93, 1–7). It should be remembered, of course, that in the history of image theology, there is another tradition (led by Bernard) that places greater emphasis on the freedom of the human will (see, for example, Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, trans. A. H. C. Downes [New York: Scribner’s, 1936], pp. 211–213). Tetrachordon (Gen. 2:18), in Works, 4:83. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeil, Library of Christian Classics 20–21 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.15.8 (emphasis mine). Diane Kelsey McColley writes: “It is above all in their capacity to love freely that created beings are like God, and it is this capacity that Adam and Eve are placed in the Garden to develop through their relationship to nature and to each other” (“Free Will and Obedience in the Separation Scene of Paradise Lost,” Studies in English Literature 12 [1972]: 109). Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1–3, trans. John C. Fletcher (London: SCM Press, 1959), pp. 36–37. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. and trans. T. F. Torrance, G. W. Bromily et al. (Edinburgh: Clark, 1936–1962), 3.1.292. Among modern critics of Milton, Arapara Ghevarghese George is one who has also noted the affinity of Miltonic theology with Barthian thought. George, however, centers his discussion on Milton’s view of marriage, paying little attention to the crucial lines of poetry on the imago itself (Milton and the Nature of Man: A Descriptive Study of “Paradise Lost” in Terms of the

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30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

Concept of Man as the Image of God [New York: Asia Publishing, 1974], pp. 65–74). Barth’s view has been criticized by Cairns on the ground that “the distinction between male and female is not something peculiar to mankind. And if it be argued that it is not this distinction which Barth has in mind, but our whole responsible existence as man in relation to woman, then we may surely still object that it is the personal element in this situation and not the sexual which is distinctive, though admittedly the two elements are singularly fused” (Image of God, p. 181). This point is well taken, as Barth himself readily concedes, that “the differentiation and relationship between the I and the Thou in the divine being, in the sphere of the Elohim, are not identical with the differentiation and relationship between male and female. That it takes this form in man, corresponding to the bisexuality of animals too, belongs to the creatureliness of man rather than the divine likeness” (3.1.196). But Cairns’s criticism and Barth’s concession are both made in fidelity to Christian theism, which holds that the deity ultimately transcends sexual distinctions. For the modern biblical critic concerned only with the historical form in which the text is found, that theological affirmation may presume upon a kind of “purity” not present in the biblical tale of creation. Commenting on Gen. 1:26, G. W. Ahlström writes: “Elohim is not soliloquizing here: he is addressing the assembly of the gods. Additional support for this view is forthcoming from v. 27, where Elohim is said to create [man] in accordance with the image of the gods, i.e. an idol. . . . This latter Elohim may well be understood as a normal plural form, cf. 3.5, for in the following verse we read how Elohim created mankind: male and female. Man is thus created in the same forms as those represented in the assembly of the gods: there were to be found both the male and female principles, and both are thus expressed in the creation of mankind” (Aspects of Syncretism in Israelite Religion, Horae Soederblominanae 5 [Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1963], p. 50). Barth, Church Dogmatics, 3.1.200–201. Tetrachordon (Gen. 1:27), in Works, 4:77. 1 Cor. 11:7–9: “For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” The best recent study on Eve that I know of is Diane Kelsey McColley’s “‘Daughter of God and Man’: The Callings of Eve in Paradise Lost” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1974). See also McColley, “Free Will”; Diane Kelsey McColley, “‘Daughter of God and Man’: The Subordination of Milton’s Eve,” in Familiar Colloquy: Essays Presented to Arthur Edward Barker, ed. Patricia Brückmann (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1978), pp. 196–208; Stella P. Revard, “Eve and the Doctrine of Responsibility in Paradise Lost,” PMLA 88 (1973): 69–78. Stella P. Revard, “The Dramatic Function of the Son in Paradise Lost: A Commentary on Milton’s ‘Trinitarianism,’” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 66 (1967): 51, 58; Revard, “Eve and the Doctrine of Responsibility,” pp. 72–73; McColley, “Free Will,” pp. 108–111. Don Parry Norford, “‘My Other Half’: The Coincidence of Opposites” in Paradise Lost,” Modern Language Quarterly 36 (1975): 25–29. Among the Italian humanists studied by Trinkaus, Giannozzo Manetti seems to put special emphasis on the beauty of the human figure as part of the endowed imago (Trinkaus, In Our Image, 1:230ff.). For Miltonic parallels to iconographic and artistic traditions, see Roland Mushat Frye, Milton’s Imagery and the Visual Arts:

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37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Iconographic Tradition in the Epic Poems (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 266–285. Lewalski, “Innocence and Experience,” pp. 101–102. Burden, Logical Epic, p. 93. James Holly Hanford, A Milton Handbook, 4th ed. (1920; repr., New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, 1954), p. 211; see also E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), p. 259. The most succinct counterargument is provided by John S. Diekhoff, “Eve, the Devil and Areopagitica,” Modern Language Quarterly 5 (1944): 429–434. McColley’s point that “from the moment Satan has entered the garden and they have been made aware of him, Eve and Adam are a kind of holy community in a world containing active evil” (“Free Will,” p. 117) is not altogether persuasive because neither the first couple nor creation are yet in a fallen state. Fredson Bowers thinks that “in his role as protector Adam had no right to relieve himself from his responsibility to Eve by making her a free agent” (“Adam, Eve, and the Fall in Paradise Lost,” PMLA 84 [1969]: 271). For counterarguments, see Revard, “Eve and the Doctrine of Responsibility,” pp. 73–75; McColley, “Free Will,” pp. 17–120. The phrase is Augustine’s: “Ita credendum est illum virum suae feminae, uni unum, hominem homini, coniugem coniugi, ad Dei legem transgrediendam non tamquam verum loquenti credidisse seductum, sed sociali necissitudine paruisse” (De civitate Dei 14.11.2). For similar opinions of other commentators, see Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis 1527–1633 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), pp. 123–125. Watson Kirkconnell, The Celestial Cycle: The Theme of Paradise Lost in World Literature with Translations of the Major Analogies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952), p. 36. Works, 15:209. On the character of Eve and the remaining of her action in this episode, critical opinions are divided. For positive assessments, see B. Rajan, “Paradise Lost” and the XVIIth-Century Reader (London: Chatto & Windus, 1947), pp. 116–117; M. M. Pecheux, “The Concept of the Second Eve in Paradise Lost,” PMLA 35 (1960): 360; Mary Radzinowicz, “Eve and Dalila: Renovation and the Hardening of the Heart,” in Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas 1600–1800, ed. J. A. Mazzeo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 172; Joseph H. Summers, The Muse’s Method: An Introduction to “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), chap. 7. For negative opinions, see Jun Harada, “The Mechanism of Human Reconciliation in Paradise Lost,” Philological Quarterly 50 (1971): 543–552; Catherine F. Seigel, “Reconciliation in Book X of Paradise Lost,” Modern Language Review 68 (1963): 260–263. See the excellent study by Diane Kelsey McColley, “The Voice of the Destroyer in Adam’s Diatribes,” Modern Philology 75 (1977): 18–28. De doctrina christiana 1.12, in Works, 15:211 (emphasis mine). C. A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). Harada, Mechanism of Human Reconciliation, pp. 548–551. De gen. ad litt. 9.5.9. De doctrina christiana 1.18, in Works, 15:367.

4 THE ORDER OF TEMPTATIONS IN PARADISE REGAINED implications for christology

T

he story of the temptations of Jesus has been variously treated in the New Testament. Mark, in its characteristic terseness, devotes only two verses to the subject (:–) that amount to no more than a summary. Providing a much lengthier account, the other two of the Synoptic Gospels agree on all essential features but diverge partially in the order of presentation. Both Matthew (:–) and Luke (:–) begin with the temptation of changing stones to bread; thereafter Matthew follows with the temptations of Jerusalem’s temple and of empire, whereas Luke reverses the order and ends the account with the episode of the temple’s pinnacle. That the biblical account forms the basic plot of Paradise Regained is familiar to all students of Milton. Why the poet chose to follow Luke’s version instead of Matthew’s is, however, a question that continues to intrigue, particularly in view of the latter book’s preeminent position in the canon and in the history of biblical interpretation before the challenge to its priority was mounted by critical scholarship. In seeking to understand the poet’s choice, modern criticism of Milton has often sought to establish the preference for Luke’s order on the basis of its correspondence with other aspects of Christian doctrine or exegesis. Thus, for those who would see in Jesus’ experience a victorious recapitulation of that undergone by the first human couple in Paradise, Milton’s is a poem that perfectly mimes the “triple equation” obtaining between Luke’s account and the temptations of Eve, the elaboration of which itself is derived directly from  John : (the lust of the flesh [bread/hunger vs. fruit/desire], the lust of the eye [sight

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of fruit vs. sight of empire], and the pride of life).1 For other critics, who would argue that the wilderness experience of Jesus provides the inaugural ordeals that launch him on his public ministry, the three temptations of both source and poem essentially test the readiness of the incarnate Christ in relation to the offices he must assume: prophet, king, and priest.2 In such a view, the poem’s structural pattern is finally determined by the venerable practice of typological exegesis of scripture. In any attempt to address this problem of the poet’s inventive use of his source, there can be little doubt that Milton is both steeped in the lore of Christian theology and profoundly responsive to antecedent tradition. Even for seventeenth-century England, a period marked by the greatest proliferation of writers embodying the most successful union of religious and literary sensibilities, Milton still remains a near-unique example of poetic prowess and theological acumen. His mature compositions, as modern scholarship has thoroughly documented, consistently enlist talent and erudition to probe and illumine many of the cardinal but vexing themes of his faith. Even with such commonplace allowance for the decisive role of theology in shaping Milton’s poetic art, however, it is hard to acknowledge that the plotting of Paradise Regained owes its organizing principle primarily to the poet’s desire to honor a particular strand of tradition. Once the Lukan account is chosen as the more appropriate source, of course, the biblical text would impose its own formal constraint on the poetic construct. Indeed, the poem everywhere suggests that its author is very much aware of the impingement made by traditional exegesis (triple equation, typology) on his source. Nonetheless, it is difficult to believe that a poet daring enough to rearrange scripture (as when he makes Adam’s request for a mate in Paradise Lost .–, – the initiative to woman’s creation, a request subsequently endorsed by the Deity’s own assessment of the essential privation in man’s solitary condition [PL ., citing Gen :]) would write in mere conformity to a prior schema of interpretation, however crucial and estimable that schema might be. Milton, in other words, must have seen something in the Lukan account itself, in contrast to the Matthean, that was more genial to the conception of his poem, to the way he wanted to tell the story of Christ’s temptations. In that regard, moreover, the typological correspondence to prophet, king, and priest by itself hardly provides a binding order of presentation, since this sequence of office varies interchangeably among biblical commentators and even within the discourse of a single author. This brief study of the order of temptations in Paradise Regained, there-

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fore, seeks to address the problem by focusing once more on the poem’s internal constraints, on how the poet seems to have crafted his story in response to the particular biblical text. At the same time, the study compares certain aspects of the poem to one possible but neglected source, The Combate Between Christ and the Devill Expounded, by the Puritan divine William Perkins (–). The choice of Perkins is dictated by both the man and the work. Though he died six years before Milton was born, Perkins and his writings were held in such high esteem in England and on the Continent that they continued to exercise a strong influence on the circle of Puritan thinkers gathered at Cambridge.3 His collected works were found in the library of Nathan Paget (–), a physician who befriended Milton and who might have leased his house to the poet in .4 Written as a homily on Matt. :–, The Combate is arguably the longest treatment of Christ’s temptations by a Protestant thinker prior to Milton’s own poem. Indeed, as we shall see, there are important similarities surfacing in both Perkins’s and Milton’s thought on the subject that might indicate a certain common context of understanding. One notable thread of that context concerns the exact meaning of the title Son of God, which Jesus was declared to be by the voice from heaven during the baptism episode. In Matthew, that episode is followed at once by the account of the temptations. Like many precritical commentators who envisage a literal and direct continuity of the Gospel narrative at this point, Perkins’s discussion of the events in the first part of chapter  rests on the assumption that the narrative continuity betokens a deeper inner logic linking the two episodes. The temptations of Jesus arise from a necessity that can be differently discerned in either the divine or the demonic perspective. As far as the Devil is concerned, the baptism of Jesus provides the immediate cause of his action. That incident precipitates a crisis of knowledge because he needs to know what is the true identity of this person whose lineage has received such a miraculous, public declaration. Thus Perkins writes: Hee [the Devil] knew well, that if Christ were the true and proper sonne of God, then hee must needs be the true Messias; and if he were the annointed of God, then also hee it was that must accomplish that old and ancient promise made to our first Parents for the bruising of the serpents head. This was the thing that of all other the Devill was most afraid of, and could not indure to heare.5

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That similar reasoning underlies Milton’s portrayal of Satan’s character and motivation is apparent from the first moments of his brief epic. Although Luke inserts some sixteen verses of genealogy of Jesus (:–) between the episodes of his baptism and temptation, it is clear as well that Milton’s conception of his story at this particular point seems to presume the Matthean logic, since he does not envisage a break between the two incidents. In contrast, however, to Matthew’s genealogy, which stresses Jesus’ Jewish descent by linking him only with Abraham and David, the Lukan catalog traces Jesus’ forebears back to the original creation, to Adam, now named by the evangelist (:) as the descendant or son “of God” (τοῦ θεοῦ). Such broadening of the line of descent places an emphasis on the common humanity of Jesus that in turn might have given further impetus to the debate on the meaning of sonship structured in the poem. If Adam already enjoyed such a nomenclature, what is so special about this late descendant of his when he is declared to be “son of God”? Thus, upon introducing Jesus as “the Son of Joseph” who came to the river Jordan “as then obscure, / Unmarkt, unknown” (PR .–),6 the narrative immediately switches to Satan, who happens to be circling in the air above the earth and thus has overheard the divine proclamation of Jesus’ status. Haunted by the threat of the protevangelium and the more recent realization that “the Womans seed / . . . is late of woman born” (PR .–), Satan tells his crew that “Who this is we must learn, for man he seems / In all his lineaments, though in his face / The glimpses of his Fathers glory shine” (PR .–). Throughout the poem, then, the burning issue for Satan is whether he can discover the exact identity—and hence the nature—of this man Jesus. The frustration of his repeated attempts understandably drives him to ever more desperate and dangerous means. If Paradise Regained, in comparison with the “cosmic grandeur” of its epic antecedent, appears “bleakly simple” to a modern critic,7 the biblical source of Milton’s poem is even more stark and laconic. According to Matthew’s matter-of-fact narration, “then was Jesus led up of the spirit [identified more specifically by Luke as the Holy Spirit] into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.”8 There is no explanation offered either before or after the episode as to why Jesus must undergo such an experience. The ostensibly motiveless character of the narrative, in fact, is what renders it especially hospitable to interpretation, for exegetical theology has always felt obliged to plumb the fateful significance of this simple and yet highly dramatic encounter between the incarnate Christ and his tempter. The history of biblical exegesis has long advanced the opinion that the

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temptation experience provides an indispensable initiation readying Christ for his entire redemptive ministry. Thus John Calvin offers two reasons for “Christ’s withdrawal into the wilderness: the first, that after a fast of forty days He should as a new, indeed a heavenly, man advance to the pursuance of His task, and the second, that only after He had been tested by temptations, after His preliminary training, would He be equipped for such an arduous and distinguished mission.”9 On the other hand, a writer like Perkins directly links the temptations to the nature of the redemptive task itself, for Christ must somehow undo satanic success wrought in the first humans. And therefore was Christ led by the spirit to encounter with the Devill, that hee might performe this one work of a Mediator, namely in temptation overcome him, who by temptation overcame all mankinde. (perkins, :)

Keenly sensitive to the symmetrical analogy joining the two Adams and all the nuanced ramifications of this Pauline theme, Milton’s poem gives explicit and emphatic definition to his self-appointed task at the very beginning. I who e’re while the happy Garden sung, By one mans disobedience lost, now sing Recover’d Paradise to all mankind, By one mans firm obedience fully tri’d Through all temptation, and the Tempter foil’d In all his wiles, defeated and repuls’t, And Eden rais’d in the wast Wilderness. (.–)

The key words in this sentence are man, obedience, temptation, and paradise, all of which forging thematic links with the former and longer epic of Paradise Lost. Concerning the person of Christ, the brief epic gives unambiguous focus to his humanity. As far as the poetic narrator is concerned, the long promised “Greater Man” of Paradise Lost has finally appeared and is now the subject of this poem. Even when he is mentioned by God, Jesus is described as “This perfect Man, by merit call’d my Son” (.). Concerning his work, what is stated in the poem sheds light also on what is not. While critics fret about the lack of any reference to the Crucifixion in Paradise Regained,

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the Father specifies what task is assigned to Christ. In the poem’s precise context, Jesus is not charged with saving humankind from the penalty of disobedience, for that would involve the Atonement, but only with the recovery of Paradise, the edenic condition lost to the first couple when they fell but subsequently promised to Adam as a displaced, internal state: “A Paradise within thee, happier farr” (PL .). To accomplish this, Jesus is sent forth to “resist / All . . . sollicitations” of the Devil, “Winning by Conquest what the first man lost” (PR .). The limitation of the poetic action is thus grounded first upon the crucial fact that Christ is seen to be a man and that he is expected to accomplish this part of his earthly mission as a man. Though military metaphors show up in the Father’s speech, they are not meant to associate the subject of his discourse with the preincarnate Son’s heavenly warfare that crushed the revolt of Satan (PL , ). The battle plan prescribed here is “By one mans firm obedience fully tri’d / Through all temptation,” the completion of which would signal the defeat and repulsion of the Tempter. If in Paradise Lost Milton sought to construct a poetic theodicy based on the fundamental premise that evil can never limit, stymie, or exhaust the resourcefulness of the good, hence the Divine is continuously depicted as capable of action that transforms, saves, and salvages, his intentions in his brief epic seem no less fervent in striving to uphold the honor and wisdom of his God. To “justifie the wayes of God to men” within his second epic’s highly specific confines, however, requires another attempt at the justification of human nature. He has to show, bluntly put, that God did not make a mistake or fall short of his own ideal in the creation of Adam and Eve. It is not enough, as the received tradition of Christian theology has generally held, that a uniquely costly means of redemption was devised for man’s salvation even prior to the Fall;10 and thus the entire line of theological argument epitomized by the so-called felix culpa motif, in my judgment, has but limited appeal to Milton’s thinking. His reticence to devote any major poetic effort to the treatment of Christ’s passion may signal a similar reservation on his part. Because primal human failure is for Milton an ineradicable fact of history as he knows it, he feels much more obliged, when the opportunity arises in a poem like Paradise Regained, to demonstrate that a human qua human11 can withstand the most seductive and severe test of temptation. Only this can redeem the worth and wisdom of the original creation. This concern explains the prominent allusions to Job in the poem that all critics have noticed, but Job’s qualified success seems only to intensify the zeal of Milton’s God. The man Jesus now occasions a new and decisive wager with the Devil.

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To show him worthy of his birth divine And high prediction, henceforth I expose To Satan; let him tempt and now assay His utmost subtilty. . . . He now shall know I can produce a man Of female Seed, far abler to resist All his sollicitations. (.–)

The ability to resist is premised on a paradox of Christian existence favored by Milton: strength derived from the weakness of utter dependence on the Divine.12 Though the wilderness experience is planned by the Father as a staging moment when Christ “shall first lay down the rudiments / Of his great warfare” before he is actually sent “To conquer Sin and Death” (.–), the mode of operation remains the same throughout the Son’s earthly career: “By Humiliation and strong Sufferance: / His weakness shall o’recome Satanic strength / And all the world” (.–). This second limitation of action that necessitates the poetic emphasis on Christ’s passivity 13 finds correlative extension in the constraint of the form in which he is to encounter Satan. Milton’s biblical source already stipulates a dialogic confrontation, but the apposite nature of such a meeting is enlarged by the poet’s own interpolations. The first lines of Christ’s soliloquy as he appears in the poem (.–), O what a multitude of thoughts at once Awakn’d in me swarm, while I consider What from within I feel my self,

convey the kind of premonitory intimation that also suggests divine prompting in a literary hero poised on some great enterprise. His utterance looks toward the words of the Miltonic Samson just before the latter proceeds to Dagon’s temple: I begin to feel Some rouzing motions in me which dispose To something extraordinary my thoughts. . . . If there be aught of presage in the mind, This day will be remarkable in my life By some great act, or of my days the last. (sa –)

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Samson’s utterance in turn recalls the old, blind Oedipus of Sophocles’ tragedy. Begging the gods for “some great consummation” (καταστροφήν τινα) for his life, he recognizes, when the end does arrive, his inward stirring as the god driving him on (έπείγε γάρ με τοὐκ θεου᾿ παρόν, ) and leads, unassisted, his daughters and his benefactor Theseus to his final resting place at Colonus. The intertextual resonance of Samson and Oedipus strikes an especially suggestive chord, since both their dramas are built on the urgent, desperate need to wrest some meaning from their devastating experience of humiliation and suffering. Only the recovery of a sense of divine purpose will enable each of them to seal his shipwrecked existence with one, climactic heroic act that will at the same time bequeath lasting benefits to his community. The life of Milton’s Christ, of course, has no need of salvage, but like his biblical and classical counterparts, the hero of this brief epic stands at the threshold of a perilous, momentous conflict, of which its imminent occurrence and purpose, however, he is at the moment unaware (PR .– ).14 In the retrospective and prospective reaches of the long soliloquy (PR .–) that surveys what Jesus knows of himself, his upbringing, and what he anticipates to accomplish in the world, the hero reveals both political zeal (“To rescue Israel from the Roman yoke”) and a dawning Messianic consciousness (“what was writ / Concerning the Messiah, to our Scribes / Known partly, and soon found of whom they spake / I am”). His knowledge sheds further ironic light on satanic tactics about to be deployed: whereas Satan, perpetually racked by doubt and uncertainty, seeks to acquire a knowledge that would, if granted, confirm his doom, Christ knows the telos of his life, his serenity buoyed by the conviction that divinely prescribed goals are to be achieved only by lawful and timely means. Most important of all, his meditation gives voice .to the cherished Miltonic preference, particularly after the failure of the Puritan revolution, for pacific means to do God’s work. Instead of seeking to overthrow “proud Tyrannick pow’r” by violence, his Christ holds “it more humane, more heavenly first / By winning words to conquer willing hearts, / And make perswasion do the work of fear” (–). This last and third limitation of the action clarifies the nature of the “deeds / Above Heroic” that the poet seeks to tell. That the temptations of Jesus must in some way reenact the experience of the first human couple but reverse its result is arguably a motif firmly embedded in even the most primitive Christian documents, the two Synoptic Gospels themselves. If in Milton’s interpretation of the Fall his Eve and Adam suffer calamitous defeat in a verbal contest over the interpretation of God’s specific com-

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mandment and prohibition, his poetic Christ can recover Paradise only if he could prove himself to be Satan’s superior in this “rematch.” If it can be said of his Eve that Satan’s “words replete with guile / Into her heart too easie entrance won” (PL .–; see also line ),15 the man Jesus must show himself “greater” in being able to resist and block such entry. Christ’s affirmation of “winning words” and “perswasion” thus not only reveals his understanding of verbal potency,16 but it also defines in anticipation the form of action he will take in the coming agon of wit and rhetoric. Perceiving the limitations that the poet has structured on the action also enables us to see more clearly the shape of its progressive development. The history of biblical interpretation has variously classified the temptations of Jesus. “A former generation” to John Calvin, according to that theologian, understood Matthew’s account of the temptations as those of gluttony, ambition, and greed.17 William Perkins, on the other hand, speaks of “three great conflicts . . . tending to bring Christ to unbeliefe, . . . to presumption, . . . [and] to idolatrie” (:). For Milton, however, the overarching issue of all three episodes can still be summed up in the matter of obedience. Since obedience or faith must have its own object, the prominence of scripture in his biblical source is, for him, no accident, for the Second Adam is there confronted repeatedly with the necessity of deciding what constitutes the proper response to, and use of, the word of God.18 In the initial speeches to Christ (.ff., ff.) by Satan disguised as an “aged man in Rural weeds,”19 the attack at once focuses on Jesus’ new and publicly declared identity as the Son of God and on the problem of trust in God’s providence made more acute by that identity. Satan’s challenge to turn stones to bread is occasioned not merely by the attested hunger of Jesus after forty days fasting (Luke :), but it is also built upon the danger of wilderness, a poetic interpolation. So treacherous and desolate is the immediate region in which the two strangers find themselves that Satan, in response to Christ’s declared faith in God’s guidance (PR .–), can assert that only a miracle (.) can assure his interlocutor safe passage. The logic appears both swift and keen: if you happen to be the Son of God, why not act to relieve your legitimate need, an act that will at the same time deliver you from the environing peril? The glosses that Milton has his Christ elaborate on the cited Deuteronomic text (:) to counter Satan’s ploy bear the symmetry of biblical typology. The wilderness of Israel’s experience is archetypical precisely because it has always been the testing ground for the community’s faith in God’s providential sustenance; hence the fitting allusion to Moses and

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Elijah, to manna and other heaven-sent provisions. Christ’s rebuttal not only rejects any ground for “distrust” but also hoists Satan with his own petard. Instead of gaining the knowledge he seeks on the Son’s true identity, he is compelled to reveal something of himself: “I am that Spirit unfortunate” (.). The lengthened debate that closes the epic’s first book continues to show satanic semblance unmasked by the Son’s discernment, ending with the deft poetic insertion of a theme of patristic theology into Christ’s words. With Christ’s advent, pagan oracles deemed the mouthpiece of Satan are all silenced.20 Had Satan been a more alert student of historical theology in the poem’s ironic anachronism, this decisive pronouncement of Christ (.ff.) might well have been a dead giveaway as one clear indication of the Son’s self-revelation. As it was, the poetic “Fiend” was “inly stung with anger and disdain” and ready to try his hand once more. The redoubled efforts of Satan begin with another demonic council. Belial’s suggestion to “Set women in [Christ’s] eye and in his walk” (.), actually a foil to Satan’s greater cunning, is quickly rejected. Biblical history may attest to a string of such prominent figures as Adam, Samson, and Solomon falling prey to their “Wives allurement,” but Satan has already perceived that the target of their plotting is “wiser far / Then Solomon” (.–). Demonic sexism demands more subtle tactics: Therefore with manlier objects we must try His constancy, with such as have more shew Of worth, of honour, glory, and popular praise; Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wreck’d; Or that which only seems to satisfie Lawful desires of Nature, not beyond. (.–)

The appeal must now be directed not merely to what is publicly acknowledged as praiseworthy but most importantly to what his adversary himself deems attractive. Milton’s interpolation makes clear how the poet wants the episode of one temptation to prepare for and lead into the next. The victory of Christ during the first temptation episode apparently has not solved the problem that occasioned the temptation itself: still ravaged by hunger, he is appropriately pondering again on the relationship between the needs of nature and God’s support. Inasmuch as Satan starts again with the scene of a banquet, the symbol of food may lead the reader to think that it is a repetition of the first temptation. Considering the issues raised, however, one can readily see that it truly belongs to the second

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temptation (or groups of temptation). The temptation to empire that sums up this episode concentrates on what are the lawful possessions of the Son of God. The appeal is skillfully double-edged. As the Son of God (and if it was indeed true), Jesus would assume natural lordship over the entire cosmos. But even as man, he is also the head of all creation in the great chain of being. Our recognition of the manifold magnitude of Christ’s possessions gives clue to both the length of this episode and its order in the poem. William Perkins reveals a bit of the theologian’s concern for rational explanation and his own amusing literalism when he comments thus on the Devil’s reported attempt to show Christ the kingdoms of the world. This he could not doe actually: for there is no mountain so high in all the world, whereon if a man were placed, he could see one halfe or one quarter of the kingdomes of the world, as they are seated and placed upon the face of the earth; nay, if a man were set in the Sunne, and from thence could looke unto the earth, yet he could not see past the half thereof. And therefore we must know, that the Devill did this in a counterfeit vision; for herein he can frame an imitation of God. (:)

What leads Perkins to devise a solution of “a counterfeit vision” supplied by Satan is precisely the inclusiveness of the biblical assertion: showing Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, the Tempter says, “All these things will I give thee.” Since Milton’s poem necessitates his miming the action of Satan, the poet’s means of conveying a developed sense of this “all” is to break up the episode into several segments. Only thus can his poem give scope and substance to the meaning of what such kingdoms and their respective glory entail. If the first temptation essentially seeks to seduce Christ into a misuse of his miraculous powers should he be the divine Son, the second temptation is in every sense a critical test of how Jesus understands his own humanity. For the entire group of temptations that occupies books  and  can be summarized as the temptation to autonomy on the part of the human creature, to bestow priority on one’s own need and law. It is not the transgression of limits but the aggregation of what is within bounds to oneself that defines this temptation. Thus Satan asks: Hast thou not right to all Created things, Owe not all Creatures by just right to thee

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Duty and Service, nor to stay till bid, But tender all their power? (.– [emphasis mine])

To this rhetorical affirmation of the Son’s licit dominion, it is no accident that the key word describing the manner of Jesus’ response is “temperately” (.), for as in other poems, the doctrine of temperance serves as the cornerstone of Milton’s effort in delineating one crucial aspect of human perfection. Temperance will serve as his Christ’s choicest weapon in crushing all forms of wealth, honor, glory, and popular praise that Satan can offer precisely because it is a virtue that, in its concrete exercise, defines his unfailing submission to God’s providential will. It is thus a virtue that gives unity to the life of the preexistent Son and the incarnate Christ. More than the typical Puritan advocacy of frugality or the doctrine of Aristotelian magnanimity oft cited from The Christian Doctrine (.), temperance substantiates the Pauline doctrine of kenosis (Phil. :–), which declares that Christ, “being in the form of God,” did not cling to or grasp after (ἁρπαγμὸν) that “equality.” If the church’s teachings often stress this notion of voluntary self-emptying of divine prerogatives and attributes as the distinctive character of the Incarnation, Milton’s epic here places the emphasis squarely on the meaning of how Jesus as man “humbled himself, and became obedient unto death.” 21 The form that obedience takes entails extending that original surrender further into the human sphere: the resolute and persistent refusal to insist on one’s rights (“That which to God alone of right belongs” [.]), an astonishing, hard truth when seen in the total drift of Western civilization. The entire course of the Son’s incarnational sojourn, the motion toward human existence, may be construed as one long, arduous, and (in the poet’s view) triumphant effort to reverse—and thus remove—all internal and external inducements to godlike aspirations on the part of the human creature. As befits the teachings of the Gospels, the sustained focus is trained therefore on the internal conquest of self (“he who reigns within himself, and rules / Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King” [.– ]). Consistent with the received paradox of Christian existence (“That who advance his glory, not thir own, / Them he himself to glory will advance” [.–]), the normal orders and expectations of ethics and politics are reversed (“who best / Can suffer, best can do; best reign, who first / Well hath obey’d” [.–]). Given this perspective, Christ’s rejection of all satanic overtures becomes understandable and consistent. The lavish banquet spread by Satan

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well exceeds “lawful desires of Nature”; the riches that he claims to be his are “impotent” because they lack “Virtue, Valour, and Wisdom.” As for military conquests and popular praise, which should be the definitive goal of one’s “thirst for glory,” especially if one, like Christ, is endowed with “God-like Vertues” (.), such an imperial theme is at once countered by the poet’s favored examples of “patient Job” and “Poor Socrates,” who, “For truths sake suffering death unjust, [live] now / Equal in fame to proudest Conquerours” (.–). Even the more specific urging for Christ to claim his legitimate heritage (“to a Kingdom thou art born, ordain’d / To sit upon thy Father David’s Throne” [.–]) by delivering Israel from the hated Roman yoke, and to which enterprise Satan promises the Parthians for assistance, is met by Christ’s insistence that his time “hast not yet come.” 22 He will no more usurp the sole prerogative of the Father, “in whose hand all times and seasons roul” (.), than indulge in wanton excesses. Satan’s final effort in completing the temptation is the proffering of wisdom, the extension of mind and knowledge as a broadening of rule (.–). Jesus’ rejection of classical learning and its stern denunciation trouble modern ears, but we need to remember the premise of that rejection. It is not merely the appeal to the Bible as the compendium of knowledge, a theological commonplace since patristic times,23 or the inferiority of pagan learning. It is rather the strict subordination of knowledge’s end in relation to the particular user. “Other doctrine” is “granted true” (.) by the Son, but he in his situation has no need of such. The acknowledgment of receiving “Light from above, from the fountain of light” abrogates any necessity for him to seek such knowledge and its purported benefit as Satan describes it—“These rules will render thee a King compleat / Within thy self, much more with Empire joyn’d” (.–)—because Jesus has already demonstrated a vastly superior understanding of what the kingship over self truly means. As we have seen over the long course of this temptation, Satan’s conception of empire contrasts completely with Christ’s. If the characteristic thrust of the Tempter’s suasion is for self-aggrandizement (“nor to stay till bid”), the disposition of Jesus throughout is exactly the reverse (“Shall I seek glory then, as vain men seek / Oft not deserv’d? I seek not mine, but his / Who sent me, and thereby witness whence I am” [.–]). Any attempt to put self ahead of God’s providential order, even if it is in the name of service to God, idolizes in fact creaturely status and interest, the equivalent of worshipping Satan. This was, after all, the ultimate thrust of Satan’s bidding in both source and poem (.–). Milton, by amplifying the brief account of the Gospels into several epi-

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sodes, has made the far-reaching implications of such bidding abundantly clear. Against the “temperance invincible” of the Son, Satan’s range of reactions—surprise, bewilderment, fear, and rage—may in part resemble that of the unsympathetic reader. How could any putative Son of God be so exasperatingly passive (“What dost thou in this World?”—.), so seemingly wanting in human energy and motivation? Satan’s behavior, as the Miltonic simile of “surging waves against a solid rock” reveals, now becomes increasingly destructive and, ironically, self-destructive. His predicament stems from his failure to discover, on his terms, the Son’s identity, and from his unwillingness to heed his adversary’s warning that such discovery might spell disaster for him (.–). His final assault on the pinnacle, unleashing the latent violence of his character, uses a physical dilemma (the poet’s invention) to force a spiritual one. The Gospel account tells nothing of the pinnacle’s danger or difficulty, but the rapid epanalepsis of Satan’s challenge (“there stand, if thou wilt stand; to stand upright / Will ask thee skill” [.–]) confronts Christ with two treacherous alternatives: he could be physically killed24 or he could act in presumption of God’s preservation. In either case, Satan thinks he would win by learning “In what degree or meaning” his adversary is called the Son of God. Despite Christ’s success in standing, which results in Satan’s simultaneous “fall,” the problem of Sonship and its precise meaning persists and continues to divide the opinion of the critics. For some, the moment is a decisive revelation of divinity, when the hero’s self-knowledge converges with the knowledge sought by his antagonist in one dramatic utterance.25 For others, the scene is an anticipatory, symbolic enactment of his crucifixion, when he fulfills his priestly role and function of offering himself as a sacrifice.26 There are even those who would argue that the inherent ambiguity of the cited biblical text in Christ’s answer (“Tempt not the Lord thy God”) and of the context (what is the referent of “the Lord thy God”?) makes it impossible to affirm a definitive solution.27 In view of the drift of this essay’s argument, I would side with the emphasis on Christ’s human success in undergoing the third temptation. 28 The statement “Tempt not the Lord thy God” must once more be understood in the context of the biblical injunction to obedience (Deut. :). When the wandering Israelites demanded water from Moses, they were accused of “putting the Lord to test” by asking the question, “Is God still with us?” (Exod. :). If the entire experience of temptation, as Michael Lieb so aptly describes it, can be considered a “descent” of Jesus into himself by confronting “the human dimension of his personality,” 29 the suc-

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cinct quotation of scripture to rebut the satanic misuse of scripture represents the most signal triumph in that dimension. Though perched on an “uneasie station,” Christ would rather risk death than risk forcing the hand of his God. His physical success in standing, whether because of skill (the satanic conjecture) or “Godlike force” with which he is “indu’d” (the angels’ closing hymn of praise), justly serves as the transparent metaphor of his spiritual victory, his crowning act of obedience as the “Greater Man.” Because of the constraint of space, I have avoided discussing thus far the difficult issue of the Miltonic understanding of the two natures of Christ. The poet’s unorthodox views are by now familiar. He has argued in chapter  of The Christian Doctrine, when commenting on the Gethsemane episode, that “the presence of an angel would have been superfluous, unless the divine nature of Christ, as well as his human, had needed support.”30 Could not the same understanding inform the magnificent climax of the poem? An affirmative answer to the above question is exceedingly tempting, though not without a formidable barrier. Even allowing for the poet’s penchant for advancing his own peculiar views on sundry theological issues, no student of his can presume that Milton has forgotten the plain scriptural assertion that “God cannot be tempted” ( james :). If Jesus triumphed at last over Satan in theophanic form, how could he be said to have “aveng’d / Supplanted Adam” by exercising that “one mans firm obedience fully tri’d”? On the other hand, the research of Barbara Lewalski has helped us see that Milton’s understanding of the communicatio idiomatum in the hypostatic union exceeds the norms of orthodox theory, in such a way that “whatever Christ says of himself, he says not as the possessor of either nature separately, but with reference to the whole of his character, and in his entire person, except where he himself makes a distinction. Those who divide this hypostatical union at their own discretion, strip the discourses and answers of Christ of all their sincerity.”31 If this understanding is applied to Paradise Regained, the Christological implications may seem radical but not out of character. As Milton has made it clear in his previous epic, his poetic theodicy is built on “the paradox central to the Christian affirmation that man who bears the image of God must also live by the realization that he is not like God.”32 His shorter epic devoted to dramatizing one crucial episode in the earthly life of the Son of God must now show how he redeems Adamic failure to live in accordance with that paradox. The Son in his earthly existence, even by satanic testimony, appears to be most godlike (.–). Thus the saving irony emerging from the temptations of Jesus is that the most character-

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istic action of this “godman” (Milton’s preferred designation of the incarnate Christ in On Christian Doctrine is θεάνθρωποϛ) is his adamant rejection of all godlike affectations. Amid the manifest plurality of meanings inherent in the phrase “the Son of God,” Satan’s quest is to pin down a definitive significance for his adversary. The Miltonic Christ, however, is one who resists to the end any hint of wishing to bear that title “in higher sort” (.). The Son, who possesses the fullest semblance to the Father, who embodies in the greatest plenitude the divine image, is he who eschews all such profession and pretension, who aspires, in short, not to be God. Only this sort of self-emptying and self-giving, in the poet’s thinking, can merit the promise of corresponding divine elevation: Therefore thy Humiliation shall exalt With thee thy Manhood also to this Throne; Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt Reigne Both God and Man, Son both of God and Man. (pl .–)

It is a Christology of which its many ramifications have yet to be appreciated by the Christian community. The clarification of the nature of the temptations enacted in the poem also helps us understand the order of their presentation. In the poet’s conception the first and third temptations essentially revolve around a single issue, but the temptation to empire has to be stretched out to achieve its full impact. Moreover, the temptations of stones and empire involve no satanic appeal to scripture, whereas the pinnacle episode has the Tempter quoting directly from the Hebrew Bible. The head-on confrontation of the contestants’ use of scripture over an invented hazard provides the opportunity for swift, potent climax. The Lukan order thus cannot be reversed without undercutting the literary effectiveness of mounting theological tension. In A Harmonie of the Gospels John Calvin writes: There is nothing very remarkable in Luke putting in second place the temptation which Matthew places last, for the Evangelists had no intention of so putting their narrative together as always to keep an exact order of events, but to bring the whole pattern together to produce a kind of mirror or screen image of those features most useful for the understanding of Christ.33

By choosing Luke over Matthew, Milton may yet have proven himself a more imaginative theologian and, in consequence, a better poet, when he

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can offer his readers so meticulously wrought a “screen image” of the Christ whom he and they both seek to understand. notes 1. Elizabeth Pope, Paradise Regained: The Tradition and the Poem (New York: Russell & Russell, 1947). 2. The definitive study here is Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of “Paradise Regained” (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1966). See also Howard Schultz, Milton and Forbidden Knowledge (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1955); Howard Schultz, “A Fairer Paradise? Some Recent Studies of Paradise Regained,” ELH 32 (1965): 275–302; Michael Fixler, Milton and the Kingdom of God (London: Faber & Faber, 1964). In the most recent booklength study of the epic, John T. Shawcross reaffirms the structural schematics of both Pope and Lewalski. His own interpretation of the poem’s structure, however, is based on the following understanding: “the first temptation investigates man’s relationship with the self; the second, with community; the third, with his God” (Paradise Regain’d: Worthy T’Have Not Remained So Long Unsung [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988], p. 45). 3. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1977), pp. 32–37. 4. Ibid., pp. 492–495. 5. William Perkins, The Combate Between Christ and the Devill Expounded, in The Vvorkes (London: Legatt, 1626–1631), 3:382. Hereafter page number will be indicated in the text immediately after citation. 6. All citations of Milton are taken from Frank Allen Patterson, ed., The Student’s Milton (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1930). Perkins comments at this point: “So long as Christ was a private man he lived with Joseph and Marie a private life; but being baptized, and thereby installed into the office of Mediator, he returns not to Bethlehem or Nazarett where he was borne and brought up, but gets him presently into the wildernesse, there to encounter Satan” (Combate Between Christ and the Devill, 3:374). Citations of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes in this essay are abbreviated as PL, PR, and SA, respectively. 7. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, p. 414. 8. All biblical citations in this essay quote the Authorized Version. 9. John Calvin, A Harmonie of the Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke, trans. A. W. Morrison (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1972), 1:133. 10. Book 3 of Paradise Lost makes high drama of the Deity’s self-deliberations in the persons of the Father and the Son. The poetic utterances that foreordain humanity’s redemption may have the ring of Calvinism, but the theological cast of Milton’s prose and poetry is not easy to pin down, as it runs the gamut of Reformed theology—mainstream and radical, Calvinist and Arminian. See Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, pp. 233–340; Dennis Richard Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 11. It is necessary to skirt the consideration here of the two natures of Christ and all the attendant speculative formulas enshrined in the history of Christian thought. Milton’s view on the matter is unusual to say the least, if not downright heretical. His position taken in the prose treatise The Christian Doctrine has been shown to

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12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

harbor shades of unorthodox opinions such as Nestorianism and Adoptionism. See Lewalski’s informative survey in chap. 6 of Milton’s Brief Epic. On the other hand, Paradise Regained is not a poem about the possible varieties of Christology. John M. Steadman, in his account of Milton’s use of Paul, writes: “In his blindness, he takes the Pauline text (‘My strength is made perfect in weakness’) as a personal motto and inscribes the Greek words ἐν ἀσθενεία τελεῖται in two different autograph albums in 1651 and 1656” (Milton and the Renaissance Hero [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967], p. 36). Stanley Fish, “Things and Actions Indifferent: The Temptation of Plot in Paradise Regained,” in Composite Orders: The Genres of Milton’s Last Poems, ed. Richard S. Ide and Joseph Wittreich, Milton Studies 17 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983): 163–186. Don Cameron Allen speaks of Christ here standing “on the threshold of an extreme expectancy” (The Harmonious Vision: Studies in Milton’s Poetry [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954], p. 119). Commenting on the first temptation in the Gospel account, Perkins draws a specific parallel with Eve’s experience in Genesis: “First hee labours to weaken her faith in the truth of Gods threatening; which done, he easily brought her to actual disobedience” (Combate Between Christ and the Devill, 3:381). A small point of interest here is the word easily, used by both Perkins and Milton. Some recent articles on this theme are Elaine B. Safer, “The Socratic Dialogue and ‘Knowledge in the Making’ in Paradise Regained,” in Milton Studies 6, ed. James D. Simmonds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), pp. 215–226; Leonard Mustazza, “Language as Weapon in Milton’s Paradise Regained,” in Milton Studies 18, ed. James Simmonds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), pp. 195–216. Calvin, Harmonie, 1:136. For a comprehensive treatment of this topic, see Mary Ann Radzinowicz, “How Milton Read the Bible: The Case of Paradise Regained,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 207–223. Cf. Perkins’s gloss on the phrase “the Tempter came unto him”: “by which phrase is probable, though not certaine, that the Devill tooke upon him the forme of some creature, and appeared unto Christ” (Combate Between Christ and the Devill, 3:381). Lactantius (Divine Institutes 2.16) considers pagan oracles to be devils posing as gods. Origen (Contra Celsus 7.3) and other Christian writers sought naturalistic explanations for the prophetic ecstasy of the priestess at Delphi. Milton’s fondness for this theme already surfaced in his early poem “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629). The fifth-century Spanish poet Prudentius describes (in Apotheosis) the flight of the pagan gods from their shrines at Christ’s birth. But the crucial source for Milton’s poetic assertion here seems to be Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel (5.18–36; 6.7), which details pagan denunciations of the oracles and their silence upon Christ’s first advent. Plutarch, in two dialogues (De E apud Delphos and De defectu oraculorum) also speaks of the decline of Delphi. See the treatments in Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Histoire des Oracles (Amsterdam: Mortier, 1687), chaps. 2–3; Robert M. Grant, Gods and the One God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 62ff. For a recent study of this important topic, particularly in relation to PL, see Michael

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22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28,

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Lieb, The Sinews of Ulysses: Form and Convention in Milton’s Works (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1989), pp. 38–52. For a recent study of this theme in Milton, see Mother M. Christopher Pecheux, “Milton and Kairos,” in Milton Studies 12, ed. James Simmonds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979), pp. 197–212. See Lewalski’s thorough discussion, Milton’s Brief Epic, pp. 281–302. George Williamson, Milton and Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 81–83; Allen, Harmonious Vision, p. 111. Arnold Stein, Heroic Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957), p. 225. Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, pp. 303–321. Thus the clearly deconstructionist reading of Lawrence W. Hyman, “Christ on the Pinnacle: A New Reading of the Conclusion to Paradise Regained,” Milton Quarterly 18 (1984): 19–22. Dick Taylor, “Grace as a Means of Poetry: Milton’s Pattern for Salvation,” Tulane Studies in English 4 (1954): 87–88; Thomas Langford, “The Nature of the Christ of Paradise Regained,” Milton Quarterly 16 (1982): 63–67. Michael Lieb, Poetics of the Holy: A Reading of “Paradise Lost” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), p. 72. Patterson, Student’s Milton, p. 1010. Milton, On Christian Doctrine, chap. 14, cited by Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, p. 153. See my discussion in “Life in the Garden: Freedom and the Image of God in Paradise Lost,” Journal of Religion 60 ( july 1980): 255ff. Calvin, Harmonie, 1:139.

5 PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS IN CHINESE WESTERN LITERARY RELATIONS For I have heard that the orchid, being the supreme fragrance of the country, will give birth to its full scent only when worn; so also the works of literature, being national treasures, must be thoroughly mastered before their beauty becomes apparent. Gentlemen of perception, mark well my words! (liu xie, the literary mind and the carving of dragons [chap. ])

A

lthough the academic study of Chinese-Western literary relations is a relatively new concern in this country,1 recent decades have witnessed steady and remarkable growth in this field of scholarly endeavor. A glance at the Asian Studies Professional Review, published periodically by the Association for Asian Studies, reveals how far the United States outdistances foreign centers of higher learning in the size and variety of academic programs as well as in the sheer quantity of doctoral dissertations devoted to Asian materials and related subjects. And though size and volume in themselves do not ensure quality, the increment of funds by governmental and private agencies, the improvement of language training on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and the greater opportunities for travel occasioned by the recent turn of political events in Asia (most especially with respect to China) may portend unprecedented proliferation of academic programs. It is in such a context of vigorous expansion that we need to make some assessment of the more specific issues related to the comparative study of Oriental and Western literatures. In the words of Claudio Guillén, “Today the consideration of poetic theory with regard to both Eastern and Western writing—to civilizations between which no genetic relations have existed—is a central desideratum of comparative literature studies.”2 The cogency of this statement by Guillén manifests itself not only in the immediate identification of the most formidable problem inherent in the study of East-West literary relations—the absence of genetic relations—but also in the recognition of the urgent need

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for greater methodological precision. The guiding assumptions underlying much of the scholarly work on Western materials may require modification and supplementation if the comparatist is to sail safely through what must be perennially his Scylla and Charybdis: the adequate appreciation of national, cultural, and historical characteristics on the one hand, and of alien matter for significant and illuminating comparison on the other. The comparative study of Western literature has always been undertaken with the tacit assumption that such a body of literature comes from a common stock of related languages, histories, and cultures. If, as Herbert Weisinger and Georges Joyaux have pointed out in the introduction to their translation of René Etiemble’s book, it is true that Horace’s use of Greek examples to arrive at the definition of tragedy marked the beginning of comparative literature, 3 then Horace’s counsels to his readers in the final sections of the Ars poetica may also have introduced the problem of literary source and influence, a problem that has since been one of the staples in comparative scholarship. Horace had a developed sense of the great tradition (aut famam sequere, l.), in which the exemplaria Graeca (l.) would constitute the font both of wisdom and of art for the writers of his own time and tongue (–). This elevation of the Greeks to a place of normative eminence in Horace’s aesthetics further implies not only the desire to imitate the Greek experience, but also the intelligibility of that experience to an educated Roman. Modern comparatists are working with literary materials of far greater scope and diversity than the Romans, but “the grounds for comparison” are usually erected on continuities of a linguistic or cultural order in the West. However different the languages, divergent the artistic forms, and disparate the temporal epochs from which the works originated, the alert mind and trained hand of the comparatist are able to discern the inventive transformation of sources, the unsuspected presence of intermediaries, the growth or attenuation of a literary genre, the distant migration of themes and topoi, and the mutable “fortunes” of various mythical and historical figures. To quote Pichois/Rousseau’s definition: La littérature comparée est l’art méthodique, par la recherche de liens d’analogie, de parenté et d’influence, de rapprocher la littérature des autres domaines de l’expression ou de la connaissance, ou bien les faits et les textes littéraires entre eux, distants ou non dans le temps ou dans l’espace, pourvu qu’ils appartiennent à plusieurs langues ou plusieurs cultures, fissent-elles partie d’une même tradition, afin de mieux les décrire, les comprendre et les goûter.4

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Beyond textual, linguistic, and historical associations, how shall we determine what belongs to the same tradition? The answer to this question, at least according to one comparatist, is to be found in locating what he calls “les grands thèmes de la littérature européenne,”5 the focal myths and legends that have fecundated countless individual works of literature. For Raymond Trousson, the themes of Oedipus, Prometheus, or Faust, with their distended sets of literary variations, deserve careful attention not only because they form an indispensable part of Western literary history; but also because they have the capacity to function as a kind of cultural universal, a Jungian Gestalt, a paradigm for certain kinds of our common human experience: Dans toute conscience éprise de justice il y a une Antigone, dans toute révolte un Prométhée, dans toute quête un Orphée; nous frémissons devant Médée, rêvons devant Tristan, tremblons devant Oedipe. Ces héros sont en nous et nous sommes en eux; ils vivent de notre vie, nous nous pensons sous leur enveloppe. En toute homme sommeillent ou s’agitent un Oreste et un Faust, un Don Juan et un Saül; nos mythes et nos thèmes légendaires sont notre polyvalence: ils sont les exposants de l’humanité, les formes idéales du destin tragique, de la condition humaine.6

Without disagreeing with Trousson, I want to present the problems and possibilities relative to the study of literatures between which there is no genetic relation, where there are few or no linguistic or cultural affinities, and where frequently even the images and symbols have accrued vastly different meanings. I hasten to point out that Asian and Western literatures are not altogether unrelated, particularly in those works written after the Renaissance, when commerce began to flourish between the two hemispheres. Europe’s discovery of China was not confined to the alluring rewards of trade or to its admiration for the sagacity of that country’s philosophers and the organizational excellence of her political institutions. As A. O. Lovejoy showed in his seminal essay of ,7 that discovery had notable consequences at an early date also for the development of aesthetics and for the history of taste in Western Europe. The monumental Bibliotheca Sinica of Henri Cordier, first published in the late nineteenth century and revised and enlarged in the early decades of the twentieth, was followed by the equally massive China in Western Literature, compiled by Yuan Tongli (Yüan T’ung-li) and published in . Both works should delight any student interested in tracing any phase of Chinese influence on Western writings

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both discursive and imaginative. They should also convince any skeptic, by the sheer weight of bibliographical evidence, about the vital role that China has played, to paraphrase the title of a multivolume study, in the making of modern Europe.8 If the consciousness of Asia has been steadily assimilated into Western literary experience (and no one familiar with the writings of Pound, Claudel, Malraux, Hesse, Brecht, and Gary Snyder, to name some obvious examples of our own era, can fail to recognize this process), the impact of the West upon Eastern letters is no less profound. The indebtedness of such modern masters of Japanese literature as Mori Ōgai, Natsume Sōseki, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Kawabata Yasunari, Dazai Osamu, Endō Shūsaku, and Mishima Yukio to their Western mentors has been studied by scholars both East and West.9 Similarly, the experimentation with Western ideas, techniques, and forms by Chinese writers has not gone unnoticed. From Benjamin Schwartz’s masterly account of Yan Fu, one of modern China’s most provocative social philosophers and vanguard translators, through the definitive history of modern Chinese fiction by C. T. Hsia, the comprehensive study of the novelist Ba Jin (Pa Chin) by Olga Lang, the careful examination of Guo Moruo’s (Kuo Mo-jo) early years by David Roy, to the scholiastic but brilliantly perceptive criticism of the neglected lyrics (ci poems) of Wang Guowei by Zhou Cezong (Chow Tse-tsung), the able account of Cao Yu’s (Ts’ao Yü) discipleship to O’Neill and Chekhov by Joseph S. M. Lau, and the splendid survey of contemporary Chinese verse by Julia Lin, we have a growing collection of scholarly writings that no serious student of East-West literary relations can afford to ignore.10 Moreover, the deeper significance in the study of literary influence lies not merely in the recognition that every creative artist has a relation to past artists within his own cultural tradition. “The struggle of genius with Genius,” to use a phrase of Geoffrey Hartman, frequently reveals a spatial as well as a temporal dimension; and thus geography, no less than history, should always be an important matter for consideration in comparative literature. The foregoing selective catalog concerns only modern literature; but what of the literature belonging to more ancient periods, which is to a great extent still inaccessible to Westerners because of the language barrier? The great paucity in the translations of Chinese texts into English is pitiful indeed. A fairly representative collection of the classic philosophic works is available; and in the case of the Daodejing, we may even have an overabundance. With respect to explicitly literary materials, however, we have but a fraction of the entire tradition rendered into satisfactory English,

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and even this small group of writings is hardly representative. In the province of prose fiction, for example, there are collections of shorter works both ancient and modern, but of the six classic novels dating from the Ming-Qing periods, which are acknowledged to be the most important landmarks of the genre (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, The Water Margin [or All Men Are Brothers], Jin Ping Mei, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and The Scholars), but until recently, none has received the loving care Dorothy Sayers lavished on Dante, Lowe-Porter on Thomas Mann, or Lattimore on the Homeric poems. The editions we had earlier in English are either strongly abridged (e.g., The Journey to the West, titled Monkey in Arthur Waley’s version), or cast in language that hardly does justice to the original style (e.g., The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by Brewitt-Taylor). Furthermore, most translators seem eager to excise the large amount of poetry built into the narrative, so that the very form of these novels is basically distorted. And one looks in vain for the kind of informative critical annotations that frequently adorn and elucidate modern editions of a Chaucerian or Miltonic text. We have good reason to believe that work has already begun on the Xiyouji (The Journey to the West), and to rejoice that the first volume of the Hong-loumeng (The Dream of the Red Chamber), newly translated by David Hawkes, is now published; but the gap here remains appalling. In the area of classical Chinese verse, the horizon is no less gloomy: a handful of anthologies exist alongside several editions of the most famous individual works, such as the Book of Odes and the Chuci (Songs of the South) and selective translations of the best-known individual poets, such as Tao Qian, Xie Lingyun, Li Bo, Du Fu, Wang Wei, Bo Juyi, Li Shangyin, and Su Dongbo. But as one recalls that the  sections of the Quan Tang shi (Complete Tang Poems) encompass over , shi poems by some , authors, and that this collection accounts for the output of only one dynastic era, one realizes that even the tip of the iceberg is barely in view. And what of that other genre of classic Chinese verse, named ci, which has made the following Song dynasty justly famous? This equally massive body of literature is virtually untouched, and this negligence cannot but impose a severe limitation, for the Western student, not only on the Chinese lyric tradition but also on the popular drama and vernacular fiction that flourished in subsequent centuries. A knowledge of the prosody, the metrics, the primary metaphors and symbols, and the most common historical allusions is a necessary requisite for understanding the character and function of verse, which is itself one of the most important formal features in these later genres.

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Although much work remains to be done, therefore, on the fundamental level of translation, it is gratifying to observe that important advances are being made on the level of interpretation and criticism. Over the past two decades, the movement designed to enhance the application of Western critical concepts and categories to traditional Chinese literature has been gaining momentum; such a tendency promises some of the most exciting developments in comparative literature. Undoubtedly, this movement had its beginning earlier in the twentieth century, when Chinese literary scholars came under the influence of Western theories; but continuous and more systematic probings in various crucial areas only rarely occurred until after World War II. This is not to say, of course, that established Western sinologists such as Arthur Waley, James Hightower, Burton Watson, Patrick Hanan, A. C. Graham, and Jaroslav Prošek did not often present telling points of comparison with literary materials of other lands. But their interests are, or were, not consciously or primarily comparative. Since the late s, however, the large number of Chinese scholars emigrating to the West has made it inevitable that their approach to literary study would be affected by the ideas and methods of their colleagues in the larger scholarly community. In addition to the concern for textual, philological, and historical investigations emphasized in traditional Chinese literary scholarship, they became increasingly aware of the formalists’ preoccupation with poetic structure or the new critics’ attention to the semantic principle. To their more distinctive critical vocabularies of gediao (conformity to rule and pattern), xingling (intuitive genius), qixiang (stylistic vitality and form), and yasu (elegance or vulgarity in style and language) were soon added such newer terms as irony, paradox, plot, character, image, and symbol. For those whose literary credo demands a more vigorously circumscribed procedure in criticism, this kind of development is apt to elicit a good deal of skepticism. However, it should be pointed out that the use of the more peculiarly Western critical concepts and categories in the study of Chinese literature is, in principle, no more inappropriate than the classical scholar’s use of modern techniques and methods for his study of ancient materials. Witness the kind of “new-critical” exposition of Sophoclean imagery in Antigone, by R. F. Goheen, or the detailed exegesis of the sea-Aphrodite metaphor in Euripides’ Hippolytus, by Charles P. Segal.11 Since, by now, it is a commonplace of literary theory that not even the writing of literary history can avoid the act of evaluation,12 and that no interpretation can be made in a conceptual vacuum, the hermeneutical question that a student of literature must pose for himself cannot be re-

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stricted to how a Chinese poem shall be judged by indigenous norms. Certainly the problems of historical and cultural contexts, of linguistic and generic particularities, and of intended audience and effects must be considered, but a serious critic has every right to ask whether novel means may be found and applied in each instance, so that the work of verbal art may be more fully understood and appreciated. It is in the light of these considerations that one can be immensely grateful for the pioneering effort and contribution of a scholar like Chen Shixiang (Ch’en Shih-hsiang), late professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Berkeley. The work of Chen is the happiest embodiment of the sinological scholarship of a specialist nourished and enriched by a broad knowledge of Western literature and poetics. His essay “Shijian he lüdu zai Zhongguo shi zhong zhi shiyi zuoyong” (The Poetic Signification of Time and Scansion in Chinese Poetry), for example, has demonstrated how a firm grasp of Western prosody and metrics can be invaluable for the examination of classical Chinese verse.13 Similarly, his essay “Zhi yu Gesture,” which is a highly original and provocative interpretation of Lu Ji’s concept of rhetoric with the help of Kenneth Burke’s, offers illuminating comparison between the ancient (–) and the modern theorists.14 In this area of Chinese literary theory and poetics, which again is characterized by a severe lack of translations and the absence of any systematic treatment in Western languages, the several essays by Chen have opened up new territories for further exploration.15 Chen was not alone in his endeavor. The widely acclaimed Art of Chinese Poetry, by James J. Y. Liu,16 provides not only a concise introduction to the subject but also a succinct review of the major schools in Chinese poetic theory compared with their Western analogues. In his translation and study of Li Shangyin, Liu was also among the first to apply the word “baroque” to this body of densely textured and luxuriantly ornamented verse, and to show how this descriptive designation of a period style gains new depth and meaning from the celebrated ambiguity in the Chinese poet.17 Such a method of investigating classical Chinese verse is also apparent in recent essays by Zhao Ye Jiaying (Chao Yeh Chia-ying), Eugene Eoyang, and Gao Yougong (Kao Yu-kung) and Mei Zulin (Tsu-lin).18 Particularly from the lengthy monographs of the latter two authors, who have recourse not only to the meticulous research on meter, tonal patterns, and rhyme schemes done by Chinese specialists19 but also to the “linguistic criticism” associated with Empson, Richards, Frye, and Donald Davie, we may garner new and profound insights into the structure, the function, and the vital-

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ity of Tang poetic language. Similarly, Eoyang’s essay goes greatly beyond such previous efforts in comparing Western and Chinese nature poetry (those of J. D. Frodsham, James W. Miller and Richard Mather, for example). By demonstrating how the image of the solitary boat in Tang verse consistently exemplifies its “metaphoric accommodation of both natural phenomena and human emotions,” Eoyang is able to indicate not only the characteristic difference in the Eastern manner of externalizing man, of representing the self and its harmony with nature, but also how this difference is accentuated by the formal and linguistic peculiarities of Chinese lyrics. And in C. H. Wang’s compellingly argued and elegantly crafted study of the formative tropes in the Li sao and The Faerie Queene, we have, in fact, a model piece of comparative scholarship on two poems originating in completely unrelated cultures and separated by nearly , years.20 His painstaking inspection of the sartorial emblems that serve so strategically to develop the quest motif in both poems has not merely disclosed remarkable stylistic and structural parallels between these works belonging to completely disparate traditions, but also given fresh insight into the working of the poets’ minds. Turning from poetry to the study of traditional Chinese fiction, we may also perceive noteworthy developments. After the publication of James Liu’s The Chinese Knight Errant,21 the comparative study of the hero in the novel can no longer disregard the Chinese variant, and any discussion of the form and function of the novel and their social implications must take into account C. T. Hsia’s masterful presentation of the Chinese tradition.22 The history of Chinese vernacular fiction is intimately linked to nearly a millennium of oral tradition, having its beginning with Buddhist preaching in the Tang period and receiving formal modifications and amplifications by the secular entertainers and storytellers throughout the medieval centuries. Though scholars have long adopted the Parry-Lord technique for analyzing the language of oral compositions and have applied it to the study of biblical, Anglo-Saxon, Old French, Spanish, and certain kinds of non-Western literatures,23 it is only recently that they have employed this method for canvassing specifically Chinese and Japanese materials. 24 Scholarly writings on these materials are necessarily more tentative and less numerous than those attending to Homeric verse or the modern epics of Yugoslavia. But as more information on the social and cultural conditions of oral performance in medieval China becomes available, this is likely to be one of the most crucial areas of comparative study. The likelihood that there was among the Chinese storytellers (such as the epic

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singers of Tibet) widespread literacy and strong attachment to written texts should provide the basis for interesting comparisons with oral traditions in the West. There are other areas of promise, too. Few would deny that comparative literature studies in the West have been enormously enriched by the treatments of the so-called postfigurative transformations of various historical or mythical persons such as Prometheus, Ulysses, Jesus, Faust, and Don Juan.25 This kind of literary metamorphosis of a well-known and wellbeloved figure of myth or history also occurs frequently in China, and it would appear that the numerous fictive accounts of Bao Gong, Guan Yu, Yue Fei, Mulian, and the bodhisattva Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara) might well be looked at in this manner.26 Since rhetorical criticism is now in the ascendant in much of Western literary studies, it is not improper to suggest that the Chinese speculations about the relation between eloquentia and sapientia, which began with the classical philosophers, continued through later Buddhist apologists and translators,27 and received further refinement in the writings of Qing theorists like Yong Fanggang, Fang Dongshu, Liu Dakui, and Yao Nai, may add significant dimensions to the discussion. With regard to literature’s relation to other disciplines, there is an abundance of scholarly works on the intimate association of Chinese poetry with painting and calligraphy, but the study of its relation to music is still at an early stage. 28 Traditional Chinese lyric poetry and drama contain vast elements of music, and there are certain literary theories that have made use of musical principles. The former requires the sort of thorough and knowledgeable analysis that has distinguished the scholarship of John H. Long in the United States and Jean Jacquot in France on Elizabethan drama, while the latter may worthily be compared with the Western critical tradition that began with Plato and Aristotle but was greatly stimulated by the writings of such later theorists as Thomas Campion, Joachim Burmeister, Charles Avison, Jean Chastellux, and Jules Combarieu. Finally, though China has no poet with an explicit religious commitment and concern comparable to the stature of a Dante, Milton, Donne, or T. S. Eliot, the immense terrain of Chinese literature has been irrigated and fertilized deeply by the powerful forces of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Scholars such as Auerbach, Robertson, de Rougemont, Trinkaus, and Abrams have made lasting contributions toward revealing how the Western religious traditions have shaped, ordered, and transformed the artistic forms and styles of certain epochs. Long stretches of China’s Geistesgeschichte, however, still wait for Western scrutiny and exploration.29

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Few of us today, I suppose, would disagree with Weisinger and Joyaux that verbal art, “considered in all its aspects, is . . . a profoundly social phenomenon: it is men calling to each other across the gulfs of separation in which they are enisled, and it is the role of comparative literature to sharpen our ears to this call.” My hope, then, is that the present essay will make us a bit more alert to the continuous beckoning of the East.

notes

1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

This essay is a slightly revised version of a paper written for the MMLA Comparative Literature Section, November 2, 1973. The first Conference on Oriental-Western Literary and Cultural Relations was held at Indiana University in 1954 and the second in 1958. See Horst Frenz and G. L. Anderson, eds., Indiana University Conference on Oriental-Western Literary Relations, University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, no. 13 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), and Horst Frenz, ed., Asia and the Humanities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959). Claudio Guillén, “Some Observations on Parallel Poetic Forms,” Tamkang Review, double issue, vol. 2, no. 2, vol. 3, no. 1 (1971–1972): 395. René Etiemble, The Crisis in Comparative Literature, trans. Herbert Weisinger and Georges Joyaux (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1966), p. ix. Claude Pichois and André-M. Rousseau, La littérature comparée (Paris: Armand Colin, 1967), p. 174. Raymond Trousson, Un problème de littérature comparée: Les études de thèmes; Essai de méthodologie (Paris: Minard, 1965), p. 7. Ibid. Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism,” in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948), pp. 99–135. The essay was first published in part in JEGP ( j anuary 1933). Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, to be completed in six volumes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965– ), see especially vol. 1, pp. 50–88, 731–815. For Japanese influence on Western literature, see Earl R. Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958). For a useful introduction to the subject and relevant bibliography, see Armando Martins Janeira, Japanese and Western Literature: A Comparative Study (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1970), chaps. 8–11. Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction 1917–1957 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961); Olga Lang, Pa Chin and His Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); David Tod Roy, Kuo Mo-jo: The Early Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); Chow Tse-tsung, Lun Wang Guowei renjian ci (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press of Hong Kong, 1972); Joseph S. M. Lau, Ts’ao Yü: The Reluctant Disciple of Chekhov and O’Neill; A Study in Literary Influence (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1970); Julia C. Lin, Modern Chinese Poetry: An Introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972).

10 6 chinese-western liter ary relations 11. R. F. Goheen, The Imagery of Sophocles’ Antigone (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951); Charles P. Segal, “The Tragedy of the Hippolytus: The Waters of Ocean and the Untouched Meadow,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 70 (1965): 117–169. 12. A point strongly emphasized by René Wellek, “The Crisis of Comparative Literature,” in Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. Werner P. Friederich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), pp. 156–157. 13. Yang Mu, ed., Chen Shixiang wencun (Taipei: Xinchao wenku, 1972), pp. 91–117. 14. Ibid., pp. 63–90. 15. Chen Shih-hsiang, “In Search of the Beginnings of Chinese Literary Criticism,” in Semitic and Oriental Studies, ed. Walter J. Fischel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), pp. 45–63; Chen Shih-hsiang, “The Shih-Ching: Its Generic Significance in Chinese Literary History and Poetics,” Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan (Bulletin of the Research Institute for History and Philology, Academia Sinica) 39 (1969), part 1:371–413. 16. James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 17. James J. Y. Liu, The Poetry of Li Shang-yin, Ninth-Century Baroque Chinese Poet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). See especially part 3. 18. Chia-ying Yeh Chao, “Wu Wen-ying’s Tz’u: A Modern View,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 29 (1969): 53–92; Tsu-lin Mei and Yu-kung Kao, “Tu Fu’s ‘Autumn Meditations’: An Exercise in Linguistic Criticism,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 28 (1968): 44–80; Tsu-lin Mei and Yu-kung Kao, “Syntax, Diction, and Imagery in T’ang Poetry,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 31 (1971): 51–136; Eugene Eoyang, “The Solitary Boat: Images of Self in Chinese Nature Poetry,” Journal of Asian Studies 32 (1973): 593–622. 19. E.g., Wang Zonglin [Tsung-lin], Zhongguo wenxue zhi shenglu yanjiu, 2 vols. (Taipei: Wenjin, 1963), and Wang Ziwu [Tzu-wu], Zhongguo shilü yanjiu (Taipei: Wenjin, 1970). 20. C. H. Wang, “Sartorial Emblems and the Quest: A Comparative Study of the Li Sao and The Faerie Queene,” Tamkang Review, double issue, vol. 2, no. 2, vol. 3, no. 1 (1971–1972): 309–328. 21. James J. Y. Liu, The Chinese Knight Errant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). 22. C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968). 23. For pertinent bibliography, see Anthony C. Yu, Parnassus Revisited: Modern Critical Essays on the Epic Tradition (Chicago: American Library Association, 1973), pp. 21–22; for Spanish literature, see Edmund de Chasca, El arte juglaresco en el “Cantar de Mío Cid” (Madrid: Gredos, 1972), pp. 331–382, and Franklin M. Waltman, “Formulaic Expression and Unity of Authorship in the Poema de Mío Cid,” Hispania 56 (1973): 569–578. 24. Hans H. Frankel, “The Formulaic Language of the Chinese Ballad ‘Southeast Fly the Peacocks,’” Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan (Bulletin of the Research Institute for History and Philology, Academia Sinica) 39 (1969), part 2:219–242; Earl Miner, “Formulas: Japanese and Western Evidence Compared,” in Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. Nikola Banašević (Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1969), pp. 405–418; Eugene Eoyang, “Word of Mouth: Oral Storytelling in the Pien-wen” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1971); C. H. Wang,

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25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

The Bell and the Drum: A Study of the “Shih-Ching” as Formulaic Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). Mention should also be made of CHINOPERL (Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature) and its publications, which are devoted to studying all the related topics in this area. See, for example, Charles Dédéyan, Le thème de Faust dans la littérature européenne, 6 vols. (Paris: Minard, 1954–1967); Leo Weinstein, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959); W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963); Raymond Trousson, Le thème de Prométhée dans la littérature européenne, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1964); Theodore Ziolkowski, Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972). George Allen Hayden, “The Judge Pao Plays of the Yuan Dynasty” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1972). See also Ma Yao-woon, “Themes and Characterization in the Lung-t’u Kung-an,” T’oung Pao 59 (1973): 179–202. See, for example, Axel Held, “Der buddhistische Mönch Yen-tsung (557–610) und seine Übersetzungstheorie” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cologne, 1972). A study that takes into account the musical elements in Chinese literature can be found in Wayne Schlepp, San-ch’ü: Its Technique and Imagery (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970). A beginning in this direction has been made by Liu Cunren [Tsun-yan], Buddhist and Taoist Influences on Chinese Novels, vol. 1, The Authorship of the Feng Shen Yen I (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1962). See also Chang Zhongyuan [Chung-yuan], Creativity and Taoism: A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry (New York: Julian Press, 1963). [Author’s note: The situation now in the early twenty-first century is quite different that when this essay was first published. Although monographic studies in this category are too numerous to cite, the following Chinese publications in a series on Literature and Religion (Wenxue yu zongjiao xilie) are too significant to be ignored: Huang Ziping, ed., Zhongguo xiaoshuo yu zongjiao (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1998); Kuang Jianxing, ed., Zhongguo shige yu zongjiao (Hong Kong: Zhongua shuju, 1999); Zhu Yaowei, ed., Zhongguo zuojia yu zongjiao (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 2001); Liu Chuhua, ed., Tangdai wenxue yu zongjiao (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 2004); Ge Xiaoyin, ed., Han-Wei liuchao wenxue yu zongjiao (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2005).]

 NARRATIVE STRUCTURE AND THE PROBLEM OF CHAPTER NINE IN THE XIYOUJI

W

hether the story about Chen Guangrui 昛⃱哲, the father of Tripitaka, belongs to the “original” version of the Xiyouji 大 㷠姀 (chap.  in most modern editions of the novel, cited hereafter as XYJ) is a problem that has occupied the attention of scholars and editors for at least two and a half centuries. If we accept the conclusions of Glen Dudbridge, who has done in English the most intensive and impressive examination of the novel’s textual history,1 it would appear that the best textual support is lacking for this segment of the Xiyouji to be considered authentic, as it is not found in what is generally regarded as the earliest known version of the hundred-chapter novel: the edition published by Shidetang ᶾ⽟➪, of Jinling 慹昝, in  (hereafter cited as SDT). The numerous clashes of details between this version and later ones, most notably the glaring inconsistency found in the later editions that put Chen Guangrui’s assumption of his public career in the thirteenth year of the reign of the Tang emperor Taizong, the same year when Chen’s son, Xuanzang 䌬⤀, was to have been commissioned to begin his westward journey, further evidence editorial changes and faulty rearrangements. In the judgment of Dudbridge, chapter  of the novel may well have been introduced by the late Ming compiler from Canton Zhu Dingchen 㛙溶冋. On the other hand, whether this portion of the novel is, as Dudbridge claims, “alien to the novel in terms both of structure and of dramatic force” seems still a debatable question.2 Huang Suqiu 湫倭䥳, a Chinese critic, had presented some formidable pieces of evidence in an earlier essay, 3 and

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Dudbridge’s dismissal of them seems a bit too intent to be wholly convincing. It is my intention here to look more closely at the issues involved, to point out certain minor albeit significant details not mentioned by Huang, and to explore the structural significance of this episode. For this exercise in both textual and literary criticism, I use the standard edition published by Zuojia chubanshe (Peking, ), and, where necessary, I refer to the SDT version.

i Of the nine places in the novel identified by Huang that make reference to the Chen Guangrui episode, the first is, of course, the rhymed verse 枣婆 that introduces Tripitaka, after he has been selected officially as the chief celebrant of the Grand Mass of Land and Water given by the Tang emperor in chapter  (chap.  in the SDT). This poem reads as follows: Gold Cicada was his former name divine. As heedless he was of the Buddha’s talk, He had to suffer in this world of dust, To fall in the Net by being born a man. He met misfortune as he came to earth, And evildoers even before his birth. His father: Chen, a zhuangyuan, from Haizhou. His mother’s sire: chief of this dynasty’s Court. Fated to fall in the streams by his natal star, He followed tide and current, chased by mighty waves. At Gold Mountain, the island, he had great luck; For the abbot, Qian’an, raised him up. He met his true mother at age eighteen And called on her father at the Capital. A great army was sent by Chief Kaishan To stamp out at Hongzhou its vicious crew. The zhuangyuan, Guangrui, escaped his doom: Son united with sire, how worthy of praise! They saw the King his favor to receive— Their fame resounded in Lingyan Tower. Declining office, he wished to be a monk, To seek at Hongfu Temple the Way of Truth. A former child of Buddha, nicknamed River Float— His religious name was Chen Xuanzang.

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Like some other scholars, Dudbridge is not inclined to attach too great importance to such narrative verse, but it should be remembered that these verses, particularly as they are designed to relate the personal histories of the central characters in the novel, are seldom gratuitously set forth either by the characters themselves or by the narrator. If one were to scrutinize carefully the verses that rehearse the origins of Sun Wukong (XYJ, chap. ; see also chaps. , , and ), of Zhu Bajie (chap. ), and Sha Wujing (chap. ), and I do so briefly at the close of this essay, one may indeed discover added details, but the basic pattern of incidents is firmly established by previous narration. It is important, therefore, to note that this passage in chapter , which introduces Tripitaka to the reader, has, with the exception of one major discrepancy (i.e., the name of the monk who took in the river-borne orphan),4 all the crucial elements constitutive of the Chen Guangrui story: the zhuangyuan from Haizhou; the maternal grandfather ⢾℔, Kaishan 攳Ⱉ by name, who was a prominent court official; the abandonment of the child to the river upon his birth; the rescue by the abbot of Gold Mountain 慹Ⱉ; the monk nicknamed River Float; the reunion with the real mother at age eighteen; and the final captivity of the bandits by imperial troops. Even the identification of Xuanzang as the preexistent Gold Cicada 慹垔, with which the poem begins, is not quite so “unaccounted for in the formal narrative”5 as Dudbridge seems to think. For it is not the final tally of hardships foreordained supposedly for the pilgrim and the allusions to them in chapter  that provide the only source of explanation for this title. As early as chapter , when the bodhisattva Guanyin volunteered to go to the East in quest of a scripture-pilgrim, the narrator has prepared us explicitly for the climactic result of her journey by the statement: Lo, this one journey will result in A son of Buddha returning to fulfil his former vow. The Gold Cicada Elder will clasp the Candana. (sdt, juan , p. b, cols. –)

When Xuanzang gave his public exposition of the faith during the mass in chapter , he was specifically named Jinchan (Gold Cicada) by the narrator’s testimonial poem (By grace decreed to meet at this temple grand, / Gold Cicada cast his shell, changed by the bountiful West. / He spread wide the good works to save the damned, / And held fast his faith to preach the Three Modes of Life), then by Guanyin, then by the narrator in one lüshi poem of chapter  (XYJ, p. ) and again in another of

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chapter  (XYJ, p. ), by the Zhenyuan Great Immortal in chapter  (XYJ, p. ), by the Cadaver Monster in chapter  (XYJ, p. ), and he was so referred to again in chapter  (XYJ, p. ) by Wukong when he explained to Bajie why their master was afflicted by an illness lasting three days. In addition to the introductory poem of chapter  in the SDT (chapter  in the XYJ), there are also noteworthy allusions to the pedigree of Xuanzang in the prose narration of the immediately following episode. The description of the monk after the poem repeats the standard genealogy (SDT, juan , p. a, cols. –), while a few moments later (cols. –), this is the scene of his audience with the emperor: After hearing his name, Taizong thought silently for a long time before saying, “Are you Xuanzang, son of the Grand Secretary, Chen Guangrui?” Child River Float 㰇㳩⃺ kowtowed and replied, “Your subject is indeed this person.”

In the following chapter (still part of chapter  in later editions) and during the episode of the Grand Mass and the epiphany of Guanyin, there is an even more impressive allusion that is overlooked by both Huang and Dudbridge, though it has been mentioned in passing by Sun Kaidi ⬓㤟䫔.6 Of Guanyin, who was searching for the scripture-pilgrim, the narrator says: When she discovered, moreover, that the chief priest and celebrant was the monk, Child River Float, who was a child of Buddha born from paradise, and who happened also to be the very elder whom she sent to this incarnation, the Bodhisattva was highly pleased. (sdt, juan , p. b, cols. –)

The significant aspect of this passage is the identification of Guanyin as the one responsible for Xuanzang’s immediate parentage, which is directly in harmony with the Chen Guangrui story included in all the Qing editions of the novel with the exception of the Xiyou Zhengdao shu 大㷠嫱忻㚠, edited by Wang Danyi 㰒㽡㻒, and dated by Dudbridge to be sometime in the sixth decade of the seventeenth century.7 In the Qing versions, when Wenjiao, the captive mother of Xuanzang, fainted in the garden of her captor and gave birth to a son, she was told by the Spirit of the South Pole Star that her child was sent to her by the explicit order of the bodhisattva Guanyin. In the earlier version of the story by Zhu Dingchen, however, it

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was the Gold Star Venus who said that he came by the decree of the Jade Emperor ( juan , p. a, cols. –). That Zhu Dingchen was both imitated and altered by subsequent editors of the novel is at once apparent to anyone who has made a comparative study of the Tang Sanzang Xiyou shini (=E) zhuan Ⓒᶱ啷大㷠慳⯤=炷ľ⌬炸⁛ with such later Qing editions as the Xiyou zhenquan 大㷠䛇娖, compiled by Chen Shibin 昛⢓㔴 (preface dated ), and the unabridged Xinshuo Xiyouji 㕘婒大㷠姀, edited by Zhang Shushen ⻝㚠䳛 (preface dated ). What is interesting here is that, whereas all these editors follow Zhu Dingchen to the extent of committing the error of repeating the date of the thirteenth year of the Zhenguan period, both Chen Shibin and Zhang Shushen “correct” this point in the Zhu version and render the annunciation reference to Guanyin consistent with the  edition. This small alteration raises the question of whether it is indicative of the sharp eyes of two editors almost half a century apart, and if so, it seems rather incredible that they who have such meticulous concern for details should miss the far more obvious inconsistency of the double date. Or, does this lend some credence, however slight, to the claim for an old version, a claim made by both Wang Danyi and Zhang Shushen and also implied by Chen Shibin in his commentary following chapter , in which the Chen Guangrui story is in some ways different from that of Zhu Dingchen? It may be argued, of course, that even in such a “corrected version,” there is still the clash of details in that the divine messenger of the Zhu version happens to be Venus, whereas in the later editions the annunciation is made by the South Pole Star. In my judgment, however, this discrepancy is far outweighed by the significance of the “alteration” where Guanyin, and not the Jade Emperor, is said to be responsible for Xuanzang’s birth. The change may have been motivated in part by the simple fact that Guanyin in popular Chinese religious beliefs is the giver of sons par excellence. On the other hand, the emphasis in the episode of Guanyin’s epiphany in the novel clearly falls on the special relationship that exists between the bodhisattva and the incarnate disciple of Buddha (i.e., Gold Cicada as the priest Xuanzang). Their intimacy is founded not merely on their presumed acquaintance with each other in Xuanzang’s previous existence, but also on the more particular circumstance when Guanyin assumes the direct responsibility of sending him to be the son of Wenjiao. It is only with this background in mind that one can fully comprehend the force of the narrator’s comment in the recognition scene when he introduces the bodhisattva’s entrance into the temple where the Grand Mass is being celebrated:

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so it is that Having affinity 㚱䶋 one will old acquaintances meet, As Perfection returns to this holy site. (sdt, juan , p. b, cols. –; xyj, p. )

and again in the following lines of the lüshi poem: Since of this sanctuary she [Guanyin] made a tour, She met a friend 䚠䞍 unlike all other men. They spoke of the present and of countless things— Of merit and trial in this world of dust. (sdt, juan , p. a, cols. –; xyj, p. )

Few readers of the XYJ can fail to notice the special eminence of Guanyin in the narrative, an honor not entirely attributable merely to her general popularity in Chinese Buddhism after the spread of the Pure Land School in the sixth century. Her peculiar importance in this work of fiction lies rather in the fact that every member of the pilgrimage to the Western Heaven for Scriptures has been chosen and converted by her, and their success or failure thus also arouses her special concern. When in the course of the Celestial Assembly Buddha announces his intention to impart the Tripitaka to the inhabitants of the East, it is Guanyin who volunteers a trip to China to find a suitable scripture-pilgrim (XYJ, chap. ). In what may be regarded as a miniature journey to the West but with the order of events and the geographical direction in reverse, the author in chapter  artfully prepares for subsequent developments of the narrative by presenting successive encounters of Guanyin and the future disciples of Xuanzang: Sha Wujing (Sandy), Zhu Wuneng (Pigsy), the Dragon-Prince (later the white horse), and finally Sun Wukong (Monkey). It is she who succeeds in persuading every one of these condemned celestial delinquents to embrace the Buddhist faith by promising to accompany the scripture-pilgrim on his journey to the West, so that the merit thus achieved would atone for the person’s previous transgressions. This pattern of banishment, wandering, and return embodied in the experience of the disciples of Xuanzang has been compared, in fact, by Okuno Shintarō8 with the typical structure of those tales that exploit the theme of the nobles in exile (kishu ryūritan 屜䧖㳩暊嬂). What Okuno fails to perceive, however, is that this pattern is discernible not only in the lives of the disciples but supremely in the life of the Master-Pilgrim as well, since the Xuanzang of the narrative is none other than the second disciple of Buddha, Gold Cicada. Because he was

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inattentive to the discourse of Buddha and thereby slighted the Law, he was fated to face tremendous ordeals in the human world. Insofar as Guanyin is the one who mediates, as it were, “the grace of forgiveness” and the possibility to atone for one’s sins through merit making, her relation to the disciples and to Xuanzang himself is exactly the same. It is she who superintends the precarious entrance of Xuanzang into human life that eventuates in his reunion with Buddhism almost immediately after his birth when he is rescued by the abbot of Gold Mountain, and it is she who enlightens him to seek the Mahāyāna scriptures later during the mass. For this reason, the narrator can make this comment with the lüshi poem in chapter : Buddha proclaimed the Tripitaka Supreme, Which the Goddess [literally, the bodhisattva]9 declared throughout Chang’an. Those great, wondrous truths could reach Heav’n and Earth; Those wise, true words could save the spirits damned. They caused Gold Cicada to cast again his shell; They moved Xuanzang to mend anew his ways. (sdt, juan , p. a, cols. –; xyj, p. )

Most probably, it is the narrator’s intention to remind his readers of Guanyin’s double acts of kindness to Xuanzang, at his birth and during the Grand Mass, that he chooses to employ in these last two lines the peculiar rhetoric of repetition (again, anew 慵炻ℵ ). Turning now to the rest of the evidence presented by Huang Suqiu, we find that there are eight more places in the narrative where, according to him, further allusions are made to the prior history of Tripitaka. And on these allusions, this is the comment we have from Dudbridge: In two of these examples [i.e., XYJ, chap. , p.  and chap. , p. ] the allusion goes no further than to remark that Tripitaka’s secular surname was Chen. In another there is the further detail of his family’s village [i.e., chap. ]. Two examples (again within a few pages of one another) allude only to the manner of his mother’s wooing—the tossing of an embroidered ball from our upper floor [i.e., chap. , p.  and chap. , p. ]. Three examples refer to the theme of disaster on the river [i.e., chap. , p. ; chap. , p. ; and chap. , p. ]. The remaining one is the “List of Hardships” in chapter , with its four opening items. Essentially, therefore, the distinct allusions are fewer than a numerical

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list suggests. In just two cases—the family village and the embroidered ball—they refer to parts of the story not covered in the verses of chapter . The argument for a lost chapter goes so far. It would be persuasive indeed if the author of the –chapter XYJ were known to have avoided casual references to legends outside the scope of his story, or again if he had given a full narrative account of every detail in the background of his other central characters. But in fact the novel alludes copiously to established legends at every point: in chapter  there is a rapid series of references to several Erlang [Ḵ恶] legends; chapter  opens with a similar cluster of stories about the Warrior of the North [⊿㕡䛇㬎]; a brief paragraph in chapter  covers the whole story of Nat.a [⒒⎺] and Li Tianwang [㛶⣑䌳]. Again the origins of such central figures as Zhu Bajie and Sha Heshang 㱁␴⯂ are presented only in allusion or otherwise indirectly, in moments of retrospect.10

I quote the full length of Dudbridge’s argument not only because of its importance and ostensible cogency, but also because the nature of his argument at this point of his essay has shifted from criticism of textual history to literary criticism proper—to speculations about the narrative practice of the author of the hundred-chapter novel. And it is in the light of his argument that I would like to advance some observations of my own. It should be pointed out first of all that as far as Chen being the secular surname of Xuanzang is concerned, the list of Huang Suqiu is by no means exhaustive. To his examples must be added the following instances when Chen is indeed identified as the familial name of the pilgrim-monk (XYJ, chap. , p. ; chap. , p. ; chap. , p. ; chap. , p. ; chap. , p. ; chap. , p. ; chap. , p. ). These allusions are obviously not within a few pages of one another; they are sufficiently widespread throughout the novel to indicate consistency of usage on the part of the author. Since, however, Chen is in fact the surname of the historical Xuanzang, these references certainly have little significance for establishing the independent existence of the Chen Guangrui story as a probable structural unit. With the reference to Haizhou 㴟ⶆ as the seat of his family village such as the one made by Tripitaka in chapter , we have a small but interesting deviation from historical tradition that deserves some attention. The biography of Xuanzang by his disciples locates a place in modern Henan 㱛⋿ as his birthplace,11 but the Haizhou in the XYJ, as far as I can determine, belongs to the province of Jiangsu. How Xuanzang came to be associated with this latter district is a problem for another investigation; what is relevant for our discussion here is the fact that even the author of the

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earliest known version of the work, and not just Zhu Dingchen or Wang Danyi, has picked up this strand of what probably was part of a popular tradition. That the author of the hundred-chapter novel is familiar at least with some parts of the life of the historical Tripitaka may be seen in his near verbatim quotation of the Heart Sūtra, translated by the monk himself, and in his use of the Preface of The Holy Religion (Shengjiao xu) that Emperor Taizong was said to have composed in gratitude for the historical Xuanzang. On the other hand, the conscious appropriation of popular tradition, which may or may not testify to the existence in textual form of the Chen Guangrui story, is apparent in even a passing remark of the fictive Xuanzang, who said in chapter  (XYJ, p. ) that he had been a monk the moment he left his mother’s belly (ㆹ冒↢⧀偂䙖⯙ ␴⯂), an assertion that surely contradicts the biographical account of his becoming a monk only at age thirteen.12 The emphasis of Tripitaka’s early entrance into religious life is heard again in chapter  (XYJ, p. ), which is itself an important omission by Huang Suqiu. When Tripitaka was questioned by one of the Rhinoceros Monsters who had captured him, he said: The secular name of your poor monk is Chen Xuanzang, who since childhood had been a monk at Gold Mountain. Later, I was appointed a monkofficial by the Tang Emperor at the Hongfu Monastery of Chang’an. Because of the execution of the Old Dragon of the Jing River by Prime Minister Wei Zheng in his dream, the Tang Emperor had to make a visit to the underworld before returning to the world of light, where he gave a Grand Mass of Land and Water for the salvation of lost souls. I was indebted to the Emperor again for his appointment of me as the high priest for that occasion.

The noteworthy elements in this speech by Tripitaka are the explicit naming of the Gold Mountain of his childhood and the residency at Hongfu Monastery by imperial appointment, both places prominently displayed in the Chen Guangrui chapter and in the verse introducing Tripitaka in chapter  (chap.  in the XYJ). Though this sketch of his past life is brief, it is nonetheless significant that such a cursory statement alludes to incidents in Tripitaka’s youth and those surrounding the Tang emperor’s journey to the underworld in such a manner that they form a continuous and consistent complex of events. The reference to Gold Mountain brings into view once more the theme of disaster on the river, and apart from the three examples cited by Huang

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Suqiu (i.e., chaps. , , and ), it should be added that the name River Float also appears in the title of chapter  (“Free of his peril, River Float came to the Kingdom; / Receiving grace, Bajie invaded the mountain forest”), and in at least four other instances again overlooked by Huang. In chapter , when Tripitaka was taken captive by a Tiger Monster, the narrator has the comment: O, pity that Tripitaka, The River Float 㰇㳩 fated to suffer oft! It’s hard to make merit in Buddha’s gate! (sdt, juan , p. a, cols. –; xyj, p. )

A few moments later, when Tripitaka was ordered to be bound by the Master of the Yellow Wind Cave, the pathetic reaction of the priest was thus depicted: This is how that Ill fated River Float 㰇㳩 on Pilgrim broods; The god-monk in pain calls Wuneng to mind. “Disciples,” he said, “I don’t know in what mountain you are catching monsters, or in what region you are subduing goblins. . . . But if you tarry any longer, it will never be preserved!” (sdt, juan , p. a; cols. –; xyj, p. )

When Tripitaka, near the end of his journey, was carried away by the Leopard Monster in chapter , the narrator comments: This is why it’s hard for Zen-nature plagued by demons to reach Right Fruit. River Float 㰇㳩 meets again his Ill-luck Star! (xyj, p. )

And when Monkey returns to find his master gone but not knowing even where to begin to look for him, the narrator closes the chapter with the observation: Alas! this is how Woe-beset River Float 㰇㳩 keeps meeting more woes! The demon-routing Great Sage is by demons met! (xyj, p. )

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From the foregoing examples, we may conclude that the name River Float is peculiarly associated with the suffering Tripitaka, the pilgrim who must endure certain afflictions ordained for him in the human world. That this is a constant theme in the narrative may be seen once more in the heptasyllabic lüshi that forms the soliloquy of Tripitaka in chapter  (XYJ, p. ). After having been captured by the Gold Fish Monster, the confined Tripitaka gives vent to his solitary anguish by the following poem: I loathe River Float, a life plagued by woes! How many water perils bound me at birth! I left my mom’s womb to be tossed by waves; I plumb the deep, seeking Buddha in the West. I met disaster at Black River before. Now in this ice-break, my life will expire. I know not if my pupils can come here, Or if with true scriptures I can go home.

The importance of this poem lies in its representation of a moment of truth, of self-reckoning for the pilgrim-monk of the story, who is, as has been observed by many readers, rather muddleheaded and imperceptive most of the time. Indeed, throughout the novel, Tripitaka is usually able to gain a measure of insight only at moments of extreme danger. Thus in chapter  (XYJ, p. ), it was only when master, disciples, and even certain celestial warriors who came to the rescue, had been completely taken captive by the spurious Buddha that Tripitaka was seen to acknowledge in tearful penitence his own folly and the truthfulness of Wukong’s warning: I loathe myself for not heeding you then, Thus bringing this day such woe on my head! Now you are hurt in the cymbals of gold. Which person knows I’m bound here with ropes? Fate, most bitter, caused what we four had met, And merits, three thousand, are all o’erthrown. What will free us from this painful restraint, That we may reach smoothly the West and leave?

It should be obvious that these two poems spoken by Tripitaka are quite similar in tone, rhetoric (both beginning even with the phrase “I loathe 冒【” ), and intended effect, for both soliloquies, not unlike some of those heard on the Elizabethan stage, are revelatory of the speaker’s sudden vi-

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sion of himself in a certain light. To be sure, the speeches of Tripitaka have neither the complexity nor the tragic intensity comparable to those of a Faustus, a Hamlet, or a Vittoria, and the knowledge he acquires at the moment is short-lived. Consistent with the comic design and the author’s highly ironic view of his character, the knowledge that he gained is hardly retained to make any change of consequence in his action. But the function of self-dramatization is nonetheless analogous to Renaissance dramatic techniques, and it is hardly accidental that the present peril of water (note the title of chapter : “Tripitaka Meets Disaster and Sinks to a Watery Home”) should induce Tripitaka to recall past woes of a similar kind. This narrative feature again does not “prove” the existence, or even the necessity, of a “lost chapter,” but it does demonstrate, I believe, the author’s artful use of the Chen Guangrui legend to be more than perfunctory. The small but purposeful drama of this episode enhances the importance of the subsequent poem, when in a less threatening situation, Tripitaka answers the question of several arboreal immortals about his age by reciting the following: Forty years ago I left my mother’s womb— My life was disaster e’en before my birth! Fleeing for life, I rolled with wave and tide. By luck I met Gold Mountain and cast my shell [literally, original bones]. Myself I trained and sutras read with zeal. In true worship of Buddha I dared not slack. Now my King sends me to go to the West. I thank you divines for love on the way. (xyj, chap. , p. )

Along with this poem, which rehearses again his youthful career and the theme of disaster on water, and the prefatory verse of chapter  (chap.  of the XYJ), the poem in chapter  thus serves also to provide the kind of background details without which the full force of Bajie’s pun on Tripitaka’s name cannot be felt (chap. , XYJ, p. : “The Master’s surname is Chen [homonymous with the word chen 㰱, “to sink”], and his name is To-the-Bottom ⇘⸽”). There is, moreover, a highly suggestive phrase in the poem of chapter  (XYJ, p. ) that invites our attention. This is the line “By luck I met Gold Mountain and cast my shell ⸠忯慹Ⱉ僓㛔橠.” Within the immediate context of the poem, this line refers undoubtedly to the abbot of Gold Mountain, who came to the rescue of the abandoned child. But in terms

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of the total economy of the narrative so thoroughly infused by the salvational ideologies of Mahāyāna Buddhism, this occasion also marks the formal entrance of Tripitaka into religious life. It is appropriate, therefore, for Xuanzang of this poem to transform that event into a symbol of redemption, of emancipation from the skeletal frame of his body. As such, the very poetic metaphor anticipates the events of chapter  (XYJ, p. ; the chapter is also suggestively titled “Only when horse and monkey are tame will the shell be cast 䋧䅇楔楜㕡僓㭤; / With merit and work perfected they see the Real [i.e., Bhūtatathatā]), when the pilgrims were ferried across a river in a bottomless boat by the Buddha of the Light of Ratnadhvaja.” In midstream, they saw floating by the boat a corpse, which was first interpreted by Wukong to be Tripitaka himself (“Master, it’s you ⷓ䇞㗗Ἀ!”), and in turn by each of the disciples as being the other person. After they reached the shores of paradise, they were congratulated by both the boatman and the narrator for finally attaining salvation through liberation from the body. From the way the river has been treated in the narrative, we may conclude that it has such particular significance as that noted by James Fu in a perceptive essay on the XYJ,13 for it is both a soteric and a destructive symbol in the life of its protagonist. There can be little doubt that in the mind of this fictive Xuanzang, the entire experience of the river—prenatal disaster met by his parents, abandonment, and rescue— forms a veritable part of his life history. To look at Tripitaka’s self-consciousness this way may help to illumine further another allusion to the Chen Guangrui story, which also discloses yet another aspect of the author’s narrative subtlety. For the attentive reader of the novel is likely to notice that on numerous occasions, Tripitaka, true to the experience of many travelers in foreign lands, is said to be filled with nostalgic thoughts for his homeland. As he draws near to his distant goal, there is perceptibly an increasing emphasis by the narrator on his feelings of longing for the mother country, commingled with the fear of not fulfilling the emperor’s command and impatience with the remaining distance (XYJ, chap. , p. ; chap. , pp. –; chap. , pp. , ; chap. , pp. –; chap. , p. ; chap. , p. ; chap. , p. ; chap. , p. ; chap. , p. ). There are also exclamations about the length of the journey they have undertaken (chap. , p. ; chap. , p. ). In this state of heightened hope and anxiety, the pilgrims approach the Tianzhu nation (India), and the psychological condition of Tripitaka is cunningly underscored by the narrator with repeated comparisons of the Land of the West with Tang territory (XYJ, chap. , p. ; chap. , p. ) that occur in the mind of the scripture-pilgrim. It is in such a state of

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agitated memory that Tripitaka makes the following statement in chap.  (XYJ, p. ): The people of this place—their clothing, their buildings, their utensils, their manner of speech and behavior—are all the same as our great T’ang nation. I’m thinking about the deceased mother ⃰㭵 of my secular home who, by throwing an embroidered ball, met someone she was destined to marry 忯冲⦣䶋 and they became man and wife. To think that they should have this custom here also!

Once again, a seemingly trivial element in the Chen Guangrui story is developed by the author into something of much greater appeal and significance. For what most impresses Tripitaka about the fictive India is, as he says, its cultural resemblance to his own land—down to the very custom that brought about the chance meeting of his own parents. That he makes this observation with a good deal of sentiment is probably what induces the mild teasing of Sun Wukong moments later (chap. , p. : “The Master’s statement that his deceased mother, who also met her fated acquaintance by the throwing of an embroidered ball, and thereupon they became man and wife, seems to indicate a longing for the past”). As the story unfolds, Tripitaka, of course, displays little of that longing for the past intimated by his disciple, for he retains what may be his most solid and, perhaps, solitary virtue: a dogged resistance to the most winsome form of sexual and courtly allurement, which wins for him even the praise of Wukong himself (chap. , p. ). This entire episode of the novel, however, which tells of Tripitaka’s also being hit by an embroidered ball and that he would thus have been forced to marry the king’s daughter had not Wukong exposed her to be the Jade Hare of the Lunar Palace, also becomes in the narrative an echo as well as a parody of the Chen Guangrui story. Unlike his father, who gained a beautiful and loyal wife on a similar occasion, Tripitaka’s threatened matrimony constitutes but another trial in a series to which he must be subjected in his journey. Like his father, however, his being struck by the ball is verily a prelude to a string of disasters to come.

ii I think that the foregoing analysis, admittedly brief, is sufficient to show the significance, if not the indispensability, of the Chen Guangrui episode in the narrative, though as I remarked earlier, these later allusions certainly

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cannot be construed as incontrovertible proofs for a “lost chapter.” The existence of such a chapter has to be established by further discovery of textual materials hitherto unknown, if such discovery is indeed still possible. It may be safely asserted, however, that the author of the hundredchapter novel, Wu Cheng’en ⏛㈧】 or whoever he might be, is thoroughly familiar with the tradition of the birth and adventures of the infant Xuanzang popularized in the dramas of Yuan and Ming China,14 and that he has consciously and skillfully exploited this tradition in his narrative. In this sense, I can hardly agree with Dudbridge’s statement that “of all the diverse blocks of narrative which fill the first  chapters, this episode [i. e., chap. ] alone contributes nothing to the progress of the plot as a whole.”15 The argument here, I suppose, turns on what one means by “progress.” If one insists on the principle of plot development something as vigorously defined as the Aristotelian law of probability and necessity, one may be duly disappointed by the entire work of the XYJ. At one point in his study of the XYJ manuscripts, Dudbridge cites with approval the negative criticism of Wang Danyi on one element of chapter  (How could the murderer of Chen Guangrui live as governor for eighteen years without being detected?), and he further mentions the “formidable list” of “absurdities” in the chapter drawn up by Chen Shibin (Wuyizi)16 in his commentary at the end of chapter . The objections of Chen, written with some of the most contrived “four-six clause ⚃ℕ⎍” constructions in parallel prose, are as follows: . The incidents are full of paradoxes and contradict popular customs. Since what is commonly accepted as proper marriage etiquette does not record anything about the practice of selecting a son-in-law by throwing an embroidered ball from a festooned tower, this incident is not to be believed. . How can a zhuangyuan’s mother live all by herself in a strange place? . How can a prime minister’s daughter go with her spouse to his post without the accompaniment of guards? . How can the wife of a governor walk unseen to the bank of a river? . How can a raft made of a single board be considered an adequate lifesaver for a child? . How can one lose contact completely with one’s beloved daughter with no questions asked? . How can the mother of an official be reduced to pauperism after separation?

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. How can there be no investigation after eighteen years of silence on the part of the daughter? . How can someone enter directly into the inner chamber of a governor’s mansion to look for his own mother? How can such a huge mansion exist without the presence of guards or maids? . How can we believe that , troops are needed to capture the bandits at the end?17

Even allowing for a measure of cogency in Chen’s arguments, it should be obvious that his kind of misguided skepticism cannot be applied to the reading of a work like the XYJ without disastrous consequences. If one were to follow the example of this early Qing editor, one might well question not simply those incidents in the disputed chapter , but countless others throughout the narrative that are likely to strain a normal reader’s credulity. One might ask, for instance, how it was possible for the high priests of the entire empire to reach the capital for the Grand Mass with less than a month’s notice (XYJ, chap. , p. ); or how could the Black Bear Monster be motivated to invite the Elder of the Golden Pool to attend a Festival of Buddha-Robe, when it was the monster himself who stole the robe from the residence of the elder moments before (XYJ, chap. , p. ); or whether it was likely that monks living near India would say that their entire hope in reading and reciting scriptures was to achieve sufficient merit so that they would be born in China at their next incarnations (XYJ, chap. , pp. –)! If, however, one accepts the sort of poetic karma ⇵⚈⼴㝄 as an organizing principle that the author seems to share with many traditional storytellers of China, then the Chen Guangrui episode may not seem so out of place after all in the structure of the narrative. For the essential features of the story do not simply account for the familial origin of the pilgrim-monk, much less does the story exist, as Dudbridge thinks, “as a self-contained action concentrating [on] the strong emotive values of family loyalty.”18 Consistent with certain traditions of folklore and folk religions, the story rather focuses our attention on the special status of a particular hero by dwelling on his supernatural birth, miraculous deliverance, and the peculiar afflictions ordained for his mundane existence. So regarded, the theme of the river and its attendant perils utilized by the author of the hundredchapter novel reinforces the theme of Tripitaka’s this-worldly identity as the incarnation of the banished Gold Cicada. Both themes in turn support the threefold etiology developed in the narrative for explicating the meaning of

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Tripitaka’s ordeals 暋: as a form of chastisement for his preexistent transgression, as a test of endurance for the earthly pilgrim, and as an exemplum of the high cost of obtaining sacred writings from the West. Compared with other authors of the classic Chinese novel, the author of the XYJ is remarkable for his eye for details and for the care in their treatment in the course of a work of such length and scope. A seemingly random remark of Tripitaka, his vow to sweep every pagoda he meets on his way in chapter  (XYJ p. ), is transformed into the causal motif for an entire episode in chapter , and is picked up again in chapter  (XYJ, p. ). The diamond snare of Laozi, which knocked down the former celestial delinquent in chapter , is recalled by Wukong to that effect when he has to borrow it in chapter  (XYJ, p. ). Five hundred years later and seventy-nine chapters after the incident, Li Jing still chafes at his defeat by the Great Sage, Equal to Heaven (XYJ, chap.  and chap. , p. ). To be sure, the author shows no hesitancy in introducing all kinds of new and unrelated traditions in myth or history along the way, as Dudbridge has pointed out, but the presentation of things, events, and places related to the central characters is astonishing for the meticulous planning and execution. In the passage that I cited earlier in this essay, Dudbridge has declared that Huang Suqiu’s argument for a lost chapter “would be persuasive indeed if the author of the –chapter XYJ were known to have avoided casual references to legends outside the scope of his story, or again if he had given a full narrative account of every detail in the background of his other central characters.” Dudbridge further maintains that “the origins of such central figures as Zhu Bajie and Sha Heshang are presented only in allusion or otherwise indirectly, in moments of retrospect.” The question that must be asked at this point is whether these assertions can be supported by the text itself. In the first place, we need to determine who are the central characters of the narrative. Dudbridge in the same passage speaks of the “copious” allusions of the novel at every point to “established legends,” and he mentions the figures of Erlang (chap. ), the Warrior of the North (chap. ), Nat.a, and Li Jing, all of whom, so the argument goes, appear in the novel without any background details presented by the author. But the question that immediately arises is whether these persons can be considered the central figures of the narrative, and the answer cannot be more apparent. By no stretch of the imagination can these deities, and for that matter we may include Guanyin, Laozi, the Gold Star Venus, and Moks.a, who appear with even greater frequency, be identified as the central characters. That distinction surely must be reserved for only the five fellow pilgrims who

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have undertaken the journey to the West. It is they who engage our constant and undivided attention; the vicissitudes of their journey, the jocular forms of their action, and the lively varieties of their speech are what causes our amazement and delight, our laughter and sympathy. Vast as the pantheons of Heaven and Hell, of Buddhism and Daoism may be, they form only the supportive cast. If we indeed acknowledge the pilgrims to be the central characters, we must still decide whether it is true that the origins of someone like Zhu Bajie “are presented only in allusion or otherwise indirectly, in moments of retrospect.” To do so, I propose to quote in full the lengthy pailü spoken by Bajie (Pigsy) when he was first questioned by Sun Wukong, in chapter : My mind was dim since the time of my youth; Always I loved my indolence and sloth. Neither nursing nature nor seeking long life, I passed my days deluded and confused. I met a true immortal suddenly, Who sat and spoke to me of Heat and Cold. “Repent,” he said, “and cease your worldly way: For taking life accrues a boundless curse. One day when the Great Limit ends your lot, For eight woes and three ways you’ll grieve too late!” I listened and turned my will to mend my ways; I heard, repented, and sought the wondrous rune. By luck my teacher he became at once, Pointing out passes key to Heav’n and Earth. To get the Great Pills of Nine Cyclic Turns, My work incessant went on night and day. It reached the Mud-Pill Chamber of my crown And the Rushing-Spring Points beneath my feet. With kidney-brine flooding the Floral Pool, My Cinnabar Field was thus warmly fed. Baby and Fair Girl mated as yin and yang: Lead and mercury mixed as sun and moon. In concord Li-dragon and Kan-tiger used, The spirit turtle sucked dry the gold crow’s blood. Three flowers joined on top, the root reclaimed; Five breaths faced their source and all freely flowed. My merit done, I ascended on high, Met by pairs of immortals from the sky.

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Radiant pink clouds arose beneath my feet; With light, sound frame I faced the Golden Arch. The Jade Emperor gave a banquet for gods Who sat in rows according to their ranks. Made a marshal of the Celestial Stream, I took command of both sailors and ships. Because Queen Mother gave the Peaches Feast— When she met her guests at the Jasper Pool— My mind turned hazy for I got dead drunk, A shameless rowdy, reeling left and right. Boldly I barged through the Vast Cold Palace, Where the charming fairy beckoned me in. When I saw her face that would snare one’s soul, My carnal itch of old could not be stopped! Without regard for manners or for rank, I grabbed Miss Chang’e, asking her to bed. For three or four times she rejected me, Hiding east and west, she was sore annoyed. My passion sky-high I roared like thunder, Almost toppling the arch of the Heaven’s gate. Inspector General told the Emperor Jade; I was destined that day to meet my fate. The Lunar Palace enclosed airtight Left me no way to run or to escape. Then I was caught by the various gods, Undaunted still, for wine was in my heart. Bound and taken to see the Jade Emperor, I should by law have been executed. It was Venus, the Gold Star, Mr. Li, Who left the ranks and knelt to beg for me. My punishment changed to two thousand blows, My flesh was torn; my bones did almost crack. Alive! I was banished from Heaven’s Gate To make my home beneath the Fuling Mount. An errant womb’s my sinful destination: Stiff-Bristle Hog’s my worldly appellation! (xyj, pp. –)19

This is indeed the moment of retrospect, when Bajie recounts his past history to his opponent before a fight. Except for the extensive use of al-

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chemical and yin-yang rhetoric to describe the process of his first becoming an immortal, however, every essential detail of his past life has been established by prior narration in the novel. The rank of Marshal of Heavenly Weeds, the affront to Chang’e as a result of getting drunk, the divine chastisement of , blows by the bludgeon, the exile to earth, the wrong turn on the way to the next incarnation, and the settlement on Fuling Mountain—all of these events have been introduced in the all-important chapter . They form, in fact, the constitutive elements of Bajie’s life history that are faithfully repeated in every subsequent autobiographical account (e.g., XYJ, chap. , pp. –; chap. , p. ). Though space does not permit me to discuss the other disciples of Tripitaka, I should like to point out that the way Bajie has been presented in the narrative is exactly the same as Wukong and Wujing. If we study chapter  and subsequent episodes (e.g., chaps.  and ), we shall see again that there is a basic core of incidents in the life of Sha Heshang that is first introduced by narration, and which will be repeated without deviation. Needless to say, the obvious importance of Monkey as a central character necessitates a much more dramatic and elaborate introduction (chaps. –), and throughout the narrative, he is given many more opportunities for self-disclosure (e.g., XYJ, chaps. , pp. –; chap. , pp. –; chap. , p. ; chap. , pp. –; chap. ; pp. –; chap. , p. ; chap. , pp. – ). But in all these instances, the consistency between what has been established in the first seven chapters and subsequent rehearsals is remarkable. In the absence of chapter , Tripitaka is the only member of the pilgrimage, in fact, whose origins are presented in the manner that Dudbridge ascribes to the disciples: in allusion or indirectly, in moments of retrospect. The early editors of the XYJ, therefore, were not wholly unjustified in their protest that a theme of such significance as the Chen Guangrui story had not been more fully accounted for by antecedent narrative. As we have it today, the Chen Guangrui chapter may well have been the work of Zhu Dingchen with further modifications by the Qing editors. Style alone should make us question the chapter’s authenticity: in a work that is estimated to contain some , poems in the other ninety-nine chapters, this chapter alone does not have a single independent verse. Furthermore, it cannot be denied that the work of the later editors has brought numerous inconsistencies into the text. But by preserving the essential features of a well-known and popular legend directly germane to the entire narrative, the chapter harmonizes rather than intrudes; and perhaps in this sense, the early editors and compilers may have shown better judgment than what is accorded them by modern scholarship.

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notes

1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

This essay is an expanded version of a paper presented at the Conference on Chinese Narrative, Princeton, N.J., January 20–22, 1974. Glen Dudbridge, “Xiyouji zuben kao di zai shangjue ˪大㷠姀˫䣾㛔侫䘬ℵ⓮㎱,” Xinya xuebao 6 (1964): 497–518; Glen Dudbridge, “The Hundred-Chapter Xiyouji and Its Early Versions,” Asia Major 14 (1969): 141–191. Dudbridge, “Hundred-Chapter Xiyouji,” p. 184. Huang Suqiu 湫倭䥳 , “Lun Xiyouji di di jiu hui wenti 婾˪大㷠姀˫䘬䫔ḅ⚆⓷柴 ,” in Xiyouji yanjiu lunwen ji ˪大㷠姀˫䞼䨞婾㔯普 (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1957), pp. 173–177. The name of the monk is Qian’an 怟⬱ġin this poem, whereas the monk of chapter 9 has the name Faming 㱽㖶. Dudbridge, “Hundred-Chapter Xiyouji,” p. 184. Sun Kaidi ⬓㤟䫔, Riben Dongjing suo jian xiaoshuo shumu 㖍㛔㜙Ṕ㇨夳⮷婒㚠䚖 (Shanghai: Shanghai chubanshe, 1953), p. 108. Dudbridge, “Hundred-Chapter Xiyouji,” p. 151. Okuno Shintarō, “Mizu to honoo no denshō: Saiyūki seiritsu no ichi sokumen,” Nihon Chūgoku gakkai hō 18 (1966): 225–226. For studies of the religious themes of the XYJ, see chapters 7 and 8 of the present volume. I realize that Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara) was in all probability a male deity originally, but the figure in the novel is unambiguously feminine. Dudbridge, “Hundred-Chapter Xiyouji,” pp. 183–184. Huili ㄏ䩳 and Yanzong ⼍じ, comps., Da Tang Da Ci’ensi Sanzang Fashi zhuan ⣏Ⓒ ⣏ヰ】⮢㱽ⷓ⁛ (Sibu beiyao edition), 1:4. Ibid., 1:6. Zhu Xuan (Fu Shu-hsien ‭徘⃰), “XYJ di bashiyi nan 大忲姀䘬ℓ⋩ᶨ暋” Zhongguo shibao ᷕ⚳㗪⟙ [Chung-kuo shih-pao], March 17, 1973, p. 12. Qian Nanyang 拊⋿㎂, Song Yuan xiwen jiyi ⬳⃫㇚㔯廗ἂ (Shanghai: Shanghai gudian wenxue chubanshe, 1956), pp. 165–172; Zhao Jingshen 嵁㘗㶙, Yuan Ming nanxi kaolue ⃫㖶⋿㇚侫䔍 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1958), pp. 68–79; Glen Dud-

15. 16. 17. 18 19.

bridge, The Hsi-yu chi: A Study of Antecedents to the Sixteenth-Century Chinese Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 75–89. Dudbridge, “Hundred-Chapter Xiyouji,” p. 184. Ibid., pp. 172–173. Juan 2, p. 12b. I use a 1924 edition of the Xiyou zhenquan 大㷠䛇娖, published in Shanghai (Yuanchang shuju. Dudbridge, “Hundred-Chapter Xiyouji,” p. 184. This passage is quoted from the revised version in The Monkey and the Monk: An Abridgment of “The Journey to the West,” trans. and ed. Anthony C. Yu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 259–261.

 TWO LITERARY EXAMPLES OF RELIGIOUS PILGRIMAGE the commedia and the journey to the west

A

lthough the definition may vary among scholars of religion, there is fairly widespread agreement that certain fundamental characteristics are common to all true religious pilgrimages. In the words of one study, at least three elements must be present: “L’existence d’un lieu consacré où l’on se rend spécialement, le déplacement collectif ou individual vers ce lieu, et enfin le but de ce déplacement, qui est l’obtention d’un certain bien matérial ou spirituel.”1 Not every protracted journey of adventures or one in which the traveler or travelers engage in various heroic or dangerous exploits will perforce qualify to be called a pilgrimage. What renders the individual or collective act religiously significant, according to the cited definition, has to do with the notion of sacred space, the modes of participation, and the peculiar benefits conferred by such an undertaking. In this essay I examine the meaning of pilgrimage in two well-known literary texts: the Commedia of Dante Alighieri and The Journey to the West, most likely the product of the sixteenth-century Chinese writer and minor official Wu Cheng’en ⏛㈧】. Following some necessary remarks on historical matter, I center my discussion on how the understanding and use of religious pilgrimage in each of the two representative texts may provide an interesting—and, it is to be hoped, illuminating—comparison of different literary and religious cultures. The discussion properly begins with the Commedia, not merely because of temporal priority, but because the fundamental idea of pilgrimage emerging from the work as a whole seems most consistent with the reli-

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gious tradition that the text presupposes. That pilgrimage has played a significant part in the life of the medieval Christian church is too familiar to require special notice. Though the evidence for its institution in the New Testament is virtually nonexistent, a reference like that of Jesus in Matt. : to “the tombs of the prophets and . . . the monuments of the righteous” (see also Matt. :, ) already implies the existence of sacred sites and sanctuaries, establishments certainly familiar also in the religion of Israel. Certain locations associated with the life and ministry of Jesus were quickly marked out as holy places of worship by the early Christians. In fact, pilgrims going to Palestine tended to regard Jesus as the first pilgrim, and his postresurrection journey to Emmaus (Luke :–) was often interpreted by medieval commentators as a pilgrimage.2 Again, the description of tombs opening after the death of Jesus in Matt. :– and the rising of “many bodies of the saints” subsequent to his resurrection may exemplify the proleptic eschatology of Gemeindetheologie, but the statement may also have been colored by regard for sacred sepulchres and relics. It must be remembered, of course, that group pilgrimages before the time of Constantine were quite rare. The legendary excellence of the Roman roads notwithstanding, economics and government hostility toward large-scale movements of a frequently persecuted sect undoubtedly served to inhibit such a practice. Journeys undertaken by clerics and ecclesiastics for both scholastic and religious reasons were more often acts of individual or small-group devotion than acts of mass piety. With the establishment of the peace of the church and the active encouragement of writers like Lady Paula and Saint Jerome, the popularity of pilgrimage grew steadily from the fourth century onward. Motivated as much by spiritual zeal as by worldly curiosity, Christians sought to visit the Holy Land and especially Jerusalem. Their ardor perhaps can best be felt through the experience of someone like the author of the Peregrinatio aetheriae (ca. ), who sallied forth, in the words of one recent scholar, “Bible en main, utilisant le texte sacré comme un véritable guide touristique.”3 Her desire to visit the prominent locales recorded in holy writ, however, was more than a developed case of Wandertrieb. By retracing scriptural events and sites in her itinerary, and by performance of liturgies spontaneously and appropriately adapted for specific locations, she becomes personally a participant of those events and places. Her physical pilgrimage, in sum, provides the occasion for the union of salvation history and sacred geography, and the coveted trek from Egypt to Palestine

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is transformed into an experiential replication of both the old and new Exodus. In addition to the desire to visit sacred sites consecrated by redemptive history, the motivation of the Christian pilgrim, not unlike that of many of his non-Christian counterparts, is often governed by the quest for such personal gain as physical healing or spiritual renewal. For an undertaking that can be so fraught with deprivations, hazards, and perils of all varieties, it is only natural that it has come to be regarded in the life of the church, and on occasions exploited no less than by “the vicar of Christ” himself, as an act of special merit and meaning. Ach, schwer drückt mich der Sünden Last, kann länger sie nicht mehr ertragen: drum will ich auch nicht Ruh’ noch Rast, und wähle gern mir Muh’ und Plagen. Am hohen Fest der Gnad’ und Huld in Demuth sühn’ ich meine Schuld; gesegnet, wer im Glauben treu! er wird erlöst durch Buss und Reu’. (tannhäuser .)

So sing the aged pilgrims in Wagner’s musical drama. And the idea of the pilgrimage as the penitential act par excellence whereby one may obtain in this life assured absolution finds its most vivid dramatization both in history (in that turbulent encounter between Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII at Canossa in ) and in operatic art (Tannhäuser). What broadens the significance of pilgrimages has been the particular biblical portrayal of the Christian believer as an exile and homeless wanderer. The classic text for such a notion, Heb. :–, refers to the faithful as “strangers and exiles on the earth,” people “seeking a homeland” and desiring “a better country, that is a heavenly one.” This idea has been developed both as “a homiletic topic and in expanded form as a literary plot” 4 in countless writers across the centuries. In a deft conflation of Homeric language, Plotinian image, and Christian sentiment, Augustine, for example, exhorts in On Christian Doctrine: “Thus in this mortal life, wandering from God, if we wish to return to our native country where we can be blessed we should use this world and not enjoy it.”5 The Christian in exile, as Jean Leclerq and others have reminded us, is in fact the dominant ideal of the Middle Ages.6 Not until the twelfth century does the journey emerge as the distinctive symbol of spiritual quest,

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and through such a development comes the rapid coalescence of the physical and the spiritual, wherein the actual journey to a specific locality— Jerusalem, Canterbury, Compostela, Rome—is also taken to mirror the meaning and process of the larger Christian pilgrimage in life. Consistent with certain strains of medieval scholasticism emphasizing the priority of mind in the human person, the upward movement of the soul is now termed, echoing the actual title of a treatise by Bonaventura, an itinerarium mentis ad Deum. Thomas Aquinas, too, has written that “we are called wayfarers by reason of our being on the way to God, who is the last end of our happiness: In this way we advance the more the nearer we get to God, who is approached ‘not by steps of the body but by affections of the soul’” (Augustine, Tractatus in Joannis evangelium ).7 The emphasis in Augustine’s words quoted by Thomas concerning how the deity is to be approached is, of course, dictated by the strict spiritualism of Christian theology proper. In Dante’s Commedia, however, God is approached indeed by “steps of the body” when we witness the poet-pilgrim’s perilous descent into Hell, his strenuous climb up Mount Purgatory, and finally, his dizzying ascent into the empyrean. The physical realism of his poem, for which Dante has been justly praised through the ages, represents much more than the poet’s willful and errant departure from received doctrines occasioned by the necessary anthropomorphism of poetic art. Erich Auerbach has written perceptively that a whole century before Dante, scholastic philosophy with its striving for concordance had gone beyond the mechanical conceptions based on the traditions of late antiquity and on Vulgar Spiritualist allegory and, in the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas, had achieved an organic, systematic order. It employs the method of listing and classifying, beginning with God and going on to deal with the creatures who have issued from Him. It is a didactic system, which, in accordance with its purposes, treats of its subject as in being and at rest.8

By giving nearly all the abstract constituents of this didactic system “a local habitation and a name,” the poet in effect “transforms Being into experience; he makes the world come into being by exploring it.” In the course of his poem, Dante turns dogma into drama and succeeds in revealing through the embodied content of the doctrine, “grounded in Christian history of salvation and theoretically formulated by St. Thomas,”9 that it is through the enlightenment of intellect and the awakening of love that man will achieve final union with God.

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The tale of someone embarking on a journey thus provides the most appropriate means for the poet to depict this process of transformation, since the temporal and spatial ramifications of the undertaking allow for the maximal exploitation of such dramatic ingredients as stasis and motion, trials and ordeals, reversals and delays. To show that this highly complex journey beyond the grave is at once a chronicle of the poet’s own spiritual growth and illumination and the intended guide for all mortals seeking eternal blessedness, the poet has drawn extensively on the known literatures of pilgrimage. Dante’s appropriation of that tradition, as scholarship has shown, is nothing short of massive,10 though our discussion here must of necessity be selective. It is important to note, first of all, that, although Dante at the poem’s beginning is told by Virgil to take a different path if he is to get out of the dark wood (selva oscura) in which he has lost his way (Inferno .–),11 nowhere in the Inferno is there any actual indication that the poet is about to embark on a Christian pilgrimage. The awful descent into Hell may comport with Christian eschatology, but it is made for the sake of acquiring rational knowledge of the beyond, not salvific grace that heals and transforms. Allusions in Hell to pilgrims and pilgrimages are often made with enormous irony, such as the simile in Inferno .–, where the contrary movements of the panderers and seducers are likened to the bustling throng of Rome in the year of Jubilee. Symbolically, Hell is most frequently identified with Egypt, the region of luxury, worldliness, apostasy, and bondage. Once the poet has reached Purgatory, his understanding of his journey undergoes a perceptible change. Not only does he refer to himself specifically as a novo peregrin (Purgatorio .), that is, one who has entered on the first day of his pilgrimage, but throughout the rest of the poem there appear increasing concordances of details between pilgrim literature, travel literature, and even medieval cartography and the movement and landscape of the poem. By the Valley of the Princes, for example, Dante at dusk recalls the hour that stabs the new pilgrim with love, when he hears from a distance the chimes that mourn the dying day (Purgatorio .–). It has been observed by many commentators that Mount Purgatory itself is a composite re-creation of Mount Sinai. Standing at the antipodes opposite Jerusalem with a summit touching the sphere of the moon, Purgatory with its precipitous cliffs (Purgatorio .–), circular paths and winding ridges (Purgatorio .–), narrow openings in the rocks (Purgatorio .–; .), and sharply angled slopes (Purgatorio .–) powerfully recalls the topography of “The Thundering Mountain of God” depicted in scripture and in pilgrimage literature. Both mountains are

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symbolically linked because they provide the tangible union of Heaven and Earth for the mortals. Just as Sinai is the mountain that both the biblical Israelites and the historical Christian pilgrims must scale before they reach the promised destination of their sojourn, and just as the Law given on Sinai must precede the Grace of the Christian evangel, so the poet-pilgrim in the Commedia must go through the experience wherein his progressively felicitous ascent comes with the gradual purging of his errors and sins (Purgatorio .–). Consonant with its religious significance and function, therefore, Purgatory is the place where the solitary wayfarer begins to acquire a deeper sense of community and communion among the redeemed. Whereas the feeling characteristic of the poet’s experience in the first book is one of loneliness and terror (Inferno .: “e io sol uno”), Dante discovers early in the second book that his own experience may now be seen as part of a larger one when he and Virgil are joined by a group of visitors on the desert island before Mount Purgatory (Purgatorio .ff.). Unlike those damned spirits assembled on the bank of the River Acheron and ferried to Hell by the demon Charon, wailing and traveling in isolation (Inferno ), these some one hundred souls carried in a boat piloted by an angel are beings who, like the poet, have begun their purgatorial path to Heaven. Disembarking together, the spirits sing with one voice (“ad una voce”) the song “In exitu Israel de Aegypto,” the opening verse of Psalm  and the text used by Dante himself in his famous letter to Can Grande della Scala for illustrating the fourfold interpretation of redemption. The manner in which the dead souls arrive—how they sing together in the boat, how the angel steering the boat makes the sign of the cross, how they fling themselves joyously on land, and the general sense of camaraderie and fellowship—has invited comparison with the accounts of actual pilgrim landings in the Holy Land. More significant, however, than the polysemous relations between text and events is the gentle irony structured in the encounter of the two poets with the boatload of souls. When the latter ask in excitement to be shown the way to the side of the mountain (Purgatorio .–), Virgil declines by pleading ignorance of the place, for, he says, “we are strangers even as you are” (“noi siam peregrin come voi siete” [Purgatorio .]). The wordplay on peregrin, which may have the meanings of both stranger and pilgrim, is perhaps deliberately intended by Dante. As someone whose eternal destiny is confirmed in Limbo, Virgil cannot use the word peregrin to describe himself in this context except in the nonreligious sense of a sojourner in a strange and unfamiliar land. On the other hand, Virgil’s use of the first person plural noi is no poetic

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license, for in his company is indeed a true pilgrim, one who shares the destiny of the other redeemed souls and from whose guardianship Virgil will resign in due time. The separation of the poet-pilgrim from his guide occurs when the travelers arrive at the top of the mountain, where Dante will have his will made “free, straight, and whole” (“libero, dritto e sano” [Purgatorio .– ]) and all his past sins purged prior to his final ascent into Paradise. The drama of that moment is carefully prepared for and meticulously wrought in the final cantos of the Purgatorio. As M. H. Abrams has aptly summarized for us in his Natural Supernaturalism, the Christian notion of life as “a toilsome peregrinatio” carries with it both the image of a linear progression and a circular return. It is linear to the extent that this central trope of life as a pilgrimage attracted into its orbit various Old Testament stories of exiled wanderers, especially the account of the exodus of the chosen people from their bondage in Egypt and of their long wanderings in the wilderness before the entry into the promised land. The goal of the journey was usually imaged as the New Jerusalem, which is both a city and a woman; and the longing for the goal was frequently expressed, following Revelation :, as an insistent invitation to a wedding: “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come.”12

Along with this image of the linear journey is also the image of the circular return, epitomized in the tale of the prodigal son (Luke :–), who collected his inheritance and “took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living” before repenting and returning to a rejoicing and forgiving father. The story has long been regarded in the Christian tradition as the supreme parable of man’s sin and redemption. In the Commedia, both figures of the linear journey and the circular return are brought into play when we witness the stages of the poet-pilgrim’s justification and sanctification. Consistent with the theology of his poem, Dante has placed Eden, the terrestrial paradise, at the summit of Mount Purgatory and made it the first goal to be reached by the poet-pilgrim in his long and arduous quest. Since the Fall of the first couple and their expulsion from the primal garden, the human race, according to the medieval geography of the poem, has been transferred from the Southern to the Northern Hemisphere, and the seat of human blessedness and first innocence has been forever barred from mortal sight (see the poet’s lament in Purgatorio .–). “The proper

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view of the particular and concrete shape which Dante gave to [his] journey,” as Charles Singleton’s detailed studies have shown us, is thus “a return to Eden, . . . a regaining of what man had lost in his fall from that lofty place.”13 At the dawn of the third day during their climb of Mount Purgatory, the poet-pilgrim, aware that they are near the summit, likens his feelings to those of pilgrims gladdened by the thought of their proximity to their homeland (“che tanto a’ pellegrin surgon piú grati, / quanto, tornando, albergan men lontani” [Purgatorio .–]). He is then told by Virgil that his craving for that sweet fruit (“dolce pome”) long sought by all mortals (Inferno .) will on that day be satisfied (Purgatorio .–). Before Virgil leaves, he invests his companion with miter and crown, those symbols of spiritual and temporal authority on earth, and his act in turn reflects the perfection of the poet-pilgrim’s will and its achievement of mastery over itself. The recovery of inner rectitude is not complete without spiritual cleansing and renewal. Singleton argues that there is in the final cantos of the Purgatorio a vivid portrayal of man’s restoration both to his natural perfection and to a state of grace, two conditions that find correspondence in the venerable Catholic doctrine that holds that Adam, created in God’s image, had further received from his Creator added gifts of grace.14 Whether Dante’s poetry is in fact a fastidious allegory of these notions of justitia originalis and donum superadditum is too complicated an issue to be taken up here. There is little question, nonetheless, that it is the advent of Beatrice, seen by many commentators as a type of Christ, that initiates for the pilgrim the transformation necessary to his final redemption. Early in the poem, the intercessory role of Beatrice has already been firmly established, when Virgil discloses (Inferno ) that it is this fair lady, prompted by Saint Lucy at the instance of the Virgin Mary herself, who descended into Limbo to enlist Virgil’s assistance for her beloved. It is she who, as Dante later exclaims in grateful retrospect, leaves her footprints in Hell in order to bring him salvation (“e che soffristi per la mia salute / in inferno lasciar le tue vestige” [Paradiso .–]). The tale of her solicitude, in fact, has helped to strengthen the Florentine bard at the commencement of his difficult journey (Inferno .–). Toward the end of the Purgatorio, the mere sight of her at once produces in Dante the powerful awakening of love, just as her eventual fierce reprimand drives him to overwhelming contrition for his past sins and errors and readies him for the ultimate visio Dei. Critics have recognized that real affection exists between the poet-

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pilgrim and his childhood sweetheart.15 It is no less apparent, however, that their “old love in all its great power” (“d’antico amor sentí a gran potenza” [Purgatorio .]) can never be regarded as an end in itself, for it serves, within the theological framework of the poem, as that decisive, enabling force in moving the lover to love “that Good beyond which there is nothing which man may long for” (“Per entro i mie’ disiri, / che ti menavano ad amar lo bene / di là dal non è a che s’aspiri” [Purgatorio .–]). At the summit of Mount Purgatory, after having regained entrance into the earthly Eden, Dante as the Christian pilgrim is granted the sight of “the advance of a pageant whose stately movement, banner-like lights, and holy songs have suggested to critics a procession of Church clerics bearing with them Christ in the form of the Host. The pilgrim has confessed his sins, done penance, and been cleansed by holy water. Fortified spiritually by four cardinal virtues, the pilgrim is next redeemed by Christ through reception of the Host, a ‘food which, satisfying of itself, causes thirst of itself.’ And this action brings the three theological virtues near to the pilgrim’s soul.”16 Throughout this entire episode and on to the next canto, the symbolic character of Beatrice, as the reflected image of the Divine Light, finds magnificent and sustained poetic development. In the dazzling luminosity of her eyes and her smile, the poet-pilgrim sees a double image: “As the sun in a mirror, so was shining within the twofold animal, now bearing with the one, now with the other” (“Come in lo specchio sol, non altrimenti / la doppia fiera dentro vi raggiava, / or con altri, or con altri reggimenti” [Purgatorio .–]).17 Despite this intense focus on her, her person, as Dante is careful to show, always points beyond herself. From the moment of her encounter with her lover through their final dizzying ascent toward the empyrean, her action directly inspires the action and reaction of the pilgrim. “As Beatrice looks upward, and I on her” (“Beatrice in suso, e io in lei guardava” [Paradiso .]) is the characteristic pattern. The light of her gaze at the sun that then strikes into the vision of the mortal now entrusted in her care and causes him in turn to gaze upward has been compared, in a controversial line, with “a falcon which darts down and rises” or “a pilgrim who would turn homeward” (“come pellegrin che tornar vuole” [Paradiso .]).18 The wordplay on pellegrin (falcon or pilgrim) again may be deliberate, since both interpretations can reinforce the meaning of her action as a double movement of descent and ascent that launches the pilgrim on his celestial path. Of the residents in Heaven T. S. Eliot has said that “at first, they seem less distinct than the earlier unblessed people; they seem ingeniously

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varied but fundamentally monotonous variations of insipid blessedness.”19 Perhaps what Eliot should remember here is that he (as reader) is seeing Heaven through the vision of Dante, whose aim in the Paradiso is to depict, with all the cunning and craft he possesses, the salvific transformation of the pilgrim. The fundamental feature marking the pilgrim’s experience in Paradise, as it is beforehand, is growth—the enlargement of intellect and the intensification of love—and not immediate knowledge and clarity. When Beatrice instructs him about the souls appearing to him on the moon, the first circle of Heaven, she pointedly refers to the venerable doctrine of divine accommodation (Paradiso .–), which is utilized here for Dante’s (and by extension, the reader’s) benefit. Later she exhorts him to open his mind and keep what she has revealed to him, since there is no knowledge without retention and internalization (Paradiso .–). The interior transformation of the pilgrim thus provides the true dynamic element in the plot; it is not the description of rank, hierarchy, and spheres, but of his progressive experience of these that unifies the action and endows it with the verisimilitude of motion and excitement. If the saints appear “less distinct than the earlier unblessed people,” as Eliot says, this is because the pilgrim’s sight has yet to adjust to the blinding intensity of celestial radiance. When at last the power of his vision has grown to such extent that it equals his station in the empyrean (Paradiso ), the identity of the host of blessed souls becomes distinct, for they are now individually perceived. To vent that rhapsodic sense of wonder, awe, and joy that accompanies his vision at this final stage of his journey, the poetic narrator once more makes use of the images of pilgrimage. The setting of his grand epic, after all, is Easter week in the fateful year . On February  of that year, Boniface has issued his papal bull that promises: “We . . . grant to all . . . who being truly penitent, shall confess their sins, and approach these Basilicas [of Peter and Paul] each succeeding hundredth year, not only a full and copious, but the most full pardon of all their sins.”20 Dante may not have believed the efficacy of plenary indulgence in exactly this manner, and his disdain for the corruption of the Roman papacy needs no elaboration. Nonetheless, his regard for the city of Rome itself cannot be denied, for as the most celebrated and revered goal of all earthly pilgrimages, the city has become the supreme type of the final destination sought by all spiritual wayfarers. It is fitting, therefore, that when the poetpilgrim nears his own destination, the city of the rose in Heaven, he compares his stupefaction with that of the barbarians who, approaching Rome from the north, first catch sight of the magnificent Lateran towers (“Se i barbari, . . . / veggendo Roma e l’ardua sua opra; / stupefaciensi, quando

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Laterano / a le cose mortali andò di sopra” [Paradiso .–]). Twice he likens himself to a pilgrim—as one who is renewed in the temple of his vows when he looks around and already hopes to tell how it was (Paradiso .–), and as one who has come from Croatia to stare at Saint Veronica’s veil in Rome (Paradiso .–). The object, one of the deepest veneration, was displayed at Saint Peter’s during January and in Holy Week. But Dante, as he will soon realize, need no longer be content with mere symbol or relic, just as the sacrality of place is finally assimilated entirely into the ecstasy of vision and praise. He will be granted shortly the unmediated sight of Infinite Goodness, vision greater than speech can show, and in seeing, the pilgrim has at last been brought from bondage to liberty.

ŒŒŒ The plot of the Commedia, as we have seen, is erected upon an imaginary journey that Dante, as pilgrim and narrator-participant, has taken. On the literal level of the poem, Dante at the beginning of the Inferno moves into a region beyond life, and, having descended into the realms of the lower world and then successfully scaled a mountain identified as Mount Purgatory at the antipodes with Virgil as guardian and guide, he soars from the mountain’s summit beyond the earthly sphere to the deity. In the reflected movement of this journey, a Christian pilgrim may be seen to have passed through the Egypt of the Inferno, climbed uphill over the globe to Jerusalem, which is situated at the earth’s center on Mount Zion opposite Purgatory, and then sailed from Palestine to Rome to look on Saint Veronica’s veil at Saint Peter’s. The poem, as John Demaray correctly observes, “points back to this world, but not as has been claimed to a world that is essentially secular. The pilgrimage pathway revealed here below is the most blessed that living men can tread, for it passes through the holiest lands, sites, and places in the entire iconographic Book of God’s Works. And the goal of the journey for the persevering pilgrim is a glimpse in this life of God’s Divine Visage.”21 Inasmuch as the poem in the deepest intentionality of its author is meant to be regarded as both fiction and truth, the traditional debate among the critics on whether it is an allegoria poetica or allegoria theologica is actually rather moot.22 On one level, the poet’s experience and vision are indeed entirely fictive and poetical. But even as poetry, its verity, at least according to the self-understanding of its author, approximates that of Holy Writ,

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for the Commedia is intended literally to bring other pilgrims also to the beatific vision (Paradiso .–). When we take up The Journey to the West 大㷠姀 (hereafter cited as Journey), a work written almost two centuries later and half a world away in China, we find remarkable instances of similarity and contrast in the two texts. Unlike the Commedia, the Chinese epic narrative is based squarely on one of the most celebrated pilgrimages in Chinese religious history, the seventeen-year (in the narrative, the span is given as fourteen) trek of the monk Xuanzang from Tang China to India to acquire Buddhist scriptures. Furthermore, although both works may be said to belong to the high comic mode in the sense that both have so-called happy endings, the Journey has a far greater abundance of low comic, indeed Chaucerian, elements of farce, ribald humor, and irreverent satires of religious and political institutions. This vast contrast in narrative tonality and character, however, should not obscure the fact that very much like the Commedia, the Journey is at once a magnificent tale of fiction and a complex allegory, in which the central drama of its protagonist’s “approach to God” unfolds within the interplay of the literal and figurative dimensions of the work. The Chinese text, I would like to propose, can be read on at least three levels, as a tale of physical travel and adventure, as a story of Buddhist karma and redemption, and as an allegory of philosophical and alchemical self-cultivation. To the extent that the story of Xuanzang is not only well known and well loved but also has received popular elaborations for nearly a millennium before it was finally worked into the form of a hundred-chapter narrative, the author of the developed Journey may be said to have found at last the formal solution most appropriate to the substance of his story. Even in dramatic form (zaju 暄∯) at an earlier stage in the history of the story’s evolution, the distinguishing feature of this early and rather unique Ming play (also entitled The Journey to the West) is its length of some forty scenes.23 But the drama, however long, cannot equal the inherent capaciousness of a narrative in portraying the duration, magnitude, and vicissitudes of a protracted pilgrimage. In deciding to retell this familiar story in the form of the long, chapter-divided “novel” (zhanghui xiaoshuo 䪈⚆⮷婒), then at the peak of its development and popularity, Wu Cheng’en or whoever the author might be has provided himself with sufficient length and space to incorporate not only most of the known antecedents of the tale he favors but also to add whatever details he chooses to invent. Invention, in fact, is the most immediate distinguishing feature of the hundred-chapter work when one compares it with either its antecedents

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or the accounts of the historical pilgrim. For, although the actual exploits of the real Tripitaka are readily accessible in the standard dynastic history and in his biography compiled by his disciples, the operative assumptions of the novel are hardly those guiding a work of historical fiction. Not only has the author made little use of known historical materials to construct his narrative journey, but, as recent Chinese criticism has firmly established, the Sitz im Leben of the work can be found in nowhere else other than southeastern China of the sixteenth century.24 Geographical details alone surfacing in the narrative would indicate that the author has virtually ignored the Record of Western Territories (Xiyu ji 大➇姀), written by Xuanzang himself, and has, instead, made use of many place-names found in the Huai’an region of Jiangsu province. Such authorial manipulations of familiar sites and locations no doubt serve to incite interest in his immediate readership as well as to underscore the imaginary character of the pilgrimage itself. This is not to say, of course, that the author of the Journey has no regard at all for the actual pilgrimage. Where appropriate, certain details are utilized with great effectiveness, as when the Tang emperor Taizong offers his “Preface to the Holy Religion” (Shengjiao xu) to the scripture-pilgrim as a gesture of imperial gratitude. Historically, this preface was bestowed by the emperor many years after Xuanzang’s return to China and after he had successfully completed the translation of the epic Yogācāryabhūmi śāstra.25 In the narrative, however, the preface is orally presented by the emperor moments after the pilgrim arrives back at the capital of Chang’an, and this minor alteration not only enhances the drama of reunion between loyal subject and royal patron, but it also provides a fitting tribute to the experience and achievement of the faithful pilgrim. In this different context certain words of the preface take on a significance even greater than that of the historical document. Witness those sentences that describe the journey’s hardships: “Risking dangers he set out on a long journey, with only his staff for his companion on this solitary expedition. Snow drifts in the morning would blanket his roadway; sand storms at dusk would blot out the horizon. Over ten thousand miles of mountains and streams he proceeded, pushing aside mist and smoke. Through a thousand alternations of heat and cold he advanced amidst frost and rain” ( Journey :).26 The sweeping rhetoric of the Tang emperor seems to have inspired the author to construct the most imaginative elaboration possible of the journey. In episode after episode we have occasion to visit with the pilgrims the most exotic haunts and fantastic locales—from a river of black water

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(chap. ) to a Mountain of Flames (chaps. –), from a Bramble Ridge of  miles (chap. ) to a Kingdom of Women (chap. ). Intriguing as these accounts may be, the Journey, of course, is not merely intended as literature of travel or adventure. Surely what impresses the reader are not the local sceneries and customs of the places Xuanzang visits, as might be if he were reading the historical Record of Western Territories, but the countless circumstances of duress and difficulty the pilgrim must go through, circumstances that accentuate the pains of pilgrimage, a major theme in the narrative. No one can fail to notice how often Xuanzang is buffeted by hunger, cold, thirst, and exposure. The pilgrim here is not the normal . member of the Buddhist san gha, someone who, leaving his family (chujia), is nonetheless embraced and supported by a new community. Although he has been made a bond brother of the Tang emperor and has received a moving royal send-off in sharp contrast to the historical figure’s lowly status and furtive departure from China, the fictive Xuanzang on the road is reduced to an “in-betweener” and a pariah. He is a mendicant (xingjiao seng) who is both figuratively and literally homeless and who, because of his pilgrimage, may come into conflict even with fellow priests and clerics of his own faith in particular regions (chaps. , ). In addition to these miseries imposed by the natural elements and by displacement, Xuanzang also falls prey repeatedly to the greed of brigands, the treachery of human magistrates and rulers, and the assaults of a vast host of supernatural beings, both demonic and divine. The sustained endurance of fated ordeals lights up the powerlessness of the liminar and lends poignance to the plaintive verse uttered by the master near the end: Since leaving my lord to go to the West, I’ve walked the path of an unending quest. In mountains and streams disasters await; My life has been the fiends and monsters’ bait. Tripitaka’s the sole thought in my mind; The Ninefold Heaven’s all I hope to find. When will I from such toil my respite earn And, merit done, to the T’ang court return? ( journey :)

It justifies, furthermore, the kind of question raised by his disciple, Monkey, in a particular moment of despair after his master had been captured by a specious Buddha: “‘Oh, Master!’ he cried. ‘In which incarnation did you incur such ordeals of bondage, that you must in this life face monster-

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spirits every step of the way! It’s so hard now to rid you of your sufferings. What shall we do?’” ( Journey :). These words of Sun Wukong, ostensibly rhetoric of random protest, actually point to the second major theme of the narrative. The journey to the West is no ordinary pilgrimage. For, although this fictive journey, unlike its historical counterpart, is an imperially inaugurated and sanctioned one, and although the sacred treasure of Buddhist scriptures remains its nominal goal, the meaning of Xuanzang’s itinerary transcends those known concerns of the historical figure. The central religious issue of the Chinese narrative, very much like that of the Commedia, has to do with personal redemption—for the master pilgrim and for his four disciples. There is, we must observe, a slight but not insignificant difference in the theological economy. Dante’s poetpilgrim is implicated by birth in the sinful condition common to all humanity, symbolized by the selva oscura (“la vita del peccato, che ottenebra la mente,” notes one modern editor)27 at the poem’s beginning from which he is to be delivered. Before he makes his final ascent, moreover, he has to confess and be cleansed of his sins committed in this life, among which those that caught Beatrice’s attention and elicited her severest reprimand were his intellectual wandering and treason in love (Purgatorio .–). The main characters in the Chinese tale, on the other hand, all suffer first because they happen to have transgressed some law of Heaven in their previous lives, and—in the case of the disciples—because they have committed further crimes even in their mortal incarnations. The expiatory experience that Xuanzang must undergo, as the dialogue of his disciples in chapter  makes clear, assumes both the general form of his banishment to earth and the specific shape of various hardships he will meet on the pilgrimage. To explain why their master has taken ill at that point, Monkey says to Bajie, “You have no idea that Master was the second disciple of our Buddha Tathāgata, and originally he was called Elder Gold Cicada. Because he slighted the Law, he was fated to experience this great ordeal.” “O Elder Brother,” said Bajie, “even if Master had slighted the Law, he had already been banished back to the Land of the East where he took on human form in the field of slander and the sea of strife. After he made his vow to worship Buddha and seek scriptures in the Western Heaven, he was bound whenever he ran into monster-spirits and he was hung high whenever he met up with demons. Hasn’t he suffered enough? Why must he become sick as well?”

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“You wouldn’t know about this,” replied Pilgrim. “Our old master fell asleep while listening to Buddha expounding the Law. As he slumped to one side, his left foot kicked down one grain of rice. That is why he is fated to suffer three days’ illness after he has arrived at the Region Below.” [Journey :]

This etiology of Xuanzang’s illness, to be sure, is expounded and received in the comic mode (witness Bajie’s horrified reply: “The way old Hog sprays and splatters things all over when he eats, I wonder how many years of illness I’d have to go through!”), but the suffering of the master, here as elsewhere, is no less real or certain. If the master-pilgrim must atone for past guilt by merit attained on the pilgrimage, this obligation is just as binding on his disciples. As I have pointed out in the introduction to the narrative, “all three of them, together with dragon-horse, have been condemned for certain misdeeds. The widespread fame of Monkey stems from the turmoils he caused in heaven; Bajie, Sha Monk, and the dragon-horse were punished and exiled to the earth below for getting drunk and insulting Chang’e, the legendary beauty of the Lunar Palace, for breaking crystals during a solemn banquet, and for setting fire to the dragon king’s palace and thereby destroying some precious pearls” ( Journey :). Throughout the story, then, forces demonic and divine appear again and again to threaten, to tempt, and to test the five pilgrims. On numerous occasions these ordeals would involve even other humans and nonhumans the pilgrims meet on their way in such a manner that the outcome would frequently reinforce the popular notion of Buddhist karma. For unwittingly shooting with an arrow a young peacock, an offspring of Buddha’s mother, the prince of the Scarlet-Purple Kingdom later has to have his queen kidnapped for three years by a goldenhaired wolf, the beast of burden of the bodhisattva Guanyin (chap. ). For pushing some sacrificial maigre to the ground and blasphemy, the prefect of the Phoenix-Immortal Prefecture is punished with three years’ severe drought until Monkey arrives to bring relief and induces conversion (chap. ). The cause and resolution of these various crises thus serve to illustrate the popular saying that “not even a sup or a bite is not foreordained” ( Journey :). As we shall learn presently in chapter , the predestined trials that Xuanzang must undergo have to be eighty-one, the number of perfection wrought by nine times nine. These ordeals, in fact, are meticulously recorded by the attendants of no less important a deity than Guanyin. When one ordeal is found to be lacking at the end of the pilgrimage, the

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goddess immediately sends one of her subordinates to “manufacture” an added one so that the cycle can be completed. It is appropriate that Guanyin is once more the superintending deity when the pilgrims near their long-sought goal, for hers is a role of special import in the narrative. It is she, we remember, who volunteers to leave the assembly of Buddha and answers to his call to go to the Land of the East in search of the proper scripture-pilgrim (chap. ), and it is she who succeeds in converting four celestial renegades and recruiting them to serve Xuanzang ( Journey :–). After the pilgrims have set out, it is Guanyin again who solicits secret protection from various tutelary deities for the master pilgrim. At various junctures of the journey, she delivers the needed warning and lends decisive assistance in the subjugation of monsters and demons. Though Guanyin is not romantically linked to the master pilgrim, her function in the narrative is surely comparable to the mediatorial and redemptive role assumed by Beatrice in the Commedia. When Guanyin embarks on her crucial mission to the Land of the East in chapter , the testimonial poem composed by the narrator refers to her as a “seeker of man” and that “to find some percipient [she] would disgorge liver and gall” ( Journey :). Because of her compassionate zeal and evangelical efficacy, her journey, as the narrator again predicts, will result in “a son of Buddha returning to fulfil his original vow” ( Journey :). When it is seen in the totality of the narrative’s design, the pilgrimage thus once more bears some interesting affinity to that in the Western poem, for the goal of both journeys is understood fundamentally as return and restoration as much as redemptive transformation. If Guanyin symbolizes, in her person and mission, the providential care and enabling power of beneficent transcendence, the role of the Virgilian guide and guardian is taken up by Xuanzang’s disciples, most notably by Sun Wukong. This irresistible simian not only defends his master from the marauding forces of Heaven and Hell but also teaches his master in a frequent reversion of positions about the true meaning of the pilgrimage. When Xuanzang, in chapter  ( Journey :), frets characteristically about the “violent airs and savage clouds” soaring up from a tall mountain blocking their path, the disciple says, “And you’ve long forgotten the Heart Sūtra of the Crow’s Nest Zen Master.” “I do remember it,” said Tripitaka. “You may remember the sūtra,” said Pilgrim, “but there are four lines of gāthā which you have forgotten.”

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“Which four lines?” asked Tripitaka. Pilgrim said, Seek not afar for Buddha on Spirit Mount; Mount Spirit lives only in your mind. Each man has in him a Spirit Mount stūpa; Beneath there the Great Art must be refined. “Disciple,” said Tripitaka, “you think I don’t know this? According to these four lines, the lesson of all scriptures concerns only the cultivation of the mind.” “Of course, that goes without saying,” said Pilgrim. “For when the mind is pure, it shines forth as a solitary lamp, and when the mind is secure, the entire phenomenal world becomes clarified. The tiniest error, however, makes for the way to slothfulness, and then you’ll never succeed in ten thousand years. Maintain your vigilance with the utmost sincerity, and Thunderclap will be right before your eyes. But when you afflict yourself like that with fears and troubled thoughts, then the Great Way and, indeed, Thunderclap seem far away.”

In this short episode we have perhaps one of the clearest instances when the third major theme of the narrative, the journey as self-cultivation, finds explicit statement. That the notion of controlling the mind is basic to the process of selfcultivation (xiuxin ᾖ⽫), as all students of Chinese intellectual history know, is common to many Neo-Confucian thinkers. From Zhu Xi to Wang Yangming, from Shao Yong to Luo Qinshun, Gao Panlong, and Jiao Hong, we have a continuous thread of emphasis tied to the importance of the cultivation of heart-and-mind and the elaborate variations of how this is to be achieved. In addition to the Neo-Confucian interpretation, the idea also gains prominence in the Chan (Zen) school of Buddhism, and, as Andrew Plaks has aptly observed, “the prajnaparamita wisdom condensed in the Heart (or, Mind) Sutra serves as a convenient reminder of this fact, but the same essential message might as well be drawn from nearly any other of the well-known texts of Chinese Buddhism.” 28 Strands of both traditions can be readily detected in the narrative, for not only is the master pilgrim shown to possess a special fondness for the Heart Sūtra (a peculiarity of Xuanzang attested by both antecedent history and popular tradition), but the narrative itself engages in constant play with such familiar and convenient metapors as “the Monkey of the Mind” and the

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inseparable connection between mind and Buddhahood (note the prefatory verse in Journey :: “The Mind is the Buddha and the Buddha is Mind; / Both Mind and Buddha are important things. / If you perceive there’s neither Mind nor Thing, / Yours is the dharmakāya of True Mind”). Although the fictive Xuanzang is able to say at the beginning of his pilgrimage that “when the mind is active, all kinds of māra [demons] come into existence; when the mind is extinguished, all kinds of māra will be extinguished” ( Journey :), his experience in the narrative reveals the greatest comic irony, namely, that he is virtually ignorant of these words’ true meaning. Time and again in the course of the pilgrimage, it is his “active mind,” or the heart/mind born of fear, suspicion, doubt, mistrust, misgiving, foolishness, attentiveness to slander and flattery, and even attachment to bodily comforts that lands him in the lair of demons. Monkey, however, is the one who not only comes to his solace and assistance but also repeatedly impresses upon him the need for detachment and the truth of no-mind, a benefit that Xuanzang himself finally acknowledges (“Wukong’s interpretation is made in a speechless language. That’s true interpretation” [Journey :]). The profound paradox emerging from the narrative appears to be thus: that the pilgrim, who has been given the sacred words (Heart Sūtra) and magic talisman (golden fillet and Tight Fillet Spell) wherewith to control the mind (“Mind is a Monkey—this, the truth profound” [Journey :]), must be aided at all times by the mind if he is to succeed. In view of the prominence given to the images of the mind, the temptation to read the entire narrative as a late Ming allegory on idealism with preponderant Neo-Confucian overtones is enormous. But to do so with Zhang Shushen, one of the mid-Qing editors of this narrative, is to miss a good deal of the other elements woven into the polysemous fabric of the work. We need, therefore, to recall that the Journey stresses not only the cultivation of mind but also the cultivation of the body, or the Dao (xiushen, xiudao, xiulian ᾖ幓, ᾖ忻, ᾖ䃱). The group of images reflecting the latter process thus brings into focus the specific art of physiological alchemy. This topic, I would like to point out, is already implied in the popular verse quoted by Monkey in chapter , for the Spirit Mountain mentioned three times in the poem is neither exclusively the literal abode of Buddha, the intended goal of the physical journey, nor the figurative nomenclature of the mind. In the syncretic lore of alchemy, Spirit Mountain apparently may refer to a certain spot in the human body, near to the heart according to some illustrations in Daoist texts. It is no accident that the pilgrim’s

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final arrival in Paradise is described in a certain order. As they reach the base of Spirit Vulture Peak, they are received into a Daoist temple with the significant name of Yuzhen, or Jade-Immortal. To reach their destination, the pilgrims are led by the Daoist temple master “through the central hall of the temple to go out the rear door. Immediately behind the temple, in fact, was the Spirit Mountain.” ( Journey :–). To an untrained and uninitiated eye, this little description sounds no more than an innocent scenic description, but to the annotators of a modern edition of the text published by a Daoist society in Taiwan, the scant geographical details here offer the decisive proof that “Spirit Mountain is to be sought inside one’s body.”29 Without exaggerating the importance of such incidental details, I must point out that this line of interpretation is certainly consistent with the aims and practices of neidan, or physiological alchemy. When Monkey, in one of his many autobiographical declamations in verse, recounts how he had learned the arts of immortality, his words succinctly summarize the belief accepted by all cultic masters and lay practitioners that “in my body were psychic and pills / Which one would work in vain to seek outside” ( Journey :). To find the elixir that could bring about a reversion to youth, an attainment of longevity because of continued rejuvenation,30 one must in this view rely not on external chemicals or drugs but only on hygienic and physiological techniques. This fundamental concept, as Lu Gwei-Djen’s pioneering study has shown, was connected with two others almost equal in importance, first a countercurrent flow of some of the most important fluids of the body opposite to their normal directions, and secondly a thought-system which envisaged a frank reversal of the standard relationships of the five elements [five phases]. The first idea, of flow in a direction opposite to the usual . . . was applicable . . . particularly to the products of the salivary and testicular glands. The second concerned the power which the physiological alchemists believed that their techniques could attain over the natural processes of mutual generation of the five elements (hsiang-shêng). They dared to believe that by their efforts the normal course of events could be arrested and set moving backwards; this was called tien tao, “turning nature upside down.”31

Both ideas, as any careful reader of the Journey must come to realize, receive prominent and repeated representations in the narrative. There are, as I have tried to show in my introduction, extensive patterns

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of correspondence between the names of the pilgrims and the Five Phases, which are then further correlated with different physiological systems or functions.32 Like Dante of the Commedia, the Chinese author has also succeeded in translating the static, mysterious vocabulary of internal alchemy into dynamic configurations of the plot. The complex system of correspondences not only enables him to comment on the experience and action of the pilgrims by allusions in the titular couplets and many of the poems structured in the narrative, but also to endow his landscape of specific regions with symbolic meaning. For example, at the beginning of chapter , there is the episode in which Monkey liberated some  hardpressed Buddhist priests by killing two of their Daoist persecutors and smashing to pieces a heavy cart, which the priests had been forced to pull up a steep ridge. What is tantalizing is the prominence given to the cart and to the spine-ridge pass ( jiguan), in both the titular couplet and the first part of the story. To the reader unfamiliar with alchemy, the prose passage may appear no more than a rather mild attempt at naturalistic description. But to the Lungmen editors steeped in spagyrical lore, the cart seems an unmistakable allusion to heche 㱛干 (river cart), which is the traditional alchemical term for either a load or measurement of medicine, or the process of reversing the flow of vital fluids in one’s body. The spine-ridge pass, according to this view, is in fact a particular spot on the spine which that process of reversal must traverse. If such an annotation by the modern allegorizer smacks too much of the “ridiculous nonsense” with which Hu Shi has charged the older editors and commentators of the narrative, one should at least take note of the striking image in numerous alchemical texts of this process: “Pulling lead and adding mercury, one transports the Great Medicine to go through the pass. The entire journey is like a cart going against the current in a river and then it will be returned to the Yellow Court ㉥戃㶣㰆炻忳⣏喍䁢忶斄炻ᶨ嶗⤪㱛ᷕ干㯜炻微㳩侴ᶲ炻䃞⼴復㬠湫⹕ḇ.”33 Awareness of a passage like this may help us to understand why the author has named this particular region the Cart-Slow Kingdom. It may also conjure up the rather bizarre image of the pilgrims who, in their symbolic roles, are coursing through the human anatomy much as the diminished figures of Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage travel through the bloodstream. If this comparison is somewhat jarring, it is because the Chinese author’s technique is so understated and unobtrusive. Readers of nearly four centuries have delighted in the narrative for its own sake, and, similar to the readership of the Commedia, not many have penetrated to “the doctrine

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shrouded by the strange mysterious verses” (“la dottrina che s’asconde / sotto il velame de li versi strani” [Inferno .–]). Nonetheless, the allegorical intent of the text is both insistent and inclusive, even in the scenic descriptions. An episode that relates how the pilgrims must traverse a long, narrow gorge clotted with stinking, rotted persimmons suggests a parallel with the large intestine with explicit puns (chap. ). After the pilgrims have succeeded in conquering the Mountain of Flames more devastating and imposing than Dante’s desert of Burning Sand (Inferno ), the narrator begins the next episode with the observation: “Since they attained the condition wherein water and fire were in perfect equilibrium, their own natures became pure and cool. Successful in their endeavor to borrow the treasure fan of pure yin, they managed to extinguish the large mountain of torrid flames.” This process of internalizing the journey, a tendency common to many allegorical texts, may in fact point to what I would call the antipilgrimage element in this particular account of pilgrimage. While the literal action of the story, framed and governed by the historical events of Xuanzang’s travel, moves relentlessly toward a final resolution found only in the pilgrim’s reaching his geographic goal, the allegorical elements throughout the narrative actually ridicule and mock any blind trust in the efficacy of distance and externality. Sacred space, from which the ultimate benefits of the pilgrim are to derive, is actually localized and internalized. The hardships of a physical journey are progressively enlisted to reflect the vicissitudes of those who practice philosophical or alchemical self-cultivation: the restlessness of the mind, the persistency of errors, the demons of illusions and delusions, the hazards of errant techniques (note the many allusions to pangmen 㕩攨 [heresy or heterodoxy]), the danger of sloth and lack of concentration, and even the hubris in assuming the role of a teacher (chaps. –). It may be asked at this point why the author of the hundred-chapter narrative has chosen the processes of internal alchemy to form part of his allegory. No doubt the full answer to this question must be sought in the cultural and intellectual milieu of both author and his intended audience of late medieval China, the ascertainment of which would require research and reflection far beyond the scope of the present essay. I would maintain, however, that a provisional and preliminary answer, or a hint of an answer, may be suggested by a passing, comic touch in the work itself. We need to call to mind here that the phrase shang xitian ᶲ大⣑, or ascending the Western Heaven, means, in colloquial Chinese, “to die” or “the state of death.” That the author of the narrative is keenly aware of such meaning is to be seen in the humorous way he exploits this idiom at every oppor-

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tunity. Referring to a ruler who had been dead three years but restored to life to serve the pilgrims briefly as a worker, Monkey says: “We took him on because he knew the way to the Western Heaven, having gone there himself in his younger days” ( Journey :). Again, a deer-monster having assumed the form of a Daoist priest is heard questioning the pilgrim: “The road to the West is shrouded in darkness! What’s so good about it?” ( Journey :). In the lively idiom of the vernacular that pervades this magnificent tale, Western Heaven is thus understood not merely as the coveted paradise, the abode of Tathāgata and the goal of the pilgrim. It is also very much the dreaded condition and end that await all humans, and the highly specialized pilgrimage to acquire Buddhist scriptures, seen in this light, is suddenly expanded to become the larger and universal pilgrimage of life wherein all mortals must journey toward death. If this is the case, is it too far-fetched to envision an author of such manifest learning and inventive genius deciding to depict, by means of allegory, the follies and foibles, the triumphs and defeats, not of Everyman but of those who through philosophy and cultic arts seek to transcend mortality? The climax of the tale is reached when the pilgrims arrive at the region of the Buddha, and it is at this point that the thorough interpenetration of Buddhist and Daoist imageries becomes most pronounced. The emphasis is laid not merely on the fact that the pilgrims will succeed in acquiring the objects of their desire, Buddhist scriptures, but on the “Five Sages becoming realized immortals” (wusheng cheng zhen Ḽ俾ㆸ䛇), as a line of the titular couplet of chapter  announces. As they journey toward Spirit Vulture Peak, they are made to cross a swift torrent of water in a bottomless boat, piloted by the Conductor of Souls, the Buddha of the Light of Ratnadhvaja. In midstream, they see floating by the boat a corpse that is interpreted by the disciples and by the boatman to be the master pilgrim, and in this way, the Daoist image of “deliverance through assuming a corpselike form” (shijie ⯠妋) and the Buddhist image of “casting one’s mortal shell” (tuohai 僓橠) readily coalesce. Although the final exaltation of the pilgrims is identified with their elevation to Buddhahood, the last chapters also insistently dwell on their attainment of immortality. Immediately following the bottomless boat episode, for example, the verse commentary says ( Journey :): Delivered from their mortal flesh and bone, A primal spirit of mutual love has grown. Their work done, they become Buddhas this day, Free from their former six-six senses’ sway.

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The imagery of the last two lines is distinctively Buddhist, since the six-six senses (liuliu chen ℕℕ⠝) most probably refers to the intensive form of the six gun.as, the six impure qualities engendered by the objects and organs of sense (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and idea), but the “primal spirit” (yuanshen ⃫䤆) of line  is the Daoist terminology for, among other things, the interior god of one’s body. If Dante, the poet-pilgrim, is granted participation in the Eucharistic meal at the end of his climb on Mount Purgatory, the pilgrims arriving at Buddha’s Great Thunderclap Monastery are the recipients of far greater culinary largesse. As they sit to enjoy the sacred banquet ordered by Tathāgata for their benefit, the narrator presents these lines as part of his poetic testimony: Such divine fare and flowers humans rarely see; Long life’s attained through strange food and fragrant tea. Long have they endured a thousand forms of pain. This day in glory the Tao they’re glad to gain. ( journey :)

Although culinary symbols are thus deployed in both texts, the experience of eating has different effects on the participants. Consistent with the Christian theological context of the poem, the “food” feeding the soul of Dante, the pilgrim, increases his craving for more (“l’anima mia gustava di quel cibo / che, saziando de sé, di sé asseta” [Purgatorio .–]), for the poetry here clearly paraphrases Ecclus. :. There Sapientia says of herself: “He who eats of me will hunger still, he who drinks of me will thirst for more (“Qui edunt me adhuc esurient, et qui bibunt me adhuc sitient”). The viands proffered by Buddha, on the other hand, so satisfy the pilgrims, including the hoggish edacity of Bajie, that they thenceforth lose much of their desire for human nourishment ( Journey :, ). The alteration of their natures thus symbolizes both the successful curbing of their mortal appetites, a Buddhist emphasis, and the pilgrims’ “perfection in the fruit of Dao” (Daoguo wancheng 忻㝄⬴ㆸ), as the text declares, which will deliver them from dependence on “foods of fire and smoke” ( yanhuo shi 䄁䀓梇). In the unself-consciously syncretic tone of the narrative, even the speech of Tathāgata may take on a Daoist hue, as when he calls the scriptures that he is about to bestow on the pilgrims “truly the pathway to the realization of immortality and the gate to ultimate virtue” ( Journey :). Lest any reader may still have missed the “point,” so to speak, the narrator presents

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one more testimonial verse after the last ordeal that the pilgrims have to go through. Nine times nine, hard task of immortality. Firmness of will yields the mysterious key. By bitter toil you must the demons spurn; Cultivation will the proper way return. Regard not the scriptures as easy things. So many are the sage monk’s sufferings! Learn of the old, wondrous Kinship of the Three: Elixir won’t gel if there’s slight errancy. ( journey :)

As the Kinship of the Three (Zhou Yi cantongqi ␐㖻⍫⎴⣹, ca. ) is the seminal text for both laboratory alchemists and physiological alchemists, read and commented on extensively by both philosophers and adepts of the immortality cult, 34 the “message” of the Journey’s author could not have been more explicit. The end of this famous pilgrimage, retold in such an expansive and imaginative manner, will be for the pilgrims not only the successful acquisition of the scriptures but also the successful cultivation of longevity and eternal youth. In their well-known study of the subject of pilgrimage in Christian culture, Victor and Edith Turner have observed that “behind such journeys in Christendom lies the paradigm of the via crucis, with the added purgatorial element appropriate to fallen men. While monastic contemplatives and mystics could daily make interior salvific journeys, those in the world had to exteriorize theirs in the infrequent adventure of pilgrimage. For the majority, pilgrimage was the great liminal experience of the religious life. If mysticism is an interior pilgrimage, pilgrimage is exteriorized mysticism.”35 The readers of both the Commedia and The Journey to the West are fortunate to have in their hands not only marvelously conflated accounts of both journeys but also highly entertaining ones to boot.

notes 1. Freddy Raphaël, “Le pèlerinage, approche sociologique,” in Les pèlerinages l’antiquité biblique et classique à l’occident médiéval, ed. M. Simon et al. (Paris: Geuthner, 1973), p. 12. The literature on pilgrimage in various religious cultures is enormous. For this study, I have consulted Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975); Sidney H. Heath, Pilgrim Life in the Middle Ages (Boston: Unwin, 1912), and the enlarged edition, titled In the Steps of

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2.

3.

4.

5.

the Pilgrims (New York: Putnam, 1950); Donald J. Hall, English Mediaeval Pilgrimage (London: Routledge, 1965); Arthur Percival Newton, ed., Travel and Travellers in the Middle Ages (London: Kegan Paul, 1926); R. J. Mitchell, The Spring Voyage: The Jerusalem Pilgrimage in 1458 (London: Clarkson Potter, 1964); Thomas Wright, trans., Early Travels in Palestine (London: Bohn, 1848); Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); “Pilgrimage,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (New York: Scribner’s, 1921), 9:10–28; A. Fowler, “Patterns of Pilgrimage” [review article], Times Literary Supplement (November 12, 1976): 1410–1412; Nancy Falk, “To Gaze on the Sacred Traces,” History of Religions 16 (1977): 281–293; and C. E. King, “Shrines and Pilgrimages Before the Reformation,” History Today 29 (1979): 664–669. For studies dealing specifically with literature and pilgrimage, I have found the following particularly useful: W. H. Mathews, Mazes and Labyrinths: Their History and Development (1922; repr., New York: Dover, 1970); Georg Roppen and Richard Sommer, Strangers and Pilgrims: An Essay on the Metaphor of Journey, Norwegian Studies in English, no. 11 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1964); F. C. Gardiner, The Pilgrimage of Desire: Theme and Genre in Medieval Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1971); Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest Romance,” in The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 13–35; D. L. Maddox, “Pilgrimage Narrative and Meaning in Manuscripts A and L of the Vie de saint Alexis,” Romance Philology 27 (1973): 143–157; Christian Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Ronald Paulson, “Life as Journey and as Theater: Two Eighteenth-Century Narrative Structures,” New Literary History 7 (1976): 43–58; Donald R. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). An indispensable bibliographical source on accounts of pilgrimages to the Holy Land from the fourth to the nineteenth centuries will be found in Reinhold Röhricht, Bibliotheca Geographica Palestinae: Chronologisches Verzeichnis der von 333 bis 1878 verfassten Literatur über das heilige Land mit dem Versuch einen Kartographie (Berlin: Reuther, 1890), rev. ed., David H. K. Amiran ( j erusalem: Universitas, 1963). Herbert Thurston, The Stations of the Cross: An Account of Their History and Devotional Purpose (London: Burns & Oates, 1906), p. 3; Gilbert Cope, Symbolism in the Bible and the Church (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), pp. 52–53; M. D. Anderson, Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 150–151; John Plummer, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves (New York: George Braziller, 1966), pl. 75; Damian J. Blaher , ed., The Little Flowers of St. Francis (New York: Dutton, 1951), p. 457. Marcel Simon, “Les pèlerinages dans l’antiquité chrétienne,” in Les pèlerinages de I’antiquité biblique et classique à I’occident medieval, ed. F. Raphaël et al. (Paris: Geuthner, 1973), p. 100. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 165. See also Gerhart B. Ladner, “Homo Viator: Medieval Ideas of Alienation and Order,” Speculum 42 (1967): 233–259; George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (New York: Harper, 1962); W. G. Johnsson, “Pilgrimage Motif in the Book of Hebrews,” Journal of Biblical Literature 97 (1978): 239–251. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson Jr. (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1958), 1.4, p. 10. Cf. Augustine’s quotation of Plotinus in The City of God,

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6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

trans. Marcus Dodds (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 9.17, p. 296. Cf. also Christine Mohrmann, Études sur le latin des Chrétiens, vol. 2, Latin Chrétien et médiéval (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 1961), pp. 75ff. See, for example, Dom Jean Leclerq, “Mönchtum und Peregrinatio in Frühmittelalter,” Römische Quartelschrift für Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 55 (1960): 212–225; Dom Jean Leclerq, “Monachisme et pérégrination du IXe au XIIe siècle,” Studia monastica 3 (1961): 33–52; Giles Constable, “Monachisme et pèlerinage au moyen age,” Revue historique 258 (1977): 3–27; and Hans Freiherr von Campenhausen, Die asketische Heimatlosigkeit im altkirchlichen und frühmittelalterlichen Mönchtum (Tübingen: Mohr, 1930). Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica 2–2, 24.4. Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 94. Ibid. A brief review of some of the pertinent literature may conveniently be found in John G. Demaray, The Invention of Dante’s “Commedia” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 51–52. For other studies, see R. H. Lansing, “Two Similes in Dante’s Commedia: The Shipwrecked Swimmer and Elijah’s Ascent,” Romance Philology 28 (1974): 161–177; D. Heilbron, “Dante’s Gate of Dis and the Heavenly Jerusalem,” Studies in Philology 72 (1975): 167–192; G. D. Economou, “Pastoral Simile of Inferno XXIV and the Unquiet Heart of the Christian Pilgrim,” Speculum 51 (1976): 637–646; D. J. Donno, “Moral Hydrography: Dante’s Rivers,” Modern Language Notes 92 (1977): 130–139; J. C. Boswell, “Dante’s Allusions: Addenda to Toynbee,” Notes and Queries 24 (1977): 489–492; A. A. M. Paasonen, “Dante’s Firm Foot and Guittone d’Arezzo,” Romance Philology 33 (1979): 312–317; J. B. Holloway, “Semus Sumus: Joyce and Pilgrimage,” Thought 56 (1981): 212–225. The Italian text of the Commedia is that of Giorgio Petrocchi’s edition published for the Società Dantesca Italiana and reprinted in C. H. Grandgent’s edition revised by Charles S. Singleton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972). Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism. Charles S. Singleton, Journey to Beatrice, originally published as Dante Studies 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 224–225. Ibid., pp. 101–116, 223–283. Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (New York: Noonday Press, 1961), see especially chaps. 2–3, 8–12. Demaray, Dante’s “Commedia,” p. 123. For the significance of the image, see Dorothy Sayers, trans., The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Cantica II: Purgatory (Baltimore: Penguin, 1955), p. 321: “In the mirror of Revelation (the eyes of Beatrice), Dante sees the double Nature of the Incarnate Love—now as wholly divine, now as wholly human.” On the problem of translating this passage, see Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, trans., The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Cantica III: Paradise (Baltimore: Penguin, 1962), pp. 352–353. T. S. Eliot, “Dante,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), p. 225. For more recent treatments of the theme of development in the Paradiso, see J. Leyerle, “Rose-Wheel Design and Dante’s Paradiso,” University of Toronto Quarterly 46 (1977): 280–308; J. L. Miller, “Three Mirrors of Dante’s Paradiso,” University of Toronto Quarterly 46 (1977): 263–279; D. M. Murtaugh, “Figurando il paradiso: The Signs That Render Dante’s Heaven,” PMLA 90 (1975): 277–284; J. A. Mazzeo,

156 two liter ary exa mples of religious pilgrim age

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

“Dante and the Pauline Modes of Vision,” Harvard Theological Review 50 (1957): 275–306. The original Latin version of the bull is found in L’anno santo del 1300: Storia e bolle pontifice da un codice del sec. XIV del Card. Stefanischi (Rome, 1900), pp. 30–31. The English translation cited comes from Herbert Thurston, The Holy Year of Jubilee: An Account of the History and Ceremonial of the Roman Jubilee (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1949), p. 14. Demaray, Dante’s “Commedia,” p. 92. Charles S. Singleton, Dante Studies I (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), chap. 1; Jean Pépin, Dante et la tradition de l’allégorie (Montreal: Institut d’études médiévales, 1970); R. H. Green, “Dante’s ‘Allegory of the Poets’ and the Medieval Tradition of Poetic Fiction,” Comparative Literature 9 (1957): 118–128; Charles S. Singleton, “The Irreducible Dove,” Comparative Literature 9 (1957): 129–135; R. H. Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s “Commedia” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969): R. H. Hollander, “Dante ‘Theologus-Poeta,’” Dante Studies 94 (1976): 192–193; J. A. Scott, “Dante’s Allegory,” Romance Philology 26 (1973): 558–591. The Chinese text can be found in the Yuanqu xuan waibian ⃫㚚怠⢾䶐, ed. Sui Shusen 昳㧡㢖, 3 vols. (Peking, 1959), 2:633–694. Su xing 喯冰, “Zhuizong Xiyouji zuozhe Wu Cheng’en nanxing kaocha baokao 徥希 ˪大㷠姀˫ἄ侭⏛㈧】⋿埴侫㞍⟙⏲,” Jilin shida xuebao ⎱㜿ⷓ⣏⬠⟙ 61 (1979): 78–92; Su xing, “Zhuifang Wu Cheng’en di zongji 徥姒⏛㈧】䘬䷙嶉,” Suibi congkan 晐䫮⎊ ↲ 3 (1979): 131–151. Huili ㄏ䩳 and Yancong ⼍じ, comps., Da Tang da Ciensi Sanzang fashi Zhuan ⣏Ⓒ⣏ ヰ】⮢ᶱ啷㱽ⷓ⁛, juan 6, 10a-17b; Arthur Waley, The Real Tripitaka and Other Pieces (London: Allen and Unwin, 1952), pp. 92–95. All citations are taken from my translation of the Xiyouji, Anthony C. Yu, trans. and ed., The Journey to the West, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977–1983). Dante Alighieri, La divina commedia, ed. G. M. Tamburini (Florence: Casa Editrice Nerbini, 1959), p. 21, n. 2. Andrew H. Plaks, “Allegory in Hsi-yu chi and Hung-lou meng,” in Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Andrew H. Plaks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 182. For an informative account of “mind-cultivation” in late imperial China, see Judith A. Berling, The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 90–144, and Judith A. Berling, “Paths of Convergence: Interactions of Inner Alchemy Taoism and Neo-Confucianism,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 6 (1979): 123–147. Chen Dunfu 昛㔎䓓, ed., Xiyouji shiyi ˪大㷠姀˫ġ慳佑 (Taipei: Quanzhen chubanshe, 1976), p. 1150. Detailed discussions of alchemical theories propounded by Chinese adepts can be found in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 5, part 4:211–323. While this volume concentrates on external and protochemical techniques, volume 5 (part 5) focuses on the physiological aspects of the art. One recent and useful study of the polysemous nature of alchemical terms is Chen Guofu 昛⚳䫎, “Daozang jing zhong waidan huanbaishu cailiao di zhengli 忻啷䴻ᷕ⢾ᷡ湫䘥埻㛸㕁䘬㔜䎮,” Huaxue tongbao ⊾⬠忂⟙ 6 (1979): 78–87. Lu Gwei-Djen, “The Inner Elixir (Nei Tan): Chinese Physiological Alchemy,” in Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honor of Joseph Needham, ed.

two liter ary exa mples of religious pilgrim age 157

32.

33.

34.

35.

Mikuláš Teich and Robert Young (London: Heinemann, 1973), p. 74. The term tientao [diandao] 栃Ὰ in this regard is especially significant, since it is precisely the term employed in the very first oral “formula” uttered by Patriarch Subodhi in chap. 2 of the novel, when he taught Sun Wukong the secrets of immortality: “The Five Phases use together and in order reverse—[diandao yong] / When that’s attained, be a Buddha or immortal at will” ( J ourney 1.88). Journey 1.36–52. See also Zhang Jing’er ⻝朄Ḵ, “The Structure and Theme of the Hsi-yu chi,” Tamkang Review 11, no. 2 (1980): 169–188; Fu Shuxian ‭徘⃰, “Xiyouji zhong wusheng di guanxi ˪大㷠姀˫ᷕḼ俾䘬斄Ὢ,” Zhongguo wenhua fuxing yuekan ᷕ⚳㔯⊾⽑冰㚰↲ 9, no. 5 (1976): 10–17. See the description under the entry “Da heche ⣏㱛干,” in Dai Yuanchang ㇜㸸攟, Xianxue cidian ẁ⬠录℠ (Taipei: Taibei jianyu yinshua gongchang, 1962), p. 35; and the Xiyouji shiyi, pp. 347–349. On the meaning of heche, see also Needham, Science and Civilisation, 5, part 4:254–255; Li Shuhuan 㛶⍼怬, Daojiao da cidian 忻㔁⣏录℠ (Taipei: Juliu, 1979), p. 405. For lengthy treatments of this difficult text, see Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976–1980), 5, part 3:50–75; 5, part 4:248–285. Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, pp. 6–7.

 RELIGION AND LITERATURE IN CHINA the “obscure way” of the journey to the west

I

begin by quoting at some length a statement made by an acclaimed scholar and translator, David Hawkes, about the distinctive character of Chinese literature:

If we begin looking for features of our own [Western] literature which are not paralleled in Chinese literature, we shall find the most striking instance in the absence of religious inspiration. Our drama began in pagan ritual and developed in medieval mystery. Chinese drama is secular for as far back as we can trace it—to the masques and buffooneries with which Han emperors were entertained two thousand years ago. Our greatest poets sing of Juno’s jealousy and Apollo’s rage, of journeys through Heaven and Hell, of Satan’s fall, and Paradise Lost and Regained. Chinese literature is in the main a secular literature. When one considers the intense devotionalism which swept through China during the “Buddhist centuries” from the first to the ninth centuries a.d., one is startled to find how comparatively little of it is manifested in contemporary literature. The monks used popular literature as a proselytizing vehicle, and they played a leading part in the development of printing, which gave China a half-educated urban reading public for cheap popular fiction centuries before the same phenomenon appeared in Europe; but few people could name any religious poetry other than the deservedly famous but not outstandingly important verses of the “Master of the Cold Mountain.” The word secular tends to recur when one speaks in general terms about Chinese literature—or, for that matter, about Chinese society. Imperial

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China may be likened to a medieval European society without Christianity in which all, not only half, the ruling class were clerks. The immense esteem in which literacy and education were held meant that a great deal of literary activity was patronized and institutionalized by the state.1

This statement by Hawkes is important for at least two reasons. First, the sweeping generalizations are not those of someone eager to attract attention by provocative announcements. Although in  the scholarly labor for which Hawkes is now best known and praised—namely, the prodigious and masterful translation of The Story of the Stone—had yet to be undertaken, his reputation had already been firmly established five years before by the appearance of The Songs of the South, an exacting and exciting rendering of the Chuci, an anthology of probably the most difficult ancient poetry. His general description of Chinese literature, therefore, bears the authority of seasoned and scrupulous scholarship. Second, the statement is important precisely because it represents a view that has commanded widespread assent even down to the twenty-first century. Countless thinkers, both Chinese and non-Chinese, have echoed Hawkes’s sentiments in affirming the central characteristics of the Chinese Weltanschauung to be rationalistic, this-worldly, and anthropocentric. To the extent that the dominant culture of traditional Chinese society is acknowledged to be essentially Confucian in both its organizational structures and systems of values, the particular allegiances of that class of people are regarded as pervasive and normative. In the words of Max Weber’s once influential study of Confucianism and Daoism, The Confucian had no desire to be “saved” either from the migration of souls or from punishment in the beyond. Both ideas were unknown to Confucianism. The Confucian wished neither for salvation from life, which was affirmed, nor salvation from the social world, which was accepted as given. He thought of prudently mastering the opportunities of this world through self-control. He desired neither to be saved from evil nor from a fall of man, which he knew not. He desired to be saved from nothing except perhaps the undignified barbarism of social rudeness. Only the infraction of piety, the one basic social duty, could constitute “sin” for the Confucian 2

Although this view of Confucianism over recent years has been challenged increasingly by the writings of such scholars as Wolfram Eberhard, Theodore de Bary, Julia Ching, Tu Weiming, Benjamin Schwartz, and others,

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the notion that a Confucian and thus secularist worldview predominated in traditional Chinese culture is a myth still holding sway over large segments of the academic community. If further documentation is desired, permit me to quote something of a much more recent vintage from The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, of . There, Burton Watson remarks, “the Chinese poetic tradition is on the whole unusually humanistic and commonsensical in tone, seldom touching on the supernatural or indulging in extravagant flights of fancy or rhetoric.”3 The Chinese poetic world is affirmed to be both easily accessible and timeless because “it concentrates to such a large degree on concerns that are common to men and women of whatever place or time.” It has “little of the ebullient celebration of heroic deeds,” and “war and violence are seldom touched on” as are explicit erotic themes and imageries. “All of this,” according to Watson, “reflects the pervading influence of Confucianism.” 4 The problem, however, with such a one-sided description of Chinese culture is that it simply cannot “save the appearances” nor stand up to scrutiny, particularly when we consider the data provided by literary history. It is my purpose to show here, within the confines of a brief study, some of the significant points or stages of contact that religion has made with the Chinese literary tradition. The crux of the debate in this context, I suppose, must center on what is meant by “religious inspiration,” the absence of which, according to Hawkes, is what distinguishes Chinese literature from that of the West. As we examine the remark of Hawkes cited at the beginning, he seems to equate religion or what is religious first of all with figures, actions, and themes found in classical myths and biblical writings of the West. Thus he speaks of “Juno’s jealousy” and “Apollo’s rage,” of the “journey through Heaven and Hell,” of “Satan’s fall and Paradise Lost and Regained,” all of which, Hawkes contends, lack parallels or counterparts in Chinese literature. In making this kind of comparison, he conveniently passes over what C. T. Hsia has described as “the numberless celestial maidens and fox fairies in stories and jottings in classical Chinese,”5 not to mention entire pantheons of gods, immortals, chthonic deities, and weird beasts and creatures of all varieties that populate the developed novels of the late imperial period. In sheer size and complexity of hierarchical structure, those pantheons would rival any Olympian or Roman model. My mention of the novels, of course, is entirely deliberate, for what is striking in these generalizations by Hawkes is the conspicuous absence of the genre of prose fiction, whether in the form of the short story (written in either the classical or the vernacular language) or the full-length nar-

religion and liter ature in china 161

rative. Hawkes’s remark about early drama perhaps cannot be gainsaid, but few students of the development of Chinese prose fiction would deny that it has intimate relations with certain religious elements in the culture. Arguably, such elements might have less to do with organized institutions and articulated dogmas than with social customs, ritual practices, and unsystematized beliefs and assumptions shared by both elite and demotic levels of society. Nonetheless, the specific origin of what is customarily translated as prose fiction (xiaoshuo ⮷婒), by most accounts of modern literary historians, is traceable to the mounting preoccupation, on the part of both rulers and subjects in the late Han and Six Dynasties periods, with what broadly may be described as the realm beyond nature, with such problems as immortality, the afterlife, the causal relation between merit and punishment, magic, shamanism, and alchemical theories and procedures. When one examines the intellectual and cultural history of this period, one is impressed by how cosmological speculations and historical writings both enlisted the theories of yinyang 昘春(complementary bipolarity) and wuxing Ḽ埴 (five phases, or multiple periodicity) to construct an unbroken set of relations obtaining in man, human society, and the universe itself.6 Concomitant with this tendency came the impulse to document or record the strange, the out of the ordinary—in short, to put into writing what deviates from the normal or natural occurrences in life and history. Although scholars may dispute the thesis of Wang Yao 䌳䐌, a noted modern literary historian, that xiaoshuo in its earliest form was directly related to the techniques of magic or divination,7 they cannot deny that both the outlook and the context of early Chinese prose tales were notably colored by the beings belonging to the world of the supernatural. Gods, ghosts, animal spirits, and numinous manifestations of various kinds densely inhabited the brief tales of this period. Indeed, it was such a dominant trait that gave to this group of writings its generic name of zhiguai ⽿⿒ (recording the strange or anomalous), but their most important feature was the fact of their independent collection. As H. C. Chang has observed, “unusual occurrences that excited wonder as events” were now regarded as “events worthy in themselves of notice—and not, as previously as part of history.”8 Unlike Aristotle in the West, whose rationalism might have led him to denigrate the deus ex machina, to ignore the all-important phenomenon of atē in Greek tragic drama, and to assign the element of the marvelous to the lowliest position in his enumeration of tragedy’s six qualitative parts, Chinese literati of the late Han and the Wei-Jin periods seemed to share instead the interests of Western Renaissance writers in

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the depiction of the marvelous. Unlike, however, theorists of the Renaissance such as Minturno, Castelvetro, Neroni, and a host of others who all insisted on pleasure as being the most important ingredient in such representation,9 instruction seemed clearly the more preferred purpose in the Chinese context. Tales about ghosts, about rewards and punishments in the afterlife, frequently assumed—in the words of Derk Bodde on the Soushenji ㏄䤆姀 (In Search of Spirits)—“the very serious mission of proving to a skeptical world the actual existence of spirits.”10 This intent, no less than its subject matter, seems to me hardly capable of being characterized as lacking in “religious inspiration.” If interest in the supernatural constituted at least one of the basic impulses for the writing and gathering of fiction in ancient China, such an impulse also proved to have a tenacious hold on the Chinese imagination in subsequent centuries. The very name of the form of prose fiction flourishing in the Tang period is indicative of its character: Zhuanqi ⁛⣯, or “a tale transmitting the marvelous.” Undeniably, the predilection for spiritual manifestations that animated four centuries of storytelling had, by the time of the Tang, become more of an established literary topos than strictly an exercise of pious zeal or religious polemics. Nonetheless, the curiosity about traffic with the transcendent world of gods, immortals, numinous beings and objects or with the world beyond the grave burned with insatiable intensity in a great number of the prose tales of the Tang and Song periods, as is evident in such extant collections as the Taiping guangji ⣒⸛ ⺋姀, the Qingsuo gaoyi 曺䐋檀嬘, and the Yijianzhi ⣟➭⽿. What might be called the religious dimension of fiction in medieval China was further enhanced and complicated by the introduction and spread of Buddhism. Although the relationship of that great religious tradition to China’s literary history has traversed such a long and complex course that a full and systematic chronicle has yet to be undertaken, at least two aspects of that relation must be briefly mentioned here. The first has to do with the origin of the idea of creative fiction in Chinese history. In his History of Chinese Vernacular Literature (Baihua wenxueshi 䘥娙㔯⬠⎚), of , Hu Shi argued that a traditional Chinese long poem such as “Ballad of the Peacock Flying South” (Kongque dongnan fei ⫼晨㜙⋿梃) was capable of only realistic narration, but it lacked the imaginative propensity to transcend nature or time and space.11 In his view, the infusion of Indian culture and imaginative literature (huanxiang wenxue ⸣゛㔯⬠) with its otherworldly (shangtian xiadi ᶲ⣑ᶳ⛘) and utterly uninhibited (haowu jushu 㮓䃉㊀㜇) orientation exerted a “powerfully liberating” effect on traditional Chinese letters. In the field of narrative verse, such an effect resulted first

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in the amplification of length itself. Hu gave as an example Aśvaghos.a’s Buddha-carita kavya sūtra ἃ㇨埴孂䴻, since the verse translation of that great account of Buddha’s life and deeds, by Tanwuchen 㙯䃉嬾, in pentasyllabic verse, in Hu’s estimate, was the first real long poem in China’s literary history. Its length of , characters far surpassed that of any native product.12 In the field of prose fiction, on the other hand, the impact of Indian literature was felt in the unprecedented emphasis of “formal design and construction (xingshishang di buju yu jiegou ⼊⺷ᶲ䘬ⶫ⯨冯䳸㥳).”13 Whereas ancient fiction, inclusive of all those prose tales that purported to record the anomalous and transmit the marvelous, had always masqueraded as a form of history—however unorthodox or baseless—Indian writings, in Hu’s judgment, provided the Chinese with “a type of literature as fabricative construction (xuankong jiegou di wenxue ticai ㆠ䨢䳸㥳䘬㔯⬠ 橼塩).” In sum, the product of pure creativity is now given independent recognition and worth. These ideas of Hu, though not without controversy, have been echoed and reinforced in later scholarship. In his study of Dunhuang literature, particularly of the bianwen, or transformation texts, Victor Mair has emphasized the important concepts of illusion (huan ⸣, māyā) and transformation (hua ⊾, nirmāna) and their influence on the Chinese understanding of xiaoshuo, which progressed from the notion of “small talk” in the sense of gossip, anecdote, and report of little consequence to something specifically invented or feigned. Citing another modern literary historian, Huo Shixiu 暵ᶾẹ, Mair gave new and compelling endorsement to the view that only in the Tang, as a result of absorption of foreign or Indian culture, was there to be conscious literary creation.14 However one might assess this line of thinking about the origin of fiction in China, there could be no objection to the view that Buddhism provided new subject matter for fictive depiction and introduced new literary forms and speech. Anyone cursorily acquainted with its history in the Chinese context would realize that Buddhism’s arrival did not merely betoken the implantation of a novel and ever-growing body of doctrines. When seen in its first , years of development in China—say, from the late Han through the Southern Song—the Buddhist visitation must be regarded as a massive invasion of a rival cultural tradition that affected virtually every aspect of Chinese literary life. The acknowledged impact of Buddhism in this area included, for example, the manifest influence of Indic linguistic concerns in the study of phonology and the refinement of tonal metrics, the adoption of Buddhist metaphysical terminologies for the elaboration of aesthetics and poetics, the unprecedented advancement of translation

16 4 religion and liter ature in china

and further development of the techniques of textual criticism and interpretation, and the imitation of Indian models in the rise of extended prosimetrical compositions. With the spread of this religion, doctrinal formulations (especially those treating karma and eschatology), stories about the Buddha and the vast assemblage of saints and heroes, and the exploits of eminent clerics all joined to create a vast repository of attractive topics for telling and retelling in Chinese.15 On the matter of Buddhist devotionalism, Hawkes indicated that he could find little example of its poetic manifestation apart from the “famous but not outstandingly important” verse of Han Shan, or Cold Mountain. Now, it is certainly true that both the lyrical forms of China, characteristically brief and compact, and the literati who used them were inimical to extensive and discursive incorporation of ideational elements in poetry. However, such a character of Chinese poetry does not render the lyrical forms wholly unsuitable or impervious to the expression of religious sentiments, Buddhist or otherwise. The Dunhuang literary remains, as Ren Bantang’s study and compilation have amply demonstrated,16 include among other specimens abundant poetic materials that are identifiably Buddhist. Cycles of poems with titles such as “The Twelve Hours of Chan Meditation” (“Chanmen shi’er shi” 䥒攨⋩Ḵ㗪) or “The Twelve Hours of the Law” (“Famen shi’er shi” 㱽攨⋩Ḵ㗪) clearly represent a rule of meditative ritual diurnally celebrated. In form, feeling, and artistry, such poems are worthy to be compared with poetic cycles of devotion by George Herbert and Henry Vaughn in England or Sura Dasa and Miram Bai in India.17 Beyond such exercises in explicit pietism, one must acknowledge the much more enduring and widespread view of seeing in the art of poetry itself a fundamental analogue to the Buddhist understanding of reality and existence. The emphasis on the polysemy of language, its cryptic revelatory power, and the need for enlightened intuition (wu ぇ, jue 奢, or satori) advocated by Zen Buddhism finds extensive echoes and elaborations not merely in such well-known disquisitions on poetic techniques as the Canglang shihua 㹬㴒娑娙 (early thirteenth century) or the writings of Huang Tingjian 湫⹕➭ (–). The apposite union of Zen and poetry, formalized in the line “Learning poetry is like learning to practice Zen ⬠ 娑㷦Ụ⬠⍫䥒,” became, in fact, a sort of creedal watchword for many poets and discussions of poetics throughout the Tang and Song periods.18 Even in a canonical figure like Bo Juyi 䘥⯭㖻 (–), who might not have been identified with any one particular school of Buddhism, specific elements of that religion turn up with revealing regularity in the vast corpus of his verse.

religion and liter ature in china 165

Particularly toward the later years of Bo’s life, ritual fastings were routinely observed and extolled as an antidote for the seduction of the senses.19 A dream of partying with three deceased friends helped him recall the Buddhist teaching of “transmuting perceptual knowledge into wisdom 廱嬀䁢㘢,” 20 while a vision of decay led to his realization of the axiom of nirodha.21 By his own admission, Bo was an avid reader of sutras and a frequent practitioner of Chan meditation.22 Moved by his good friend Yuan Zhen’s famous elegiac poems for his wife, Bo offered as a curative of grief . to his good friend the Lan kāvatāra Sūtra 㤆ụ䴻.23 That Bo had also been a dabbler in Daoist alchemy, that he was neither a didactic zealot like Han Shan nor a pious devotionalist like some of the Dunhuang poets, actually has made his poetic affirmation of Buddhism even more striking. The simplicity of his style and diction and his complete mastery of tonal metrics have not only won for him a deservedly central place in the tradition; they also served as a powerful and effective means for the unobtrusive transmission of religious feelings and beliefs. If we turn momentarily from Buddhism to Daoism, we may find once again specific and revealing traces not merely in the works of such poets as Xie Lingyun and Tao Qian, who were known for their Daoist sympathies and inclinations. As the scholarship of Edward Schafer and Paul Kroll has shown, Daoist notions of transcendence, cosmology, astronomy, and alchemy colored vast segments of the poetic canvas of medieval China. That such a situation has not gained widespread recognition is because few modern readers, Chinese or Western, have taken these ideas and their sources with sufficient seriousness, but they are as necessary for a proper understanding of many Tang poems and poetic practices as Lactantius, Jacob Arminius, and Hugo Grotius are necessary for Milton’s epic theodicy and Gregory the Great and Peter Comestor for Dante’s conception of purgatory. The religious underpinning of a lyric tune like the nüguanzi ⤛ ⅈ⫸ and its characteristic tropes of erotic dalliance and separation or death cannot be felt without specific awareness of instances of hierogamic rites and sartorial symbolisms of the Daoist priestess.24 A suite of mountainclimbing poems by Li Bo may appear to the unwary reader as works of great secular learning, given the allusions structured in the lines. However, their true meaning as that of the poet’s encounter with the numinous center of Tai Shan will not become apparent unless “their full religious context” has been restored, which in their case requires a thorough knowledge of Daoist periapts, talismans, meditative techniques, and sacred geography.25 Many more examples such as these may be found in Chinese literary

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history, but I trust my point has been made with sufficient clarity that the vast panoply of traditional Chinese literature, far from lacking in any religious inspiration, has been touched and even transformed by various religious elements. For the rest of this essay, I turn to a brief examination of one particular work that can serve as a more intimate example of the confluence of both literary creativity and religious inspiration. This, of course, is the sixteenth-century, hundred-chapter narrative Xiyouji 大㷠姀 (The Journey to the West [hereafter cited as JW ]), most likely written by a minor official named Wu Cheng’en ⏛ㆸ】. As should be familiar by now, the story of the novel is loosely based on the historical exploits of the Tang priest Xuanzang 䌬⤀, who took seventeen years (the narrative gives fourteen years) to go to India to fetch Buddhist scriptures for his own people. Although Xuanzang was not the only Buddhist believer, Chinese or foreign, sacerdotal or lay, who had succeeded in making the long and arduous round-trip between the two countries, the peculiar circumstances surrounding the commencement of his pilgrimage in  (in disguise and in defiance of an imperial edict banning foreign travel at the time), the astonishing achievements both during the long trek and during the extended travels in the land of his faith, and the monumental accomplishments in translation and exegesis after his return to China all combined to make him probably the most famous Buddhist cleric in Chinese history. He was without question a master of Indian languages, having achieved such fluency that, according to his disciples’ biographical account, brigands were converted to Buddhism and rival clerics were defeated in debates by his skillful oratory. The book he wrote recording the places and peoples he visited was considered by many to be the first genuine book of geography in Chinese history. Honored by the Tang emperor Taizong for his religious and secular accomplishments, Xuanzang became a legendary hero in his own lifetime (–). The novel is most significant for the topic under consideration precisely because the fundamental subject of this text is built squarely upon the person and experience of an identifiable religious figure. Whereas the plots of three other Ming works with which JW makes up what are referred to as the four monumental works of prose fiction (sida qishu ⚃⣏⣯㚠) derive from either historical material (Sanguo yanyi and in part Shuihuzhuan) or entirely from invention ( Jinpingmei), the action of Journey directly concerns a famous cleric. This feature having been duly noted, it should be pointed out immediately that Journey is not a historical novel in the sense that it seeks to transcribe faithfully the journey and life of the historical priest Xuanzang. Apart from the main theme of pilgrimage in quest of Buddhist

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scriptures, the name of the human protagonist, and a near-verbatim citation of a royal encomium composed by the Tang emperor and bestowed upon the priest, the narrative seems to have little to do with the original event. That the real Xuanzang, traveling largely along the Silk Road, sustained appalling hardships is familiar enough to readers of his own writings and biography, but such hardships pale in ingenuity and intensity when compared with the cycles of captivity and release dramatized in the novel. The fictive Xuanzang’s own words at one point in the novel—“In mountains and streams disasters await; / My life has been the fiends’ and monsters’ bait”26 —may serve as an eloquent epitome of the terrible ordeals that seem to stalk every step of his way, during which fiends, demons, animal spirits, and delinquent deities of all varieties sought literally to devour him alive. If many details surrounding the fictive priest seem to be inventions of the Ming author, building on nearly , years of storytelling and embellishment prior to the full-length narrative, this is no less true of his three disciples and the beast of burden that serve him on his journey. However one might wish to account for the origins of the familiar and appealing figures of Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie, it has to be recognized that they were by no means the original party of the pilgrimage, so to speak, for they were clearly the additions of the literary imagination. To assert, however, that the novelistic figures and events are lacking fundamentally in historical reference is not thereby to intimate that JW is thus devoid of or diminished in religious meaning. What I want to suggest, rather, is the intriguing paradox this narrative displays: namely, that its deviation from formal details of history acknowledged to be parts of a most celebrated chapter of Chinese religious history actually constitutes that very inventive design of the author in investing his work with a more intricate network of religious significance. That network is woven out of echoes, allusions, and symbolisms that refer not merely to a single religious tradition like Buddhism but also to the two other dominant traditions of Confucianism and Daoism. The massive appropriation and development of the teaching from the Three Religions (Sanjiao ᶱ㔁) is what makes JW virtually a unique text in the history of the Chinese novel.27 Although the fictive treatment of the priest’s birth, youth, and the public events inaugurating his pilgrimage manifestly diverges from established accounts, there are many instances in the text that indicate the author’s acquaintance indeed with Buddhist sources and ideas no less than his ingenious use of them. In chapter , when the pilgrims approach India, a brief conversational exchange outside the Gold-Spreading Monastery

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(Bujin si ⶫ慹⮢) reveals this kind of authorial knowledge through the words of the human master pilgrim. “In studying the sūtras,” Xuanzang said, I have frequently read this account, which tells of the Buddha’s experience in the Jetavana Park of the city, Śrāvastí. The park was to be something that the Elder Anāthapin.d. ika wanted to purchase from Prince Jeta, so that it could be used as the place for Buddha to lecture on the sūtras. The prince, however, said, “My park is not for sale. The only way you can buy it is for you to cover the whole park with gold.” When Elder Anāthapin.d. ika heard this, he took gold bricks and spread them throughout the park. Only then did he succeed in purchasing the Jetavana Park from the prince and in inviting the World-Honored One to expound the Law. When I saw the Gold-Spreading Monastery just now, I thought this could be the one described in the story. ( j w :)

In addition to this little etiological tale, incidental details traceable to explicit Buddhist writings abound in the narrative. As the essays of one student of the novel have suggested, 28 readers familiar with Xuanzang’s biography itself may find numerous accounts that seem to “foreshadow” certain episodes of the novel. The description of a kingdom of women and of a celestial maiden giving birth to four children after being “touched” by a water spirit (chapter  in the Biography) is reminiscent of chapter  of the novel, where the master pilgrim and Pigsy were made pregnant after drinking water found in the Kingdom of Women of Western Liang. In the brief account of Kucha ⯰㓗 found in chapter  of Xuanzang’s own Record of the Great Tang Western Territories, the depiction of a dragon pool (longchi 漵㰈) in which dragons are said to mate with fine mares to produce dragonhorses not only transmits a well-known motif of Hindic mythology but also recalls specifically the genealogy of the fictive Xuanzang’s beast of burden and the location of its final exaltation. Having received Buddha’s commendation for the achieved merit of “carrying the sage monk daily” on his back during his journey to the West, the horse was taken “to the Dragon-Transforming Pool at the back of the Spirit Mountain. After being pushed into the pool, the horse stretched himself, and in a little while he shed his coat, horns began to grow on his head, golden scales appeared all over his body, and silver whiskers emerged on his cheeks. His whole body shrouded in auspicious air and his four paws wrapped in hallowed clouds, he soared out of the pool and circled inside the monastery gate, on top of one of the Pillars That Support Heaven” ( J W :).

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In the episode of the Cart-Slow Kingdom (chapter ) where Monkey engages in a magic contest with three animal spirits masquerading as Daoist magicians, the incident of rainmaking contains elements strikingly similar to some of the stories concerning the life and activities of Amoghavajra (Bukong ᶵ䨢), the famous Indian cleric reputed to have helped introduce Tantric Buddhism to the imperial court of the Tang. Honored as a close and powerful confidant of the imperial family under no less than three Chinese emperors—Xuanzong 䌬⬿ (r. –), Suzong 倭⬿ (r. –), and Taizong ⣒⬿ (r. –)—Amoghavajra was made, toward the end of his life, a master of the state (guoshi ⚳ⷓ), a title, we note, that is also bestowed on the three Daoists in the novel. In Amoghavajra’s biography, preserved in the Song Gaoseng zhuan ⬳檀₏⁛,29 it is recorded that both Xuanzang and Taizong had asked Amoghavajra to pray for rain during times of severe drought. The first time it rained so heavily that “people drowned in the markets and trees were uprooted,” 30 a condition of exuberant excess that might have been echoed by the effects of Monkey’s effort in rainmaking. “So great was the downpour,” according to the narrative, “that all the streets and the gulleys of the Cart-Slow Kingdom were completely flooded” ( J W :), and the king had to urge Monkey to stop the rain for fear of damaging the crops. The second time, when Emperor Taizong requested prayer for rain, the command came with a stipulation that Amoghavajra had to prove his “dharma power” ( fali 㱽≃) within three days, and the biography goes on to record that a great cloudburst did occur on the second day. Such a stipulation again recalls the entertaining episode in the novel where Monkey and his master had to demonstrate the efficaciousness of their power under specific imperial constraint of death. Indeed, in the novel, that the king had promoted Daoism and sought to destroy Buddhism was precisely motivated by the fact that Buddhist priests had failed to produce rain in a prior contest. This theme of Buddhist and Daoist rivalry, powerfully and recurrently sounded in the novel, is of course nothing alien to the long course of Chinese history. That these two religious traditions were locked in the bitterest of contests during the Tang period (particularly during the reigns of Xuanzong and Taizong) is a well-attested fact. Thus it is no surprise that the biography of Amoghavajra itself provides a few brief but entertaining details of a contest of magic between the Buddhist priest and a certain magician (shushi 埻⢓) named Luo Gongyuan 伭℔怈, 31 and this small but not insignificant incident might have again stimulated the Ming author’s imagination in constructing this part of his engaging tale. Examples of such Buddhist sources for the narrative can be multiplied,

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but I do not think that their abundant presence constitutes the only feature that endows the work with religious significance. It is, rather, in the basic conceptualization of the master pilgrim, his disciples, and their various experiences on the pilgrimage that we can perceive the more profound and subtle influence of religious doctrines. We may recall here that the Xuanzang of history and hagiography was portrayed as a man of prodigious intelligence, courage, endurance, and resolution. For the sake of doctrinal clarification necessary to the spiritual welfare of his people, he was willing to defy death and brave the “thousand hills and ten thousand waters” to seek out and bring back those Buddhist treasures of sacred texts still unavailable to China. As all readers have noticed (usually with misgivings), on the other hand, the Xuanzang of the novel is almost an exact opposite of the historical figure in mind and character. Though he is perhaps no less tenacious than the real Tripitaka in his commitment to seek the scriptures, he shows little knowledge of the object of his quest and virtually no understanding of his own experiences. Such a sharp contrast between the historical figure and the fictive counterpart, far from being a lapse of authorial imagination, is, I would argue, an indication of deliberate and careful design. The Xuanzang of history, as the available records show us, was determined in his efforts precisely because he had a clear vision of his goal. The long trek from China to India and back, however difficult and dangerous, was but a means to this end; it was not an end in itself. The fictive pilgrim, however, is presented in such a radically different fashion that the vicissitudes of his life, from the very moment of his conception even prior to his birth, are progressively developed by the narrative as something related in every way to his final destiny. The journey, in sum, is seen not merely as a selfless undertaking on behalf of the benighted populace of China but more importantly as a means for personal redemption or enlightenment. This understanding of the journey, as I have argued in several studies of the novel, 32 is elaborated in terms of not one but all three religious traditions of China: Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. On the Buddhist side, what is emphasized in the experience of Xuanzang and his disciples is the need of merit making through suffering, popularized in the common notion of using merit to expiate sins ( jiang gong shu zui ⮯≇岾伒). Specifically for Xuanzang, the journey is the ordained medium to atone for preincarnate indolence. Like Eutychus of the New Testament, who fell to his death by falling asleep during a sermon of the apostle Paul (Acts :–), so Xuanzang in a previous existence as the elder Gold Cicada was a disciple of Buddha who permitted his mind to wander (wuxin ting fo-

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jiang 䃉⽫倥ἃ嫃) and fell asleep while the Patriarch was lecturing ( J W :). For such a lapse in devotion, he was banished to suffer in the human world, where the peculiar medium of his salvation included both the general hardships of a mendicant priest and the specific ordeal (eighty-one in all) of a special pilgrimage. Like their master, too, the disciples of the fictive Xuanzang, including the white horse, must also suffer in order to atone for various crimes committed in their previous existences. Such an understanding of the journey and its ramifications are explored in nuanced variation of the main theme as the novel progresses. Because the mind in Buddhism, particularly the strongly idealistic cast of the Chan school, is regarded as both the creator of illusory experience and its chief source for illumination, the narrative has seized on this paradoxical exaltation of the mind and its proscription as one of the main devices for the construction of plot and character. In fact, this concern has enabled the author to give new twists of meaning to the well-known and hackneyed Buddhist metaphors of “the ape of the mind and the horse of the will” (xinyuan yima ⽫䋧シ楔) for expressing the restless, recalcitrant nature of the human intellect and affection. That the historical Xuanzang was especially fond of the prajñā-pāramitā wisdom epitomized in the so-called Heart Sūtra (Xinjing ⽫䴻) and found, during moments of great hardship on his journey, constant solace in its great maxims against the lures of both the senses and phenomenal distractions is firmly established by his biography and popular tradition. What the novel has done is to expand this basic theme of the monk’s particular relation to scripture by inventing the most realistic and engaging figure of Sun Wukong as the chief disciple and guardian of the master pilgrim. Consistently denominated by the narrator as Mind-Monkey (xinyuan ⽫䋧), Sun not only protects his master but also serves as the latter’s teacher and guide. When the human pilgrim falters under the weight of extremities or complains about his wants, it is Monkey who so prods his master’s memory on the crucial injunctions of the scriptural classic that the latter is compelled to acknowledge at one point that “the lesson of all scriptures concerns only the cultivation of the mind” ( J W :). That moment of perception reached by Xuanzang, in chapter , is not, however, explainable in Buddhist terms alone, for as students of Chinese intellectual history well realize, the Mencian notion of nourishment or cultivation of the mind and heart (yangxin 梲⽫, xiuxin ᾖ⽫) has been a constant theme of Neo-Confucianism at least since the time of the Song, though its real beginning might have started as early as the Tang. 33 Joining this notion to the concept of the cultivation of the self (xiushen ᾖ幓), a key

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phrase that the Book of Great Learning of classical Confucianism regards as foundational to the action of the sage—centrifugally conceived—to put in order the family, govern the state, and pacify the world (qijia, zhiguo, ping tianxia ġ 滲⭞炻㱣⚳炻⸛⣑ᶳ), Neo-Confucians have repeatedly urged the cleansing (qingxin 㶭⽫) and rectification of the mind and heart (zhengxin 㬋⽫) in the double sense of “not letting heterodox and superficial notions gain entry”34 and concentrating on the essential truths with utter attentiveness. This emphasis receives succinct articulation in the writings of Zhou Dunyi ␐㔎柌 (–): Singlemindedness is the essential way. Singlemindedness is having no desire. Having no desires, one is empty in quiescence and straightforward in action. Being empty in quiescence, one’s mind is clear and hence penetrating. Being straightforward in action, one is impartial, and being impartial, one is all-embracing. Being clear and penetrating, impartial and all-embracing, one is almost a sage.35

For the readers of The Journey to the West, such an exhortation to singlemindedness or oneness might well have been the basis for a hilarious and exciting episode in the narrative in which Sun Wukong and his double cause great disturbance in the entire cosmos because no power therein can tell them apart. Only Buddha at last possesses the requisite might of discernment to separate the true Monkey from its false image, the six-eared macaque of chapter . As the two simian figures fight their way up to the Western Paradise, we can hear these words of Buddha addressing his congregation: “You are all of one mind, but take a look at two Minds in conflict arriving here.” The narrator, too, specifically offers this comment: If one has two minds, disasters he’ll breed; He’ll guess and conjecture both far and near. He seeks a good horse or the Three Dukes’ office, Or the seat of first rank there in Golden Chimes. He’ll war unceasing in the north and south; He’ll not keep still, assailing both east and west. You must learn of no mind in the gate of Zen, And let the holy babe be formed thus quietly. ( j w :)

I cite this poetic commentary deliberately, for although the penultimate line makes homily of a Buddhist commonplace, the language of the last

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line decisively illustrates how a motif of another religious tradition can be introduced effortlessly in the narrative texture. This is, of course, the tradition of Daoist alchemy, for the phrase “holy babe” betokens the crucial state of realized immortality when the “inner elixir,” or enchymoma, is achieved. As Joseph Needham and his colleagues have made clear in their monumental study of the history of Chinese science, the theories and praxis of alchemy were “born within the bosom of the Daoist religion.” Whether it is practiced in its external mode (waidan ⢾ᷡ) with the aid of chemical, metallurgical, and herbal substances, or in its internal mode (neidan ℏᷡ) with the galvanization of physiological elements and processes, Chinese alchemy has always had as its goal “the induction of material immortality.”36 This emphasis on the prolongation of physical life, in fact, ultimately distinguishes it from its Indian or Western counterparts, despite many parallels in both ideas and techniques. That the novel has made massive use of the language and rhetoric of physiological alchemy has been recognized from the earliest Qing editors and commentators of the narrative down to the present sponsors of a new Daoist edition of the novel in Taiwan. 37 In my own translation of the novel, I have tried to track down many sources for the references to historical spagyrical literature, and this effort has been augmented significantly by a series of five long essays by Liu Ts’un-yan (Cunren) of .38 By providing us with detailed examples of the novel’s appropriation from the writings of one particular Daoist community, the Quanzhen ℐ䛇, or Perfection of Authenticity school, Liu’s research has perhaps lent new credence to the insistent claim by both Qing and contemporary Daoists that the novel was not the work of a Ming author but that of Qiu Chuji 恙嗽㨇 the grand patriarch of the sect and a known alchemist who flourished in the Yuan period (–). The matter of authorship, in my judgment, is still too controversial to be settled, but Liu’s studies have rendered incontrovertible the fictive author’s intimate familiarity with the ideas associated with Wang Zhe 䌳┮ (–), founder of the sect, Ma Danyang 楔ᷡ春 (–), his chosen successor, and their descended disciples. The interpretive questions necessarily attendant to the study of the novel thus must take up the reason for its use of alchemy and how the spagyrical concepts and configurations are deployed. Because I have covered some of the ground already in other studies, I make only a few brief observations here. Concerning the why of alchemy, it should be pointed out first of all that this motif is, in the history of the novel’s development, clearly an aspect peculiar to the narrative presentation of the story. If, for example, one examines the long dramatic version

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of the Xiyouji most likely preceding the extant version of the hundredchapter novel, one can discover many incidental and characterological similarities, but the drama version shows no hint whatever of allegorization by reference to alchemy. It is the narrative author who has elected to confer on his grandly conceived tale an additional dimension of meaning by enlisting the routes and structures of inner elixir. To the Buddhist notion of salvation or enlightenment and the Neo-Confucian rectification of the mind, the author now further posits immortality as the distinct goal of the pilgrimage. The Quanzhen notion of achieving physical longevity, conveniently summarized by David Hawkes in his study of its dramas, is that the adepts of this particular school aimed to produce pure yang by a marriage inside an imaginary crucible in the Cinnabar Field between the navel and the pubes, of the essences extracted by complicated internal processes from the upper and lower humours of the body. Swallowing the saliva, after it had been worked into a foam by the tongue, was an important part of the process. This was the “upper water” which eventually had to combine with “fire” from the lower part of the body. The adept produced two kinds of saliva, one which combined with the qi 㯋 of the liver and one which combined with the qi of the lungs. The eventual product was a kind of “spiritual water 䤆㯜” (water having the element of fire in it). The “fire” emanating from the lower part of the body underwent a similar processing. Kan ⛶ and li 暊, the names of the trigrams representing water and fire, were used for this “spiritual water” and “true fire 䛇䀓” when they met in the Cinnabar Field. The “pure yang” which was produced by the successful employment of these methods was to the Quanzhen adept what the elixir was for old-fashioned wai-dan alchemists. It could only be produced under conditions of “pure stillness 㶭㶐”, when the mind was totally free from worry, desire, or any other form of distraction [the monkey and the horse].39

Readers of The Journey to the West will recognize at once that this process of the inner elixir invariably constitutes the main theme of the disciples’ autobiographical speeches that stud the narrative. Always uttered in the highly rhythmic form of the pailü with resounding end rhymes, these poetic declarations give a vivid and dramatic account of how Sun Wukong, Zhu Wuneng, and Sha Wujing had struggled to attain the lofty status of a xian ẁ, or realized immortal endowed with magical powers. It is their elevation from the humble condition of a beast (Monkey) or a human mortal (Pigsy, Sandy) to that of a supernatural being by means of arduous

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self-cultivation that qualifies them to serve not merely as the pilgrim’s guardians but occasionally also as his guide in alchemy. Just as Sun has sought in various instances to assist his master in understanding the true meaning of detachment enshrined in the Buddhist Heart Sūtra, so both Monkey and Sha Monk, in chapter , become their master’s tutors in physiological alchemy by using the latter’s human homesickness under a bright moon as his induction into the deeper internal mysteries. In the symmetry of a skillfully crafted episode, the pilgrim’s poetic eulogy to the moon, characteristically filled with conventional conceits and historical allusions, is answered by his eldest disciple’s observation that “the moon may symbolize the rules and regulations of nature’s many modes and forms” ( J W :). The lesson that follows, expounded by both Zhu and Sha and complete with poetic citation (with minor emendation) from the great spagyrical text of the Song the Wuzhenpian ぇ䛇䭯 (Poetical Essay on the Primary Vitalities), by Zhang Boduan ⻝ỗ䪗, combines alchemical ideas found in such a classical text as the Cantongqi ⍫⎴⣹ (The Kinship of the Three), by Wei Boyang 櫷ỗ春 (ca. ), and in Quanzhen literature. The images of the moon’s waxing and waning, embodied in the expressions of rising crescent and lowering crescent (shangxian ᶲ⻎, xiaxian ᶳ⻎), are taken to mirror the accession and recession of the yin-yang forces alternately obtaining in the cosmos and in the human body. Such a movement, conveniently symbolized by strokes of certain trigrams enshrined in the Classic of Change, is further correlated with the interactive process of chemical substances such as lead and mercury, which are themselves also allegorical signs of various bodily fluids or vital breaths (qi 㯋) of the viscera. Needham’s explanation, “hence the veiled usage of ‘two eight-ounce amounts of lead and mercury (er ba liang)’; a secret way of referring to the lunar quarters (two eight-day intervals),” 40 provides an illuminating gloss on Su Wukong’s injunction to his master: “If we can nourish the Two Eights until we reach the perfection of Nine Times Nine, then it will be simple for us at that moment to see Buddha, and simple also for us to return home” ( J W :). In the rich polysemy of this narrative, even the simple word “home” in this context (here, literally “old” or “former fields” [gutian 㓭䓘]) means more than its secular designation of China, for which the human pilgrim is depicted to have continuous longing. Since he and his disciples are all, in one way or another, delinquents from a prior celestial existence, their journey to see Buddha, fraught with redemptive suffering, is fittingly presented in the narrative as a homeward journey. Whereas China remains indisputably the true home of the historical pilgrim, the fictive narrative

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continuously emphasizes instead that for the elder Gold Cicada to reach the Western Paradise is for this former son of Buddha to arrive at his true abode. Moreover, his homecoming (note the phrase huanxiang 怬悱, used by Tripitaka in the poem he composed in chapter  [ JW :] extolling the merit of the life of the pravaj) is also conveniently blended in the narrative with that understanding of Buddhist enlightenment as the recovery of one’s original nature (benxing 㛔⿏), identical with the Buddha-nature within, through the illumination of the mind (mingxin jianxing 㖶⽫夳⿏). So understood, this motif of return is, appropriately enough, regarded by the author also as one possessing profound resonance and easily exploitable for depicting the process of alchemy. “There is no single key to physiological alchemy,” according to Needham, “more than the idea of retracing one’s steps along the road of bodily decay.” 41 Ever since the time of the Daodejing, the Daoist has been keenly interested in the phenomena of birth and death. In the familiar maxims gathered in chapter  of this classic: The myriad creatures all rise together And I watch their return. The teeming creatures All return to their separate roots, Returning to one’s roots is known as stillness. That is what is meant by returning to one’s destiny. Returning to one’s destiny is known as the constant. Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment.42

For the physiological alchemist, however, his quest is a different knowledge and a different kind of permanence. To attain his goal, his is an attempt to reverse the natural course of nature, and this is why his writings make constant reference to such concepts as huan 怬 and fan 彼 (regeneration and reversion), xiu ᾖ (restoration), xiubu ᾖ墄 (repair, replenishment), and fu ⽑ (return, restore, recover). The fundamental thrust of this belief, according to Needham, is instrumental to the rise of two other sets of ideas explanatory of such alchemical techniques: First a counter-current flow of some of the most important fluids of the body opposite to their normal directions, and secondly a thought-system which envisaged a frank reversal of the standard relationships of the five elements [or five phases]. The first idea, of flow in a direction opposite to the usual, is expressed by such terms as ni liu 微㳩 or ni xing 微埴, and was

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applicable . . . particularly to the products of the salivary and testicular glands. The second concerned the power which the physiological alchemists believed that their techniques could attain over the natural processes of mutual generation of the five elements (xiangsheng 䚠䓇) and of mutual conquest (xiangsheng 䚠⊅ or xiangke 䚠⇳). They dared to believe that by their efforts the normal course of events could be arrested and set moving backwards; this was called tiandao 栃Ὰ, “turning nature upside down.” 43

Such a complex of ideas may seem intolerably arcane to the modern reader, though Needham tries to make them more acceptable with scientific comparisons. When, however, these abstractions are noted in the engaging and exciting context of the novel, they help to illumine both the larger meaning of certain episodes and the author’s inventive ingenuity. It is within the schema of alchemical allegory that the pilgrims achieve their furthest reach of significance, for they themselves have become the actants or agents of the elixir process. Through an intricate system of nominal correspondences, the master pilgrim and his disciples are first correlated with the cycles of the five phases and then with visceral functions and secretions. Their experiences on the journey, so entertainingly recounted on the surface of the narrative as repeated battles with demons, monsters, and renegade deities of all varieties, also chronicle the hazards and vicissitudes of the Daoist adept: the recurrent failures and partial triumphs, the constant fight against mental and bodily distractions, and the lifethreatening danger of errant techniques. Furthermore, their very persons and experiences dramatize the action and reaction of alchemical forces, in such a way that regional topography takes on anatomical features. As I have pointed out elsewhere, a narrow mountain gorge filled with rotted persimmons is explicitly likened (with a verbal pun) to a section of the human colon44 (chap. ), and the pumping of testicular fluids up the spine by means of the “river chariot” or “water-raising machine” (heche 㱛干, which one spagyrical text describes as “like sailing a boat against the current” [ru nishui xingzhou ⤪微㯜埴凇])45 undoubtedly has generated the episode of the Cart-Slow Kingdom located in a region significantly named Spine-Ridge Pass (chap. ). The way by which the external pilgrimage to fetch Buddhist scriptures is transformed into an internal journey to achieve the formation of the enchymoma justifies in great part the sentiment of those readers who saw in the narrative “a step-by-step enactment of the Quanzhen technique ⮯ℐ䛇≇㱽徸㬍㺼↢.” 46 I close with a brief consideration of three questions, the first being, is the allegory necessary? If one means by this whether there is any reason

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intrinsic to the tale of a scripture-seeking pilgrimage that requires allegorical depiction, the answer would likely be negative. But if one means by the question whether our understanding of the text demands our taking the allegorical elements seriously, my reply would be firmly in the affirmative. Far from being destroyed by “centuries of meddling from Daoists and Buddhists,” as Hu Shi has said of the novel’s editors and commentators,47 the work itself makes constant demand of its readers to heed the many levels of nonliteral meaning structured therein.48 A feature such as why Sha Monk alone of the four disciples is portrayed as never having either the need or the ability to transform himself is one that no principle of realistic fiction is adequate to explain. External knowledge and references must come to aid in our attempt to decipher intentionality and meaning.49 My second question concerns closure. Because of the marked tendency toward episodic repetitions in the narrative, Andrew Plaks, in The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel, has considered the ending of JW to be somewhat anticlimactic. The pilgrims seem to have undergone little change, and their arrival at their long-sought destination is described in a manner reminiscent of their many previous occasions of straying or wandering. Does this understated denouement suggest that the pilgrims are going nowhere, that their final goal is as illusory as some of the demonic manifestations encountered on the way? Such a view of the novel’s ending, though not without merit, must in my view be balanced by our awareness of other textual features. Since the plot of the novel, however deviant from history, nonetheless takes the historical pilgrimage as its frame, it can do little to alter the success of Xuanzang in his quest or his triumphant return to his native land. A certain sense of closure, in other words, is dictated by the given telos of the authorizing source. One of the striking features of the last three chapters of the novel, however, has to do precisely with the ironic manner wherewith the pilgrims’ success is depicted. It seems that salvation or enlightenment has stolen upon them unaware. As always, it was Monkey who possessed the perspicacity of vision to discover that they had arrived at their goal, and the blindness of his companions had to be removed by his admonition: “Master, you insisted on bowing down even in a specious region, before false images of Buddha. Today you have arrived at a true region with real images of Buddha, and you still haven’t dismounted. What’s your excuse?” ( J W :). At the threshold of their deliverance from the “old selves” (literally, original carcasses [benhai 㛔橠]) with the crossing of the Cloud-Transcending

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Stream in a bottomless boat, Zhu Bajie, Sha Monk, and the human pilgrim continue to exhibit the sort of comic timorousness and blindness consistent with the characterization throughout the narrative. Even after their meeting with Buddha, when participation in a celestial banquet at long last granted the pilgrims “longevity and health” and enabled them “to transform their mortal substance into immortal flesh and bones,” the full significance of their achievement still escaped them. It was only after they had been stranded once more on earth during their journey back to the Chinese capital, when the forgetfulness of Xuanzang to fill a request of an aged turtle landed the entire entourage in a river, that they reached finally a proper understanding of their acquisition. This little mishap, which caused some loose, dampened pages of the acquired scriptures to stick to the boulders by the shore, again might have derived from the Biography of Xuanzang himself.50 But its true meaning was expounded by Sun Wukong to his frightened companions as they huddled to protect their treasures from marauding demons of the night: Master, you don’t seem to understand . . . that when we escorted you to acquire these scriptures, we had, in fact, robbed Heaven and Earth of their creative powers. For our success meant that we could share the age of the universe; like the light of the sun and moon, we would enjoy life everlasting for we had put on an uncorruptible body. Our success, however, had also incurred the envy of Heaven and Earth, the jealousy of both demons and gods, who wanted to snatch away the scriptures from us. They could not do so only because the scriptures were thoroughly wet and could not be harmed by thunder, lightning, or fog. . . . Now that it is morning, the forces of yang are ever-more in ascendancy, and the demons cannot prevail. ( j w :).

“Only then did Tripitaka, Bajie, and Sha Monk realize what had taken place,” added the narrator, “and they all thanked Pilgrim repeatedly.” However it is to be conceived, transcendence is attained not merely by the pilgrims’ success in acquiring the scriptures, but that very act of acquisition has also been made a metaphor for their realization of immortality (chengzhen ㆸ䛇). If my argument thus far has succeeded in demonstrating the large presence of religion in the text, there remains the third and final question that has often been asked of such an interpretation: how is religion compatible with the biting satire and exuberant humor that enliven virtually every page of the marvelous work? The underlying assumption, of course, is that

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religion is serious business, much too solemn and heavy a shroud to cloak a narrative of such vitality and ribald fun. To answer this question properly, I realize, would require another essay of equal length. I can only point to how this problem may be addressed. I begin with the acknowledgment that, although The Journey to the West shares certain common motifs and characteristics with such great religious allegories of the West as the Faerie Queene, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Commedia, it lacks the severe gravitas of the Bunyan text or the rhapsodic vision of Dante’s mighty canticle. When the Chinese narrative is compared with monuments of Western literature, the works that most readily come to mind are those by Chaucer, Rabelais, and Swift. The achievement of high comedy and satire on the part of the Ming author cannot be slighted or denied, and Zhu Bajie, who is a sort of Falstaff, Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza all rolled into one, is arguably the comic figure without rival in traditional Chinese literature. His sensuality, sloth, and hoggish appetite have delighted centuries of readers. So, too, have the daring antics of an obstreperous ape who pisses on the Buddha’s middle finger, consigns the icons of the Daoist Trinity to the privy, and tricks their unwary disciples into drinking his own urine by passing it for “holy water.” How could a text of such manifest irreverence be considered in some sense religious? My reply would be that it all depends on what kind of religion is in view. Although Judaism, beyond the Hebrew scriptures, possesses a wealthy tradition of jokes, folk wit, and even unbridled humor, the Christian religion is at once more earnest and subdued—at least insofar as its character is to be adduced from its canonical documents.51 The verb “smile” (meidao) never occurs in the New Testament, and the words “laugh” and “laughter” ( gelao and cognates) appear only in the context of derision (e.g., Matt. :) or as generic contrasts to an activity like weeping (Luke :, ; James :). Instances of mockery or scorn do turn up in the letters of Paul, but they are used as instruments of fierce polemics. When we come to the Chinese context, we note that Confucianism, too, is a tradition of solemnity and high seriousness, and the master’s fastidious deportment is to be seen in the report that he “never laughed unless he was happy” (Analects .). Only rarely has it been recorded that “he broke into a smile” (Analects .). For Daoism, by contrast, the dialogues and anecdotes collected in the Zhuangzi point to the enlistment of outrageous wit and wry humor in the service of serious philosophical discussion. In the history of Chinese religions, however, it is undoubtedly Buddhism that offers the most obvious example of how jest and facetiousness can cohabit with truth. Particularly in the enigmatic behavior and utterance of the Zen

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masters, the ridiculous, the farcical, the non sequitur, and even slapstick may function as inducement to awakening. When one reads the various recorded sayings of the Zen masters, one cannot but be impressed by how frequently laughter interposes with speech, for laughter in this milieu often denotes the sudden advent of insight. In their recourse to riddles, jokes, and absurd reasonings, the patriarchs are attempting to help their interlocutors see at once the paradoxical nature of truth and the stubborn, tenacious trap of profane rationality. Humor, together with such physical impudence as shoutings and beatings, must join to shock us out of our complacent entertainment of illusions. It is this spirit of iconoclasm that begets the extreme but famous injunction to “jeer the patriarchs and abuse the Buddhas ␝ἃ伝䣾” or even to kill the World-Honored One “with one stroke of the rod and feed him to the dogs ᶨ㡺⫸ㇻ㭢[ᶾ⮲]冯䉿⫸⎫⌣.”52 Given this tradition where “even the most sacred moments of Zen experience are not exempt from comic profanation and the humbling qualifications of humor,” for in Zen iconoclasm, “the relationship between the sacred and the comic is really the same as in all polarities that stand in dialectical relationship,”53 it is not surprising that some traditional readers and commentators have admired The Journey to the West for its marvelous fusion of the holy and the comic. Monkey’s encounter with his first teacher from whom he acquired his enormous magic powers and the secret of longevity, reported in chapter , patently imitates and parodies the Zen “cases” ( gongan ℔㟰) with their rapid-fire dialogues and witty exchanges between mentor and pupil. Once he had broken the riddle posed by the Patriarch Subodhi ( J W :), Monkey throughout the novel made a consistent display of such cunning, skill, and resourcefulness that new meaning would be added to the proverbial “ability to do as vicissitudes demand” (suiji yingbian 晐㨇ㅱ嬲) or “to meet plot with plot” ( jiangji jiuji ⮯妰⯙妰 [ JW :]). Faced with the formidable weapons of a magic gourd and jade vase (in actuality the purloined treasures of Laozi), which could reduce someone sucked inside to pus “in one and three-quarter hours” (chap. ), Monkey played the supreme con man and wangled these instruments from their monster owners by promising them a specious gourd that could even store up Heaven. Threatened by a decree of the Dharma-Destroying King, who vowed to kill , Buddhist priests in one lifetime (chap. ), Monkey had the presence of mind to bring both ruler and subjects to heel and penitence by secretly shaving all of them bald during the night. This novelistic conception of Monkey’s alert and adaptive intelligence is not without enormous significance, for as Bernard Faure has observed, “the stress on upaya ( jap. Hoben 㕡ὧ) or skillful means, . . . reminds us of

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something that the Western tradition has neglected since it chose Platonician idealism against the practical wisdom or mètis of the early Greeks. The Zen ideal type (Han-shan, Pu-tai), like Odysseus, is a kind of trickster, fond of riddles and always ready to seize the opportunity.”54 Much more than these illustrious figures of Zen history and hagiography, Monkey can be seen as a type of the trickster par excellence. In himself he embodies that fascinating union of contraries—Promethian daring and clownish prankishness, single-minded devotion and restless irreverence, penetrating perception and blinding passion—characteristic of the figure familiar in many mythologies of the world. “Humble braggadocio, gamy holiness, sacred profanity—these are the ironies that the trickster challenges us to understand.”55 An episode like chapter , in which Monkey was punished for slaying the Six Robbers, is manifestly built upon the well-known dialogue between Zen master and disciple preserved in the Recorded Sayings of Chan Master Benji of Mount Cao 㚡Ⱉ㛔⭪䥒ⷓ婆抬. The profound irony of the incident stems from the fact that, whereas the human priest has but a literalistic understanding of the prohibition of killing, Monkey is the one who grasps adequately the paradoxical truth of showing compassion by “slaying the Six Robbers with one sweep of the sword ᶨ∵㎖䚉ℕ屲.”56 The didactic intent of the episode, so engagingly served by the lively allegory, might well have been one of the many textual features that led Liu Yiming to the observation: “The rhetoric of The Journey to the West is quite similar to the mysteries of Zen. The real message completely transcends the actual words of the text. Sometimes it is hidden in vulgar or ordinary language, sometimes it is conveyed through [the description] of the terrain and the characters. Sometimes the truth and perversity are distinguished from each other through a joke or a jest; sometimes the real is set off from the false in the space of a word or phrase.”57 The novel succeeds as a comic allegory precisely because its narrative texture and inventive design allow for the affirmation of certain truths of the Three Religions to be made right alongside hilarious jibes at “worthless monks and impotent Daoists ᶵ㾇䘬␴⯂炻內⊭䘬忻⢓”( J W :). At the beginning of the novel, when Monkey steals into the chamber of his adept-teacher to learn the arcane arts of immortality, he is greeted first by these words of the Patriarch Subodhi: Hard! Hard! Hard! The Way is most obscure! Deem not the gold elixir a common thing. ( j w :)

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The word translated “obscure” is xuan 䌬, which also has the meanings of dark, subtle, profound, cunning, and even imaginative. A word immortalized in chapter  of the Daodejing for depicting the layered mysteriousness of the Dao, it is also employed later to describe the art of those telling and writing fiction. In turning the obscure way of the gold elixir into such delightful and easy reading as The Journey to the West, the craft of its author belongs indeed to a genius of the first order. notes 1. David Hawkes, “Literature,” in The Legacy of China, ed. Raymond Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 86–87. 2. Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Daoism, trans. and ed. Hans H. Gerth (New York: Free Press, 1951), pp. 156–157. 3. Burton Watson, trans. and ed., The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the Thirteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 3. 4. Ibid. 5. C. T. Hsia, “Chinese Novels and American Critics: Reflection on Structure, Tradition, and Satire,” in Critical Issues in East Asian Literature (Seoul: International Cultural Society of Korea, 1983), p. 179. 6. The literature on the development of dualistic and correlative thinking in ancient China is enormous. For a succinct discussion, see Xu Fuguan ⼸⽑奨, “Yinyang wuxing zhi qi youguan wenxian di yanjiu 昘春Ḽ埴⍲℞㚱斄㔯䌣䘬䞼䨞,” in Zhongguo sixiangshi lunji xubian ᷕ⚳⿅゛⎚婾普临䶐 (Taipei: Shibao chuban songsi, 1982), pp. 41–111. See also Henry Rosemont Jr., ed., Explorations in Early Chinese Cosmology, Journal of the American Academy of Religion Studies 50, no. 2 (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1984); Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), chap. 9. On correlative thinking and its impact on Chinese narrative, see Andrew H. Plaks, “Conceptual Models in Chinese Narrative Theory,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 4 (1977): 25–47. 7. Wang Yao 䌳䐌,”Xiaoshuo yu fangshu ⮷婒冯㕡埻,” in Zhongguwenxue sixiang ᷕ⎌ 㔯⬠⿅゛ (Shanghai: Tangdi chubanshe, 1951), pp. 153–194. For further studies of magic, magicians, and their relation to literary history, see Lu Xun 欗彭 , “Zhongguo xiaoshuo di lishi di bianqian ᷕ⚳⮷婒䘬㬟⎚䘬嬲怟,” in Lu Xun quanji 欗彭ℐ 普 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), 9:301–312; Ngo Van Xuyet, Divination, magie et politique dans la Chine ancienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976); Kenneth J. DeWoskin, Doctors, Diviners, and Magicians of Ancient China: Biographies of Fang-shih (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Wang Guoliang 䌳⚳列 , WeiJin nanbei chao zhiguai xiaoshuo yanjiu 櫷㗱⋿⊿㛅⽿⿒⮷婒䞼 䨞 (Taipei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 1984). On the rise of prose fiction in general, see Henri Maspero, “Le roman historique dans la litérature chinoise de l’antiquité,” Mélanges posthumes sur les religions et l’ histoire de la Chine (Paris: Civilisations du Sud, 1950), 3:55–62; Ni Hao-shih ῒ尒⢓ġ[William B. Nienhauser Jr.], “Zhongguo xiaoshuo di qiyuan ᷕ⚳⮷婒䘬崟㸸,” Gudian wenxu ⎌℠㔯⬠ 7 (August 1985): 919–941. 8. H. C. Chang, Chinese Literature 3: Tales of the Supernatural (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 5.

18 4 religion and liter ature in china 9. Baxter Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces: Renaissance Literary Criticism (New York: Random House, 1968). 10. Derk Bodde, “Some Chinese Tales of the Supernatural: Kan Pao and His Sou-shen chi,” first published in 1942 and reprinted in Essays on Chinese Civilization, ed. Charles Le Blanc and Dorothy Borei (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 334. See also Karl S. Y. Kao, ed., Classic Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic: Selections from the Third to the Tenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), and Anthony C. Yu, “‘Rest, Rest, Perturbed Spirit!’ Ghosts in Traditional Chinese Prose Fiction,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47, no. 2 (December 1987): 397–434 (see chap. 10, the present volume). 11. Hu Shih 傉怑, Baihua wenxue shi 䘥娙㔯⬠⎚ (1928; repr., Taipei: Qiming shuju, 1957), p. 195. 12. Ibid., pp. 190–191. 13. Ibid., p. 203. 14. Victor H. Mair, “The Narrative Revolution in Chinese Literature: Ontological Presuppositions,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 5 ( july 1983): 1–27; Victor H. Mair, Tun-huang Popular Narratives, Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature and Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–30. 15. For a convenient but brief survey of Buddhist influence on Chinese literature, see Jan Yün-hua, “Buddhist Literature,” in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. William H. Nienhauser Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 1–12. See also Zheng Zhenduo 惕㋗揠, “Foqu yu bianwen ἃ㚚冯嬲㔯,” and “Foqu xulu ἃ㚚㔀抬,” in Zhongguo wenxue yanjiu ᷕ⚳㔯⬠䞼䨞 (1957; repr., Hong Kong: Guwen shuju, 1970), 3:1066–1067, 1068–1101; Jaroslav Průšek, “The Narrators of Buddhist Scriptures and Religious Tales in the Sung Period,” and “Researches into the Beginnings of the Chinese Popular Novel, I–II,” in Chinese History and Literature (Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1970), pp. 214–227, 228–302; V. Hrdlicková, “The First Translations of Buddhist Sutras in Chinese Literature and Their Place in the Development of Storytelling,” Archiv Orientální 26 (1958): 114–144; Paul Demiéville, “La pénétration du bouddhisme dans la tradition philosophique chinoise,” “Le bouddhisme chinois,” and “Le Tch’an et la poésie chinoise,” in Choix d’études bouddhiques (Leiden: Brill, 1973), pp. 241–260, 365–435, 436–455; Paul Demiéville, “Les début de la littérature en chinois vulgaire,” and “Tch’an et poésie,” in Choix d’études sinologiques (Leiden: Brill, 1973), pp. 121–129, 322–329; Chen Yinque 昛⭭〒, “Sisheng sanwen ⚃倚ᶱ⓷,” in Chen Yinque xiansheng wenshi lunji 昛⭭〒⃰䓇㔯⎚婾普 (Hong Kong: Wenwen chubanshe, 1973), 1:205–218; Zhang Mantao ⻝㚤㾌, ed., Xiandai Fojiao xueshu congkan 䎦ẋἃ㔁⬠埻⎊↲, vol. 19, Fojiao yu Zhongguo wenxue ἃ㔁冯ᷕ ⚳㔯⬠, and vol. 38, Fodian fanyi shi ἃ℠侣嬗⎚ (Taipei: Dasheng wenhua chubanshe, 1976–1979); Sawada Mizuho 㽌䓘䐆䧿, Bukkyō to Chūgoku bungaku ἃ㔁̩ᷕ⚳㔯⬠ (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 1975); Hirano Kenshō ⸛慶栗䄏, Tōdai bungaku to bukkyō no kenkyū Ⓒẋ㔯⬠̩ἃ㔁̯䞼䨞 (Kyoto: Hōyū shoten, 1978); Shi Lei 䞛⢀,”Wenxin diaolong” yu FoRu erjiao yili lunji ˪㔯⽫晽漵˫冯ἃ₺Ḵ㔁佑䎮婾普 (Hong Kong: Yunzai shuwu, 1977); Kaji Tetsujō ≈⛘⒚⭂, Chūgoku bukkyō bungaku kenkyū ᷕ⚥ἃ㔁㔯⬠䞼 䨞 (Kyoto: Kōyasan Daigaku Bunkagaku Chūgoku Tetsugaku Kenkyūshitsu, 1979); Sun Jingyao, “The Name of the Game: The Term ‘Comparative’ and Its Equivalents in the Context of Chinese Literary History,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 33 (1984): 59–62; Kang-i Sun Chang, Six Dynasties Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 117–120.

religion and liter ature in china 185 16. Ren Bantang [Erbei] ả⋲⠀ [Ḵ⊿], Dunhuang qu chutan 㔎䃴㚚⇅㍊ (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi lianhe chubanshe, 1954); Ren Bantang, Dunhuang qu jiaolu 㔎䃴㚚 㟉抬 (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi lianhe chubanshe, 1955). 17. John A. Ramsaran, English and Hindi Religious Poetry: An Analogical Study (Leiden: Brill, 1973). 18. Qian Zhongshu 拊揀㚠, Tanyi lu 婯喅抬 (1948; repr., Taipei: Kaiming shuju, 19XX), pp. 118–119; Du Songbo 㜄㜦㝷, Chan-xue yü Tang-Song shixue 䥒⬠冯Ⓒ⬳娑⬠, 2nd ed. (Taipei: Lianjing wenhua, 1978), esp. chaps. 3–5. 19. Bo Juyi 䘥⯭㖻, “Zhong xia zhaijie yue ẚ⢷滳ㆺ㚰,” “Zhaiyue jingju 滳㚰朄⯭,” “Zhaiyue ju 滳㚰⯭,” “Zhaiju 滳⯭,” and “Zhaijie 滳ㆺ,” in Bai Xiangshan shiji 䘥楁Ⱉ娑普 (SBBY ed., hereafter cited as BXS), 21/4, 29/11, 30/11b, and 36/4 (first number indicates juan). 20. Bo Juyi, “Yinmeng youwu ⚈⣊㚱ぇ,” in BXS, 24/7. 21. Bo Juyi , “Guanhuan 奨⸣,” in BXS, 29/5. 22. Bo Juyi, “Du Chan jing 嬨䥒䴻,” “Bingzhong kanjing zeng zhu daolü 䕭ᷕ䚳䴻岰媠忻 ὞,” “Zhengyue shiwuri ye Donglinsi xue Chan ouhuai Lantian Yang zhubu yincheng Zhi Chanshi 㬋㚰⋩Ḽ㖍⣄㜙㜿⮢⬠䥒„㆟啵䓘㣲ᷣ悐⚈⏰㘢䥒ⷓ,” in BXS, 33/1, 37/6b, 16/12b. 23. Bo Juyi, “Jian Yuan Jiu daowangshi yinci yiji 夳⃫ḅつṉ娑⚈㬌ẍ⭬,” in BXS, 14/2b. For additional discussion of Bo’s Buddhist faith, see Arthur Waley, The Life and Times of Po Chü-i (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949); Kenneth K. S. Ch’en, The Chinese Transformation of Buddhism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 177–239. 24. Edward H. Schafer, “The Capeline Cantos: Verses on the Divine Loves of Taoist Priestesses,” Asiatische Studien 32, no. 1 (1978): 5–65. 25. Paul W. Kroll, “Verses from On High: The Ascent of T’ai Shan,” T’oung pao 69, nos. 4–5 (1983): 223–260. See also Stephen Bokenkamp, “Taoist Literature. Part I: Through the T’ang Dynasty,” and Judith Boltz, “Part II: Five Dynasties to the Ming,” in Nienhauser, Indiana Companion, pp. 138–174. 26. All citations are taken from my translation of the Xiyouji. See Anthony C. Yu, trans. and ed., The Journey to the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977–1983), 4:190. Volume and page numbers henceforth will be given in the text immediately following the citation. 27. The only other novel I know of that is comparable in scope and magnitude in utilizing elements of the sanjiao for novelistic exposition and enactment is the Sanjiao kaimi guizheng yanyi ᶱ㔁攳徟㬠㬋㺼佑, a text as yet unavailable for circulation since the only extant copy is preserved in the Tenri University library ( Japan). See the pioneering and splendid study by Judith A. Berling, “Religion and Popular Culture: The Management of Moral Capital in The Romance of the Three Teachings,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 188–218. According to Berling, this novel is manifestly influenced by, among other works, The Journey to the West, but its didactic intent seems even stronger than that of its antecedent. For a recent and important study of certain ethical aspects of two major novels of the sixteenth century (The Journey to the West and Fengshen yanyi ⮩䤆㺼佑), see Rob Campany, “Cosmogony and Self-Cultivation: The Demonic and the Ethical in Two Chinese Novels,” Journal of Religious Ethics 14, no. 1 (spring 1986): 81–112. 28. Cao Shibang 㚡ṽ恎, “Xiyouji zhong ruogan qingjie benyuan di tantao 大㷠姀ᷕ劍⸚ね 䭨㛔㸸䘬㍊妶,” Zhungguo xueren ᷕ⚳⬠Ṣ 1 (March 1970): 99–104; “Zaitan ℵ㍊,” Youshi

186 religion and liter ature in china

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

yuekan ⸤䋭㚰↲ 41, no. 3 (March 1975): 32–37; “Santan ᶱ㍊,” Youshi xuezhi ⸤䋭⬠娴 16, no. 3 (December 1980): 197–210; “Sitan ⚃㍊,” Shumu jikan 㚠䚖⬋↲ 15, no. 3 (December 1981): 117–126; “Wutan Ḽ㍊,” ibid., 16, no. 4 (March 1983): 35–43; “Liutan ℕ ㍊,” ibid., 17, no. 2 (September 1983): 36–45; “Qitan ᶫ㍊,” ibid., 19, no. 1 ( June 1985): 3–13. My brief discussion of Buddhist sources here owes in part to Cao’s suggestions, but many of his identifications seem to me to be rather far-fetched. Takakusu Junjirō and Watanabe Kaikyoku, eds., Taishō shinshū dai-zōkyō ⣏㬋㕘僑 ⣏啷䴻, 50, no. 2061:712–714 (hereafter cited as T). Ibid., p. 713. Ibid. Anthony C. Yu, “Narrative Structure and the Problem of Chapter Nine in the Hsiyu chi,” Journal of Asian Studies 34 (1975): 295–311 (see chap. 6 of the present volume); Yu, Journey to the West, 1:36–62; Anthony C. Yu, “Two Literary Examples of Religious Pilgrimage: The Commedia and The Journey to the West,” History of Religions 22, no. 3 (1983): 202–230 (see chap. 7 of the present volume). Most scholars studying this theme see in Zhu Xi 㛙䅡 (1130–1200) the beginning of a new orthodoxy. See, for example, Wm. Theodore de Bary, Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). But according to the recent study by Yü Ying-shih [Yu Yingshi] ἁ劙 㗪, Han Yu 杻グ, in “Yuan Dao ⍇忻,” is already advocating the theme of the mind’s governance 㱣⽫, an emphasis traceable to the ascending impact of Zen Buddhism. See Yü Ying-shih, “Rujia sixiang yu jingji fazhan ₺⭞⿅゛冯䴻㾇䘤⯽,” The Chinese Intellectual 䞍嬀ấ⫸, no. 2 (1986): 3–45, esp. pp. 6–9, 14–16. See also Charles Hartman, Han Yü and the T’ang Search for Unity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 93–99, 159–166. On the Zen notion of mind as another name for Buddha (㗗⽫㗗ἃ炻ġ㗗⽫ἄἃ) and the territory of mind as the equivalent to Buddha nature (㛔奢䛇⿏Ṏ⎵ἃ⿏炻ġṎ⎵⽫⛘), see Jing [Ying] de chuandeng lu 㘗⽟⁛䅰抬 (SBCK ed.), juan 9, 13b; juan 13, 13. De Bary, Neo-Confucian Orthodoxy, p. 37. Zhouzi tongshu ␐⫸忂㚠 (SBBY ed.), 4b; English translation is by Wing-Tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 473. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 5, part 5:xxv. For a recent summary, see Catherine Despeux, “Les lectures alchemiques du Hsi-yu chi,” in Religion und Philosophie in Ostasien, Festschriften für Hans Steininger (Würzburg, Ger.: Königshausen and Neumann, 1985), pp. 61–75. Liu Tsun-yan [Cunren] ⬀ṩ, “Quanzhenjiao he xiaoshuo Xiyouji ℐ䛇㔁␴⮷婒ġ˪大 㷠姀˫,” in Hefengtang wenji ␴桐➪㔯普 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1991), 3:1319–1391. David Hawkes, “Quanzhen Plays and Quanzhen Masters,” Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient 69 (1981): 164. Needham, Science and Civilisation, 5, part 5:57–58. Ibid., p. 25. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1963), p. 72. Needham, Science and Civilisation, 5, part 5:25 (pinyin renderings in this citation are mine). Yu, “Two Literary Examples,” p. 226.

religion and liter ature in china 187 45. See the description under the entry “Da heche ⣏㱛干,” in Dai Yuanchang ㇜㸸攟, Xianxue cidian ẁ⬠录℠ (Taipei: Taibei jianyu yinshua gongchang, 1962), p. 35. See also Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 5, part 4:254–255; Needham, Science and Civilisation, 5, part 5:225, 250; Li Shuhuan 㛶⍼怬, Daojiao da cidian 忻㔁⣏录℠ (Taipei: Juliu tushu, 1979), p. 405. 46. “Xiyoujji shiyi longmen xinchuan chuban xu ˪大㷠姀˫慳佑漵攨⽫⁛↢䇰⸷ĭ,” in Xiyouji shiyi 大㷠姀慳佑 (Taipei: Quanzhen chubanshe, 1976), p. 33. 47. Hu Shi, “Xiyouji k’ao-cheng ˪大㷠姀˫侫嫱” (first published in 1923, reprinted in Hu Shi wencun 傉怑㔯⬀, 4 vols. [Hong Kong: Yuandong tushu, 1962], 2:390). 48. Andrew H. Plaks, “Allegory in Hsi-yu Chi and Hung-lou Meng,” in Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Andrew H. Plaks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 163–202; Andrew H. Plaks, The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel: Ssu ta ch’i-shu (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). chap. 3. 49. Liu Yiming ∱ᶨ㖶, ed., Xiyou yuanzhi 大㷠⍇㖐 (Huguo an kanben, 1819), juanshou ⌟椾, 34b–35. 50. Da Tang da Ci’ensi Sanzang fashi zhuan ⣏Ⓒ⣏ヰ】⮢ᶱ啷㱽ⷓ⁛, in T, 50, no. 2053, juan 5. 51. The subject of humor in religion has yet to receive its due attention in scholarship. For general discussions, see Reinhold Niebuhr, “Humour and Faith,” in Discerning the Signs of the Times (New York: Scribner’s, 1946); M. Conrad Hyers, ed., Holy Laughter (New York: Seabury Press, 1969); Helmut Thielicke, Das Lachen der Heiligen und Narren (Freiburg im Breisgau, Ger.: Herder, 1974); Robert A. Kantra, All Things Vain: Religious Satirists and Their Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984). For Jewish humor, see Shmuel Avidor, Touching Heaven, Touching Earth: Hassidic Humor and Wit (Tel Aviv: Sadan Publishing, 1976); Henry D. Spalding, comp., Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor: From Biblical Times to the Modern Age (New York: Jonathan David, 1975); Judith Stora-Sandor, L’ humour juif dans la littérature de Job à Woody Allen (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984). The last title contains an extensive bibliography. For Christian humor, see Martin Grotjahn, Beyond Laughter (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957); D. Elton Trueblood, The Humor of Christ (New York: Harper and Row, 1964); Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 52. Foguo Huanwu chanshi Biyanlu ἃ㝄⛄ぇ䥒ⷓ䡏⵾抬, in T, 48, no. 2003:143–144, 146, 156. 53. M. Conrad Hyers, Zen and the Comic Spirit (London: Rider, 1974), p. 115. 54. Bernard Faure, “Zen and Modernity,” Zen Buddhism Today 4 (spring 1986): 87. 55. Robert D. Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 24. See also Mac Linscott Ricketts, “The North American Indian Trickster,” History of Religions 5 (1967): 327–350; Laura Makarius, “Le mythe du ‘Trickster,’” Revue de l’ histoire des religions 175 (1969): 17–46. 56. The phrase comes from the Cao Shan Benji chanshi yulu, in T, 47, no. 1987B:538. 57. Liu Yiming, juanshou, 28.

9 THE REAL TRIPITAKA REVISITED international religion and national politics

the story of xuanzang In the year , a twenty-six-year-old Chinese Buddhist monk put on a wig to hide his clean-shaven head, took off his clerical garb and donned some secular clothing, and, under the cover of darkness, slipped out of the heavily guarded gates of the imperial capital Chang’an 攟⬱ġ(Everlasting Peace).1 He joined a caravan of merchants leaving central China and headed northwestward on the famous Silk Road. Eventually, he would make it past five more fortified watchtowers, go through the well-known Jade Gate Pass (Yumen guan 䌱攨斄) in the Great Wall, and embark on one of the most famous journeys undertaken by a Chinese in all of that civilization’s long history. This monk was none other than Chen Xuanzang 昛䌬⤀, who left China because he was troubled even as a teenager both by the lack of certain authentic Buddhist scriptures and by what he considered to be poor translations of crucial texts. Eventually, he made a vow to serve Buddha and China by going to India, the land of his faith, to acquire the needed scripts. Sustaining appalling hardships and dangers along the long trek from central China, through the rugged and desolate plains of northwest China, Tibet, and Central Asia, up the towering peaks of the Himalayas, he finally reached his destination—but only after he had been robbed, beaten several times, and encountered numerous near-death experiences induced by starvation, thirst, exposure, exhaustion, and loneliness. After he reached India, he eventually took up residence at the famous

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Nālandā Monastery and crisscrossed the Indian continent at least five times. Not only did he master the difficult languages of his faith, principally Sanskrit and Pali, so that he could read with expertise the sacred writings, but he became so fluent in other Indian languages as well that he could debate native princes and priests. When he preached and expounded the Law, according to his biographers, even brigands and thieves were so moved that they converted to Buddhism. To this day, shrines and numerous memorabilia of Xuanzang’s visits are preserved in various locales in India. Although Xuanzang was not the only cleric, Chinese or foreign, who had made a trip from China to either India or some part of Central Asia to seek Buddhist writings or a deeper understanding of Buddhist doctrines (history tells us that there were over  of these persons spanning nearly six centuries of such activities), his exploits were certainly the most celebrated and the most admired. He departed China a fugitive, for reasons I will make clear in due course, but he returned sixteen years later virtually a hero, bringing home with him in the year  some  volumes (bu 悐) of Buddhist writings.2 The second emperor of the Tang dynasty, Taizong ⣒⬿, received him in the capital and quickly showered him with generous royal protection and patronage so that he could devote the rest of his life to serving Buddhism by translating the scriptures he brought back. Receiving allegedly a handwritten “Preface to the Holy Religion” (Shengjiao xu 俾㔁⸷) from the emperor extolling both his virtue and Buddhist scriptures, he was then installed in the Great Wild Goose Pagoda, an edifice still standing today and seen probably by many of my audience who have visited the city Xi’an, the modern Chang’an. After his death, the life and deeds of Xuanzang swiftly metamorphosed from history to myth, and his story went through repeated and variegated tellings by mouth, brush, drama, poetry, painting, and iconography for nearly , years. In the late sixteenth century, a one-hundred-chapter novel was published celebrating this beloved tale of scripture seeking, and overnight the Xiyouji 大㷠姀 (The Journey to the West) became the most popular novel of all time. Because my own work has helped to introduce this novel in its complete form to the entire English-reading world, my readers may think that I am going to talk about the story. Instead, however, what I choose to do here is to use the inspired example of the historical monk to make a few observations about the unusual historical setting and background of this pilgrimage, the significance of Xuanzang’s activities, and the meaning of his achievement both for him and for us today in the context of national politics and international religion.

19 0 the real tripitak a revisited

the exchange of cultures We should remember that Xuanzang’s accomplishments, no less than countless other stories about the memorable deeds—real or imaginary—of Buddhist priests and laypersons, of individuals and communities, all belong to the history of that religious tradition in China. For nearly two millennia, that entire history itself, sustained by both mercantile and religious traffic, represents the most momentous and consequential meeting of two already highly developed civilizations, each possessive of immense cultural sophistication and achievement. When Buddhism reached China in the second century, that nation had already had a literate and bookish culture for over , years, but Indian Buddhism brought with it a language and a new world of writings that, in sheer scope and volume, both elicited response from the Chinese and produced changes in the receiving culture of such magnitude that it has yet to be measured adequately. Earlier in the twentieth century, the famous scholar, philosopher, and diplomat Hu Shi 傉怑 (–), had opined that Indian literary forms and inventiveness directly and decisively influenced Chinese culture in the development of imaginative fiction, in contrast to ancient Chinese fictive writings that began as anecdotal legends and episodic variations of historiographic prose.3 Major themes and topics such as the rabbit in the moon (yuetu 㚰⃼), the use of the watermark on a boat to weigh an elephant, the belief in the dragon (naga 漵) as the parent of the horse, and certain myths about sweet dew ( ganlu 䓀曚) and deathless liquids (busi shui ᶵ㬣 㯜) that Chinese frequently take for granted as native ideas are, according to the well-known research by Chinese scholars in China and elsewhere, actually imported materials from India. In that regard, Sanskrit as the most authoritative, classical literary language of India has had such a profound and far-reaching impact on China that its full effect has yet to be adequately studied and understood. In terms of formal features, Sanskrit is probably the most different from Chinese, because the Indian language is characterized by extremely complex grammar and morphology, whereas Chinese, an essentially monosyllabic and nonmorphological language, is virtually its diametrical opposite. When these two mighty linguistic systems collided, astonishing results occurred. Long before China’s contacts with the tongues and scripts of Europe and America, the encounter with Indian writing and speech produced an undertaking in translation such that, in sheer volume, scope, and magnitude, the civilized world had never seen hitherto. Apart from the thousands of titles that form the body of Buddhist scriptures, the Chinese

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canon also contains important volumes on lexicography, the science of translation, grammar, and linguistics that lamentably too few Chinese scholars have studied. It was estimated by Liang Qichao 㠩┇崭, the reformer and modern scholar, that Indian languages, directly or indirectly, had helped to enlarge Chinese vocabulary by at least , words, surpassing the roughly , that Shakespeare bequeathed to the English language.4 The impact of Sanskrit on Chinese culture, moreover, extends beyond translation and diction, for the investigations by Rao Zongyi 棺⬿柌, Tsu-lin Mei, and Victor Mair have demonstrated conclusively that tonal metrics (shenglü 倚⼳), the exceedingly complicated scheme of prosody built on the juxtaposition of different tones that govern most forms of premodern Chinese poetry such as regulated verse (lüshi ⼳娑), lyric (ci 娆), and song (qu 㚚) all derived from the earnest attempt of the Chinese to imitate certain phonetic properties of the Sanskrit language. Those immortal lines of poetry by Li Bo 㛶䘥, Du Fu 㜄䓓, Bo Juyi 䘥⯭㖻, and Su Shi 喯怑—and one could name any famous or obscure poet between the fifth and twentieth centuries whom the Chinese people cherish and want to teach their school-age children to recite—could not have been written in the forms that they have now come to love without the direct stimulus of certain foreign linguistic features. 5 If this brief account seems too monothematic, I should point out briefly that Indian influence on Chinese culture extends far beyond language. Many spices and varieties of food, including such ordinary items as black and white pepper and carrots, or more exotic items like ghee, cheeses, and koumiss, were introduced to China from “the West,” meaning in early medieval time the regions of India and Central Asia. Indian culture contributed to Chinese development of many facets of technology, encompassing some techniques of surgery, the medical use of certain analgesic or anaesthetic ingredients, and the enlargement of herbal medications. The importation of new forms of dance, music, and instruments, an all-toofamiliar topic in Chinese literary history, directly helped develop an entirely new poetic form, the lyric, or ci, in the seventh and eighth centuries. Evangelistic efforts of Buddhist communities sped up dramatically in the Tang dynasty the use of paper and printing as well, just as monastic education, according to contemporary scholars, significantly modified even certain aspects of the imperial educational system.6 This is the historical context in which we must locate the story of Xuanzang’s journey, for the event did not come about as a freak accident any more than he was living in a sociocultural vacuum. The historical monk, along with well over  million residents in the capital of Chang’an of his

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time (with thousands of these being foreigners who came from as far away as Persia and modern Turkey), was already living in an environment that could justly be labeled multicultural or pluralistic.7 Without the direct impact of a genuinely foreign culture and its undeniable religious appeal, there would have been no such undertaking as going to India to seek more scriptures.

the conflict of cultures I have emphasized this element of cultural diversity in the historical and social setting of Xuanzang’s life and time because I think it may offer us some valuable issues to ponder, both about the monk personally and about certain aspects of historical Chinese culture generally. Despite the twentieth century’s exponential increase in scholarly knowledge of the varied constituents that have gone into the making of Chinese civilization in any particular period, the conviction that historical Chinese culture is something that has always remained stable, unified, and monolithic persists in large domains of native and nonnative Sinology. Because Indian Buddhism has already been part of China’s total culture for so long, it is difficult for Chinese to think of it as a foreign religion. Indeed, even among the Asian students on American campuses today, it would not surprise me to learn that there are quite a few who may be adherents to one of the several schools or divisions of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Tibetan Buddhism largely because of familial influence. To acknowledge, however, the age of the Chinese Buddhist tradition or its continuous vitality even among contemporary Chinese believers is not the same as saying that Buddhism, now or historically, is a fully integrated part of Chinese culture, however defined. On the contrary, it is my contention—and that of other scholars as well—that Buddhism, since its first arrival in northeast Asia, has always been in tension, and frequently in conflict, with the dominant, official tradition of China. Despite the many changes or modifications of both doctrine and ritual that various forms of Buddhism had instituted over the centuries to accommodate the reality of Chinese society, Buddhist belief remains at odds with the traditional Chinese understanding of the state and the family, both institutions, as they surely are even to this day, imbued with Confucian notions and values. The evidence of conflict may be detected not merely in, for example, the all-too-familiar “Memorial Against the Buddha’s Relics” ( jian ying fogu biao 媓彶ἃ橐堐), penned by the famous Tang poet and Confucian official Han Yu (–), a treatise still frequently studied by Chinese schoolchildren, but also more vividly

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in the widespread turmoil in Taiwan localities during  and , when monasteries and clerics were accused of harming or destroying familial structures and values by seducing young men and women to enter religious orders. Seen from the perspective of stringent Chinese cultural nationalism, Xuanzang and all Buddhist followers past and present are actually subscribing to a foreign ideology, a system of beliefs and practices hardly compatible with prevalent indigenous values. As the famous anti-Buddhist polemicist Fu Yi ‭⣽ (–), a contemporary of our monk, had contended in his series of proposals for suppression of Buddhism (–) only years before the monk embarked on his journey, that religion’s alleged deleterious impact affected virtually all aspects of Chinese society— economics, politics, national identity and self-esteem, sociopsychological orientation, and intellectual integrity.8 For to think, as Xuanzang the young Buddhist zealot obviously did, that Buddhist writings were necessary to the welfare and fulfillment of the Chinese people is in essence to deny the self-sufficiency or adequacy of indigenous wisdom and thought, and identify one’s deepest norms and values with something regarded as non-Chi. nese. To affirm that the Buddhist san gha should supercede the obligations of one’s family, as the young teenager Xuanzang also maintained when he sought ordination at the Luoyang monastery (FSZ :–), is to tear apart the ties of kinship that Chinese have valued since time immemorial. Finally, to insist that such objects of one’s religious veneration (e.g., Buddhist scriptures and teachings) as something to be acquired despite express legal and political prohibition is to incur the risk of treason. In the light of Buddhism’s inherent conflict with historical Chinese culture, Xuanzang’s religious devotion and commitment—and not merely scholarly zeal, as Chinese savants past and present would like to describe his motivation—cannot be doubted. What is remarkable is how such commitment apparently had the tacit approbation and support of his family. In this matter, both the utterance and silence of textual sources may speak volumes. It should be apparent to anyone familiar with the priest’s biographical writings that he came from a rather unusual family. According to the FSZ (:), his grandfather Chen Kang 昛⹟, by excellence in scholarship, was appointed erudite in the School for the Sons of the State ( guozi boshi ⚳⫸ ⌂⢓), a moderately high rank.9 His father, Chen Hui 昛よ, was said to have mastered the classics at an early age and loved to affect the appearance of a Confucian scholar (hao ruzhe zhi rong ⤥₺侭ᷳ⭡). As the Sui declined, the father buried himself in books, refusing all offers of official appoint-

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ments and duties. Despite this withdrawal from public service, the paternal devotion to familial instruction in the Confucian manner never let up, and the FSZ singles out one incident to praise the sensitive piety of the young Xuanzang. While reciting the paradigmatic Classic on Filial Piety before his father, the eight-year-old suddenly rose to his feet to tidy his clothes. When asked for the reason for his abrupt action, the boy replied: “Master Zeng 㚦⫸ [Confucius’s disciple] heard the voice of his teacher and arose from his mat. How could Xuanzang sit still when he hears his father’s teachings?” This anecdotal exemplum, intended unmistakably to magnify the elite orthodoxy of both father and son, may serve at the same time as an unintended and ironic commentary of familial ethos. Given the Confucian heritage identified with ancestor, great-grandfather, grandfather, and father duly rehearsed in the biography, one would have thought that the text would proceed to provide more encomium on the acumen and achievement of the subject at hand. Xuanzang, let us notice, was indeed said to have also mastered the Confucian classics at an early age, but the account of his prodigious intelligence and love of learning becomes a mere pretext to display his astounding decision to seek “holy orders,” as it were, at age thirteen. What is even more astonishing is the fact that he had an elder brother who by this time was already an ordained Buddhist priest. Of the four sons belonging to the Chen household, therefore, at least two appar. ently had entered the san gha while they were very young. To this unusual phenomenon, the biographical text by its amazing silence implies no familial opposition. Given the strict vow of celibacy that Chinese Buddhism had always demanded of its clergy, this silence meant that the family no less than the young men themselves was willing to incur the risk of not providing a male heir for familial lineage, a failure that, according to the words of Mencius, was the greatest form of unfiliality. Xuanzang’s family, in other words, could be one of those which, while fully participatory (as far as we can learn from history) in all aspects of Chinese life of their time, was also subscribing to a form of cultural diversity. They were unafraid to embrace a system of values that, in many respects, was critical of, or at odds with, their native tradition. Once the young Xuanzang had entered the Gate of Emptiness in formal commitment, we learn from the biography that he and his brother traveled widely not merely between the two Tang capitals of Chang’an and Luoyang but also to far away Sichuan in quest of further learning and teachings from erudite priests. Apparently, these activities during the dangerous and tumultuous period of transition between the Sui and the Tang were tacitly supported by the family.

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Although history tells of the considerable popularity of Buddhism in the Sui and early Tang, this religion’s widespread influence was not met with universal acceptance, as we have just noted. Even in the person of Taizong, whose own career eventually entailed such intimate involvement with this particular monk no less than with the larger monastic and lay communities, the emperor’s attitude toward Buddhism was marked more by manipulations of opportunistic politics than by the urgent promptings of faith.10 This contrast of attitude and behavior toward religion on the part of emperor and subject may betoken not merely the idiosyncratic difference of two individuals but also the wider phenomenon of reception or resistance. In the accounts of Xuanzang’s early life and already assertive engagement with Buddhist studies and preaching in fraternal company, could we not detect perhaps the family’s basic and genial regard for this religion? Might not such familial hospitality, in turn, deepen his commitment to the extent of undertaking not merely the daunting pilgrimage of sixteen years but also the task of a reversed missionary throughout the land of his faith when he participated liberally in doctrinal disputations and evangelistic preaching? Finally, and most significantly, could such familial support furnish him with the needed courage and confidence to embark on his journey against imperial prohibition, thus transforming a religious pilgrimage into also an act of religious defiance against the Chinese state?

the passionate pilgrim Let me hasten to add that such questions on possible influence of familial setting are admittedly rhetorical and speculative. What we know with certainty, however, is the fact that Xuanzang departed Tang territory furtively, for “at this time,” declares the FSZ (:), “the state’s governance was new and its frontiers did not reach far. The people were prohibited from going to foreign domains.” The transgressive act of the monk thus earned him a recent biographer’s justifiable observation that he left Tang China “with a warrant on his head,”11 but Sally Wriggins’s remark only inferred the severity of his crime. The textualized accounts of his early biographers reveal more intensely his religious convictions. The initial petition for permission to go West for scriptures and doctrinal clarification, according to the FSZ, was submitted by Xuanzang and other Buddhist clerics. “When the imperial rescript denied it, all the others retreated, but the Master of the Law refused to bend [bu qu ᶵ⯰]. Because he then resolved to travel alone and the road to the West was both

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difficult and dangerous, he had to interrogate his mind-and-heart on the matter. Since he had been able to bear and overcome so many afflictions of humankind already, he could not retreat from his present duty. Only then did he enter a stupa to make known his firm resolve, begging in prayer for the various Saints’ secret benediction so that his journey and return might be unimpeded” (:). This depiction of the priest’s resolve not only narrates the deliberateness of his motivation but also the steadfastness in his resolve. The biographies tell us that during the process of leaving Chinese territory, Xuanzang was warned twice about his incriminating action. The FSZ (:–) makes only the briefest mention of one Li Daliang 㛶⣏Ṗ, regional military commander (dudu 悥䜋)12 of Liangzhou, who, upon learning of the priest’s desired project, simply urged him to turn back. In the Obituary of Xuanzang, composed by the disciple Mingxiang ⅍䤍 most likely in  and thus the earliest biography of the priest, a slightly longer anecdote details the incident of a nameless barbarian hired to sneak the pilgrim past the five signalfire ramparts strung out beyond Jade Gate Pass. In the middle of the night [while they were sleeping by a riverbank], the barbarian arose and walked toward the Master of the Law with a drawn knife and the intent to kill him. Whereupon the Master of the Law rose up and began immediately to recite the name of Buddha and a sutra. The barbarian sat down again, only to stand up once more after a little while. He said to the priest: “According to the Law of the State, it is a most serious crime to go to a foreign state on your private wish. When you pass through the road beneath those five signal fires, you will be caught for certain. Once you are arrested, you are a dead man! Since your student still has family obligations, how could I take this on myself! Imperial law cannot be breached. Let me go back with the Master.” The Master of the Law replied, “Xuanzang can only die facing the West, but I vow I shall not return East and live. If my patron cannot do this, he is free to turn back. Let Xuanzang proceed by himself.”13

Though flavored perhaps with the hyperbolic accent of hagiography, this short tale also rings true at another level with dramatic irony. For the priest stubbornly committed to his journey to the west, it took a barbarian (hu 傉) to remind a Tang subject of his own social reality to which both of them were subject, and to point out both the nature and risk of his illicit action. The word I translated as “private wish” is si 䥩, a word as old as the Classic of Documents (Shujing 㚠䴻) that stretches through Warring States

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texts (e.g., the Analects, Laozi, Mencius, Lüshi chunqiu) and the Han Compendium of Ritual (Liji) to denote all that is personal, self-regarding, selfdirected, and self-motivated.14 In premodern China’s rigid taxonomy of both social structures and human affects, whatever resides outside the domain of state governance and power ( gong) is si, including even clan or household kin (e.g., Zuo Commentary, Duke Xuan ). Whatever human motive or action not originating from state or, in a household or clan, parental authority is si, and thus private desire and personal possession— inclusive of space and time—always exist in the parlous potential of selfishness. This predominantly negative assessment of the personal, in fact, is what led eventually to the escalating debate on gong and si among many Ming-Qing Confucian elites when they began to question, ever so cautiously, the origin, maintenance, and limit of imperial power.15 To the Tang barbarian, however, Xuanzang’s act of seeking the dharma in the West, however noble, still falls within the realm of the private, and thus violates the law of state that brooks no rivalry. Against the state’s initial refusal of travel permission and the specific warning by the barbarian recounted in the two biographies, Xuanzang’s resistance is portrayed in a language normally reserved in Chinese writings for exemplary political subjects. The FSZ says that the priest refused to bow or bend (bu qu), a phrase recalling the defiant stance of countless patriots celebrated for their undying loyalty. His own words represented in the Obituary indicate that he was clearly ready to pay the supreme sacrifice for the decision of seeking scripture. It is of great interest to me as I reread the story of Xuanzang today that he did not attempt to justify his undertaking in terms of what great boon he was hoping to obtain for his nation or even his people. His passionate commitment to his long, hazardous pilgrimage and its stupendous achievements, in any final assessment, must be honored and recognized first and foremost as an act of religious devotion. In the twentieth century, Hu Shi called Xuanzang “China’s first overseas student” (di yi ge Zhongguo liuxue sheng 䫔ᶨᾳᷕ⚳䔁⬠䓇), and this epithet has been invoked many times since.16 Although I have no wish to belittle the priest’s intellectual and scholastic accomplishments, I must emphasize that to treat him only as a scholar is to miss both the power of his personality and the significance of his undertaking. Trained first in Confucian ethics and politics to revere without reservation both sovereign and the state, Xuanzang nonetheless by his action indicated his belief that there was a demand, an obligation, and a law that were higher than any norm or form of authority sanctioned by his native tradition. His thoughts, words, and deeds recorded in those

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early segments of his biographies were as “scandalous” as the sixth-century Parthian dumping all his wealth into a river after he heard Buddhist preaching, for neither motivation could find adequate explanation in strictly secular terms.17 Xuanzang had to go to India because his religion compelled him, and because he regarded those missing scriptures and unclarified teachings as a supreme good for his own people. When the imperial court said no, he disobeyed. The disobedience, in Chinese understanding, was already political rebellion, but such an act for Xuanzang clearly had its own justification that, at the same time, was indisputably at odds with the most cherished ideals of his native culture. Like the early Christians’ refusal to worship Caesar because of their faith in the assertion Kyrios Christos (Christ is Lord), Xuanzang’s actions, from his youthful dedication, through secret defiance of royal command, to prolonged endurance of hardships on his journey, were wrought and sustained by religious zeal. To recognize the fideistic character of this Chinese monk’s person and deed is also to put his intellectual and scholastic achievements in the proper context and perspective. Xuanzang, let me emphasize again, did not take on such enormous risk and suffering incurred by that lengthy journey to India merely for material gain, for himself or for his family. Indeed, his entire vocation, we should remember, placed no emphasis on that aspect of his existence, for he had to take a vow of poverty along with that of celibacy. Although history has firmly recorded the fact that he received abundant imperial favor and even was named a national treasure ( guo bao ⚳⮞) by the emperor upon his return, one could hardly assert that such reception and outcome were his expectation during his furtive flight from China. Although immersed in the Confucian ideals of his own heritage, Xuanzang did not aspire to serve China through officialdom, through the rigors and rewards of either civil or military service. He did not go to India because he wanted more knowledge of statecraft or commerce. His mental and educational pursuits, from the time of his early teens, were singularly focused on studying some of the most abstruse and abstract texts in the Buddhist canon. The so-called Consciousness-Only School of Buddhism (Weishi zong ⓗ嬀⬿), to which he had been attracted at an early age, has been understood, in his time and ours, as philosophically one of the most demanding divisions of that religion. The complexity of both text and doctrine, in fact, makes apparent the reason why such writings were not available in any significant amount through translation in Tang China. To seek out the most venerated writings of his denomination with a hope

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eventually to make them available to his own people, he accepted the arduous task of mastering one of the world’s most difficult languages. His success enabled him to give to the Chinese people in their own script seventy-five volumes, or , scrolls of Buddhist writings, surpassing the accomplishment of any scriptural translator in previous Chinese history. Those specimens of his intellect not only represented some of the best translations of Buddhist texts up to his time and beyond, but they also bequeathed to posterity instructive examples of how Indo-European languages were studied and understood in medieval China, including the invaluable knowledge of grammar, syntax, and phonology. Finally, the record of his protracted travel that he wrote down on the so-called Western territories (Western Territories of the Great Tang [Da Tang xiyu ji ⣏Ⓒ大 ➇姀]) not only won him deserved recognition from the throne as a master savant of other lands and peoples; the work itself also has justly been hailed as the first authentic work of geography authored by a Chinese. For these monumental achievements, Xuanzang had won numberless accolades from his own people, but I wonder how many Chinese admirers even today would completely reckon with the momentous implication of the priest’s initial resolve. That single act of almost reckless daring represented nothing less than an audacious challenge to imperial power by a solitary youthful monk, while the single-mindedness of purpose that sustained the sixteen years of his itinerant quest and beyond bespoke total devotion to his faith. Anyone familiar with the history of Chinese Buddhism knows, of course, that the Tang pilgrim was hardly the first Buddhist lawbreaker, for thoughtful and faithful believers from even the early stage of Chinese Buddhism had felt obliged to advance stringent critiques of their own political culture and ideals. Already in the Wei-Jin period, according to a modern scholar, it was unquestionably assumed that the “Chinese Emperor . . . was . . . the Vicar of Heaven and Earth, the rightful source of all temporal authority. If certain persons failed to recognize that authority, it was through ignorance or out of malice, but it was never justifiable. Consequently the Chinese traditionalist could recognize no class of beings that is in the world but not of it. For such a person the Buddhist monk on Chinese soil was an intolerable anomaly.”18 When the historical Xuanzang returned to China in  and found imperial favor almost immediately, it was to the credit of Emperor Taizong, then at the zenith of his power, that he did not find the monk’s person and accomplishments an anomaly. On the other hand, Xuanzang throughout his sojourn, as his biographers represent him, was careful to pay the most glowing tribute to his own sovereign.19 After emperor and monk had made

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acquaintance, the subject for the rest of his life always treated his ruler and the royal house with the greatest tact and circumspection, and the series of exchanged imperial rescripts and priestly memorials preserved in the second half of the FSZ fully reveal the intelligence and persuasive power of the monk’s rhetoric. Nonetheless, Xuanzang also was bold to acknowledge in his first memorial to the throne, seeking imperial pardon before he dared set foot again on Tang soil, that, “braving the transgression of the articles of law, he had departed for India on his own authority [si]” (FSZ :). That single act of admission undoubtedly represents candor and prudence, but it would also give the lie to the myopic chauvinism that for the Chinese people, their sense of ultimate allegiance is likely always to derive from the comfort of communal sanction, the familiar ballast of family and state that allegedly is uniquely Chinese. We now live in a disturbing moment of history when, in its determined efforts to modernize, the world’s most populous nation also has made it its constitutional requirement that any religious community or organization seeking legitimacy in its domain must first be certified as “patriotic.” The freedom to practice religion is guaranteed indeed, but only to those totally subservient to the state. Crossing the national border today, even if only in thought or in print, may prove to be just as risky and transgressive as our pilgrim’s secretive exit from his homeland. I wonder what the Chinese on the mainland and in the diaspora globally, who find so many “anomalies” in the followers of Falun Gong, or Rebiya Kadeer, an Islamic woman sentenced in  to eight years of prison for sending back copies of local newspapers to her exiled husband, 20 would think of Xuanzang, our passionate pilgrim. notes 1. The dates of the monk’s birth, departure for India, and death have been subjects of endless controversy in modern Chinese scholarship. I follow the conclusion reached by Liang Qichao 㠩┇崭, supported by Luo Xianglin 伭楁㜿 and, more recently, by Master Yinshun ⌘枮. Their studies have been collected conveniently in the two volumes (8 and 16) devoted to Xuanzang. See Xuangzang dashi yanjiu 䌬⤀ ⣏ⷓ䞼䨞, in Xiandai foxue congkan 䎦ẋἃ⬠⎊↲, ed., Zhang Mantao ⻝㚤㾌 (Taipei: Dasheng [Mahāyāna] chubanshe, 1977). More debates on these dates are included in volume 16. Hereafter, the two volumes will be cited as XZYJ. The problem with the early date, however, is that it directly contradicts the statement of Xuanzang himself in his memorial to Emperor Taizong during the final stage of his return journey: “In the fourth month of the third year of the Zhengguan reign period [i.e., 630], braving the transgression of the articles of law, I departed for India on my own authority.” The memorial, if genuine, is preserved in book 5, the first half of his biography compiled by Huili, generally regarded as the more reliable section

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2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

of the work. See the modern critical edition of the Da Tang Da Ci’ensi Sanzang Fashi zhuan ⣏Ⓒ⣏ヰ】⮢ᶱ啷㱽ⷓ⁛, collected in Tang Xuanzang Sanzang zhuanshi huibian Ⓒ䌬⤀ᶱ啷⁛⎚⼁䶐, ed. Master Guangzhong ⃱ᷕ (Taipei: Dongda, 1988), p. 127. Hereafter, the work will be cited as FSZ, with book and page numbers following. The discrepancy between the traditional date and the reconstructed one is usually explained on the basis of calligraphic similarity between the character for original/ first (yuan ⃫), as in the “first year of the Zhenguan period,” and the one for three/ third (san ᶱ), thereby inducing mistranscription or misreading. Luo Xianglin, “Jiu Tangshu Seng Xuanzang zhuan jiangshu ˪冲Ⓒ㚠˫₏䌬⤀⁛嫃䔷,” in XZYJ, 16:270. Hu Shi 傉怑, “Fojiao di fanyyi wenxue ἃ㔁冯侣嬗㔯⬠,” in Baihua wenxue shi 䘥娙 㔯⬠⎚ (Taipei: Qiming, 1957), pp. 157–215. The estimation is based on the vocabulary count in Takakusu Junjirō and Watanabe Kaikyoku, eds., Taishō shinshū dai-zōkyō ⣏㬋㕘僑⣏啷䴻, 85 vols. (Tokyo: Daizō shuppan, 1934). See also Liang Qichao 㠩┇崭, “Fanyi wenxue yu fodian 侣嬗㔯⬠冯ἃ℠,” in Foxue yanjiu shiba pian ἃ⬠䞼䨞⋩ℓ䭯 (1936; repr., Taipei: Zhonghua shuju, 1966), p. 27 (N.B.: page numbers refer to individual essays collected in the volume). For Indian literary references and themes in Chinese writings, see Yu Longyu 恩 潁ἁ, ed., Zhong-Yin wenxue guanxi yuanli ᷕ⌘㔯⬎ℛ䲣㸸㳩 (Changsha: Hunan wenyi chubanshe, 1987). On language and linguistic issues, see Rao Zongyi, Zhong-Yin wenhua guanxishi lunji ᷕ⌘㔯⊾斄Ὢ⎚婾普 (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1990); Victor H. Mair and Tsulin Mei, “The Sanskrit Origins of Recent Style Prosody,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51, no. 2 (December 1991): 375–470; and Victor H. Mair, “Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 3 (August 1994): 707–751. For numerous transfers of both knowledge and materials from India to China— from astronomy and mathematics, through metallurgy, printing, and medicine, to various agricultural techniques and the method of crystallizing sugar—one should consult the encyclopedic accounts in Joseph Needham’s multivolume Science and Civilisation in China. For Buddhism’s contribution to education in medieval China, see Erik Zürcher, “Buddhism and Education in Tang Times,” in Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and John W. Chaffee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 19–56. For recent accounts of Indian influences on Chinese religious beliefs, practices, symbolisms, and institutions both within and beyond Buddhism, see Stephen F. Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994); Valerie Hansen, “Gods on Walls: A Case of Indian Influence on Chinese Lay Religion?” in Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China, ed. Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Peter N. Gregory (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993), pp. 75–114. One other recent monograph of note is John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). In the year 742, according to Peter Hopkirk, the capital’s population was “close to two million (according to the census of 754, China had a total population of fiftytwo million, and contained some twenty-five cities with over half a million inhabitants). Ch’ang-an, which had served as the capital of the Chou, Ch’in and Han dynasties, had grown into a metropolis measuring six miles by five. . . . Foreigners

202 the real tripitak a revisited

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

were welcome, and some five thousand of them lived there. Nestorians, Manichaeans, Zoroastarians, Hindus and Jews were freely permitted to build and worship in their own churches, temples and synagogues” (Foreign Devils on the Silk Road [Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980], p. 28). Even this estimation of the number of foreigners may be too small, for as early as 630, when the Tang Emperor Taizong assumed the title Heavenly Qaghan (tian kehan ⣑⎗㯿) at the request of China’s northwestern peoples, thereby vanquishing the eastern Turks, who had been for centuries marauders of the country, the eventual imperial policy was to resettle them in Chinese territory. Of the some 100,000 Turks “placed along the Chinese frontier from Ho-pei to Shensi,” about “ten thousand eventually came to live in Ch’ang-an, and several of their tribal leaders received commissions as generals in the T’ang army.” See Howard J. Wechsler, “The Founding of the T’ang Dynasty: Kao-tsu (Reign 618–26),” in The Cambridge History of China, ed. Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank, vol. 3, Sui and T’ang China, 589–906, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), part 1:223. Arthur F. Wright, “Fu I and the Rejection of Buddhism,” in Studies in Chinese Buddhism, ed. Robert M. Summers (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 112–124. In The Journey to the West, these proposals were compressed and fictionalized into statements made in a debate with the ardent Buddhist official Xiao Yu 唕䏨 (574–647) before the Tang emperor Taizong, resulting in his commission of Xuanzang as the scripture pilgrim. Xiao Yu, incidentally, was thought by Arthur Waley to be the official responsible for withholding the historical monk’s request for a passport to begin his quest in 627 (The Real Tripitaka and Other Pieces [New York: Macmillan, 1952]). For the fictionalizer account, see Anthony C. Yu, trans. and ed., The Journey to the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 1:262. In translating official titles, I follow Charles O. Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 389. Arthur F. Wright, “T’ang T’ai-tsung and Buddhism,” in Perspectives on the T’ang, ed. Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twichett (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 239–264. Sally Hovey Wriggins, Xuanzang, A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), p. 3. Hucker, Dictionary of Official Titles, p. 544. Da Tang gu Sanzang Xuanzang Fashi xingzhuang ⣏Ⓒ㓭ᶱ啷䌬⤀㱽ⷓ埴䉨 , in Zhuanshi huibian, p. 289. Exhorting his appointed officials, the king, in the Classic of Documents says: “Oh! All you virtuous officials that I have, honor your charges, and be careful with the decrees you issue. Once issued, they must be executed and not retracted. When you use that which is public [ gong ℔] to eliminate that which is personal [si 䥩], the people will be gladly obedient.” See “Zhou guan ␐⭀” (Zhou officials), in Shangshu jishi ⯂㚠普慳, ed. Qu Wanli ⯰叔慴 (Taipei: Lianjing, 1983), p. 325. Although this passage is likely apocryphal and dates to the Warring States period, the injunction to use that which is public to eliminate the private (yi gong mie si ẍ℔㹭䥩) has become an entrenched slogan from antiquity to the present. Yu Yingshi, Xiandai Ruxue lun 䎦ẋ₺⬠婾 (On Contemporary Confucianism) (River Edge, N.J.: Global Publishing, 1996), chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5. For a study of Confucianism’s problematic relations to the modern theory of universal human rights, see An-

the real tripitak a revisited 203

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

thony C. Yu, “Enduring Change: Confucianism and the Prospect of Human Rights,” chap. 15 of the present volume. See, for example, the essay by Li Dongfang in XZYJ, vol. 16. Jacques Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese Society: An Economic History from the Fifth to the Tenth Centuries, trans. Franciscus Verellen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. xiii-xvii. Leon Hurvitz, “‘Render Unto Caesar’ in Early Chinese Buddhism,” Liebenthal Festschrift, Sino-Indian Studies 5, nos. 3–4 (1957): 81. One oft-cited example of Xuanzang’s tribute to Taizong was the latter’s brief discourse on Chinese imperial virtues and accomplishments for King Harsha, the last of the great Buddhist rulers in India prior to Hindu and Islamic conquest (FSZ 5:107). The verdict on her crime was given as “revealing state intelligence” abroad, the “illegally giving of information across the border.” See New York Times, Friday, April 28, 2000, A8.

 10  “REST, REST, PERTURBED SPIRIT!” ghosts in traditional chinese prose fiction The other world will be admirable for congruities. —benjamin whichcote

For Joseph S. M. Lau

T

he sheer complexity of the subject no less than its utter unwieldiness will be the first impression of anyone undertaking a study of the topic of ghosts in traditional Chinese literature. The length of the Chinese literary tradition and the persistence of interest in the subject have helped to spawn a staggering amount of materials and create enormous difficulty in the isolation of sources. As in the case of many topics in Chinese culture, the development of this particular one ranges in many directions; it is not a subject enshrined in only a single genre of writing. Ghosts, of course, are part of the mythologies of the dead and dying. They belong, as Mircea Eliade has observed, to that experience “that renders intelligible the notion of spirit and of spiritual beings.”1 Because the concern for the dead and its treatment, for the possibility and nature of an afterlife, represents one of the most basic concerns of any human society, the Chinese expression and exploration of this concern are understandably multifarious, verbal documents being but one of many cultural artifacts embodying such concern. In this category of written materials, there is a vast amount of historical, philosophical, religious, ritual, and literary texts that make specific reference to gui 櫤, the word most commonly translated as “ghost,” and to scores of some  words still in use that are constructed on this particular radical.2 What complicates matters, moreover, is the knowledge common to all students of Chinese sources that gui and its various cognates represent only one concept within a bountiful vocabulary of the spirit world. While the present study will indeed focus on gui in fiction, it also recognizes the unavoidable necessity to make occasional

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contact with such other related terms as shen 䤆 (spirit, god), ling 曰 (spirit, soul, efficacy, the numinous), yao ⤾ (monster, fiend, weird, abnormal), guai ⿒ (strange, portentous, anomalous, fantastic), xie 恒 (demonic, perverse, deviant), mo 櫼 (demons, goblin, ogre; also standard term for translating the Sanskrit māra, the deva who hinders or destroys, the Evil One), and the venerable but still controversial binome hunpo 櫪櫬. Leaving aside the problems of etymology, philology, and worldviews, 3 I shall concentrate on the analysis of literary materials, namely, those in the provenance of prose fiction in both classical and vernacular styles. Even this pragmatic delimitation of labor and territory does not greatly facilitate my task. The problem, in the first place, is again a familiar one: the boundary between fiction and nonfiction is not a rigorously observed propriety in ancient writings. Not only are ghosts and their appearances recorded in such historical documents as the Zuozhuan ⶎ⁛ and the Shiji ⎚姀, but chapters also in the Mozi ⡐⫸ ( juan ), Lunheng 婾堉 ( juan –), and the Baopuzi ㉙㛜⫸ ( juan , ), for example, make frequent use of antecedent historical or anecdotal materials in their discussions of gui. As we shall see, a good deal of the ancient rumination on the soul, the spirit world, and such related categories as qi 㯋, jing 䱦, shen 䤆, and yin-yang 昘春, seems to pervade, at least in popularized form, the later fictive presentation of the subject. When one moves on to what are by common consent the specific literary corpuses, the voluminous nature of the sources is equally daunting. The tale is found in virtually all periods of Chinese fiction. In a very real sense, therefore, to study this topic is to engage in a survey of the history of traditional Chinese fiction, running the gamut of Six Dynasties zhiguai ⽿⿒ (records of the strange) and Tang chuanqi ⁛⣯ (transmissions of the marvelous) stories, the Dunhuang popular narratives (bianwen 嬲㔯), the Buddhist avadāna tales, and the vernacular fiction of the late medieval period. Some notable collections and anthologies adorning this history include the following: Lieyi zhuan ↿䔘⁛ (Records of Marvels), attributed to Cao Pi 㚡ᶽ (–); Soushen ji ㏄䤆姀 (In Search of Spirits), compiled by Gan Bao ⸚⮞ (fl. ca. ); Yuanhun ji ⅌櫪姀 (Accounts of Ghosts with Grievances), compiled by Yan Zhitui 柷ᷳ㍐ (–); Shishuo xinyu ᶾ婒㕘婆 (A New Account of Tales of the World), by Liu Yiqing ∱佑ㄞ (–); attributed to Liu are also the anthologies Youming lu ⸥㖶抬 (Records of the Dark and Light) and Xuanyan lu ⭋槿抬 (Records of Manifest Retributions); Mingxiang ji ⅍䤍姀 (Dark Omens

20 6 “rest, rest, perturbed spirit!”

Recorded), by Wang Yan 䌳䏘 (late fifth century); Xuanguai lu 䌬⿒抬 (Accounts of the Mysterious and Strange), by Niu Sengru 䈃₏₺ (–); Xuanshi zhi ⭋⭌⽿ (Records of a Palace Chamber), by Zhang Du ⻝嬨 (?-ca. ); Zuanyi zhi 个䔘⽿ (Bizarre Events Recorded), by Li Mei 㛶䍓 (fl. ); Xu Xuanguai lu 临䌬⿒抬 (A Sequel to Accounts of the Mysterious and Strange), by Li Fuyan 㛶⽑妨 (fl. ); Yiwen ji 䔘倆普 (A Collection of Strange Events), compiled by Chen Han 昛侘 (fl. ); Qingsuo gaoyi 曺䐋檀嬘 (Lofty Opinions Under the Green-Latticed Window), compiled by Liu Fu ∱㕏 (ca. –); Yijian zhi ⣟➭⽿ (Records of Yijian), compiled by Hong Mai 㳒怩 (–); Jiandeng xinhua −䅰㕘娙 (New Tales Written While Trimming the Wick), by Qu You 䝧 ỹ (–); Liushi jia xiaoshuo ℕ⋩⭞⮷婒 (Sixty Stories), published by Hong Pian 㳒㤑 during the period –; Gujin xiaoshuo ⎌Ṳ⮷婒 (Fiction Old and New), published /, first collection of Sanyan ᶱ妨 series, by Feng Menglong 楖⣊漵 (–); Jingshi tongyan 嬎ᶾ忂妨 (Comprehensive Words to Admonish the World), published in  by Feng and associates; Xingshi hengyan 愺ᶾ⿺妨 (Lasting Words to Awaken the World), published in , compiled by Feng; Qingshi leilue ね⎚栆䔍 (A Classified History of Love), compiled by Feng; Poan jingqi ㉵㟰樂⣯ (Striking the Table in Amazement at the Wonders), published in , compiled by Ling Mengchu ⅴ㾃⇅ (–); Erke poan jingqi Ḵ⇣㉵㟰樂⣯ (The Second Collection [of the same]), published in ; Liaozhai zhiyi 俲滳娴䔘 (Tales of the Unusual from the Leisure Studio), by Pu Songling 呚㜦漉 (–); Zibuyu ⫸ᶵ婆 (What the Master Disdains to Speak Of ), compiled by Yuan Mei 堩㝂 (–).

To give some notion of the quantity of materials at hand, one can cite the Liaozhai zhiyi, possibly the most famous collection of supernatural tales in the entire canon, which alone contains some  stories. To be sure, not all of them are about ghosts or spirits, but a substantial number are certainly devoted to that theme. When all twenty-four collections are taken together, the number of stories easily exceeds ,. Admittedly, several of these anthologies, such as the Soushen ji, Zhuanyi zhi, Yiwen ji, and Xuanguai lu, no longer exist as independent works. Large portions of these texts, however, survive preserved in the Taiping guangji ⣒⸛⺋姀, that invaluable encyclopedia compiled in the tenth century, in which the entry on gui alone commands forty-four juan ⌟ (from  to ) and numbers  pages in a modern edition. If one also consults other entries under such related headings as dingshu ⭂㔠 (predetermined lot), baoying ⟙ㅱ (karmic retribution), meng ⣊ (dreams), huanshu ⸣埻 (manifestations), yaoguai ⤾⿒ (monsters and fiends), and zaisheng ġℵ䓇 (resurrection, revivification, and rebirth), the amount of materials expands dramatically. When one arrives

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at another and even longer reference work, the Gujin tushu jicheng ⎌Ṳ⚾㚠 普ㆸ, compiled by Chen Menglei 昛⣊暟 and published in , the entries under the most pertinent sections on hunpo, za guishen (miscellaneous ghosts and spirits), and mingsi ⅍⎠ (bureaus of darkness) number in the thousands culled from both known and untraceable sources. All of the items mentioned above, it should be noted, are collections of only short fiction or anecdotes, for the present study has deliberately avoided other genres like drama and poetry. Although no single one of the monumental classics of vernacular fiction, mercifully, has ghosts as its principal theme, there are nonetheless memorable scenes in such titles as the Xiyouji 大㷠姀 (The Journey to the West) and the Hongloumeng 䲭㦻⣊ (The Dream of the Red Chamber) that demand some attention. In view of such a massive quantity of materials and the equally astonishing lack of systematic scholarly treatment,4 the first step toward a critical study must deal with the problem of organization. This essay thus does not concern the identification of sources and the authentication of texts, responsibilities that belong properly to historical criticism. Instead, it will analyze some representative samples of the stories to ascertain whether there are particular emphases, persistent themes, or recurrent patterns underlying these tales on ghosts and spirits, on existence and phenomena in the life beyond. The classifications listed hereafter are not meant to be hard and fast; they are, rather, working hypotheses, heuristic typologies subject to further revision.

the ghostly apologue Although belief in the existence of ghosts and spirits apparently goes back to the dawn of Chinese history, it is a belief neither well defined nor assured of universal assent. Numerous accounts of the avenging ghost that stud the standard works of Chinese dynastic histories may betoken a well-accepted and stubborn conviction, 5 but there is also evidence of resistance and skepticism among some of the literate elite. Confucius is often quoted on his refusal to talk of prodigies, feats of violence, disorders, and spirits (shen) (Analects .), but he is also credited with the injunction: “Respect the ghosts and spirits, but keep them at a distance” (Analects .). Whether this last statement implies a sincere presupposition of their existence or an oblique denial is tantalizingly ambiguous. Other ancient sources seem to view ghosts and spirits as integral phenomena of the natural order, and thus, in principle, they should neither disturb nor terrify unduly. The “Great Commentary” (Da zhuan ⣏⁛) of the Classic of Change 㖻䴻, for example,

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declares that “the union of the quintessential qi produces things, while the wandering soul brings about change. This is how [humans] come to know the conditions of ghosts and spirits, which resemble heaven and earth; hence there is no basis for conflict” (., ). In the chapter on “The Meaning of Sacrifice 䤕佑” in the Liji 䥖姀 (Record of Rites), we have the following dialogue: Zai Wo said, “I have heard of the names of gui and shen, but I don’t know what they refer to.” The Master said, “Now qi is the fullest expression of the spirit [shen], and the po [soul] is the fullest expression of the gui. The union of gui and shen constitutes the ultimate of doctrine. All living creatures must die, and all the dead must return to earth. This is what is called gui 㬠 [i.e., “return”; was the Master resorting to definition by punning, a device he used frequently in the Analects?]. Flesh and bones deteriorate below and, sheltered there, become the earth of the wilds; but their qi rises up to become resplendent luminosity, odoriferous fumes, and sad feelings. This is the emanation of all things, the concrete manifestation of spirit.”

What is signified by the terms gui and shen in this view is apparently some essential part of the human that can not only survive physical decay but also become visible to the naked eye. How attractive and popular this notion of disembodied existence of the human was may be gathered from the rigorous assaults it receives from the polemics of a philosopher like Wang Chong 䌳⃭ (–). In his Lun heng 婾堉 (Carefully Weighed Arguments), Wang devotes lengthy chapters to such subjects as “Death,” “The Falseness of Being After Death,” “The Records of the Monstrous,” “Ghosts” (SBCK ed., juan –) and seeks to discredit various recorded prodigies by offering rational explanations. One line of refutation developed by Wang is that the dead are far too numerous to become ghosts visible only in single numbers as is claimed.6 Another is to question the possibility of conscious life after death. “A man before birth resides in the primal breath [ yuanqi ⍇㯋 ] and returns also to it after death,” according to Wang. “Before birth a man has no consciousness; upon death a man returns to the origin of no consciousness [wuzhi zhi ben 䃉䞍ᷳ㛔]. How could he still possess consciousness?” ( juan ). Whether Wang’s arguments are compelling or not is not as germane to our interest here as how widespread and persistent his kind of unbelief was among the elite. For example, Ruan Xiu 旖ᾖ and Ruan Zhan 䝣, both nephews of the celebrated poet Ruan Ji 旖䯵 (–), were also both famous for their disbelief in ghosts (wugui lun 䃉櫤婾). Such stubborn

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skepticism may in turn have something to do with the literary response I discuss here, for a good many examples in our first category appear to have, in the words of Derk Bodde on the Soushen ji, “the very serious mission of proving to a skeptical world the actual existence of spirits.” 7 However brief the tale may be, each work nonetheless is thus a form of the apologue, for “each is organized as a fictional example of the truth of a formulable statement or closely related set of such statements.”8 The statement, moreover, often bears the emphasis of the visual reality of the world beyond. We begin with two stories collected in the Soushen ji.9 One man, we are told, long held to his belief that there were no ghosts (wugui lun), and he was fond of boasting that his incontrovertible arguments could properly explain life and death. Receiving a guest one day, he chatted with him for a long time and bitterly debated the matter of ghosts and spirits. Quite defeated, the guest turned angry and said, “The existence of ghosts and spirits has been affirmed by worthy sages past and present. How could you alone maintain that they are not? I myself happen to be a ghost.” Thereafter the speaker changed into a strange shape and soon disappeared. The unbeliever fell silent; in slightly more than a year illness led to his death. Quite possibly a variation of the first, the second story presents an interesting twist in the plot. A certain student of a chief commander, both habitual skeptics, overwhelmed in like manner a chance visitor in a white and black robe. When the guest ran out of words, he said, “Your rhetoric may be clever, but your reasoning is deficient. I myself happen to be a ghost. How could you claim that ghosts do not exist?” “For what reason has our ghost come here?” the man asked. “I was authorized to summon you,” was the reply. In great fear and distress the student asked to be spared, and eventually he was asked, “Is there someone who resembles you?” The student at once replied with the commander’s name, whereupon the latter on the following day was struck in the head by an iron awl produced by the visitor. The commander complained of a mild headache at first, but it soon turned severe and he perished forthwith. There are a few noteworthy features common to both stories. The doubters are characteristically unwary of their visitors’ true identity until it is disclosed. The revelation does not occur until the ghost is defeated in disputation; when it comes, however, it has all the bluntness of a Johnsonian injunction to confirm the reality of a tree by kicking it. Found in both stories, the utterance “I myself happen to be a ghost” is meant, of course, to illustrate how vision is superior to a thousand words. But such

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sighting brings about more than a change of mind; for the doubters the final result is a swift and painful demise, which certainly appears to be a veiled form of chastisement for their unbelief. Though the narrator does not resort to overt moralization or exhortation, the tone of the tales is plainly cautionary. Happily, not all encounters with spectral beings end in such dire consequence for the human characters. Much of this kind of fiction may be didactic, but the intended messages differ just as the plot arrangements serviceable to them differ. The demands of the departed can be quite reasonable, and even ghosts can be outwitted. In a tale collected in the Liuyi zhuan ↿䔘⁛,10 we have a charming incident involving a man named Zong Dingbo ⬿⭂ỗ outwitting a spectral companion. In his youth, Dingbo once journeyed at night and met a ghost. When asked who he was, the ghost said, “I’m a ghost.” Then the ghost asked who he was, and to deceive him, Dingbo said, “I, too, am a ghost.” “Where are you going to?” the ghost asked. “To the city Wan,”11 was the reply. The ghost said, “I also would like to go to the city Wan.” They therefore traveled together. After a few li, the ghost said, “Walking is too tiring. Let’s tote each other by turn, how about that?” “Very good,” replied Dingbo. The ghost toted Dingbo first for several li before saying, “You’re too heavy. I suspect you’re not a ghost.” “I’m a new ghost,” said Dingbo, “and that’s why my body is heavy.” Dingbo then toted the ghost, who seemed to have no weight at all. This went on for several times, and Dingbo said again, “I’m a new ghost, and I don’t know what I should avoid.” The ghost said, “I only dislike being spat at by people.” They thus traveled together till they came to a body of water. When Dingbo ordered the ghost to wade through the water first, he found that the crossing was completely noiseless. When he himself then waded into the water, however, there were sounds of splashing. “Why are you making all these noises?” asked the ghost again. Dingbo said, “Because I’m a newly dead ghost and not used to crossing waters. Don’t blame me.” When they almost reached the city, Dingbo quickly seized the ghost after tossing it over his shoulders. The ghost cried out in a loud, rasping voice, and demanded to be put down. Dingbo did not comply. When the ghost touched the ground upon their arrival in the midst of the city, it changed into a sheep. Dingbo wanted to sell it, but fearing that it might change into something else, he spat on it. Eventually he got a thousand and five hundred cash for it. Thus a proverb of the time said, “Dingbo sold a ghost, and acquired a thousand and five hundred cash.”

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The few remarkable details in this story include the ghost’s weightlessness and its disdain for human spit. The first feature, common to many such stories, is simply an affirmation of the disembodied nature of the apparition, of its insubstantial, shadowy or shadelike character. The latter, however, may point to some specific form of taboo that requires further research for its clarification, or it may betoken a sardonic reference to the notion that gui, as both spirit and alien being, deserves to be spat at. This is one of the few stories in the Chinese canon that I know of that contain a specific description of how a ghost speaks. “A loud, rasping voice” is my rendition of “he sounded zeze-like” ␳␳䃞, the Chinese term being patently a form of onomatopoetic binome so common in the language. As a ghostly oddity, it is worthy of comparison with the “squeak” (Gk. tetriguīa) uttered by Patroclus’s ghost when it resisted Achilles’ embrace (Iliad .) and the Shakespearean echo in Julius Caesar: “And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets” (..). Ghosts who make noises in Chinese stories often appear as weeping ghosts ( guiku 櫤⒕), usually protesting wrongs suffered in life or death and trying to communicate with the living. Apart from establishing the reality of ghosts and spirits, many of these tales are concerned with informing the reader about the character of life beyond the grave, the values that obtain therein, and the essential relation between the world of the living and that of the dead. We should remember here that the earlier debate on the existence of ghosts was further fueled by the larger debate on the merit of Buddhism, a central preoccupation of this religion’s history from the Wei-Jin period down through the Six Dynasties (–). As Buddhism made its rapid spread across the nation, many of its beliefs (immortality, transmigration, karmic retribution) and . practices (the life and rules of the san gha) were attacked and defended by native polemicists. In the fourth century, for example, Huiyuan’s treatise Shenbumie lun 䤆ᶵ㹭婾 (On the Indestructibility of the Soul) was later assaulted by Fan Zhen’s Shenmielun 䤆㹭婾 (On the Destructibility of the Soul ), only to be further criticized by a host of Buddhist apologists, both clerical and lay. Huilin’s Baihei lun 䘥湹婾 (On Black and White), a fierce castigation of Buddhism by a former priest, was met in kind by the great defender of the faith Zongbing ⬿㝬 and others.12 Since the period coincided with the rise of the zhiguai stories, it was no surprise that the themes of karmic retribution and Buddhist soteriology, popularly conceived, pervaded such “religious anthologies”13 as the Xuanyan lu, the Mingxiang ji, and the Yuanhun ji. For the person anxious to learn of the hereafter, death regrettably is the great divide precisely because it is, as Hamlet succinctly puts the matter, “the undiscover’d country from whose bourn / No traveller returns.” To

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overcome such an enormous obstacle, literatures of this genre, East and West, are obliged to find some effective means to enable that country’s discovery. One familiar device frequently used is the journey to the underworld, after which the traveler is allowed to return to the land of the living to bear witness. The knowledge acquired is thus beneficial not merely to the traveler alone (as in the case of an Odysseus or an Aeneas), but also to all those who may come into contact with him. In this particular variation of the story, ghosts, in fact, are not the main focus; their impact on the beholder is the more important element. Seen in this light, the hundreds of tales gathered in the Chinese canon on the subject are one in purpose, though certainly not in magnitude or artistry, with Dante’s poem. They share in the same basic design of turning the traveler’s vision and experience into the principal medium and message of instruction for himself and for his audience. Given this intent, it is only logical that the literary treatment dwells at length on the suffering of the departed encountered on the way by the traveler. This emphasis does not imply that in either Christian or Buddhist eschatology there is little room for the joy of the enlightened or the redeemed. But the “myth of sanctity” has always been for the literary imagination something much more difficult to render,14 whereas the judgment of the wicked readily provides sensational ingredients dramatizing both the ingenuity and the exactitude of retributive justice. The places and tools of punishment, the so-called loca and lora poenalia in Christian theology, are often graphically depicted. The sojourner in hell would likely catch sight of “faces twisted toward their haunches / and found it necessary to walk backward” (Dante, Inferno .–); or “boiling iron, . . . bronze arrows . . . and wheels of swords” that inflict continuous punishment (Maudgalyāyana –); or “skins peeled and bones exposed, / The limbs cut and the tendons severed” (The Journey to the West, chap. ).15 The features discernibly common to these three otherwise vastly different texts are their narrative technique and the physical realism in the description. Not only do the damned spirits or ghosts suffer as if they had bodies, but the instruments of their affliction are of material substance, as if in deliberate defiance of verisimilitude. Moreover, the insistent, didactic voice of the verse narrative addresses the traveler (and by extension, the reader) directly or indirectly. Confronted by such appalling and grim visions, it is small wonder that one Chinese protagonist of a short tale, Zhao Tai 嵁㲘,16 is quick to ask: “What can a man do to gain a happy retribution after death?” The answer of the official who released Zhao from the netherworld provided an unambiguous injunction: “Now that you have seen in hell the

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retribution for sins, you should report this to the people of the world. Tell them all to do good, for they are free to choose vice or virtue. How could anyone be careless of its consequence?” In order for the traveler to act as a messenger to the living, some excuses must be found to allow for his return, and this usually takes the form of extending for the protagonist the allotment of years, or—if some offense or crime happens to be the presumed cause for his visit to the underworld— establishing his innocence, or finding some bureaucratic error in the halls of darkness. In the story just cited, Zhao Tai was represented as someone “determined to cherish virtue and remain untarnished by various vices.” His uprightness and the fact that he was not yet fated to die would thus ensure his release from hell, though he was brought there for the specific purpose of bearing witness and instituting, after his return to life, masses for his grandparents and two younger brothers. He also redoubled his diligence in instructing his sons and offspring to observe the Law, and “the prodigy of his revivification and his many sightings of the damned and blessed” attracted flocks of visitors. These features of fearsome encounters leading to repentance and meritorious deeds are typical of stories colored by forms of popular Buddhism. In The Journey to the West, for example, the emperor Taizong ostensibly perished after he had been terrified in his dream by a dragon he could not save from execution. When his soul went to the underworld, however, he was greeted by the ghosts of his two brothers, Jiancheng and Yuanji, as well as by that of his father, Li Yuan. Shouting “Here comes Shimin! Here comes Shimin!” the brothers “clutched at Taizong and began beating him and threatening vengeance” ( J W :). This is, of course, a thinly veiled allusion to the Xuanwu Gate Incident of , when Li Shimin ambushed his two brothers and slaughtered them before proceeding to usurp the throne.17 One of the emperor’s trusted generals sought to comfort him shortly before his death with the remark, “When you established your empire, you had to kill countless people. Why should you fear ghosts?” ( J W :). In the Buddhist perspective, however, the emperor’s past constitutes precisely his guilt. Not only had he repeatedly committed the sin of killing, but in his effort to gain final power, he even resorted to fratricide, the shedding of kindred blood. Had there not been the bureaucratic bond between Wei Zheng, the chief minister, and an underworld judge, whose presence of mind in altering the Book of the Dead added years to Taizong’s allotment, the emperor’s long and dramatic journey would have terminated down below. The emperor’s unexpected and disconcerting meeting with the

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spirits of his deceased brothers thus reinforces the weight of the judge’s parting counsel: “When Your Majesty returns to the World of Light, be very certain you celebrate the Grand Mass of Land and Water so that those wretched, homeless souls may be delivered. Please do not forget! Only if there is no murmuring for vengeance in the Region of Darkness will there be the prosperity of peace in your World of Light. If there are any wicked ways in your life, you must change them one by one, and you must teach your subjects far and wide to do good. You may be assured then that your empire will be firmly established, and that your fame will go down to posterity” ( J W :). Not all persons visiting the world of darkness are as socially exalted as a Tang emperor or as guilty as he in blood crimes. One minor official by the name of Zheng Yue 䦳婒, who by his own acknowledgment “guarded his office with integrity and made his official decisions with reverence and caution,” was brought down below apparently on a false charge.18 As the king of the underworld said to him, “When you were presiding over the Zhibang District, you slaughtered fifty head of cattle. Now, a cow is a creature which uses its strength to support humans. When you kill such innocent creatures, you will have to pay for the act with your life and be sent on to an other-than-human path of incarnation.” Only when Zheng convinced the king by documentary proof that his act had been ordered by the prince of Zhizhou for feeding an expeditionary army was he returned to life. In another story, even the integument of keeping dietary law becomes an issue of fateful consequence.19 Zheng Shibian 惕ⷓ彗 died suddenly in his teens but returned to life after three days, claiming that he was herded among six rows of prisoners. When in fear and distress he concentrated on chanting the name of Buddha, he saw a monk whom he had known before in life approach and say to him, “You did not devote yourself in life to the cultivation of blessedness. What will you do now with this sudden change?” Zheng begged for deliverance, and he was promised revivification after he had vowed to keep the five prohibitions. After his revival, Zheng maintained his vows for several years before he broke one of them by eating pork at a friend’s insistent behest. That very night he dreamt that he himself had been transformed into a rāks.a, with fangs and claws several feet long, seizing live pigs and devouring them. When he asked people to look inside his mouth, they found it filled with clotted blood. Horrified, Zheng dared not eat meat at all for another few years, when he was forced to do so again by his newly wedded wife. Though the previous symptoms did not return, Zheng was afflicted for the next five or six years with the

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foulest body odor and huge sores and boils that would not heal. As if the events had not conveyed the message with sufficient clarity, the narrator at the end adds: “Some suspected that his transgression of the prohibitions was the cause of all this.” If the violation of Buddhist commandments can beget suffering in hell, it is only reasonable that the observance of the Law or the use of certain means or talismans will produce the opposite result. In Chinese fiction, at least, perdition is frequently a reversible state. In yet another story that has to do with the tour of hell,20 one Huangfu Xun 䘯䓓⿪ died suddenly and, having met the wife of his uncle in the underworld, was given a tour of inspection by a white-robed monk. When Huangfu heard someone calling his name from the infernal flames, he discovered that it was his former student, with the all-too-significant name of Huseng bian 傉₏彐 =[彗] (Controverting the Barbarian Monk, or, alternatively, the Disputatious Barbarian Monk)! When questioned by a startled Huangfu, the student tellingly answered, “It was because I drank wine and ate meat with you and others during my life that I am in this condition today. I regret it, but it’s too late. Now that you are following a monk, you will undoubtedly acquire many blessings. I hope that you will rescue me.” Huangfu asked how he might help him, and the student replied, “You must write on my behalf a scroll of the Diamond Sūtra and erect in the marketplace a stone banner. Then I will be released to take the next incarnation as a beast.” What is noteworthy in this story is the reference to a specific classic text of the Buddhist canon. I have yet to ascertain why this particular sutra is so popular in this genre of literature, but in story after story, the writing or the chanting of the Diamond Sūtra ( Jin’gang Jing 慹∃䴻, the Vajracchedik āprajñāpāramitā sūtra) apparently is held to be of special merit or efficacy.21 Not all objects possessive of such extraordinary potency, however, are related to a religious tradition. In the history of Chinese literature and folklore, there are virtually countless artifacts—a sword, a fan, a mirror, a musical instrument, a flower basket or fish basket, a seal, a hairpin, a lock, to name only a few of the most commonly deployed ones—that may acquire magical or numinous power by dint of age, process of production, or usage. Similarly, a person’s triumph over the forces of darkness and eventual deliverance may be brought about by secular means. Thus in this subgenre of ghostly apologue, the exaltation of a particularly favored virtue like filial piety often goes hand in hand with vehement satire of the perceived social and ethical milieu of the world below. Bribery, illicit gifts, and payoffs are, in these tales, as common as bumbling lictors and venal judges, and in this way, the tales serve as much as any other kind of Chinese fiction

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to reflect the basic realities of their context. We have, for example, a story about a cruel young man fond of catching and eating stray dogs and cats. 22 While modern historians assure us that this happens to be one of China’s most ancient culinary preferences, 23 the hapless animals in the story filed charges down below and summoners duly went after the gourmand. The young man managed to persuade the two infernal agents to delay execution of their charge and drink with him. This “favor of one moment’s inebriation” obliged the two summoners at last to say to him: “If you prepare four hundred thousand cash, we will grant you three more years of life.” The man of course complied with the burning of the ritual paper cash, but he died nonetheless three days later, not realizing that what the ghosts referred to as three years were merely three days in the human world. This disparity of the temporal scheme of two realms apparently is intended to emphasize the sentiment, frequently expressed in countless of these tales by means of formulaic parallelism (yuming yilu ⸥㖶䔘嶗, rengui shutu Ṣ櫤㬲徼, youxian luge ⸥栗嶗昼), that the ways of the living and the dead are vastly different. The slight detail here is quite remarkable since it reverses the customary equation set up in Chinese fiction that considers a day in the supernatural realm may be a lengthy period in the mundane world. Hence the adage: Barely seven days in the mountains / Will be a thousand years in the world. Another story, long and magnificently crafted, that reveals even more sharply the paradox of difference and congruity of this world and the next is found in the Liaozhai.24 The father of a filial son by the name of Xi Fangping ⷕ㕡⸛ was brought to the underworld because of a disgruntled neighbor’s bribery of the nether officials. Overwrought with grief, Xi himself also died and his soul went to the capital of hell to protest his father’s detention and mistreatment. Much of the rest of the story is then devoted to describing Xi’s suffering in the courts of hell at the hands of corrupt officials. The tortures are appalling enough—including the red-hot iron rack and the saw—but the extreme agony of a soul that is not perishable is further intensified by the judges’ complete disregard for justice. Such wretched misery drove Xi to “reflect on how darkness in the netherworld is even more intense than that in the world of light.” This single line of enormous irony and poignance must have moved readers past and present, even as it amply discloses what the author, Pu Songling, has in mind when he declares in his own preface that among other things, Liaozhai happens to be “a book of solitary outrage.” Students of China’s social history may well surmise what could have been the targets of such authorial anger. For the readers of Pu’s composition, however, the protagonist is happily

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a filial son who does not give up his quest for his father’s release even after a couple of reincarnations. At last the god Erlang, who is one of the most gallant and impartial deities in the pantheon of Chinese folk religions, came to his rescue by issuing an edict, which in superb classical prose roundly condemned the kings of darkness and their subordinates for gross negligence of duty and corruption. Both Xi and his father were finally returned to life, for in all such texts of didactic fiction, filial piety must have its reward.

the avenging ghost As we have seen in the early chapters of The Journey to the West, persons like the brothers of the emperor Taizong are prone to become vengeance seekers because they have suffered “bad deaths.” As “perturbed spirits” out to rectify the wrongs done to them, they are probably the most familiar figure in this genre of literature. Even in literary texts not largely concerned with the fortunes of the dead, the figure of the avenging ghost often makes its appearance. In the so-called Hamlet episode of the novel (chaps. –), for example, the ruler of one Black Rooster Kingdom was pushed into a well, his throne usurped, and his queen taken, all by a Daoist. Through the characteristic medium of a dream, the ghost of the deceased king sought and received help from Xuanzang and his disciples, and he was eventually restored to life. It must be remembered that not all bad deaths recorded in the literary texts are thought to be the result of human violence. What the Chinese consider an undesirable demise may range from death by natural calamities (earthquake, flood, famine, plague), accidents (fire, collapse of house or bridge, boat capsize), and even sudden death (baozu 㙜⋺, baowang 㙜ṉ). All persons who suffer such fates are potentially capable of becoming souls with grievances or wronged souls ( yuanhun ⅌櫪) who would demand attention or some form of recompense. Another large group of “perturbed spirits,” which I discuss presently, belong to those subject to improper burials of one kind or another. Nonetheless, the violent death induced by either communal conflict or personal enmity tends to be regarded by far as one most capable of provoking ghostly apparitions. Such an understanding is certainly as ancient as the Zuozhuan. In  b.c., Zichan, in explaining the apparitions of Boyou, who had been killed in battle, maintains: “When an ordinary man or woman dies a violent death, the soul and spirit are still able to keep hanging about men in

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the shape of an evil apparition,” so that a nobleman like Boyou was all the more capable of making himself manifest as a ghost.25

Again, as the famous lines of the “Prose Elegy for an Ancient Battlefield,”26 by the Tang writer Li Hua 㛶厗 (fl. eighth century) have described for us: “This is an ancient battlefield where the ghosts can be heard whenever the sky darkens.” In a story of the Liaozhai,27 the cry, “What a horrible death I’ve suffered!” reverberated in a haunted house once raided by bandits, and the spirits were pacified only when a Mass of Land and Water had been recited by both Buddhists and Daoists and votive rice scattered in the courtyard. The figure of the avenging ghost that makes its frequent appearance in such tales, however, is much more likely a victim of personal injustice than large-scale hostility. The grievance or grudge that the ghost has is often directed at people with whom it has had intimate relations (a blood kin, a friend, or an official who is a superior or subordinate) but who have dealt it a fatal injury. It is the wrong suffered at the hands of those expected to be trusted and beloved and the compelling need for the requital of justice that stir the wronged soul’s activities in Chinese fiction, much as the spirits of Hamlet’s father, Caesar, and Banquo rage for revenge in Shakespeare’s plays. In his fine study on “Revenge and the Law in Traditional China,” Michael Dalby has pointed out that “the moral imperative to revenge, the role of public authority, the presumption of its validity, and the rudimentary forms of mediation” 28 all serve to define the social context of vengeance. Such elements, it will be seen, are presupposed as well in the literary tradition. Given human nature and the Chinese kinship structure, it is understandable that the evil stepmother assumes a place of prominence in this kind of fiction. A classic story collected in the early anthology the Yuanhun ji concerns a man who had a son whom he named Tiejiu 揝冤 (Iron Mortar).29 When his first wife passed away, the man married another woman by the name of Chen who was most cruel and determined to get rid of Iron Mortar. When a boy was born to Chen, she swore at him, saying, “If you do not do away with Iron Mortar, you’re not my son!” For this reason she gave her son the name of Tiezhu 揝㜝 (Iron Pestle), thinking that the pestle would vanquish the mortar. She went on to inflict all sorts of pain and vicious beatings on Iron Mortar; he would not be fed when he was hungry, nor would he be given more clothing when he was cold. Since her husband was weak by nature

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and was absent from home most of the time, the second wife had complete freedom in perpetrating her cruelty. Iron Mortar finally died from the cold, the hunger, and all those beatings; he was only sixteen. Some days after his death, a ghost suddenly returned to the house and ascended Chen’s bed, saying, “I’m Iron Mortar. In truth not guilty of the slightest misdeed, I was brutally harmed without cause. Because my mother complained to Heaven, I have now received a warrant from the Heavenly Tribunal to come to fetch Iron Pestle. I will cause him to be sick and suffer for as long as I have. There will be a specific date of his arrest, which I shall await by staying here.” The voice was just like that when he was alive; all the people in the family heard the words, though they could not see his form. Thereafter the ghost remained on the beam of the roof. . . . During another night Chen secretly spoke of the ghost to someone. The ghost at once said loudly, “How dare you speak of me? I must now sunder the beam of your house.” Immediately the sound of a saw was heard and wood shavings began to fall from above. There was a loud crack, as if the beam were actually toppling. The entire family ran out of the house. Shortly thereafter they lit candles to look inside and found that nothing had changed. At another time the ghost also rebuked Iron Pestle, saying, “Since you killed me, you have sat in your house thinking you are secure in your pleasure. I ought to burn down your house.” Immediately a fire flared up. Smoke and flames grew so fierce that the whole household became desperate. In a short while, however, the fire went out by itself, and the thatched house from top to bottom appeared as it was, without the slightest damage. Daily the ghost abused the inhabitants, and often the ghost could be heard singing a song that went like this: Flower of peaches and plums, What will you do when heavy frost descends? Fruit of peaches and plums, Heavy frost-descent will bring your early end. The voice was most melancholy, as if it lamented the fact that he could not reach adulthood. At the time Iron Pestle was six years old; the moment the ghost arrived he fell ill. He had body ache and his belly became swollen; gas rising in his stomach, in fact, prevented him from eating. Repeatedly the ghost assaulted him, and he had bruises all over. In slightly over a month he died, after which the ghost was not heard of again.

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We can note in this story that it is the victim that takes direct action against those who had harmed him, with the result that another life (and presumably innocent, too) was taken for his own. In other stories about the cruel stepmother, frequently it is the dead mother’s ghost who intervenes, threatening the living couple with death if they do not alter their ways and treat her son better.30 In both stories, the public authority that sanctions the avenger’s acts belongs to that of the supernatural realms (Heavenly Tribunal, the Court of the Underworld). In another story, 31 five children beaten daily by a vicious stepmother complained tearfully on their own mother’s grave. The mother’s ghost emerged to comfort them and then wrote on a piece of white cloth a twelve-line pentasyllabic regulated verse for her husband to read. Lines such as the final four, I aim to cherish our boys and girls, 32 Though you’re free unkindly to behave. Would you care to know the heart-break place? The brightest moon shines on one lonely grave.

moved the father to weep bitterly and file suit before a human magistrate. Eventually the stepmother was exiled to Guangdong, but the father was removed from his office as well. In yet another story, 33 a courtesan was mistakenly sentenced to death when she was captured along with several bandits caught raiding a house. She was actually an entertainer in the house, but the magistrate failed to conduct a thorough investigation when he interrogated the bandits. By the time the owner of the house attempted to vouch for her innocence, the official was too indifferent to alter the documents he had issued and signed. When the day of her execution drew near, the courtesan said to the sympathetic multitude who had come to visit her: “Though I may be engaged in an ignoble profession, I have admired virtue since my youth and have never indulged in unlawful deeds. In truth I did not rob anyone. Magistrate Tao knows all about this, but unjustly he still wants to kill me. If I don’t become a ghost after I die, that’ll be the end of it. But if I do become a ghost, I shall certainly file charges. She then sang a song to the accompaniment of the lute and went to her execution. Fully aware of her innocence, all the people mourned and wept for her. More than a month went by and Tao dreamt that the courtesan came before him, saying, “You killed me unjustly, and my outrage really

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could not be assuaged. Now my complaint has been accepted as proper and right, and I have come therefore to arrest you.” She at once went into Tao’s mouth and dropped below to his stomach. Greatly startled, Tao awoke and then collapsed once more as if he had been struck by epilepsy. Only after a long while did he regain consciousness, and all of a sudden, his head was twisted around completely to face his back. Four days later he died. After his death, his family became poor. One son died young, and a grandson became desolate by the wayside.

As one can see from these tales, there is not only a strenuous effort in upholding the strictest scale of retributive justice, but the offender, perhaps cast by the didactic intent of such fiction in the obligatory role of providing an example to all, often suffers more acutely than the victim he or she has harmed. The victims, as we have seen from the tale about stray dogs and cats, need not always be human. Even small creatures like cicadas, when offended, can bring savage vengeance, as one official found out when his three daughters one after another perished through violent deaths. 34 Victims who die with grievances, however, do not always become ghosts or avengers. The possible difference in the destinies of such ill-fated persons perhaps offers an explanation of the courtesan’s statement cited above: “If I don’t become a ghost, that’ll be the end of it.” Like many persons in fiction or folktales of other cultures, the Chinese victim of bad death may be rewarded with apotheosis and become a god (shen 䤆). The well-known goddess of the privy, Lady Purple, or Zigu 䳓⥹ (alternatively, ⫸⥹), is one such figure, another being Lady Ding, or Dinggu ᶩ⥹35 Both of these women, it may be pointed out, are variations on the theme, because they suffer quite similar fates. Lady Purple, who lived as a concubine, was harshly treated by the legal wife until she died in the privy she was ordered to clean out regularly. Lady Ding was only sixteen when she was brutalized by her mother-in-law and driven to hanging herself. Shortly after her death, rumors of her miraculous power began to circulate among the people of her region, and she made revelations through a medium to ask people to remember the diligent toil of women and allow them to rest on the day of the Double Ninth, when she had committed suicide. During one of her manifestations, she specifically claimed to be a supernatural being (wushi gui-shen ⏦㗗櫤䤆). The lady in this story did not return to exact vengeance from her adversary, but two youths who tried to flirt with her in that manifestation were later found to be drowned. While the avenging ghost is always a wronged soul nursing a grievance or grudge, all ghostly grievances, we must remember, are not necessarily

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the fruit of violence, malice, or the miscarriage of justice. Although these tales, perhaps because of their brevity, do not stress detailed observation of ritual, nonetheless improper burials, unsatisfactory conditions of burial, the exposure of parts of the body or skeleton, and peculiar nagging concerns of the dead are all capable of causing restlessness among the spirits. In the story about Boyou’s ghost in the Zuozhuan, Zichan understood the deceased man’s concern and appointed Liangzhi, son of Boyou, to be the father’s successor. The action, which managed to terminate the ghostly activities terrorizing the people of Zheng, received from Zichan a succinct explanation on a ghost’s need for a place of refuge: “When a ghost has a place to belong to, it does not become an evil one; I have assisted it to return to where it belongs.” When the Tang official Di Renjie 䉬ṩ‹ was a prefect of Ninghou, as one story has it, 36 he was investigating a so-called haunted house when a man in official garb met him. Claiming that he was an official from a certain previous dynasty buried beneath some trees west of the courtyard steps, the man explained that his body had been pierced by the tree roots, thus causing unbearable pain. His request for reburial was promptly granted. In another story, 37 a woman whose husband had gone off to a border expedition died of sudden illness. Since she had no other relatives, she was only placed in a coffin by her neighbors and not given a proper burial for over a year. Her explanation to her eventual benefactor of such a burial’s absolute necessity may give us insight into long-held beliefs about the condition of the dead. Now, when the flesh and bones of the dead are not returned to earth, the soul and the spirit [hunshen 櫪䤆] will not be recorded in the Bureau of Darkness. They will therefore drift and scatter in an indeterminate way, as if intoxicated or in a dream. If you show concern for this dark soul, it will be reckoned as your merit accrued in the next world [yinde 昘⽟]. I have no other wish than to have you send my corpse into the grave so that my spiritual essence may find its refuge.

Important as it may be, the burial is not the only thing that matters. A story that sheds some interesting light on certain aspects of mortuary practice concerns a woman who, pregnant because of an affair with a stableman, was beaten to near death by her husband.38 She was then buried alive and in a prone position (daomai Ὰ❳), her corpse covered by a wooden bed. Her ghost, in the form of a woman with loose, untied hair,

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appeared before a military officer to request her bones be dug up. At first the officer only tried to appease the apparition by holding a Buddhist service for her. When he rested in a post house in another place the next day, the woman appeared again in his dream, though her hair now appeared to be tied up. Confronted by the angry officer as to why she was not satisfied with the religious service, the woman wept and said, “My skull (dinggu 枪橐) below is still buried upside down. Unless it is dug up and its position corrected, I cannot expect to live [i.e., proceed to the next incarnation]. I beg the general to give one word to the district commander to have me brought out. When I am on my way to life, would I dare forget the general?” When the officer awoke, he did as the woman had requested, and the story eventually ends with the proper burial of the skull as well as the sudden death of the stableman. Although the story does not relate whether the official was rewarded for his compliance with the ghost’s wish, her final words of gratitude to him and promise of repayment point up one further strand of these stories. As students of the Chinese language recognize, the word bao ⟙ may be used not only to form the terms for revenge (baochou ⟙ṯ, baofu ⟙⽑) and karmic retribution (baoying ⟙ㅱ), but also for the repayment or reciprocation of kindness (baochou ⟙愔, baoda ⟙䫼), a moral concept as important in Chinese history as it is in fiction. In this way the tales grouped together under the rubric of the avenging ghost may be seen as those displaying the double-edged understanding of bao of repaying kindness with kindness, and injury with injury (yi de bao de ẍ⽟⟙⽟, yi yuan bao yuan ẍ⿐⟙⿐). Ghosts are aroused to action by the need for retaliation as much as by the obligation for the repayment of favor and beneficence. A kind and compassionate Lord Assistant Chief Justice who had released many death-row prisoners in his criminal decisions once met on his way to morning court a white-haired old man leaning on a cane. 39 When he was asked why he was bowing to give thanks before the official’s horse, the old man said, “I’m not a living person, but the father of one of your condemned prisoners. A lowly being of darkness, I have nothing to repay your kindness. But if you ever have any extremely pressing need, I might be able to provide for it.” At first the justice declined this offer, saying that the man’s son owed his release to his own innocence and not to the official’s favor or twisting of the law. After the ghost had departed, however, the justice was moved eventually to call on the ghost for his services, which included the provision of a week’s dalliance with a beautiful girl whom the justice saw in the capital and fell in love with. Ten years thereafter the ghost also gave his benefactor an egg-sized pill that could transform

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ordinary bones to be the best bone chips for sword handles, and it was the use of this pill that gave the justice livelihood when his liberal legal policies provoked an envious superior to exile him.

the amorous ghost In his massive study of the Chinese religious system, J. J. M. de Groot noted how frequently and extensively the dead can traffic with the living. Visits are paid by the dead to the living to bid them farewell and discourse with them about their domestic concerns; to enjoy the sexual pleasures of married life; to satiate the curiosity of their kinsfolk by telling them about their adventures, fate and prospects in the other world; to tell them what measures they ought to take to alleviate their misery and improve their conditions there. Not seldom they appear just when sacrifices are set out for them, attracting them by their favour to the ancestral home.40

Of the countless tales of this genre, a large number has thus taken up the theme of the ghost lover. Indeed, this theme apparently enjoys such enormous popularity that storytellers seem eager to explore and exploit every possible nuance of its development: not only do the dead take living spouses, but they may even arrange marriages for friends. Humans and their ghost mates may enjoy all the delights of the living, including the bearing and rearing of children. One common variation of this theme is the impeded path of love, where the lovers are not allowed to be united until one or both of them have passed through death. In a story about the famous king Fucha ⣓ⶖ of the state of Wu ⏛, his eighteen-year-old daughter Purple Jade fell in love with Han Zhong 杻慵, a young man one year older than she.41 In secret she promised herself to him, but his parents’ formal request for marriage later was angrily refused by the king, and the daughter died of pent-up anger. Three years later the young man went to offer sacrifices before her grave, and she emerged to meet him and sing about their unrequited love. When she finished her song, she begged him in tears to enter the grave with her. “The dead and the living follow different paths,” said Han, “and I fear there may be punishment. I dare not obey.” “I, too, know that the dead and the living follow different paths,” replied Purple Jade, “but when we part this time, there will never be another time for us to meet. Do you really fear that I as a ghost will bring you harm? I earnestly want to give you some-

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thing. How could you not believe me?” Moved by her words, Han returned to the grave mound with her and she drank and feted with him. He stayed for three days and nights, and they fulfilled the connubial rites. When he was about to go out, the girl gave him a string of pearls, saying, “My reputation has been ruined and my fondest hopes abolished. What more shall I say? Take good care of yourself in the years to come. If you happen to visit my house, give the great king my respects.”

When Han went to see the king and told him what had happened, the king became enraged and refused to believe him. He charged Han with fabricating the incident and blaspheming against the dead spirit. The pearls, he claimed, proved that Han was only a grave robber who should be arrested. Han fled back to the grave to tell the girl, and she decided to appear before the king to clear him. Indeed she spoke at length to her father; “when the queen heard her voice, she came out and tried to embrace her daughter, but Purple Jade seemed like a wisp of smoke.” In another story on the power of undying love,42 a man who left home on a journey dreamt of his wife: first, separated from him by rows of flowers, she appeared to be weeping. Then she seemed to be looking into a well and smiling. When the man awoke, he sought the counsel of a diviner, who told him: “When someone weeps beyond rows of flowers, the person’s complexion will fade with the wind; when someone smiles looking into a well, the person shows delight in the path to Yellow Springs.” Several days after this, the news of his wife’s death arrived. Overcome by implacable grief, the man undertook—as poets through the ages had done—to write and chant through the night impassioned verse about the virtues and beauty of the deceased. There were imploring couplets like the following: 櫪№劍㚱デ炻ầἃ⣊ᷕἮ

If still to have feelings her spirit seems, Let her or her likeness enter my dreams.

Such incantations eventually proved efficacious in recalling her to his sight. The account of their reunion, in view of the general brevity of these tales, is quite elaborate and meticulous. At first, the man only heard someone weeping with him as he chanted his melancholy verse, and only gradually, after much entreaty, was he permitted to catch sight of the dead wife. In coming to meet him, she emphasized repeatedly how “the hidden and the manifest, the yin and the yang, belong to different paths,” but his sincere

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longing had succeeded in moving even the official of darkness to approve her momentary release. They thus proceeded to enjoy a visit that had virtually all the trappings of familial bliss: eating and drinking, conversation, the attentive service of a large domestic staff (a dead maid and some servants who existed previously only as paper-cut figurines also appeared), and reunion with a daughter who had died a few years before. The persistent notes sounded throughout the encounter are the paradoxical similarity and difference of the world beyond. To the overjoyed husband, everything seemed strangely familiar and yet suggestive of subtle changes. According to the wife, all kinds of fine food were available in the netherworld except a certain type of rice gruel, which she promptly requested during their meal together. The daughter, who had died in infancy, continued to age to such an extent that she now appeared to be a child of five or six. The wife herself, who did not seem adept at poetry while alive, now wrote a competent regulated quatrain to answer her husband’s compositions. Their lovemaking, discreetly narrated, was as good as ever, but her hands, her feet, and her breath were cold. At last she had to leave, and when questioned, replied that they would most likely meet again after forty years. If her parting words render explicit what seems to have been hinted at throughout the narrative, that there can be no lasting union of humans and ghosts till both are dead, there are nonetheless stories in the tradition that portray a different outcome. The dead in Chinese fiction, of course, can be revived through a variety of means. One device frequently used is the so-called jieshi huanhun ῇ⯵怬櫪 (retrieving the soul by borrowing another body), by which the spirit of a deceased person “enters” someone’s body, whereupon the revived person acquires the characteristics of both beings. In a famous story titled “The Golden Hairpin,”43 a girl betrothed to a man died before he could marry her. Later, her younger sister became his bride, and it was some time before both families made the startling discovery that “the body was indeed that of Qingniang [i.e., the living, younger sister], but the voice and mannerisms were those of Xingniang [i.e., the deceased].” What apparently had happened, according to the rather intricate plot, was that the dead sister’s soul had been allowed to occupy the living one’s body for a period of time. The latter had secretly married the man and eloped with him. After the revelation was made, the girl cried bitterly and fell to the ground. She appeared dead. Quickly a broth was forced between her lips, and in a brief while Qingniang revived. All symptoms of her sickness were gone, and her actions seemed

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normal. When asked about what had happened, she apparently remembered nothing, as if she had just awakened from a dream.

The story ends with the formal marriage between the man and the younger sister, and further sanction come from the words of the departed to him in a dream: “Thanks to your prayers, I have gained my salvation. My love for you is undying, even though we are in separate worlds. I feel deeply grateful and have great admiration for you. My younger sister is gentle and meek; please treat her with kindness.” In another story of the Liaozhai,44 a female ghost, Nie Xiaoqian 倞⮷ῑ, who died when she was eighteen and was then conscripted into the service of a monstrous creature (yaowu ⤾䈑), was actually allowed to return to life and become the wife of a fine and upright man. The unusual aspect of the story is precisely this development, for as Ma and Lau have aptly observed, Nie after all had been “responsible for a number of murders committed while she was under the control of the demon.” 45 Prior to her revivification, it may be noted, Nie had already taken on traits of the succubus and the vampire. Her beauty and sex were used as bait, and in her own words of confession: When a man becomes intimate with me, I secretly pierce his foot with an awl and he becomes unconscious. Then I suck out his blood and give it to that demon to drink. Sometimes I use the gold—actually it’s not gold at all, but the bones of the rakshas. The demon will cut out the heart and liver of anyone who keeps the gold. These two methods are used because women and gold are what men are after.

In such a role Nie is no different from a popular figure of the Liaozhai and other collections: the ghost (and sometimes interchangeably, the fox)46 as evil temptress. A particularly frightening story on this theme has two students, Wang and Li, meeting a lovely woman in the middle of the night.47 Li eventually succumbed to her beckoning and left with her. When Wang later went to spy on them, he saw “Li reclining in bed while the woman, using a piece of silk, was strangling him until his neck snapped with a crack. The woman had a white face over three feet long, but there were no features on it.” In another story, a man again was approached at night by an exquisitely beautiful woman attended by two maids.48 At first, he dared not accept her advances, but she overcame his resistance with rhetoric repeated many times in similar tales: “Orphaned in my youth, I have no other refuge. Now

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I’m willing to serve you, a gentleman, on the pillow and mat. Would you permit me?” A few months after the man and the girl began living together, with the latter arriving at night and departing in the morning, the man chanced to meet an old friend who was a Daoist priest. When the cleric saw the strange complexion of his friend, he said, “You are under the spell of some ghost or demon. You must terminate this relationship, or you’ll die.” Horrified by what he had heard, the man gave an account of his experience. The priest said, “This is a ghost.” He gave the man two charms, one to be worn on the sash of his robe and one hung on the door. “When this ghost comes again,” said the priest, “she’ll become enraged. Take care that you don’t speak with her.” At night, when the girl arrived and saw the charm on the door, she broke out with a torrent of abuses. Before she left, she said, “Get rid of it quickly or there’ll be calamity!” The next day the man went to tell the priest, who said, “When she returns this evening, you may sprinkle on her my exorcistic water. She’ll disappear.” By nightfall, the girl indeed returned and appeared grief-stricken. The man sprinkled on her the exorcistic water provided by the Daoist priest, and she disappeared.

It may be pointed out that three structural elements of the plot—the union with a temptress, the appearance of a cleric who provides the warning, the intervention of magic power leading to the removal of the temptress—have provided the model for many tales of this kind.49 In all such stories, the goal is invariably the subjugation or destruction of the evil one. Pu Songling’s treatment of Nie Xiaoqian, on the other hand, achieves a significance greater than a mere happy ending. It is, rather, his deft handling of her progressive reintegration into the human community that makes this story more moving than most of the other fantastic accounts of his anthology. Even when she was but a seductive spirit subservient to the demonic powers, Nie already showed remarkable perception when she acknowledged the fine qualities of the man she tried to tempt: “I’ve had much experience with men but I’ve never met anyone as resolute as you. You are truly a sage, so I wouldn’t dare deceive you.” After her escape from the demon’s clutch partly as a result of reburial and proper sacrifices he provided, her most impressive accomplishment detailed in the narrative was her developing relation with her benefactor and his mother, accepting their assistance in reintroducing her to the ways of the living but also winning gradually for herself their admiration, trust, gratitude, and finally, love.

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The girl waited upon Ning’s mother every morning. She drew the water for the toilet, managed the affairs of the household, and performed everything according to Ning’s mother’s wishes. Every evening after she had informed his mother that she would retire, she went at once to the study, where she read the sutra by candlelight. When she felt that Ning wanted to sleep, she then sadly took her leave. Some time before, Ning’s wife had been bedridden and Ning’s mother had had to work so hard she could scarcely bear it. Now, with the girl’s help, she was able to take her ease. Her heart was touched and as the days passed, she came to love the girl as if she had been her own daughter. She even forgot that Xiaoqian was a ghost. She could not bear to let the girl leave at night and wanted her to stay with her in her bedroom. At first, Xiaoqian neither ate nor drank. But after six months, she gradually took some thin rice gruel. Mother and son both doted on her. They avoided mentioning that she was a ghost, and of course outsiders would not be able to tell. Shortly after, Ning’s wife died. His mother secretly wished to take the girl as her daughter-in-law, but was afraid that it would do her son harm. The girl realized this and took an opportunity to say to the mother, “I’ve lived here for more than a year and you ought to know my feelings. I came away with your son because I did not want to harm travelers; I had no other purpose in mind. Your son’s honorable character has won everyone’s approval. I only hope that by staying with your son for a few years, I may be able to get an imperial recognition through him. This will be to my credit in the underworld.” “Sons and daughters are bestowed by Heaven,” the girl said. “Your son is destined for good fortune and he is allotted three sons to bring honor to the family. Having a ghost wife will not deprive him of that.”

It is not only the rectitude of her action but also the probity of her thought and words that fully establish her as a legitimate member of the household and justify her final release, when a leather scabbard left as a talisman by a swordsman entraps and destroys her pursuing rāks.a. Despite such unusual deviation from tradition, however, the author’s achievement is hardly revolutionary. After all, Nie Xiaoqian’s restoration to life coincides with her reintroduction into a society in which all values and hierarchies remain intact. She left the clutches of the demon only to become the model subservient wife and daughter-in-law. The pattern persistent in this subgenre of literature is all too patent: the male is the “normal” human protagonist, whereas the female is almost always depicted

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as the incredibly beautiful, talented, sensual, and sometimes virtuous figure of another realm. It is no accident that in such an anthology as Feng Menglong’s History of Love, not one of the thirty-eight stories listed under the heading of qinggui ね櫤 (amorous ghost) concerns a male spirit. This sharp division in the role of the sexes also locates the point where the literary tradition diverges most markedly from the ethnographic one. Accounts by modern anthropologists are filled with references to male ghosts taking wives or lovers.50 In traditional Chinese fiction, where even the vernacular stories were written virtually all by males, the female more often than not appears only as a creature of fantasy—both affectionate and threatening, both desired and feared. The biases of culture and gender could not be more apparent. One of the lasting impressions for anyone delving into this vast canon of literature on ghosts surely has to be the munificent and ingenious variety of the stories. The style and form of the materials range from gossipy anecdotes and ethnography-like fragments to polished compositions of exquisite language and superb control. The three groups of stories discussed above represent one convenient manner of organizing some of the material; they by no means exhaust the topoi and themes covered in the tradition. With the authors and audiences of such stories being in all likelihood highly literate persons, it is hardly surprising that many of the ghost tales revolve around a talented specter of some activity dear to the educated Chinese: music, chess, painting, calligraphy, and, most especially, poetry. One story relates how a ghost retrieves a long-lost painting, reputedly a treasure of Li Yu’s of the Southern Tang;51 a second tells of the love affair between a general and a female ghost who is also a fine flutist; 52 and a third presents a talented scholar taking a female ghost as his student of a string instrument (qin 䏜).53 There are many more tales that delight in reporting how the dead and the living communicate through the cherished medium of verse or participate in poetic games and contests. 54 One of the most amusing accounts of the profound consequence of poetic allusions has to be that devoted to Yang Weizhen 㣲䵕䤶 (–), the famous Yuan official and poet who wrote a regulated quatrain for a woman who died defending her chastity. 55 The poem expressed both criticism and skepticism of the woman’s action, and such disparagement aroused the dead woman to appear in Yang’s dream one night. “Do you know why you have no children?” she asked. “No!”

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“Do you remember the poem you wrote on Wang, the virtuous woman?” she asked. “Though you cannot really harm her good reputation, your intentions are rather mean, bent on slandering and destroying the proper meaning of chastity. Your sins are great, and that is why Heaven has cut off your line.”

When Yang awoke, remorse led him to pen another poem with the same rhyme scheme, but this time it was lengthened to an eight-line regulated verse. The longer form is clearly purposive, for it allows the poet to pile on the proper allusions (dian ℠) in praise of the woman’s martyrdom. The second middle couplet, for example, reads: 栀晐㸀䐇倚ᷕ㬣炻ᶵ徸傉䫛㉵塷䓇

Fatal chords of the Xiang zither I’d rather meet Than live to the foreign flageolet beat.

Here the zither unmistakably refers to the two consorts of the ancient sage-king Shun, who threw themselves into the Xiang River after his death. Their commemorative service instituted later is characterized by the sounds of drum and zither. The flageolet beat, on the other hand, brings to mind the story of Cai Yan 哉䏘, 56 a talented musician kidnapped by barbarians. She raised two children in foreign territory, and after twelve years, she was ransomed and returned to Han China. When barbarians thought of her, however, they would roll up rush leaves to make a kind of flageolet and produce mournful melodies. The couplet makes it abundantly clear which act of these celebrated figures of history is considered more exemplary, and, as if to underscore his chastened sensibility, the poet writes throughout the poem in the first person, in the assumed voice of the woman. The pronounced alterations of the second eulogy were not lost on the dead either, for the woman again appeared in a dream to thank him. Shortly thereafter, the man was rewarded with a son. In addition to these vignettes that appeal specifically to one’s literary interests, there are those that are intended to strain the limits of the reader’s credulity by accentuating to the utmost the element of the fantastic. One story that should rank high in this category has the official in charge of souls in the underworld declare: “When a living person dies, the three souls and seven spirits [sanhun qipo ᶱ櫪ᶫ櫬] will scatter in death, for there is nothing more to which they may attach themselves. If now you want them gathered into one body, they will have to be smeared by a spe-

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cial glue for reconnecting strings [xuxian jiao 临䳫先]!”57 Another story in the Liaozhai even reports that a ghost can die and become something else.58 Because its author has a declared intention in social polemics, the Liaozhai is an anthology in which the satiric jostles the fantastic in claiming the reader’s attention. Many venerable institutions and structures of traditional Chinese society become the ready targets of Pu Songling’s irony. Under his prolific brush, there are marvelously entertaining—and often riotously funny—tales of drunkard ghosts, jealous wives and concubines, corrupt officials, ghosts desperate to pass civil service examinations, and incorrigible gamblers whose legal problems endure even in hell. 59 In virtually all of these stories, the variegated experiences of the world of light are transplanted wholesale into the world of darkness. This feature of the ghost tales is perhaps the most pronounced and persistent one of the genre, and its recognition may help us detect more accurately some of the underlying cultural assumptions. Since the “integrated structure” of Chinese mortuary rites is frequently “associated with settling the soul after death,”60 a “perturbed spirit,” the subject of all the stories examined in this essay, may be regarded as one in relation to which there is, broadly speaking, a failure or a breach of rite. If there were no such failure, to put the matter bluntly, there would have been no “ghost” story. This may explain, at least in part, why the stories themselves do not concentrate on ritual practice as such—the formalized methods of mourning and treatment of the deceased—but rather on the varying causes of the dead’s disturbance. Within the fictional context the meaning of rite is consonant with the traditional understanding of li 䥖 in Chinese culture, encompassing both the specifics of ritual (e.g., the corpse is buried upside down and the situation must be rectified) and the fulfillment of socioethical norms (e.g., the requital of injustice or kindness). The “discomfort” suffered by the dead that instigates its arousal thus ranges from physical pain induced by inverted burial or a tree root invading the corpse to worry over a son’s due inheritance and indignation at a poet’s careless encomium to feminine virtue. Seen in this light, the loud proclamations about the difference between the way of the living and the way of the dead that I noted earlier are both ironic and dialectical formulas, for the concerns and preoccupations of the living are seen clearly to extend beyond the grave. Even the rhythm of life—punctuated as it is by birth, growth, marriage, and death—and the provision for its material and spiritual well-being (food, raiment, lodging) obtain as stubbornly in the world beyond as they do in the present one.

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Settlement of the dead, however, is not necessarily the most desirable denouement of these stories. Modern anthropological inquiries may detect little soteriological interests in contemporary funeral ideology, but many of the traditional tales display an unambiguous preference for life or reincarnation as a way of reentrance to the world of light. H. C. Chang, in the introduction to his volume on tales of the supernatural, has observed unerringly that “in later tales, ghosts, increasingly associated—under Buddhist influences—with infernal justice, grow in stature and might, and are much feared and respected. Nevertheless, there is a lingering suspicion that ghosts are inferior to living beings and, indeed, in most tales, ghosts long to return to life again.”61 This last point of view, on the part of the departed spirits, is not unique to Chinese culture, to be sure. As Mircea Eliade has made clear in his study, “the almost universal conviction that the dead are present both on earth and in a spiritual world . . . reveals the secret hope that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the dead are able to partake somehow in the world of living.”62 One of the most celebrated lines in world literature giving voice to this hope must be Achilles’ remark in the underworld to his one-time companion, Odysseus: “I would rather take up the plow as a slave to another man . . . than be king over all the perished dead” (Odyssey . –). The Chinese expression of such sentiment, rhetorically more terse and pithy, is no less poignant in the phrase “a felicitous death is not as good as a bitter life” (le si buru ku sheng 㦪㬣ᶵ⤪劎䓇).63 In one story, there is the stark portrayal that not even a judge of hell is free from suffering; the condition of the damned thus needs no elaboration. It is in such a context of despair that a casual statement—“the highest happiness cannot surpass that of rebirth” (zhixi moruo chongsheng 军䅡卓劍慵䓇)64 —attains sudden, disclosive power. Similarly, the passing notice by the narrator of those lining the way, when an untimely visitor of the underworld was escorted back to life, speaks more eloquently than much lengthier descriptive passages: “Those moved to weeping out of envy for this man were numberless” (xian er qi zhe buke shengji 佐侴㲋侭ᶵ⎗⊅䲨).65 Herein perhaps is the pleasing paradox that has always constituted the reading experience of such literature: though its focus concentrates on the dead and dying, the values and concerns of the living predominate. notes The author gratefully acknowledges the comments and criticisms of Professors Yu Chunfang, C. H. Wang, David Knechtges, William Nienhauser Jr., and Yuk Wong.

23 4 “rest, rest, perturbed spirit!”

Abbreviations GJTS: Gujin tushu jicheng ⎌Ṳ⚾㚠普ㆸ (; repr., Taipei: Wenxing shudian, ). In citations of this work, the first number refers to the ce 䫾, the second to the arabic page number. Lu: Lu Xun 欗彭, Gu xiaoshuo gouchen ⎌⮷婒戌㰱,  vols. (Hong Kong: Xinyi chubanshe, ) LZZY: Zhang Youhe ⻝⍳浜, ed., Liaozhai zhiyi 俲滳娴䔘  vols. (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, ) Ma and Lau: Y. W. Ma and Joseph S. M. Lau, eds., Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations (New York: Columbia University Press, ) QSGY: Liu Fu ∱㕏, comp., Qingsuo gaoyi 曺䐋檀嬘 (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, ) SSJ: Xinjiao Soushen ji 㕘㟉㏄䤆姀 (Taipei: Shijie shuju, ) TPGJ: Taiping guangji ⣒⸛⺋姀,  vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, ) TPYL: Taiping yulan ⣒⸛⽉奥,  vols. (facs. SBCK ed.) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, ) Xu: Xu Zhen’e ⼸暯⟖, Han-Wei liuchao xiaoshuo xuan 㻊櫷ℕ㛅⮷婒怠 (Shanghai: Gudian wenxue chubanshe, ) YYZZ: Youyang zazu 惱春暄ὶ (SBCK ed.) 1. Mircea Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 34. The essay from which the quotation is taken, “Mythologies of Death: An Introduction,” is reprinted in Frank E. Reynolds and Earle H. Waugh, eds., Religious Encounters with Death: Insights from the History and Anthropology of Religions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), pp. 13–22. 2. This figure is based on the gui radical section of the Zhongwen da cidian ᷕ㔯⣏录 ℠, but it does not include other cognates in which gui is not the determinative radical. For the latter category, see Shen Chien-shih, “An Essay on the Primitive Meaning of the Character 櫤,” Monumenta Serica 2 (1936–1937): 1–20; Ikeda Suetoshi, 㰈䓘㛓⇑, “Kodai Chūgoku ni okeru reiki kannen no tenkai ⎌ẋᷕ⚥̬㕤̒͌曰櫤奨 ⾝̯⯽攳,” Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica 29 (spring 1970): 121–164. 3. For the present study, I have benefited from consulting Walter Liebenthal, “The Immortality of the Soul in Chinese Thought,” Monumenta Nipponica 8 (1952): 327– 397; Qian Mu 拊䧮, “Zhongguo sixiang zhong zhi guishen guan” ᷕ⚳⿅゛ᷕᷳ櫤䤆 奨, HYHP 1 (1955): 1–43; Izuishi Yoshihiko ↢䞛⼍ㆸ, “Kishin kō” 櫤䤆侫, in Shina shinwa densetsu no kenkyū 㓗恋䤆娙⁛婒̯䞼䨞, ed. Zōho Kaiteiban (Tokyo: Chūō kōron sha, 1973), pp. 393–444; Daniel L. Overmeyer, “China,” in Death and Eastern Thought: Understanding Death in Eastern Religions and Philosophies, ed. Frederick H. Holck (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1974), pp. 198–225; Michael Loewe, Chinese Ideas of Life and Death: Faith, Myth and Reason in the Han Period (202 b.c.–a.d. 220) (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982); and Yü Ying-shih ἁ劙㗪, “Zhongguo gudai sihou shijieguan di yanbian” ᷕ⚳⎌ẋ㬣⼴ᶾ䓴奨䘬㺼嬲, Lianhe yuekan 倗⎰㚰↲ 26 (1983): 81–89. 4. Available studies in English on related topics include Albert E. Dien, “The Yüan-hun Chih (Accounts of Ghosts with Grievances): A Sixth-Century Collection of Stories,” in Wenlin: Studies in the Chinese Humanities, ed. Chow Tse-tsung (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), pp. 211–228; Donald E. Gjertson, Ghosts, Gods, and Retribution: Nine Buddhist Miracle Tales from Six Dynasties and Early T’ang China, Asian

“rest, rest, perturbed spirit!” 235 Studies Committee Occasional Papers, no. 2 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978); Alvin P. Cohen, “Avenging Ghosts and Moral Judgement in Ancient Chinese Historiography: Three Examples from Shi-chi,” in Legend, Love, and Religion in China: Essays in Honor of Wolfram Eberhard on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Sarah Allan and Alvin P. Cohen, CAC Asian Library Series, no. 13 (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1979), pp. 97–108; Kenneth J. Dewoskin, “The Six Dynasties Chih-kuai and the Birth of Fiction,” in Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Andrew H. Plaks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 21–52; Dominic Cheung, “‘Chrysanthemum Tryst’ and ‘Fan Chu-ch’ing’s Eternal Friendship’: A Comparative Study of Two Ghost-Friendship Tales in Japan and China,” Tamkang Review 8, no. 2 (1977): 121–132; Dominic Cheung, “The ‘GhostWife’ Theme in China, Japan, and Korea: New Tales of the Trimmed Lamp, Tales of Moonlight and Rain, and New Tales of the Golden Carp,” Tamkang Review 15, nos. 1–4 (1985): 151–174; Donald Harper, “A Chinese Demonography of the Third Century b.c.,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 45, no. 2 (1985): 459–498. See also Qian Zhongshu 拊揀㚠, Guanzhui bian 䭉抸䶐 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), 1:181–187, 230; 2:776–780, 784–785, 788–792. For the student of death and dying in Chinese history, fiction, and social custom, there is no substitute for J. J. M. de Groot’s The Religious System of China, 5 vols. (1892; repr. Taipei: Zhengwen Publishing Company, 1972), which contains a massive amount of information, and for Henry Doré’s Researches into Chinese Superstition, trans. M. Kennelly, S.J., 13 vols. (1914; repr. Taipei: Zhengwen Publishing Company, 1966). These two titles far surpass in wealth of materials and scholarly analysis the work of G. Willoughby-Meade in Chinese Ghouls and Goblins (London: Constable, 1928). H. C. Chang, Chinese Literature 3: Tales of the Supernatural (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) is a welcome recent publication containing a historical introduction and fine translation of selected tales. Karl Kao’s Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) has a fuller format, and the excellent introduction presents a synchronic, typological analysis of the structural elements in the zhiguai and chuanqi tales. Rob Campany’s “Cosmogony and Self-Cultivation: The Demonic and the Ethical in Two Chinese Novels,” Journal of Religious Ethics 14. no. 1 (1986): 81–112, treats more than ghosts, but the article touches on important aspects of the investiture process in the Fengshen yanyi ⮩䤆㺼佑. Understandably, there is no lack of study of individual texts like the Soushen ji or Liaozhai in Japanese scholarship, but full-scale analysis of ghosts in traditional Chinese literature is not abundant. See Nagasawa Yōji 㯠㽌天Ḵ, Kishin no gengi to sono enshin 櫤䤆̯⍇佑̩̞ ̯㺼忚 (Tokyo: Iizuka shobō, 1977); Takeda Akira 䪡䓘㗫, Chūgoku no yūrei: Kai’i wo kataru dentō ᷕ⚥̯⸥曰—⿒䔘͓婆͌ễ䴙 (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1980). For a history of the concept of hell, see the authoritative account by Sawada Mizuho 㽌䓘䐆䧿 in Jigoku hen: Chūgoku no meikaisetsu ⛘䋬⎀烉ᷕ⚥̯⅍䓴婒 (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1968). For Buddhist impact on Chinese ideas of soul and afterlife, see Michihata Ryōshū 忻䪗列䥨, Chūgoku bukkyō shisō shi no kenkyū ᷕ⚥ṷ㔁⿅゛⎚̯䞼䨞 (Kyoto: Heirakuji shoten, 1979), chap. 2, and the fine study by Stephen F. Teiser in “Ghosts and Ancestors in Medieval Chinese Religion: The Yü-lan P’en Festival as Mortuary Ritual,” History of Religions 86, no. 1 (August 1986): 47–67. For ghosts in Western literature, I have learned from W. B. Stanford, “Ghosts and Apparitions in Homer, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare,” Hermathena 56 (1940): 84–92; Hans Ankenbrand, Die Figur des Geistes im Drama der englischen Renaissance (Leipzig: Deichert, 1906); Gisela Dahinten, Die Geisterszene in der Tragödie vor Shakespeare (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck

236 “rest, rest, perturbed spirit!”

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

and Ruprecht, 1958). For an informative survey of the subject of ghosts in Western culture, see R. C. Finucane, Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1984), but it should be supplemented by Jacques Le Goff’s magisterial La naissance du Purgatoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). For classical antiquity, E. Rhode’s classic Psyche: Seelencult und Unsterblichkeits-glaube der Griechen, 2 vols. (1898), has now been brought up to date by the excellent study of Jan Bremmer in The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). Cohen reports that he has found “sixty-four distinct accounts of avenging ghosts” from the Shih-chi to the Xin Tangshu 㕘Ⓒ㚠, but “if duplicates are counted, there are ninety-seven cases” (“Avenging Ghosts,” p. 102). Loewe, Chinese Ideas of Life and Death, p. 36. Derk Bodde, “Some Chinese Tales of the Supernatural: Kan Pao and His Sou-shen chi” (1942), in Essays on Chinese Civilization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 334. See also Zheng Zhenduo 惕㋗揠, Chatuben Zhongguo wenxueshi ㍺⚾㛔ᷕ⚳㔯⬠⎚ (1932; repr., Peking: Wenxue guji kanxingshe, 1959), 1:225–227. Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), p. 8. SSJ, pp. 116–117. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. Xu, p. 28. Variations of the protagonist’s name include Song Dingbo ⬳⭂ỗ and Zhang Dingbo ⻝⭂ỗ. Wan is now the Nanyang district of Henan province. Kenneth Ch’en, Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 135–144; Tang Yongtong 㸗䓐⼌, Han Wei Liang-Jin Nanbeichao fojiaoshi 㻊櫷ℑ㗱⋿⊿㛅ἃ㔁⎚ (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1937), 2:3–10, 40–43; Li Jianguo 㛶∵⚳, Tangqian zhiguai xiaoshuoshi Ⓒ⇵⽿⿒⮷婒⎚ (Tianjin: Nankai daxue, 1984), passim. The term is Zheng Zhenduo’s, Chatuben Zhongguo wenxueshi, 1:226; see also Tang, who asserts that “the many compositions recorded by the people of the Six Dynasties on gui and shen were all influenced by Buddhism” (Han Wei, 2:118). Of even Dante’s Paradiso, T. S. Eliot has said, “It is either incomprehensible or intensely exciting.” See his Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1964), p. 225. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, trans. Allen Mendelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 170; Victor H. Mair, Tun-huang Popular Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 100; The Journey to the West, trans. and ed. Anthony C. Yu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 1:244–245. Volume and page numbers of the last title (hereafter cited as JW ) will be given immediately after citation hereafter. The story of the emperor Taizong’s visit to hell is of ancient vintage and very popular, as is evident in the bian-wen literature. Originally collected in the Mingxiang ji ⅍䤍姀, the present version is included in Xu, p. 73. Denis Twitchett, ed., The Cambridge History of China, Volume 3: Sui and T’ang China, 589–906, Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 182–187. QSGY, pp. 136–138. Originally collected in the Mingbao ji ⅍⟙姀, the present version is included in GJTS, 393:1064. Originally collected in the Tongyou ji 忂⸥姀, the present version is included in GJTS, 492:404–405.

“rest, rest, perturbed spirit!” 237 21. For stories expouding the theme of this sutra’s efficacy, see TPGJ, juan 102–108. 22. YYZZ (xuji 临普), 1.5–6. 23. See, for example, K. C. Chang, ed., Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), esp. chaps. 1 and 2. 24. LZZY, 4:1341–1348. 25. H. C. Chang, Chinese Literature, p. 4, quoting James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), 5:618a. 26. Li Hua 㛶厗, “Diao guzhanchang wen ⺼⎌㇘⟜㔯,” in Quan Tang wen ℐⒸ㔯 (facs. 1814 ed.), 20 vols. (Taipei: Jingwei shuju, 1965), 7:4119 ( juan 321.13). 27. See the story titled “Weeping Ghosts” (Gui-ku) in LZZY, 1:76–77. On the motif of ghosts haunting battlefields, see Finucane, Appearances of the Dead, pp. 13–18. 28. Michael Dalby, “Revenge and the Law in Traditional China,” American Journal of Legal History 25 (October 1981) : 275. 29. Xu, pp. 80–81. 30. Originally collected in the Jishen lu 䧥䤆抬, this version is now included in GJTS, 493:511. 31. Originally collected in the Benshi shi 㛔ḳ娑, this version is now included in GJTS, 493:485. 32. Alternatively, this line can be read as I meant to nurse or bring up our boys and girls, since huai ㆟ could mean to cherish, to think of, or to carry in one’s bosom. 33. Originally collected in the Huanyuan ji 怬⅌姀, this version is now included in GJTS, 493:480. 34. Originally collected in the Tongyou lu 忂⸥抬, this version is now included in GJTS, 493:492. 35. SSJ, p. 37. 36. TPGJ, 4:2614; see also another story in the SSJ (pp. 118–119), in which a ghost requests reburial because water is flooding its coffin. 37. Collected in YYZZ (xuji), 3.9b-10b; see also the story of Chen Chong 昛⮝ in the Hou Han-shu ⼴㻊㚠, juan 76, where Chen heard sounds of weeping whenever it rained. When the exposed skeletons of people who perished in “chaotic times” were gathered and buried, the weeping ceased. 38. Originally collected in the Leshan lu 㦪┬抬, this version is now included in GJTS, 493:519. 39. Originally collected in the Guangyi ji ⺋䔘姀, this version is now included in GJTS, 493:490. See also the story of Zhao He 嵁⎰ (TPGJ, 4:2749), who met the ghost of a young girl killed by bandits and buried for three years in the desert sand. She requested that her bones be gathered and taken back for burial in her native region. Chao agreed, and she at the end fulfilled her promise of requital by transmitting to him her grandfather’s secret alchemical formulas, which could transform bricks into gold. 40. De Groot, Religious System of China, 4:421. 41. SSJ, pp. 122–124. 42. Originally collected in the Tongyou ji, this version is now included in TPGJ, 4:2635– 2638 and GJTS, 493:486–487. 43. Ma and Lau, pp. 400–403. 44. I use the translated version contained in Ma and Lau, pp. 404–409. 45. Ibid., p. 385. 46 Although the ghost and the fox spirit remain two different creatures in most stories

238 “rest, rest, perturbed spirit!”

47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

of the fantastic, they become identical in some tales. See, for example, SSJ, p. 141; LZZY, 1:201–204; 2:535–547. Originally collected in the T’ung-yu lu, this version is now included in GJTS, 493:492. Originally collected in the Jiyi ji 普䔘姀, this version is now included in GJTS, 493:509. See, for example, the story of Scholar Wu, originally collected in the Youguai lu ⸥ ⿒抬, now included in GJTS, 493:519–20, and “The Eternal Prisoner Under the Thunder Peak Pagoda,” the Chinese version of Lamia, in Ma and Lau, pp. 355–378. Admittedly, the temptress figure in the last story is a serpent, not a ghost, but progress in the plot conforms to the pattern I described. David K. Jordan, God, Ghosts, and Ancestors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Emily M. Ahern, The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1973). QSGY, pp. 117–118. Ibid., pp. 159–163. LZZY, 3:985–990. See, for example, the story of Liang Jing 㠩䑇, originally collected in the Xuanshi zhi, with the present version included in GJTS, 493:506. The story, collected in GJTS, 493:527, has as its protagonist the Yuan poet Yang Weizhen 㣲䵕䤶 (zi Lianfu ⹱⣓ [1296–1370]). Yang’s biography can be found in L. Carrington Goodrich, ed., Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 2:1547–1553. The subject of his poetic eulogy is one Lady Wang, who, according to the Xin Yuanshi 㕘⃫⎚ ( juan 144), was kidnapped by a garrison commander after her husband and his parents had been killed. When the commander tried to force her submission, she threw herself over a cliff, after using the blood of a bitten finger to write a poem. Yang’s first poem in the story can be found in the Tieya shiji 揝Ⲿ娑普, bk. 6 (⶙普), p. 8, in Songfenshi congkan 婎剔 ⭌⎊↲, ed. Dong Kang 吋⹟ [1867–1947], juan 58, 1st ser. (1917 ed.). I have not been able to locate his second poem in any of his known poetical collections. The story of Cai is recorded in the Hou Hanshu, juan 114. Originally collected in the Xuanshi zhi, this version is now included in GJTS, 313:1058–1059. LZZY, 2:627–631: Ṣ㬣䁢櫤ˤ櫤㬣䁢倣ˤ櫤ᷳ䓷倣䋞Ṣᷳ䓷櫤ḇˤ See, for example, LZZY, 2:582–587; 822–825; 1166–1173; 4:1534–1559. See the preface in James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski, eds., Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). H. C. Chang, Chinese Literature, p. 4. Eliade, Occultism, p. 41. LZZY, 4:1684. A similar assertion, “a good death is not as desirable as a wretched existence” ⤥㬣ᶵ⤪ら㳣, can be found in The Journey to the West, chap. 63. The statement is found in the story of Deng Cheng 惏ㆸ, originally collected in the Guangyi zhi and now preserved in GJTS, 393:1069. This statement is found in the story of Wu Quansu ⏛ℐ䳈, originally collected in the Zhiming lu 䞍␥抬 and now preserved in GJTS, 393:1059.

 11  CRATYLUS AND THE XUNZI ON NAMES For David Grene

T

his chapter presents the result of a preliminary investigation. In  T. P. Kasulis began the specific comparative study of the Platonic understanding of language—more precisely, of the relation between linguistic names (onomata) and objects ( pragmata)—with an East Asian language philosopher, and William S.-Y. Wang did so briefly in .1 In a recent volume of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China, Christoph Harbsmeier makes constant and telling comparisons with Greek and Sanskrit at various points of his magisterial survey of Chinese language and logic.2 Despite that scholar’s compendious review of virtually all the major relevant issues pertaining to the Chinese language, the sort of modest but focused exercise attempted here is still valuable. I am aware that the Cratylus occupies only one stage of the Platonic view of language, but the dialogue undoubtedly represents the most concentrated and sustained discussion of the subject. Similarly, experts have praised chapter  (in traditional editions) of the Xunzi, “On the Right Use of Names,” as “the most disciplined, coherent, and by the far the best-organised discussion of naming that has come down to us from ancient China.”3 Although my discussion focuses on the Platonic dialogue and the Xunzi chapter, some references to other texts and figures cannot be avoided. What follows is a treatment of three salient issues that I want to highlight for comparative consideration of the two texts: the meaning of names, the purpose of names, and the maker of names.

24 0 cr at y lus and the xunzi on na mes

the meaning of names According to the Western understanding stemming from Aristotle (De interpretatione a), we may define a linguistic appellation as a composite consisting of two elements: a phonological sign, which is the voice articulated as a symbol, and, if the language under consideration is also a written one, a scriptural sign. In a language that uses a standardized or conventionalized script (alphabet, syllabary), the scriptural sign also purports to “articulate” or represent visually the phonological component(s) of the vocal sign. This representation, moreover, must also be conventionalized: there may be an English and an American way of pronouncing the word “tomato,” but the variations cannot be multiple, let alone infinite or indefinite. Relative to such an understanding, what the Platonic dialogue reveals in certain respects is already a surprisingly modern view of linguistic names. It allows for Greek or barbarian names (i.e., phonological signs) to differ first as vocal representations (e.g., Greek hippos; French cheval; Chinese ma). But in a single linguistic system (dialektos), a sequence of sound (apart from such peculiarities as deliberate puns) does not change from day to day or from circumstance to circumstance in its designation of the object thus named. Socrates’ discussion of onoma in the Cratylus makes clear that he is interested not merely in the fully formed words of one or many syllables as such but also in the constitutive units of a single name: namely, the alphabets themselves that, as letters (stoicheia, grammata) in the Greek system, are also names or “first names [ prōta onomata],” as Socrates calls them. The interesting phenomenon emerging from Socrates’ remarks is that the structuring structures of the Greek language are, in fact, what may be thought of as layered names, and that helps explain why he wants to focus discursive attention down to the level of the letters (d–e). What the lawgiver (nomothetēs) knew so well (epistēthē kalōs), according to Socrates, is how to give names appropriate to the letters. On that basis the lawgiver is said to know “how to place each name fitted by nature for each object [to hekastōi physei pephykos onoma] into sounds and syllables [phthoggous . . . syllabas]” (d–; see also d–e). Appropriateness here is construed as the capacity for the letter’s name, itself already as nominatum, to disclose its nature (physin dēlōsai, e). Such an understanding in turn helps explain why Socrates goes to such extraordinary lengths in the dialogue to dwell on “natural” etymologies, because he believes that the articulation of the letters may bestow a measure of accuracy on the names that they help to form, by virtue of mimesis through the voice, tongue, or mouth (d–b). As Richard

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Robinson has pointed out, “by ‘first names’ Plato does not mean temporally first names but logically first names, that is names which imitate their nominates directly by their sound or feel.”4 The rapid, rolling movement of the tongue required to pronounce the letter rō, generally expressive of motion (kinēsis, c), can, for example, assist in shading the semantic content of a word in which it plays a constitutive role (e.g., tromos, trembling; rymbein, whirl). On this first level, the Socratic view validates Jacques Derrida’s charge against Platonic logocentrism as a kind of phonocentrism, more elaborately conveyed in the Phaedrus because it grants decisive priority of speech over writing. The correct use of names, one involving their most fundamental and elemental designations, is based first and foremost on voice and sound.5 Socrates’ definition of a name as the smallest unit of a saying (logos) in c and his correlative assertion that “the name is spoken as part of a true saying [to onoma ara to tou alēthous logou legetai]” exemplify this constant accentuation of oral activity. Even the cognate verb onomazein (to name, to address someone by name, to call one something) may in certain contexts acquire the sense of “to pronounce” (e.g., c). The assertions of Socrates in the Cratylus may seem to contradict certain sayings of his in the Theaetetus. In that latter dialogue devoted to probing the issue of the certainty of knowledge in terms of elements and combinations, significantly illustrated in the presumed writing system by the punning Greek terms of stoicheîon (letter) and syllabē (syllable), Socrates seems to contend at first that only syllables “have a rational content [ logon echousa]” but letters do not (a) and are thus unknowable (c). As he develops his argument, however, the philosopher comes around to exactly the opposite thesis. “Because if there are parts of anything, the whole must inevitably be all the parts” (a–), the letters themselves belong indivisibly to the syllable, conceptually a “whole [holon]” and an “all [pân].” In this logical sense, the letters themselves and the syllable they combine to form become, in Socrates’ words, “single in form [monoeides] and indivisible [ameriston]” (d–). His conclusion, therefore, asserts that both letters and syllables are equally “knowable and speakable [ gnōstai kai rētai]” (d).6 On that basis, in fact, Socrates goes on to claim for “the elements as a class [ genos]” a form of knowability and an instrumentality for knowledge that are much more important than the compounds (b). As with the Greek onoma, the Chinese term ming is not without ambiguity of meaning, but its discussion in ancient Chinese texts does not share in the Socratic concerns I have just described. The comparison of ancient Greece and China perforce must presume not only the vast difference in social and cultural contexts but also the obvious disparity of language. Of

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course, some graphs in Chinese purport to mimic directly certain kinds of sound (e.g., the familiar “kan kan goes the osprey 斄斄晶沑,” of poem , line , of the Classic of Poetry 娑䴻), but unless the reader of that line happens to know in advance how to say the graph kan, nothing in the written form itself indicates its phonological property. Not being an alphabetical language, Chinese does not have a regularized system of phonemes to standardize vocalization of its written signs, even though some of the “radicals,” or graphic rudiments, may also function as phonemes or vocalization markers. A graph as a single word may indicate one phoneme, but a word composed of two or more graphs may have only one graph or portion thereof on loan as a phonetic indicator. What complicates historical phonology in Chinese, moreover, is that these indicators may vary regionally in their pronunciation. Therefore, how are we to understand the term ming ⎵? Although most scholarly discussions of the term seem to regard it as referring primarily to a written sign,7 some of the textual evidence indicates that the Chinese were not unaware of some aspects of the speech/script problem. We learn from paleography that ming itself is composed of two graphs: one for half-moon and hence the derivative meaning of dusk or evening ⢽, and one for mouth ⎋.8 The Han dictionary Shuo wen jie 婒㔯妋⫿ (postface ), compiled by Xu Shen 姙ヶ (d. ), in a gesture not unworthy of comparison with Socrates, offers this etymological explanation: “Ming is self-designation [zi ming ye 冒 ␥ḇ].9 Dusk is dimness [ming ye ⅍ḇ]. In dimness people do not see each other, and that is why one uses the mouth to name [oneself]” (Shuowen ). Although Xu Shen’s analysis of the word’s logographic parts also refers simultaneously to a vocal activity, comparable with Socrates’ assertion (Cratylus b–) that speaking is an action (to legein . . . tis tōn prazeōn estin), the Qing philologist Duan Yucai resolutely ties the notion of “selfdesignation” or “self-naming” to written signs. His annotation of this passage in the dictionary refers to tomb inscriptions (also ming but written as 所) as the basis for Xu’s definition. It never occurred to Duan, however, that tomb inscriptions, unless planned with forethought and executed with prescience, can hardly be called self-designation. Without attempting to adjudicate the issue, we may nonetheless point out that Duan’s comment itself is based on the principle of homophonic etymology, a practice widely exploited by the ancient Chinese. Indeed, the etymological trail of this particular word for name (ming) provides a telling illustration of how several homophones are used in an almost circular fashion to gloss a single term, in the process of which the words with similar or identical vocalization are implicated in mutual explication. As another example of

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this principle at work, the third-century etymological glossography Shiming 慳⎵ (Explanations of Names), compiled by Liu Xi ∱䅁, offers this definition in part , “Shi yanyu” 慳妨婆 (Explanations of Language): “A name is a distinction [ming, ming ye ⎵㖶ḇ], that by which name and actuality may be distinguished [shi ming shi fen ming ye ἧ⎵⮎↮㖶ḇ]” (Shiming, , b, SBCK). When we compare even the brief citations on ming we have gathered with the passages on etymologies in the Cratylus, similarity and difference become readily apparent. The Socratic attempt to pin down the correct meaning of words resorts to both semantic and phonological etymologies. Words are dissected according to their alleged logographic components (e.g., a–: “the word onoma seems to be a compressed sentence, signifying on hou zētēma [being for which there is a search]” [Jowett]) and their smallest units of sound. In Xu Shen’s definition of ming, the term is also analyzed anagrammatically, but the wider tradition of homophonic etymology renders linguistic and philosophical definitions more frequently than not as definitions by punning, a process that, according to one critic, forges “unexpected connections, whose suggestiveness shimmers on the borders of concepts, threatening to transform them.”10 Definitions by punning, if we may paraphrase Jonathan Culler, give us respectable folk etymologies, but their accuracy is more dependent on the speaker’s perceptual ingenuity and rhetorical cunning than on the strict science of language. Without the conventions of the alphabet as stable phonetic anchors, determining in Chinese whether an appeal to identical or approximate vocalization for semantic elucidation indicates a real cognate or merely sporting with sounds is difficult. The philosopher, politician, or even the lexicographer is free to assert authoritative and original—thus, also unsuspected—polysemia by manipulation of the phoneme. Puns, in other words, are the inventions of sophistic phonocentrism that thrives on sonic continguity and metonymity.11 Of the ten terms cited from the Shuowen by Roger Ames in a recent study,12 at least nine of them offer glosses by referring to homophones or near homophones. That principle pervades as well the vast majority of entries in Liu Xi’s Shiming. Exploited in that manner, the phoneme can be highly subversive: to the extent that a single sound unit can represent several meanings, the phoneme exists to undermine, if not utterly destroy, the semantic stability allegedly secured by the visual, scriptural sign.

the purpose of names My last sentence is meant to recall deliberately some of the sayings by Confucius, who, among early Chinese thinkers, was certainly one fond of

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punning etymologies that seem especially pithy in setting forth the crucial concepts of his sociopolitical agenda. We are all familiar with the oftquoted assertions: ren zhe ren ye ṩ侭Ṣḇ (benevolence is people [Doctrine of the Mean, ]); zheng zhe zheng ye 㓧侭㬋ḇ (governance is rectification [Analects .]). Indeed, the punning emphasis on governance and the need for self-correction (Analects ., in which zheng 㬋 may be read as a nice counterpart of the Greek orthos) lends credence to the traditional ascription to Confucius of the development of the teaching concerning the rectification or correct use of names (zheng ming 㬋⎵). Without going into the controversy of whether that doctrine was an interpolation by later thinkers (e.g., Arthur Waley and H. G. Creel), I want to emphasize the two sentences that end the famous passage on this doctrine (.). After enumerating in ascending severity the deleterious effects of incorrect names, Confucius goes on to say: “Thus the superior man will name only that which he can say something about, and he will say something about only that which he can practice. Concerning his speech, the gentleman is simply never careless [wu suo gou ye 䃉㇨劇ḇ]; that’s all.”13 The sentences here seem to clarify the meaning of what Confucius said just before, that “if names are not correct, then what is to be said will not flow smoothly [yan bu shun 妨ᶵ枮].” To reverse the process of social decline, starting with “unreasonable” (D. C. Lau) or inappropriate discourse that is induced by incorrect names, the remedy has to be found in the action or behavior of the superior man that validates his discursive utterance. Speaking receives notice here, but it does not enjoy the logical priority assigned by Platonic philosophy to linguistic representation, because it is not concerned with the sayability of being or the nature of things, as in the case of Socratic thought (e.g., Cratylus b–). For Confucius, rather, the correct use of names represents something else. Unlike some ancient Chinese thinkers who wrestle with the more general problem of elementary semantic relations, of whether names tally with actualities (ming fu qi shi ⎵䫎 [var. ∗] ℞⮎), Confucius and his followers regard names and their use as signs of personal, and therefore, social ethos. Ineffectual speech thus becomes logically a first symptom of moral and social disorder. This Confucian emphasis justifies my view that Xun Qing 勨⌧ (ca. – b.c.) may well be regarded as the most astute disciple in developing the implications of the Master’s basic insight into the use of names. When Xunzi describes the discourse of the superior man ( junzi zhi yan ⏃ ⫸ᷳ妨) in the chapter under consideration, he contends that their making names correct (zheng qi ming 㬋℞⎵) and rendering appropriate the words or phrases (dang qi yan 䔞℞妨) only serve the purpose of expressing mean-

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ing and intention (bai qi zhi yi 䘥℞⽿佑). Names and phrases, in his view, are messengers (shi ἧ) of meaning and intention, and are to be discarded in their use once communication has been made. “Act carelessly and it [i.e., name or speech] results in illicitness [gou zhi, jian ye 劇ᷳ⦎ḇ (XJ, chap. , p. )].”14 The ideal of the correct use of names, characteristic of Confucian thinking, now finds realization only in the superior man, a person of presumed rectitude as a user of names. Therefore, only the most consequential linkage exists between name and person because the correct use of names (zheng ming) is directly assimilated into the ethical-political activity of correcting the self (zheng shen 㬋幓 [Analects .; .]), the advocacy of which strengthens the force of Confucius’s contention in the same section that one saying (yi yan ᶨ妨) may almost vitalize or ruin a state (.). This perspective enables us to see why Xunzi begins his remarks on the subject in the manner preserved in his book: after the obligatory rehearsal of what names were established in which previous sage dynasties, he launches at once into a series of definitions, not about name as an ordinary or general category, but about the “various names [san ming 㔋⎵]” that crucially account for the human person in Confucian thought (nature [xing ⿏], the affective disposition [qing ね], thinking [lü ㄖ], exertion [wei ‥], business [shi ⮎], conduct [xing 埴], awareness [zhi1 䞍], knowledge [zhi 3 㘢], capability [neng 傥]). In a chapter of collected sayings or teachings that purport to discuss linguistic phenomena, observations about the constitutive parts and activities of the human subject remarkably predominate. Although Xunzi himself and later writers both have spoken of the nature of things and the disposition of things (wu xing Ḽ埴, wu qing Ḽね), the preponderant meaning of nature and disposition in this chapter, and indeed throughout the book, has to do with the human. This figure threading through the carpet of his discourse cannot be accidental because correct names in Confucian thought are at bottom the products of the correct self. Such an emphasis, however, may in a certain respect provide sharp contrast to the thrust of Socrates’ argument throughout the Platonic dialogue that “things have their own fixed essence [ousia], neither in relation to us nor influenced by us [ou pros hēmas oude hyph’ hēmōn], changing this way and that according to our imaginations [phantasmati], but they exist of themselves according to their own essence imposed by nature [alla kath’ hauta pros tēn autōn ousian echonta hēiper pephyken]” (d–e). Whereas nature (xing ⿏) and disposition (qing ね) in Xunzi represent human attributes that are only by extension applicable to the myriad things,15 the Socratic

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interest is trained on things as they are in themselves, a condition for which the names of essence (ousia) and nature (physis) provide the clearest indication. The authentic meaning of those names cannot be grasped other than as signs of complete independence from human influence or even thought, a startling stipulation by Socrates that may be especially jarring to postWittgensteinian ears. That is why Socrates early on in the dialogue can offer his famous dictum: “That which says things as they are is true, and that which says them as they are not is false” (b–). An act of ontological definition in which essence and nature are both appositely specified, a correct name is thus an eidetic name because, for Socrates, linguistic expressions must follow and serve the proper understanding or percipient grasp of ideal natures, and not the other way around. Such a contrast with Plato may also invite rejoinders at this point. Does not Xunzi in this chapter on the correctness of names also resort to the vocabulary of name and actuality (ming, shi), a vocabulary common to many Warring State thinkers reflecting on discourse and language? Does not the use of those two terms also indicate an interest in the relation between a name as a linguistic sign and its objective nominatum? The answer to the first question has to be an unqualified yes, because Xunzi does indeed make use of the terms prominently. With respect to the second question, however, modern scholars have pointed out that Xunzi’s particular position on language and names may indicate indeed advances over the Daoist Zhuangzi’s skepticism or the Mohist theory on how names may conform to objects known through observation, explanation, or report.16 Nonetheless, Xunzi’s own succinct summation of the nature of names continues to elicit the label of nominalism for his thinking: Names have no fixed appropriateness; we agree on them by means of designation. When agreement is established, custom is formed, and they are called “appropriate.” What is different from what is agreed upon is called “inappropriate.” Names have no fixed actuality [gu shi ⚢⮎]. Agreement is used to designate actuality. The agreement, once established, becomes custom, and they are called actual [or substantive] names ⮎⎵. (xj, p. )

Clearly, such an assertion has more similarity to the emphasis on convention and agreement (zynthēkē kai homologia) to institute the correctness of names (orthotēs onomatos, d) by Hermogenes in the Cratylus than to the opinions of his interlocutor, Socrates. The way the term shi ⮎ġ that I translate as actuality is used in Xunzi’s

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observation offers the sense that “a name has no intrinsic actuality or substantiality as its object.” Summarized in such a fashion, Xunzi’s linguistic nominalism may even seem to advocate a correlative denial of the objective existence of things. Space constraints forbid me from probing further in the Chinese text for the thorny implications of language and epistemology (e.g., how do we know that things exist and how do we name or express such knowledge?), but I want to end this section on the purpose of names with the following observations. As one works through the chapter, some of Xunzi’s concerns clearly are to pin down the functions of names. I have alluded to the communicative purpose of names in the reference to sayings of the superior man ( junzi zhi yan). In another passage against an asserted background of the disappearance of sage-kings, the disorder in the world, and the rise of illicit sayings, the superior man of Xunzi’s ideal, although without political power, is obliged to counter them by disputing other discourses. The disputative effort, according to this view, arises from a graduated scale of representational dysfunction: When actualities do not signify [yu ╣], then we use designations. When designations do not signify, then we group them. When groupings do not signify, we use discourse. When the discourse still does not signify, we make use of disputation. (xj, pp. –)

Immediately thereafter, however, Xunzi outlines for us the ideal situation when linguistic signs and activities are working properly. When a name is heard and an actuality thereby signifies, this is the function of a name. Names are combined to form a pattern, and this is the coupling of names. When one grasps both function and coupling, this is called knowing names. Names are what groups together various actualities. Phrases are what joins different actualities in order to discuss a single ideal. (xj, p. )

This passage seems to highlight straightforward descriptions of linguistic properties such as reference (function) and syntax (pattern), but we may still be led to ask, What is an actuality (shi) in Xunzi’s thinking? Can it refer to any object included in the generalized abstraction myriad things (wan wu)?

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Although Xunzi cites many examples in the chapter of what may be construed as objective things, and thus actualities—ranging from animals such as cattle and horses to flavors and emotions—on closer examination, what he actually means by shi (actuality, intrinsic substantiality, object, reality, stuff—these have all been used to translate this elusive term) is reality that is already known, not a novel or previously unknown reality (such as a new element of the periodic table requiring linguistic identification) or a novel action (such as feeding information into a computer for the first time) for which one must labor to invent an appropriate nomenclature, the standardization of which will also grant referential stability. Xunzi’s tendency here justifies what modern scholars have observed, that the purpose he confers on names is both prescriptive and practical rather than theoretical.17 For the ancient Chinese thinker, then, names are actually reborn of exigencies, the disruptions of known conditions and states of affairs. “When nobility and baseness are not clear, when similarity and difference are not distinguished, such a condition will certainly beget the mishap of misunderstood intentions [again the communicative concern], and affairs will suffer the disaster of obstruction and abolishment. Therefore, the person of intelligence made divisions and distinctions, and instituted names to point to actuality” (XJ, p. ). Actuality, in such a context, is not something original or new, but something (such as the paired opposites of nobility and baseness, similarity and difference) already known but now lost to social, moral, and thereby linguistic decay. That is why immediately following when Xunzi examines in a sustained fashion the various ways of conceiving how relations between names and actualities may be disturbed, disrupted, or even perverted (luan Ḫ), the language always refers to a recognizable or known condition affected by an implied agency. It is about some person who can “use names erroneously to disorder names,” or “to use actuality to disorder names,” or even “to use names to disorder actuality” (XJ, pp. –). As examples of these subversive actions, Xunzi offers serially sayings such as “To kill a robber is not to kill a man,” “Mountains and marshes are level,” and “A white horse is not a horse.” That last declaration is too pointed a quotation to be missed by the student of Chinese thought. Rather than pursuing the fine point of logical analysis that will help determine the truth or falsity of a proposition, as the thinkers belonging to the School of Names had done with the white horse statement, Xunzi’s consistent Confucianism focuses on the human, social agencies that can pervert or restore linguistic order. For him, language philosophy has no independent viability other than to serve political philosophy, and

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thus the correctness of names seems to imply already the meaning also of the corrected names.

the maker of names My reference to agency brings me to the last section of this chapter, which considers the user of names as the maker of names. Although the Platonic dialogue manifestly seems to uphold in various places a realist theory on the relation of names to things, the theory that “every thing has a correct name by nature [onomatos orthotēta einai hekastō tōn ontōv physei pephykuian]” (a–), how that relation comes about, according to Socrates, depends a great deal on the lawgiver as the name giver. And, although that figure has been allegorized by some scholars to be no more than a mythical figure or a personification of human experience,18 the figure nonetheless receives too great attention in Socrates’ analysis to be regarded as merely a device of rhetoric. In his protracted discussion of the success of naming that, by definition, is also correct naming for Socrates, that achievement in turn “depends on one’s grasp of the ‘form of the Name,’ i.e., one’s insight into the essence of the nominatum, and one’s linguistic skills.”19 For this reason, the name giver is not just any ordinary individual but is compared to several kinds of professional in the dialogue. Because even actions may be regarded as a class of being (e–), a professional is no ordinary craftsman; he is a person who knows how to perform an action in accordance with its proper nature (a–). In passages strikingly resonant with certain strands of ancient Chinese thought, Socrates repeatedly stresses how the cutter must cut “each thing according to the nature of cutting” no less than with the “natural instrument” (a–). Physis, as it is used here, has less affinity with the Chinese xing ⿏, generally translated as “nature,” than with other key terms. Wu li 䈑䎮, the underlying principles of things, that Chinese and Japanese use to render the modern science of physics, brings out a large part of the equation between the Chinese and the Greek names. However, because physis, particularly as Plato uses it, has large ontological implications as well, one may argue that part of it is almost analogous also to the important concept of dao 忻 in ancient China, the vital force or reality that not only impregnates all things but also embodies the power (de ⽟) that can individuate and thus define different entities. In turn, the embodied or structured essence (ousia) of a differentiated entity may be seen to evoke or approximate one classical meaning of the Chinese qing ね.20 For the Platonic Socrates, therefore, that the name giver must follow a

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proper course of action based on thorough knowledge of both what he must do and of the nature of the tool or instrument (organon) by which he must accomplish his task is perfectly reasonable. Just as a weaver must master the nature and function of the shuttle, the borer his drill, and the smith his hammer and anvil, so the name giver must master names as his organon of teaching and separating realities and also ply his instrument with skill (a-e). Such instructional and discriminatory intelligence belongs to the rarest of men and artisans, and for good reason Socrates in one breath makes the name giver (onomatourgos) and the lawgiver (nomothetēs) one and the same person (e–a). Even this conferral of identity, however, does not allow for a satisfactory closure, because further reflection on the tool-and-instrument analogy brings out the hidden hierarchy of artisans. Above the various professional craftsmen stands another class of persons who can direct and supervise, and that again in accordance with the nature of both work and workers. In the realm of names, as Socrates grandly concludes, the person who can best direct the lawgiver’s work and assess it when it is finished is none other than the dialectician, the one who knows how to make questions and answers (c-e). When we rejoin Xunzi on his side, we do not hear, of course, any reference to the dialectician as such. Instead, the persons who are presumed to be the correct and effective makers of names are named as the later kings (hou wang ⼴䌳), the sage-kings (sheng wang 俾䌳), and the superior man; they are the crucial instigators and guardians of correct names. As I have pointed out, Xunzi’s investigation into the subject is premised on an existing condition of social disorder that manifests itself also in language. He says at the beginning of his chapter, “Now that sage-kings are gone, the preservation of names is neglected, strange proposals have sprung up, the names and actualities are in chaos, and the forms of right and wrong are unclear. Thus even the law-abiding officials and the textreciting, topic-counting Rus are in confusion. Should a kingly one arise, he would certainly follow certain old names and also create some new names” (XJ, p. ). The term of interest in this passage is wang zhe 䌳侭, which I translate as “kingly one,” or, as Knoblock would render it, “True King.” The term, we may point out at once, is not an exclusive feature of the Xunzi, because it appears prominently in Mencius and in other contemporary thinkers. Hardly to be thought of as a real historical individual who can lay claim to rulership by birthright or inherited status, the kingly one who can resume and repeat certain activities of later kings or sage-kings is a posited

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figure of discourse, one who fully embodies and articulates the Confucian ideals. As in the thought of Socrates, so, too, the thought of Xunzi seeks to prescribe what must be the indispensable qualifications of the name maker. Just as Socrates asserts that “it is not for every man to give names [ouk ara pantos andros . . . onoma thesthai]” (e–a), but only the lawgiver under the supervision of the dialectician can do an acceptable job, so for Xunzi the task must also fall correspondingly on a special sort of person. “Therefore the way the kingly one institutes names,” he says near the beginning of the chapter, “is that when the names are fixed, actualities will be distinguished, his way will be practiced, and his intention will be known. He will then lead with caution so as to unify his people” (XJ, p. ). We are still in the orbit of names in relation to actuality (shi), but we know what special meaning the term actually possesses. Grasping the true import of that relation, as we have seen, requires special understanding of linguistic signs and linguistic activities, but what seems most important to Xunzi is for his “kingly one” to recognize and affirm a special tradition of culture. The very opening sentences of Xunzi’s chapter provide decisive illumination of how the accumulated cultural achievements of China’s ideal past must be held up as the foundation of correct naming. “When the later kings established names, they followed the Shang in the names of criminal law, the Zhou in the names of official rank, the Rites in the names of cultural patterns. In applying the miscellaneous names to the myriad things, they followed the regional dialects and customs of the various Xia states [i.e., China], and because of this, distant villages of different customs were able to communicate” (XJ, chap. , p. ). If a “kingly one” were to flourish in Xunzi’s time or later, he could do no better than to recapitulate the practice of the “later kings.” The venerated cultural tradition in Xunzi’s discourse acquires the function of actuality (shi) that substantiates the correctness of a set of names, because they articulate what a Confucian such as Xunzi would consider to be the principles of proper governance (zheng 㓧). These names are said to perpetuate the past, endorse the authority of centralized orthodoxy, obviate tribal difference, and domesticate linguistic otherness. Only on this basis could Xunzi present later a grandiloquent summation of how language would support politics: “Therefore, groups, names, disputations and explanations—all these are the grand patterns of usefulness, the very beginning of the kingly enterprise” (XJ, p. ). However divergent the ancient Greek and Chinese thinkers may be with regard to so many things relative to their respective languages and cultural traditions, the remarkable point of convergence in their thought at this

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juncture centers on the figure emerging from their discourse. Both have a human figure who provides solutions to the problems of language, and both thinkers have gone to great lengths, in fact, to demonstrate how their exalted figures, based on their sufficient knowledge, would bring about solutions. Dare we yield to temptation and say further that the dialectician spotlighted in the Cratylus and the wang zhe in the Xunzi are none other than some persons such as Socrates and Xun Qing themselves? A tooobvious speculation, perhaps, but I’ll let my patient reader decide. notes 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

T. P. Kasulis, “Reference and Symbol in Plato’s Cratylus and Kukai’s Shojijissogi,” Philosophy East and West 32, no. 4 (1982): 393–406; William S.-Y. Wang, “Language in China: A Chapter in the History of Linguistics,” Journal of Chinese Linguistics 17, no. 2 (1989): 183–221. Christoph Harbsmeier, Language and Logic, vol. 7, part 1 of Science and Civilisation in China, ed. Joseph Needham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Ulrich Unger, Rhetorik des klassichen Chinesisch (Wiesbaden, Ger.: Harrossowitz, 1994), and Lü Xing, Rhetoric in Ancient China, Fifth to Third Century b.c.e.: A Comparison with Greek Rhetoric (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998). Harbsmeier, Language and Logic, p. 326; see also p. 321. For this study, my citation of Xunzi will come from the text of the Xunzi jijie 勨⫸普妋, ed. Yang Jialuo 㣲⭞榙 (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1987) (hereafter cited as XJ ). Numbers refer only to pages of this edition. Richard Robinson, Essays in Greek Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 106. Timothy M. S. Baxter writes: “The elements are the end of the process of analysis of a name into smaller names; as such they are names themselves, revealing an essence as any name should” (The “Cratylus”: Plato’s Critique of Naming, Philosophia Antiqua, ed. J. Mansfield et al., 58 [Leiden: Brill, 1992], pp. 76–77). And also: “The prôta onomata represent the limits of analysis, the smallest parts of language with semantic content; as such whether they are letters, syllables or whatever depends not on the nature of language but on that of a given nominatum” (p. 78). See also N. Bretzmann, “Plato on the Correctness of Names,” American Philosophical Quarterly 8 (1971): 126–138; Bretzmann calls these first names “proteronyms” but denies that they are names. Baxter disputes this last point. J. N. Findlay has written: “The whole which things form can, on reflection, be nothing but the elements in the totality of their relations, and, if we know something about the whole, we ipso facto know something about all the parts. Or if, alternatively, the whole is something new and simple which supervenes upon the related parts, then it too will be an element, and unknowable as the elements of which it is held to consist. The drift of the whole argument is to discredit the strict separation of elements from complex unities which we may imagine the exact young reasoners of the Academy to have pressed for. Socrates-Plato implies, we may suggest, that the ultimate and unutterable is none the less [sic] that without which the derivative and utterable would not be utterable at all, and that it therefore, in a

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7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

manner, shares in the utterability of the latter, just as the latter after a fashion shades into the unutterability of the former” (Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974], p. 228). By the time of Zheng Xuan 惕䌬 (127–200), ming ⎵ (name) and zi ⫿ (scripted word, honorific style) are regarded as synonyms, their only difference being that the former was the older term. See Zheng’s commentary in the Lun Yu Yi Shu, cited by John Makeham, Name and Actuality in Early Chinese Thought, SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture, ed. David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 43. A. C. Graham, in his article “Chinese Philosophy of Language,” observes: “China provides the unique instance of philosophy of language developed in a language of uninflected words organised solely by word order and the functions of grammatical particles. In the absence of morphological features such as compel attention in Indo-European and Semitic languages, there is little to make Chinese aware of the structures of their own language” (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, ed. Hugo Steger and Herbert Ernst Wiegand [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992], 7.1:94–104). The point to be emphasized here is that such “morphological features” as indicated by “inflections” in those languages mentioned by Graham may all be units smaller or “less developed” than a full-blown word, but they are still meaningful units as temporal, gender, number, and case markers—both visually and phonetically—by reason of their alphabetical formation. The Chinese graphs, by contrast, may or may not convey such meanings in their constitutive parts. Bernhard Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa, Bulletin no. 29 (Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1957), p. 219. The word that I translate as “designation” is also ming but written as ␥, which A. C. Graham defines, in its verbal form, as “to name either something to be brought about . . . or an already existing thing” (Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science [1978; repr., Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1990], p. 196). John Knoblock offers an expanded definition: “To pronounce the state of an oracle from which the usage ‘to give a name’ to something probably derives. It also means to order an official to do something, and the mandate or charge given to such an official” (Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, vol. 3, bks. 17–32 [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994], p. 123). Jonathan Culler, “Call of the Phoneme: Introduction,” in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 2. Françoise Meltzer, “Eat Your Dasein: Lacan’s Self-Consuming Puns,” in Culler, On Puns, pp. 156–163. Roger T. Ames, “Thinking Through Comparisons: Analytical and Narrative Methods for Cultural Understanding,” in Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking Through Comparisons, ed. Steven Shankman and Stephen W. Durrant (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 93–110. I base my translation on the Chinese text used in the bilingual edition of D. C. Lau (1992). I agree with Knoblock’s observation (Xunzi, pp. 115–116; see also p. 343, n. 88) that the use of the word gou 劇 in Xunzi may have been a deliberate echo of the Analects 13.3. Although Xunzi asserts in the very beginning of his chapter that the “various names [san ming 㔋⎵]” were those that later kings “added onto the myriad things [wan wu

25 4 cr at y lus and the xunzi on na mes

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

叔䈑] by following the established customs and general agreements of the central Xia states,” he singles out immediately the “various names for what is within man” for his concentrated analysis (XJ, p. 274; Knoblock, Xunzi, p. 127). Makeham, Name and Actuality, pp. 51–57; Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 302–327. Harbsmeier, Language and Logic, p. 322. Bernard Williams, “Cratylus’ Theory of Names and Its Refutation,” in Language, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 36. Baxter, Cratylus, p. 44. A. C. Graham has sought to demonstrate that qing in the documents of the Warring States period often takes on the meaning of “essence,” in the sense of what is essential to a thing—and by extension, to a human person. In this sense as well, the word is analogous to the Aristotelian concept of essence, but the similarity “relates to naming, not to being” (Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature [1986; repr., Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990], p. 63).

 12  READING THE DAODEJING ethics and politics of the rhetoric For Robert Hegel

author and texts The Daodejing 忻⽟䴻 (Classic of the Way and Virtue [hereafter cited as DDJ]) is traditionally attributed to Lao Dan, a slightly older contemporary of the historical Confucius (– b.c.). Preponderant Chinese scholarship of the twentieth century (with notable exceptions found in Hu Shi 傉怑 and Xu Fuguan [Hsü Fu-kuan] ⼸⽑奨)1 has both doubted and contested the attribution, and its cumulative skepticism across several decades has in turn influenced a great deal of modern scholarship on early Chinese thought,2 including even more recent examples.3 The most vigorous defense of the traditional position, marshaling counterarguments from a wide spectrum of current Chinese scholarship and archaeological findings, has been mounted by Chen Guying 昛溻ㅱ, a professor of philosophy who has taught in both Taiwan and Beijing,4 but the controversy is by no means settled. Complicating the controversy of dating has been the discovery of new materials. The first major archaeological find crucial for our understanding of Laozi and a host of other related topics, issues, figures, and texts is, of course, the  unearthing of the Mawangdui tomb materials located in what would be the region named Chu 㤂, in present-day Changsha of Hunan province.5 The wealth and importance of the materials have been compared with those of the Dead Sea caves in the ancient Near East.6 Since their discovery, two versions of the DDJ on silk, copies in two different ancient Chinese scripts with some significant variations in diction, chap-

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ter order, and reversal of the two-part divisions of the received text, have been studied extensively by scholars worldwide. As one of the more recent translators has noted, however, “the Ma-wang-tui texts do not differ in any radical way from later versions of the text.” 7 At least three translations of the Mawangdui texts are now available to the English reader. 8 The second and most recent () discovery is also found in the land of Chu, located in Tomb Number  of the village Guodian 悕⸿, at the town of Jingmen 勲攨, Hubei province. Three copied versions of the DDJ are preserved on bamboo slips, now judged to be the oldest surviving texts of the classic because the date for them may possibly be set at “the end of the fourth century,”9 a date that would locate immediately the texts and the formation of the DDJ discourse as contemporaneous with Mencius (ca. – b.c.) or possibly much earlier. Preliminary examination indicates that the contents of the three versions (about two-fifths of the extant DDJ) are again largely similar to the received text, though the documents reveal different chapter arrangements and are not divided into two parts on the Way and Virtue, a staple feature of all known extant textual specimens up to this point.10 Participants of the International Conference at Dartmouth have debated the various conjectural hypotheses on the relationship of the Guodian’s manuscripts to the received text of Laozi—i.e., whether one derives from another, whether both represent diverse versions or textual stemmas, whether both represent different transcriptions from a common source, either written or oral, and what may be the relationship between these two text groups and the Mawangdui materials.11 According to the brief but much later written biography of Sima Qian,12 Lao Dan was a native of Chu, a southerner from the perspective of ancient geography. His family name was given as Li 㛶, name Er 俛, and his style Dan 俫, the last graph glossed by the Han lexicon Shuowen 婒㔯 as meaning “ears extended 俛㚤ḇ.” He was said to have served as the archivist of the Zhou royal court. Although the graph li itself has appeared already in such ancient documents as the Classic of Poetry, the Zuo Commentary, and Mencius, with the meaning of “plum tree” or its fruit,13 as a name, it has been considered by Chinese philologists since the Han to have evolved from the homophone li 慴, meaning “village.”14 The Tongzhi 忂⽿, compiled by Zheng Qiao 惕㧝 (–), on the basis of the alleged custom in antiquity to use one’s appointed office also as surname, offers an alternative explanation that Li derives from such other homophones as li 䎮, meaning “messenger” or “envoy,” or li ⎷, meaning “jail warden.” Because li as village is frequently on loan for the word for envoy,15 which, in turn, was used by Sima Qian

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to account for the identity of the homophonous name Li Li 㛶暊,16 a definitive origin of the name Li may remain a philological puzzle. Sima Qian’s biography, however, has aroused further scholarly controversy over name and identity, because his narrative, by mentioning a nameless person observing that “Lao Laizi is also a person of Chu 侩厲⫸ Ṏ㤂Ṣḇ,” seems to suggest that his subject under discussion also might have gone by the name of Lao. Although the graph lao 侩 is indisputably used to designate a surname in such ancient texts as the Zuo Commentary (Duke Cheng ; Duke Zhao ) and the Analects (. ), Sima’s casual narration does not warrant confident reception. Most modern scholars agree that the word yi Ṏ as used in the observation has the force of making Laozi and Lao Laizi two different persons. Finally, the biography cites a third observation by a nameless person that “[the Grand Scribe of Zhou] Dan is, in fact, Laozi [␐⣒⎚₳]⌛侩⫸],” but this ancient hypothesis has been hotly contested and largely refuted in modern scholarship.17 The incident of the Grand Scribe meeting with Lord Xian of Qin 䦎ㅚ℔ alluded to in the biography is also recorded in such other parts of the Shiji as “The Basic Annals of the Zhou ␐㛔䲨,” “The Basic Annals of the Qin 䦎㛔䲨,” and “The Document of the Fengshan Ritual ⮩䥒㚠,” but none of those episodes has any reference to the identification of Dan as Laozi. Sima’s tantalizing mode of presenting his subject’s identity may have followed, as one modern editor and translator of the DDJ suggests, the “rhetorical rectitude of the Spring and Autumn Annals: that one should use what is trustworthy to transmit what is trustworthy, and what is doubtful to transmit what is doubtful 㗍䥳ᷳ佑炻ᾉẍ⁛ᾉ炻䔹ẍ⁛䔹.”18 But what is doubtful, thus represented, has certainly elicited more doubt not confined merely to the name of Laozi, and an opinion such as that of William Boltz’s, that the biography “contains virtually nothing that is demonstrably factual,”19 is widely shared today. That conviction notwithstanding, three assertions by Sima are noteworthy not only because they help to shape the entire textualized tradition of Laozi for posterity, but also because they continue to influence the contemporary scholarly reception of this tradition. The first of the assertions from the biography claims that Laozi had authored a book in two parts that, in ,–plus words, expounded the meaning of the Way and Virtue. The length of the work thus noted roughly matches that of the DDJ’s received text, while the summary of its content has not been challenged by the two most important textual discoveries of the twentieth century. The second remark pertains to the venerable tale

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of Confucius making inquiry of Laozi about ritual, or li 䥖, a story that may have derived from a widespread legend of many meetings between the two eminent thinkers of antiquity, but the emphasis invariably falls on Confucius’s respect for and homage paid to the “Daoist” teacher. 20 Of the at least sixteen episodes in the Zhuangzi that mention Laozi by name, for example, eight of them—all preserved in the “Outer Chapters” of the work—relate contacts or conversations of the latter with Confucius, and their discussions touch on “how to study the Way 㱣忻” (Zhuangzi ), on the Classic of Poetry, Classic of History, Classic of Change, Classic of Ritual (), on ancient texts and the way of governance in relation to benevolence and rectitude (), on cosmology (), and on the nature of self-growth in all things (). Sima Qian’s story of inquiry on ritual is given much more elaborate content and detail in the “Zengzi wen 㚦⫸⓷” (Master Zeng’s Queries) chapter of the Classic of Ritual. The Annals of Lü Buwei, moreover, remarks that “Confucius studied under Lao Dan” and with two other named but now unknown masters.21 Finally, the story of “Confucius meeting Laozi” is given pictorial form preserved on a slab of stone carvings found with the remains of the Wuliang Shrine and dated to the second century. Such a representation, according to a contemporary art historian, inspired a great many “iconographical studies” by mid- and late-Qing scholars eager to establish correspondence between the venerated classics of their literary sources and visual artifacts.22 As may be readily seen, this little tale of which thinker learned from whom, whether strictly historical or not, can attain enormous significance for one assessing the development of ancient Chinese thought. In a culture where priority and antecedent— and not just origin—inevitably posit also authority, whether Confucius took some ideas from Laozi matters a great deal. One aspect of how it matters, in fact, surfaces in the last and third assertion of Sima Qian, for his biography tellingly observes that “today, followers of Laozi denigrate Confucianism and students of Confucianism also denigrate Laozi.” Taken as a description of the relations between these two schools of thought descending from ancient China and already heir to protracted and intense rivalry by the Han, the historian’s words are nothing if not historical and factual. Indeed, they would acquire added truth and acuity across the centuries in highlighting such a clash of sentiments that has persisted down to the present. Not only are there charges and countercharges among modern savants in their findings, but their unacknowledged desire for the primacy of Confucius or Laozi as China’s first serious thinker would also color frequently their views on date, authorship, and textual meanings. Even for scholars who seemingly have

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little ideological stake in upholding the priority of either Confucianism or Daoism, their interpretations can vary on how one should construe a selfsame issue. Because the story of Confucius’s inquiry into rites with Laozi had been alluded to even in so manifestly a Confucian text as the Record of Ritual, the surmised reason for its inclusion divides modern readers. For Xu Fuguan, this legend had to be handed down from a tradition prior to the Han, one that had been so firmly entrenched that not even Han Confucians dared devise its removal. For A. C. Graham, on the other hand, the anecdote would appear more likely to be a Daoist invention to counter the growing influence of Confucianism during the Warring States period.23

rhetoric If the dating of the DDJ and the identity of its putative author or compiler(s) still await solution despite recent discoveries of new textual materials, the construal of textual meaning also continues to pose daunting challenges, as is evident in the scholarly discussions recorded in the Dartmouth Conference proceedings. In spite of its being one of the shortest classics of antiquity, its terse and subtle rhetoric, devoid of any mimesis of conversational discourse among named (and frequently known) figures of history— a staple feature in the vast majority of Warring States texts harking back to the Analects—has teased and tantalized readers down through the centuries. This and other features may contribute to explaining why the DDJ has been one of the most translated ancient texts of China in our time. When compared with another text like the Zhuangzi, the DDJ displays a much more limited vocabulary and simpler diction, and its overall syntax seems less complicated than even that of a text like the Mencius. Upon every scrutiny, however, the DDJ appears to sport a deliberate predilection to exploit a well-known feature of classical Chinese: the grammatical fluidity, and thus ambiguity, of individual words. As all students of the language realize, a single graph in literary Sinitic, depending on the context, may be used as either a noun, a verb, an adjective, or even an adverb. How the reader construes its grammatical function will significantly modify its meaning. But, apart from this general linguistic character, why the DDJ continues to vex and perplex its every interpreter and translator must be the parlous and pervasive lack of infratextual context to ground one’s conjecture of grammatical functions and meanings. Bereft of any dialogical or narrative constraints manifest in so many of the texts that

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purport to record the gathered teachings of Warring States thinkers, the voice of the DDJ speaker at once asserts and teaches anyone and no one, a discourse without context or audience. The pithy, verselike meditations are unlike other known specimens of Chinese poetry of antiquity. Despite the noticeable use of rhyme and the tetrasyllabic line in many segments of the work, the textual content hardly engages any concrete specificities or visibilia of the natural (for example, the fauna and flora of the Classic of Poetry that so pleased Confucius) and human worlds. Among the early group of Warring States texts, the gnomic and sapiential texture of the DDJ is manifestly laced with the most abstract of diction. The occasional transposition of different sections in any one text—a problem that may have been caused by copyist “error,” redactor judgment, or the “misplacement” of writing materials like bamboo slips—and the seemingly casual insertion of connectives like “hence” or “therefore” augment the difficulty in gauging argumentative logic or coherence. To illustrate yet again some of these difficulties, the familiar sentences that open chapter  of part  of the received text (the chapter order of which will be presupposed throughout this brief essay)24 may serve as the convenient example beginning our discussion. The pair of statements opening chapter  (dao ke dao, fei chang dao; ming ke ming, fei chang ming 忻⎗忻炻朆ⷠ忻烊⎵⎗⎵炻朆ⷠ⎵) seems as memorable as they are relatively uncomplicated. Virtually all readers past and present have understood the grammatical structure of the parallel assertions to be something like noun + auxiliary word + verb. A nagging question, nonetheless, involves how best to understand the second dao in each clause in such a way that will enable the three-word unit to form a cogent assertion. Translations into languages other than Chinese are also frequently tempted to indicate in some manner the sense and effect of the pun, but this attempt is complicated by the fact that already in the Analects, we can discern at least four senses in the usage of dao. The nominal one refers to a path or road (.; .; .) or an ethico-political principle operative within a person, community, or an institution (., , ; .; .; ., ; .; ., ; .; .; .; ., , ). The verbal one can be: “to guide or instruct” (.; .; .); “to say or speak” (.; .). Most interpreters of the first dao seem to favor collapsing the two nominal usages into a related one: thus an abstract principle becomes metaphorically a way to be walked on or a path to be followed, a trope that finds increasing preference among recent English translations. For the second dao, the last option of the verbal meaning as saying or speaking has also been the preferred reading of most translations, in Western lan-

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guages or the modern Chinese vernacular, especially in the light of such later comments by Zhuangzi: “The Way has never had borders, saying has never had norms. . . . The greatest Way cannot be cited, The greatest disputation cannot be spoken. . . . The Way lights up but does not guide. . . . Who knows an unspoken disputation, an untold Way? ⣓忻㛒⥳㚱⮩, 妨㛒 ⥳㚱ⷠ, . . . ⣓⣏忻ᶵ䧙, ⣏彗ᶵ妨, . . . 忻㗕侴ᶵ忻, . . . ⬘䞍ᶵ妨ᷳ彗, ᶵ忻ᷳ 忻.”25 A reading of the DDJ that comports with Zhuangzi and its own (chap. ) equally provocative description of the sage as one who “undertakes teaching without words (xing bu yan zhi jiao 埴ᶵ妨ᷳ㔁),” a phrase repeated in chapter , therefore, will emphasize “the untold Way” as the fitting changdao, or constant Way. One clause in Zhuangzi’s very chapter on “The Sorting That Evens Things Out 滲䈑婾,” however, may insert a different, albeit not unrelated, nuance in the opening declaration of the DDJ. In observing that “the Way lights up but does not guide,” Zhuangzi may well be targeting for critique that understanding of dao as a form of normative, and thus superior, guidance for the people (min 㮹) prescribed by the Confucian discourse (e.g., Analects .: “Guide it with government [versus] guide it with virtue 忻ᷳ ẍ㓧 . . . 忻ᷳẍ⽟”). Seen in this light, the DDJ’s first clause may mean something like “the Way that can instruct or guide is not the constant Way,” or to translate Zhuangzi’s phrase differently, only “the Way that does not guide (bu dao zhi dao)” is knowledge worth having. Although differing in degree, both Laozi and Zhuangzi evidently share a stern estimate of language’s intrinsic limitations. This common skepticism, however, extends not merely to language per se, but much more so to linguistic discourse as a form of political and moral action such as that championed by Confucians and to its compatibility with the nondiscriminatory and noninterventionist mode of operation Laozi and Zhuangzi associate with the true and constant Dao. Read from the latter perspective, the first assertion of the DDJ is not necessarily one of apophatic mysticism, that somehow an ineffable or unspeakable Dao is to be preferred. What is constant (chang), rather, must be understood as that which is consonant with the virtues of the Dao articulated repeatedly in different segments of the text. If Confucius wishes to set forth a basis for proper government by fashioning or attempting to revive a normative system of names and referents (e.g., Analects . and . for “the rectification of names”; . for “government” as “let the ruler be a ruler”), the derived principles and inferences of which would be honored as authoritative paideia and encoded as canonical classics by later followers, the DDJ as a Daoist text would counter with a discourse that challenges both the need and adequacy of the

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discursive medium as self-authenticating nominalization and normative instruction.26 This difference on whether the Dao should be taken as a discourse of guidance has not been lost in subsequent centuries. Nearly two millennia later, Wang Shouren (Yangming) 䌳⬰ṩ (–), on the occasion of dedicating a refurbished library of a private school, began his commemorative essay with the ringing declaration for the enduring texts of his own tradition: “The Classics, they are the constant way 䴻炻ⷠ忻ḇ.”27 For someone like Laozi, on the other hand, the “constant Name” is no more nameable, as we shall see, than ascribing to the constant Way a disposition for prescriptive guidance. After such an intriguing beginning, the DDJ text goes on to declare: That-which-is-not names the beginning of heaven and earth That-which-is names the mother of ten thousand things. 䃉⎵⣑⛘ᷳ⥳ 㚱⎵叔䈑ᷳ㭵

The subject of these two sentences, which I have deliberately rendered in this clumsy manner, refers, of course, to two of the most important dialectical concepts in the text: the wu 䃉 and the you 㚱, which have the literal meanings of “there is not” and “there is,” although those meanings obtain in this particular instance only if the two graphs are taken to be nominals. If they are regarded as adjectives (and thus it obliges the concomitant switch of name [ming] from a verb to a noun), both the grammar and the semantics of the two statements may change significantly to the following: Without name [i.e., the nameless], the beginning of heaven and earth. With name [i.e., the named], the mother of ten thousand things.

There is nothing in the received text’s Chinese construction, as far as I can determine, that would prevent either reading, but the force of the two assertions and their nuanced implications vary with the grammatical changes, much as the Keatsian “a thing of beauty is a joy forever” is not to be equated with the tepid “a beautiful thing.” To both these sentences in the Mawangdui manuscripts, as A. C. Graham rightly observes,28 there is added a terminal particle (ye ḇ), in which case, the construction decisively prohibits making wu and you the nominal subjects. Instead, that feature turns the nameless (wu ming 䃉⎵) and the named (you ming 㚱⎵) into the proper ones. However, it must be pointed out as well that this particle is tagged on to all first six sentences of chap-

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ter  of the Mawangdui versions. The particle is a staple feature of definitions, explanations, and conclusions, and thus the way those texts punctuate, for this reader at least, conveys the tone and flavor of a particular editorial explanation. Despite a date earlier than the received text’s extant version, the Mawangdui texts may be no more authoritative than the later received text in providing us with the most “authentic” or compelling textual meaning. In this regard, it is unfortunate that the early chapters of the DDJ are not preserved in all three of the Guodian versions. Wu and you in the DDJ and other classical Chinese texts have, of course, been translated frequently as “nothing” or “nonbeing” and “something” or “being.” 29 Apart from the problem of whether to use the language of ontology in exegesis and translation, 30 the inherent grammatical instability of the terms themselves imposes further difficulty when they are joined with other words in constructions susceptible to different readings. A revealing example may be found in what follows immediately in the text of chapter : Therefore frequent no/nothing desire/intend by means of observe its wonder frequent is/something desire/intend by means of observe its bound .㓭 ⷠġ 䃉ġ 㫚ġ ẍġ 奨ġ ℞ġ ⥁ ⷠġ 㚱ġ 㫚ġ ẍġ 奨ġ ℞ġ ⽤

Once more, the crucial problem of interpretation in these lines boils down to whether the dialectical pair of wu and you ought to be taken as nominals or adjectives, for that decision will, in turn, affect one’s understanding of the sentential syntax, of how the string of graphs may be divided into meaningful units (i.e., duan ju 㕟⎍). If the words are taken as adjectives, then they must be regarded as qualifiers of the word yu 㫚, now understood in the nominal sense of “desire.” All five of the recent English translations (Lau, Mair, Hendricks, Ivanhoe, Roberts) have opted for this solution made explicit by the syntactical variation of the Mawangdui texts, but such a reading, I must point out, fails to persuade completely on two counts. First, the reading does not provide us with even a hint as to why the text should want to bring up the issue of desire and its lack thereof so abruptly at this point as a requisite for its cosmic observer. True enough, by chapter , the speaker is already using the phrase “wu yu 䃉㫚,” but this is perfectly understandable even in a confined segmental context in which the discourse concentrates on how the sage’s action would affect the people. In

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chapter , on the other hand, we have no such indication. Why do we need desire to observe the wonders or subtleties (miao) of something, and why do we need to be rid of desire to observe the very limit of something ( jiao, literally, boundary or border)? Moreover, although the DDJ certainly teaches the importance of not having desires, the opposite emphasis of “having desires 㚱㫚” is hardly conceivable in the light of such explicit statements elsewhere in the same document: “Watch the colorless and embrace the simple, diminish private longings and reduce desires 夳䳈㉙ 㧠, ⮹䥩⮉㫚” (chap. ); “I have no desires and the people themselves become simple ㆹ䃉㫚侴㮹冒㧠” (chap. ). Second, this reading emphasizing desires fails to pin down the exact force of the possessive deictic qi ℞ (its), because it cannot locate its attributive referent. What is the object possessive of wonders/subtleties and boundary for which the text urges observation? Neither the reading of the Mawangdui texts nor the translations based on them seem to offer satisfactory answers to such questions. If, however, we take wu and you as nouns, a reading consistent with their possible grammatical function already surfacing in the previous sentences of the chapter, the difficulty dissolves. The sense of the assertions would be: Therefore, frequent [in the sense of hold on to or stay with] that-whichis-not, with the intent by means of which to observe its wonders; frequent that-which-is, with the intent by means of which to observe its boundary.

We may notice in this connection that the word chang ⷠ (frequent, constant) has been regarded by Qing philologists as a loan word for shang ⯂ (to uphold, honor, esteem, respect) in classical texts like the Classic of Poetry and the Guanzi, 31 an understanding further supported by historical phonology because both words were thought to be vocalized as ziang. If this move is adopted, the reading’s cogency would be strengthened further, for the sentence would read something like: “Uphold that-which-is-not, with the intent by means of which” etc. The reasonableness of such an interpretation is fourfold. First, it avoids the tendency, perhaps unintended, of so many translations in turning the sentences of each chapter into unrelated, individual utterances. Scrutiny of the Chinese text ought to persuade any attentive reader that the text’s playful and perplexing rhetoric is not achieved at the expense of coherent thought and argument altogether, virtues that the reading proposed here seeks to honor. Because the previous pair of sentences already asserts that

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wu and you perform a naming function of different aspects of the cosmos, the next pair adduces an argument of consequence—therefore (gu) do such and such. Second, the action proposed by this reading has nothing to do with desires or their lack thereof in the observer. The textual injunction is for the addressee to have constant regard for “nothing” and “something” so as to observe its wondrous manifestations and its reach or extent. The implied meaning of the word yu 㫚 in such a reading is purposive. Third, this reading brings out more distinctly the difference of what is to be observed with respect to you and wu, which justifies the use of the argumentative adverb gu (therefore). Having asserted that these two terms name “the beginning of heaven and earth” and “the mother of ten thousand things,” the text says, “therefore,” if you stay constantly with x or y, you will be able to observe the proper effects of x and y. The effects, however, are not the same, and, therefore, the observable takes on a different character expressed through the naunced diction of contrastive parallelism. If thatwhich-is-not or nothing (wu) names the beginning of heaven and earth, this is, in effect, another way of asserting (with chap. ) that “something [you] is begotten of nothing 㚱䓇㕤䃉.” The commonsense speculation on cosmogony in the West may perhaps best be summed up in Lear’s words of Shakespeare’s play: “Nothing will come of nothing” (..). Only the deity in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is capable of creatio ex nihilo, or making something out of nothing. Although the creative artist in later periods of the Western tradition is affirmed to have a capability that mimics the creative act of God, an affirmation interestingly echoed in the Chinese aphorism on falsehood and fiction no doubt derived from the DDJ—“Of nothing was born something” (wu zhong sheng you 䃉ᷕ䓇㚱)— Laozi’s use of the word miao (mystery, marvel) here in chapter  aptly depicts the character of self-contradictory genesis. The action of how something is born of nothing defies explanation. On the other hand, once something (you) is posited as “the mother of ten thousand things,” the result of this procreative process involves replication and multiplication. Hence what is to be observed is the jiao, the range and reach, the border or limit, of ever-expanding phenomena. Fourth and finally, this reading thus satisfies the grammatical and syntactical demands of the text by making wu and you the proper attributive referents of qi (its) within the structure of the self-same sentence. What wonders and boundary are we supposed to observe? They are none other than the very conditions or characteristics of that-which-is-not and thatwhich-is, of “nonbeing” and “being.” As the text goes on to specify one further linkage in the discussion, “These two things [i.e., wu and you]

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emerge similarly [i.e., from the same source of the Dao?] but they are named differently 㬌ℑ侭⎴↢侴䔘⎵.” In closing this section, I would like to point out finally that in an eighth-century Dunhuang text, the Upper Scroll of Laozi’s Scripture of the Way 忻䴻ᶲ, a further variant can be found for the two sentences under consideration.33 What is noteworthy in this manuscript version is that the two uses of the co-verb yi ẍ are completely removed by either the editor or the copyist, 34 such that the sentences read: ⷠ䃉㫚奨℞⥁炻ⷠ㚱㫚奨℞㙺.” Apart from the alteration of diction at the end so that a different jiao (brightness) provides the object of vision, what is significant in this construction is that the graph yu makes much better sense as an auxiliary verb—“so as to, in order to”—than as a noun meaning “desire.” If this view—no less than the lines themselves—is accepted, the syntactical pause will almost certainly have to come after wu and you, thereby effectively eliminating any reference to desire from the couplet. As in the case of all textual interpretation and translation, reading the DDJ makes it apparent that philology at the level of individual words attains its true worth only if it serves the cause of hermeneutics, because textual understanding occurs largely at the level of sentences or meaningful semantic units ( ju).

thematics The Dao In the course of the received text, the graph for dao occurs at least seventy-three times, but as in the case of some of the words discussed in the previous section, the meaning of the graph varies significantly in different contexts. And, as has already been observed, the familiar couplet opening chapter  readily displays the speaker’s rhetorical cunning in the use of punning or paronomasia to define the enigmatic cosmic principle called the Dao. Moreover, as I have argued at length, the pun of the first line can be understood in at least two ways, whereas the pun of the second line is most likely to be understood as “the name that can be named is not the constant name.” Because the dao and ming are nothing if not two of the most debated terms in the schools of thought emerging in the early Warring States period, the polemical overtones immediately audible may well have come from targeting a rival position like the Confucian doctrine of the rectification of names (zheng ming 㬋⎵). If the Master in the Analects . wants to pin down even a wine vessel with its “proper” appellation (gu 如), and if his later disciple Xunzi contends that wise men “instituted names

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to refer to objects ⇞⎵ẍ㊯⮎,”35 the speaker in the DDJ is far less certain about either the accuracy of linguistic names or the identity of the object of his speech. Nonetheless, he offers an arresting depiction: “There is a thing comminglingly formed, / Born before heaven and earth. / Silent and solitary, / Standing alone without altering, / Going around without tiring, / It can be the mother of the world.” The denomination he assigns to this “thing” (wu 䈑), however, is entirely arbitrary: “I, not knowing its name, / style it as Dao; reluctantly I give it the name of Great” (chap. ). In sharp contrast to the Confucian teaching on names, the Dao in such a view exists linguistically as an uncertain signifier. In the thought of the DDJ, the Dao is referentially elusive, for it points neither to any palpably physical or material object nor to a fixed mental concept. Despite its being designated as a “thing,” according to chapter , the Dao is “shadowy and indistinct” ⿵も both in itself and in its image. Because of its invisibility, inaudibility, and intangibility, the speaker heaps on it such descriptions as “evanescent ⣟,” “rarefied ⶴ,” and “minute ⽖.” Although “these three cannot be fathomed, they commingle to become one,” existing in such oxymorons as “the shapeless shape, the thingless image 䃉䉨ᷳ䉨炻䃉䈑ᷳ尉” (chap. ). Verbal ironies of this sort in both Laozi and Zhuangzi have in recent years tempted scholars to interpret them as virtually “protodeconstructionist” thinkers, a view this reader does not entirely endorse. Their reservations about language notwithstanding, neither of the Daoists seems to me to entertain a thoroughgoing skepticism in regard to the linguistic sign’s stability or capacity to signify, however limitedly. Rather, how these two thinkers use language is arguably the way a poet in many traditions uses language: keenly aware of the fugitive and feeble ephemerality of his or her medium, the poet nonetheless exploits it to the utmost to convey what seems impossible to communicate. Like the epic narration striving to make “darkness visible” in Milton’s Paradise Lost (.), Laozi’s metaphors seem intent on rendering absence presentable. Haphazard as this process may seem in constructing a “foundational” concept for his thought, the DDJ speaker is not at all shy in detailing all sorts of features and activities of the Dao. Because “the ten thousand things of the world are born from that-which-is, but that-which-is is born from that-which-is-not” (chap. ), wu and you thus both constitute the “nature” of the Dao. Appositely, therefore, it is the “Dao [in the creative process] that begets one, one begets two, two begets three, and three begets ten thousand things” (chap. ). In attributing (chap. ) a cosmic procreative and nurturing role for the Dao and Virtue (de), the DDJ echoes the punning definition in the Zhuangzi: “That by which things obtain [de] life is called

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Virtue [de] 䈑⼿ẍ䓇媪ᷳ⽟.”36 This understanding of the Dao as a force and principle of nature poses one most pointed contrast to the Confucian view. In the Analects, the word “Dao” also appears some seventy-seven times, but its meaning lies entirely in its sociopolitical significance and not in its generative agency, as may be seen from such following remarks: The superior man . . . swift in action but cautious in speech, would follow those possessive of the Way and become upright (.). Of the Way of the former kings, this [i.e., the alleged “harmony” wrought by rites] is the most beautiful (.). The superior man works at his foundation; when his foundation is set up and the Way is born. Being filial and obedient as a brother, is not this the foundation of a man’s character (.)? Those who are called great ministers would serve their ruler with the Way, but when that’s not possible they would desist (.).

Unlike this sort of emphasis rehearsed by Confucius and his disciples, the DDJ asserts that if man, heaven, and earth all model themselves after the Dao, what the Dao models itself after is the self-so (ziran 冒䃞) frequently translated as nature (chap. ). The semblance between the Dao and nature is what motivates the ten thousand things “to honor the Way and esteem Virtue ⮲忻侴屜⽟,” but this sense of deference differs from the Confucian imperative because, “not decreed by authority, it is made constant in nature ⣓卓ᷳ␥侴ⷠ冒䃞” (chap. ). As this crucial segment of the DDJ goes on to make clear, the character of such life-giving and nurture bestowed by nature’s Dao is its very “selflessness”: “It gives life but claims no ownership; / It acts without causing dependency; / It promotes growth without governance; / This is called Mysterious Virtue.” Namelessness in such a view implies the correlative rejection of a sense of self or identity. “The Dao is made constant in being nameless, or, the Dao [abides] constantly in the nameless 忻ⷠ䃉⎵” (chap. ), declares the text, and again, “The Dao lies hidden in the nameless 忻晙䃉⎵; / thus only the Dao is good at lending and bringing things to completion” (chap. ). Such a posture in turn makes for profound implications for both ethics and psychology: Thus the sage embraces the One to become the world’s mode: He has no view of his own, and therefore he understands; He does not affirm himself, and therefore he is known; He does not commend himself, and therefore he is meritorious;

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He does not boast, and therefore he endures. He alone is not contentious, and therefore the world can never contend with him. (chap. )

Whereas Zeng Shen 㚦⍫, one of Confucius’s chief disciples, frets about scrutinizing his body/self thrice daily ⏦㖍ᶱ䚩⏦幓) to determine his moral accomplishment (Analects .), the DDJ offers a strikingly different model: The reason why heaven and earth are long lasting Is that they do not give life to themselves. Therefore, they can live long. Thus the sage puts his body/self last, And his body/self comes first; Treats his body/self as extraneous, And his body/self endures. (chap. ).

It is this very principle of “not ever regarding itself as great 䳪ᶵ冒䁢⣏” that the Dao may be called great (chap. ) and “able to bring to completion its own greatness 傥ㆸ℞⣏” (chap. ). Because the sage’s pacific and non-selfcentered disposition (chap. ) is seen to be actually a source of immense power, the DDJ can declare that “the loftiest good is like water. / Water benefits ten thousand things without contention, / And it settles where most people despise. / Hence it comes nearest to the Way” (chap. ). The aquatic simile just cited, interestingly enough, reveals another significant difference between the DDJ and the rhetoric of a Confucian like Mencius, and the difference of linguistic construction indicates a deeper disparity in logic. For Mencius, the “natural” inclination of humans to pursue a benevolent ruler (A.) and practice the good (A.) is likened to water’s natural tendency. The passage in A., in fact, declares that “the matter of human nature being essentially good is like water always flowing downward Ṣ⿏ᷳ┬ḇ炻䋞㯜ᷳ⯙ᶳḇ.”37 Notice that the Mencian argument proceeds from an assertion about the fundamental goodness of human nature assumed to be indisputable, and it then elicits for its support through analogy a phenomenon of nature. The analogy, of course, is debatable on two counts. On the premise itself, his fellow Confucian Xunzi a little later would offer the most pointed challenge to the affirmation of the goodness of human nature. As for the concluding comparison, the seemingly prescient acknowledgement of gravity can still be disputed when one

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remembers that primitive agricultural technology, already in use in Mencius’s time, can force water to flow “upward” or “sideways” in a particular arrangement or circumstance. The last point, in fact, was implicit in Gaozi’s remark about how human nature was like water that could through “outlet” be made to “flow east and west” at will, an observation that drew the Mencian attempted rebuttal. The DDJ’s argument, on the other hand, does not start with human nature; its text by contrast abounds with praise for what it considers to be water’s semblance to supreme goodness ᶲ┬劍㯜. The defining “character” of water is precisely its manifest pliancy and weakness that no other thing under heaven can surpass ⣑ᶳ卓㝼⻙㕤㯜 (chap. ), and this virtue further translates metaphorically into its pacificity or noncontentiousess (bu zheng ᶵ䇕). In this view, from the observed phenomenon of how gravity affects the behavior of water (same acknowledgment as Mencius’s) emerges a different, but more compelling, ethical analogy: water’s willingness to take a lowly position, an excellent disposition that renders the river and the sea to become “king of the hundred valleys 㰇㴟ᷳ㇨ẍ傥䁢䘦察䌳侭” (chap. ), provides the basis for the argument that “the extremely pliant in the world will ride rough shod [D. C. Lau’s translation] over the hardest in the world ⣑ᶳᷳ军㝼楛榩⣑ᶳᷳ军➭” (chap. ). The physical attributes and propensity of water, thus distilled, provide the discursive model for the seeker of the Dao.

Reversion “Reversion is the Dao’s movement ⍵侭忻ᷳ≽” (chap. ), and this statement of the DDJ, already illustrated by the example of water just cited above, validates A. C. Graham’s conclusion that “the most characteristic gesture of Lao-tzu to overturn accepted descriptions is the reversal of priorities in chains of oppositions.”38 The gesture, in sum, represents an enlistment of what are perceived to be examples in natural phenomena to challenge directly certain cultural assumptions and ordering, the descriptions and priorities already valorized in human thought and society. If society tends to exalt “something,” “doing something,” “knowledge,” “male,” “big,” “strong,” “hard,” “straight,” and the like, the DDJ takes pains to foreground the opposites of “nothing,” “doing nothing,” “ignorance,” “female,” “small,” “weak,” “soft,” and “crooked.” The latter group of characteristics, however, represents more than mere oppositions, for they are ineluctably related to the former. One unavoidably implies the other because Laozi’s assumption is that such is the nature of the universe. Hence the text observes:

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What is about to shrink Will always stretch out; What is about to weaken Will always be strong; What is about to become useless Will always flourish; What is to be taken Will always give out. This is called minute discernment [ 㗗媪⽖㖶]. (chap. )



Although such an observation has been taken in both antiquity (e.g., Hanfeizi 杻朆⫸, chap. , in juan , a [SBBY ed.]) and by subsequent commentators as the stratagem of realpolitik, the text itself may be arguing first for the dialectical phenomenon of how the fullest manifestation of one quality or condition must imply its diametrical opposite. Thus Laozi never tires to emphasize that “the bright way seems dull; / The progressive way seems regressive” (chap. ). Again, “Great perfection seems incomplete, / But its use does not fail; / Great fullness seems drained, / But its use is inexhaustible” (chap. ). The use of the word “seems” (ruo 劍) in these declarations is noteworthy, for it suggests that neither natural phenomena nor cultural priorities are what they appear to be. To understand the “omen” 40 and persistence of reversion requires, as the text says, “minute discernment” (wei ming). The hiddenness of the Dao and the paradox of appearance—“The great square has no corners; / The great vessel is late in making” (chap. ); “Great skill seems clumsy; / Great eloquence seems tongue-tied” (chap. )—thus oblige the Daoist sage to be an astute hermeneutician. Not merely a transmitter, an editor, or an interpreter of texts, this sort of a sage must also possess the ability to read the subtle semiotics of nature and culture, to see what others do not see. It is for this reason as well that the sage himself also does not appear to be what he is, for his deportment and even his demeanor are utterly different from the rest of the people (chap. ). The meaning of reversion ( fan), however, is not exhausted by opposition or opposite. As the idea is discussed in the DDJ, it acquires further development when it becomes associated with such notions as reversal and return (gui, fu). When attempting to describe the invisible, inaudible, and ungraspable Dao in chapter , the text goes on to say: “Its upper part does not dazzle; / its lower part is not opaque. / Unending, it cannot be named; / Once more it returns to no thing ⽑㬠㕤䃉䈑.” The movement of the Dao thus

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operates in the mode of recursive cyclicity, because according to the logic here, that you which is begotten of wu (chap. ) will also eventually go back to “nothing.” Hence the crucial and grand declaration of chapter : The ten thousand things flourish together; And I use them to observe reversal [⏦ẍ奨⽑].

The irony of the declaration here is generated precisely by the paradox that when everything seems to be alive and thriving, the sage speaker—and he alone—is the one who sees through that very phenomenon to adduce an opposite condition. Thus he continues: Now, these things thrive in abundance, But each again returns to its roots. Return to roots is called stillness. It is called the reversal to destiny. Reversal to destiny is called constancy. Knowing constancy is called discernment. Not knowing constancy, one foolishly practices violence. Knowing constancy induces forbearance; Forbearance is impartial; Impartiality is king; Kingliness is heaven; Heaven is Dao;41 And Dao is perpetuity, Free from danger till the end of life.

A knowledge of such a constant process wherein all things must reverse from a state of “something” to a condition of “nothing” induces a concomitant reordering of preferences and values. If age is valorized in Confucius’s autobiographical account of his moral accomplishment based on advancing decades of cultivation—“at seventy I followed my heart’s desires without overstepping the line” (Analects .)—the DDJ, on the other hand, puts its recurrent emphasis on the condition of infancy or babyhood (chaps. , , , ). The praise for the abundantly virtuous naked child who is immune to attacks by poisonous insects or ferocious animals, however, has little to do with secret revelation of Christian messianism read into the text by later Jesuit exegetes. Although both the terms (naked child [chizi 崌⫸], baby or infant [ying’er ⫘⃺]) and the depiction of infancy had been appropriated by later Daoist adepts to represent the state of real-

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ized immortality in physiological alchemy, the DDJ text makes it apparent that what it cherishes in the infant is its characteristics of weakness (ruo ⻙), pacificity (he ␴), and suppleness or pliancy (rou 㝼). Because a living human is supple and only a dead one is stiff (chap. ), the infant betokens the supreme embodiment of life. “Things that mature will become old, / And this is called Not-Dao. / Not-Dao will perish early” (chap. ). Herein lies one intriguing but perhaps unintended irony of the DDJ: Laozi, or Master Old, so named by the legend that he was born with a head of white hair, is actually required by his teachings to exalt the youthful and the newborn.42

Rulership As has been intimated somewhat in the foregoing section already, the implications for ethics and psychology embedded in the DDJ betoken more than insights for personal self-cultivation. The text makes apparent that its concerns are deeply embedded in politics and the implicit critique of rival theories on society and government. Beginning with chapter  and going right to the end, the vocabulary of the DDJ alights repeatedly on such names as min 㮹 (people), zhi 㱣 (governance, to rule), baixing 䘦⥻ (literally, the names of a hundred clans, stock metaphor for the common folk), guo or guojia ⚳炻⚳⭞ (state), tianxia ⣑ᶳ (under heaven, stock metaphor for the political domain as known world, a term that had been used sometimes to argue for dating the DDJ or some parts thereof to postimperial times), wang 䌳 (king, kingly, kingliness, and to rule as king), chen 冋 (political subject), bing ℝ (soldiers, arms, troops, military affairs), shi ⢓ (troops), jun 幵 (troops, military units), and jun ⏃ (sovereign, lord, ruler). They are all terms receiving recurrent explication and debate among Warring States thinkers, and it is in comparison with them that Laozi’s thought attains its pithy and piquant distinctiveness. Whereas the Confucians, the Mohists, and the later Legalists have all advocated theories of governance that rely on policies and examples issued from the top down, the DDJ speaker is forthright in rejecting much of the leadership role of the ruling classes and places the proper initiatives as squarely coming from the common people.43 Laozi’s program of reversal may readily be seen in chapter , where he seeks to overturn the locative metaphors of the high, or upper (shang ᶲ), and the low (xia ᶳ) by revaluation: “Is not the way of heaven like stretching a bow? / The high is pressed down; / The low is raised; / The excessive it hurts, / And the deficient it mends.” Exactly opposite such heavenly generosity is “the way of humans Ṣᷳ忻” that

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“hurts the insufficient in order to serve the excessive ㎵ᶵ嵛侴⣱㚱检.” The injuries perpetrated by humans are traced (chap. ) specifically to heavy taxation, which causes popular starvation, to the ruling classes’ overcraving for life, which leads them to regard death lightly, and to their predilection for sheer intervention (you wei 㚱䁢), which eventually makes the governance of people difficult (min zhi nan zhi 㮹ᷳ暋㱣). This critique of those in power, however, does not mean that Laozi is advocating necessarily an incipient form of republicanism, let alone democracy,44 for in his thinking, there is still the Daoist sage who, like the ideal “kingly one” (wang zhe 䌳侭) championed by Mencius and Xunzi, is especially fit to govern because of certain qualities. For Laozi, “he who is possessive of the Dao” (you dao zhe 㚱忻侭) is the one who can “offer his surplus to the world” (chap. ). That is why the text observes in another place that “the sage resides above but the people are not burdened; / He leads in front but the people are not harmed” (chap. ). The DDJ’s focus on the needs and priorities of the common people thus complements the reversal of the sage-ruler’s role and values, while both themes derive apparently from the fundamental concept of the Dao and its relations with nature, or ziran. In this light we can understand not only the powerful critique that Laozi mounts against Confucian ethics and politics but also his ostensibly more extreme statements on the people. Familiar to students of classical Chinese thought, the Confucian emphasis on the personal rectitude of the ruler as virtue (de) is firmly and finally based on its suasive power to attract and mold his subjects (Analects .; .), causing his people to rush to his allegiance like water flowing downward (Mencius A.). The constitution of that virtue, too, is well known: filial piety (xiao ⬅), and benevolence (ren ṩ) concretely defined as primarily the love of parents and kin,45 and the regard for established rituals and ceremonies (li 䥖) amid both court and clan (Analects .; ., ; ., ; .; .). Such a notion of virtue as a capacity not only to practice the good but also by that very practice to provoke a similar response from those benefiting from such an action may underlie the paronomasic definition of “virtue is that which acquires or obtains” (de zhe de ye ⽟侭⼿ḇ). Analects . provides the classic proof text: “To govern by means of virtue may be compared with the Pole Star: it assumes its proper position [in the middle] and the various stars gather to pay homage.” These oft-quoted words of Confucius validate a modern scholar’s elucidation of the Confucian conception of de as a propensity to influence feeling and behavior, a “moral force” or potency that would elicit reciprocity.46 It may be gathered from the DDJ that its speaker teaches with full ac-

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knowledgment of virtue’s power, but the distinctive content that he gives to this notion, as we have seen, is based on his ideas about the Dao, heaven, and nature. The potency of the cosmos, in Laozi’s reading of nature, works differently since it is never acquisitive or interfering. Consider the difficult (possibly corrupt) sentences of chapter : “The person of loftiest virtue does not act but leaves nothing undone; / The person of lowest virtue acts but leaves something undone ᶲ⽟䁢侴䃉ẍ[ᶵ]䁢炻ᶳ⽟䁢ᷳ侴㚱ẍ[ᶵ]䁢.”47 Elsewhere (chap. ), Laozi says, “The action of the profoundest virtue / Is to follow only the Dao ⫼⽟ᷳ⭡䁢忻㗗⽆.” The way virtue (de) shares in the creative process of the Dao (“The Dao gives birth to it; / Virtue rears it 忻 䓇ᷳ炻⽟䔄ᷳ”) is precisely what earns it its name as “mysterious virtue” ( ⃫ ⽟), for it is an action that seeks no telos in “ownership 㚱, dependency ㊩, and governance ⭘” (chap. ). Unlike the authoritative stance—reciprocity ends in homage from others—predicated of virtue in the Confucian discourse, the virtue of the DDJ unites with the Dao in not undertaking any action of self-aggrandizement. This is the reason why “the naked babe is incomparable as the abundant embodiment of virtue ⏓⽟ᷳ⍂炻㭼㕤崌⫸,” its supremely pacific nature (he zhi zhi ␴ᷳ军) rendering it immune to the attack by poisonous insects and ferocious beasts (chap. ). The Great Way . . . Clothes and nurtures ten thousand things and refuses to be lord. Ever free of desire It may be named small; When ten thousand things submit to it And it still does not become lord, It may be named great. That it itself never seeks to be great Is why it can perfect its greatness. (chap. )

This utter repudiation of purposive action for itself on the part of the cosmic Dao thus obligates similar repudiation, including moral cultivation, by those in true union with the Dao. It helps explain the DDJ’s derogatory and highly striking remarks on the nonbenevolent nature of heaven and earth (chap. ), on the need to “abolish benevolence and discard rectitude” (chap. ), on how all rituals and ceremonies are but “the thinning of loyalty and trustworthiness, the beginning of chaos” (chap. ), on how a state not governed by cleverness is its blessing (chap. ), and how the people must be kept in a state of ignorance (chap. ) and desirelessness (chap. ).

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Above all, it serves to elucidate the central precept of no action or do nothing (wu wei 䃉䁢), a topic eliciting endless discussion since antiquity.48 “The Way abides in no action, but there is nothing it does not do 忻ⷠ䃉 䁢炻侴䃉ᶵ䁢” (chap. ). As a nearly identical construction, the clause wu wei er wu bu wei 䃉䁢侴䃉ᶵ䁢 (doing nothing but there is nothing it does not do) is repeated in chapters  and  of the received text, but it does not appear in the Mawangdui materials, possibly because of loss () and emendation (, ). Along with its antecedent four lines of chapter , however, the entire clause of six graphs is preserved intact in the B text of the Guodian manuscripts.49 The declaration in chapter  makes apparent that the concept of wu wei does not mean inaction or without activity, because the DDJ is replete with descriptions of what the Dao and the Daoist sage (sheng ren 俾Ṣ) can do and what they are doing constantly. Wang Bi’s annotation on the phrase, that it means “to obey nature 枮冒䃞ḇ,” has exerted a lasting influence on subsequent students of the text. Building on the interpretation by Fukunaga Mitsuiji (䤷㯠⃱⎠), Chen Guying argues that wu wei should be understood in the sense of wu wangwei 䃉⤬䁢, or do not act recklessly, unscrupulously, or even willfully, and the seemingly paradoxical result would be that everything gets done.50 If this line of thinking is deemed plausible, one can also begin to appreciate how the rhetoric of the DDJ continues to heighten the contrast between appearance and reality, between what seems to be “inaction” and “nonactivity” on the one hand and what the Dao and the sage are actually accomplishing. The parallel assertions are plain: The Dao constantly does nothing, And yet there is nothing it does not do. If lords and princes could hold fast to it, The ten thousand things would be transformed by itself. (chap. ) ... Thus the sage says, “I do nothing, And the people on their own will themselves.” (chap. )

The transformation of things (hua wu ⊾䈑) and the transformation of humans (hua ren ⊾Ṣ) are both cherished accomplishments in ancient Chinese thought, for the knowledge of these processes indicates, respec-

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tively, the power of creative nature and the efficacy of such cultural institutions as government and education. It is in regard to these two crucial fields of knowledge that the pre-Qin philosophers all attempted to advance their own teachings and propositions. Within this arena of discursive contestation, the DDJ’s injunction (chap. ) is bluntly oxymoronic—wei wu wei 䁢䃉䁢—but like other rhetorical ironies studding the text, this particular injunction may also be asserting a meaning entirely opposite of what seems like the surface meaning of “do no action.” Only by recalling the lessons learned in hints and inferences gleaned from other textual segments and filling in the argumentative blanks, so to speak, can one begin to comprehend the oddly non sequitur conclusion: “Then there is nothing that is not in order [ze wu bu zhi ⇯䃉ᶵ㱣].” It is this lesson of doing no reckless thing that helps us appreciate more deeply Laozi’s arresting ideal: That’s why the sage acts without presuming on his own ability, Achieves merit but refuses to dwell on it. Isn’t it because he has no desire to appear as a worthy? (chap. )

Laozi might not have been a revolutionary, but measured by even the values of more than , years after him, his thought is nothing if not extraordinary. At a time when officials of particular nations on earth are vying to vaunt the ability of their leadership or the merit of incomparable power even in the looming shadow of catastrophic conflict, the wisdom of the DDJ seems ever more compelling and urgent. notes 1. Hu Shi 傉怑, Zhongguo gudai zhexueshi ᷕ⚳⎌ẋ⒚⬠⎚ (1919; repr., Taipei: Commercial Press, 1961), pp. 43–63; Xu Fuguan ⼸⽑奨, “You guan Laozi qi ren qi shu di zai jiantao 㚱斄侩⫸℞Ṣ℞㚠䘬ℵ㩊妶,” in Zhongguo sixiangshi lunji xubian ᷕ⚳⿅゛⎚婾 普临䶐 (Taipei: Shibao wenhua, 1980), pp. 217–310. 2. Herrlee G. Creel, What Is Taoism? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), chap. 1; Lao Siguang ⊆⿅⃱, Xinbian Zhongguo zhexueshi 㕘䶐ᷕ⚳⒚⬠⎚ (Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1981), 1:205–252. For early twentieth-century investigations by the so-called revisionist historians associated with Gu Jiegang, see Gushi bian ⎌⎚彗, vol. 4, Zhuzi congkao 媠⫸⎊侫, ed. Luo Genze 伭㟡㽌 (Beijing: Beijing shuju, 1933), pp. 303–519. 3. William G. Boltz, “Lao tzu Tao te ching 侩⫸忻⽟䴻,” in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993), pp. 269–292. 4. Chen Guying, Lao Zhuang xinlun 侩匲㕘婾 (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1991). 5. Earliest reports and transcriptions of the texts can be found in “Changsha Mawa-

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6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

ngdui hanmu chutu Laozi yiben juanqian gu yishu shiwen 攟㱁楔䌳➮㻊⠻↢⛇˪侩 ⫸˫ḁ㛔⌟⇵⎌ἂ㚠慳㔯 ,” Wenwu 㔯䈑 (October 1974): 30–42; “Mawangdui hanmu chutu Laozi shiwen 楔䌳➮㻊⠻↢⛇˪侩⫸˫慳㔯,” Wenwu 㔯䈑 (November 1974): 8–20. For an early study in English of the texts, see Jan Yun-hua, “The Silk Manuscripts on Taoism,” Toung Pao 63, no. 1 (1977): 65–84. Robin D. S. Yates, Five Lost Classics: Tao, Huanglao, and Yin-yang in Han China (New York: Ballantine, 1997), pp. 3–5. Robert G. Hendricks, trans., Te-Tao Ching (New York: Modern Library, 1993), p. xviii. They are: D. C. Lau, trans., Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1963–1982); Victor Mair, Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu (New York: Bantam, 1990); and that by Robert Hendricks. In addition, there are two more recent translations of the received text undertaken with obvious knowledge of the new textual discoveries. See Moss Roberts, trans., Laozi Dao De Jing: The Book of the Way (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), and Philip J. Ivanhoe, trans., The Daodejing of Laozi (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002). Sarah Allan and Crispin Williams, eds., The Guodian Laozi: Procceedings of the International Conference, Dartmouth College, May 1998 (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2000), p. 120. Jingmen Museum, ed., Guodian Chumu zhujian 悕⸿㤂⠻䪡䯉 (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1998). I thank Professor Roger Ames for his generous gift of a copy of this book. See the summary in ibid., pp. 142–146. For a brief but illuminating discussion of the problem of sequentiality for the different sections 䪈 in different textual groups of the DDJ, see Rudolf G. Wagner, The Craft of a Chinese Commentator: Wang Bi on the “Laozi” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 58–59. For the most recent and an authoritative review of how the Guodian materials have affected scholarly dating of the Laozi and the text’s still perplexing process of formation, see Edward L. Shaughnessy, “The Guodian Manuscripts and Their Place in TwentiethCentury Historiography on the Laozi,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 65, no. 2 (December 2005): 417–458. “Laozi, Han Fei, liezhuan 侩⫸杻朆↿⁛,” in Sima Qian ⎠楔怟, Shiji ⎚姀, juan 63 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1969), 7:2139–2156. Bernhard Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa (Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1972), pp. 258–259, graph 980a. The Jin minister (dafu) Li Ke 䎮⃳, mentioned in the Zuozhuan ⶎ⁛, Duke Min 2, is written as Li Ke 㛶⃳ in the Lü shi chunqiu ⏪㮷㗍䥳, bk. 19, in the chapter on “Shiwei 怑⦩” or “Moderating Severity”; see John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel, The Annals of Lü Buwei: A Complete Translation and Study (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 494. Karlgren, Grammata Serica, pp. 258–259, graph 980a. See Shiji, juan 119, “Xunli liezhuan ⽒⎷↿⁛,” 4:3102, for the assertion: “㛶暊侭㗱㔯 ℔ᷳ䎮ḇ.” The most serious modern advocate of identifying Laozi with Taishi Dan seems to have been Luo Genze 伭㟡㽌, Zhuzi tansuo 媠⫸㍊䳊 (Hong Kong: Xuelin shudian, 1967), pp. 207–219; 220–256. Luo, in the same volume (pp. 257–278), provides an informative review of the history of critical investigation into dating and authorship

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18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

of the DDJ in traditional Chinese scholarship. For the most cogent critique of the Taishi Dan identity theory, see Gao Heng 檀Ṑ, Laozi zhenggu 侩⫸㬋姩 (Shanghai: Kaiming, 1940). Yu Peilin ἁ➡㜿, Xinyi Laozi duben 㕘嬗侩⫸嬨㛔 (Taipei: Sanmin, 1997), p. 8, citing from the Guliang Commentary, Duke Huan 5. Boltz, “Lao tzu,” p. 270. Shiji, juan 63, 7:2140. Sima repeats the assertion of Laozi as a contemporary of Confucius in the preface to “Biographies of Confucius’s Disciples ẚ⯤⻇⫸↿⁛,” in Shiji, juan 67, 7:2186. Knoblock and Riegel, Annals of Lü Buwei, p. 90. The compilation of the annals has been dated to 239 b.c. by Michael Carlson and Michael Loewe, Early Chinese Texts, p. 324. See also Knoblock and Riegel, Annals of Lü Buwei, pp. 27–35 for further discussion of the text’s formation. Wu Hung, The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 42–45. Xu, “You guan Laozi”; A. C. Graham, Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 115–117. Essentially the Wang Bi 䌳⻤ (226–249) version collated with the guben ⎌㛔 (old text) version of Fu Yi ‭⣽ (ca. 558–ca. 639 CE). The English rendering is taken from A. C. Graham, Chuang Tzu: The Seven Inner Chapters and Other Writings from the Book Chuang-tzu (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 57; the translation has been slightly modified. For the Chinese text, I use Huang Jinhong 湫拎扸, ed., Xinyi Zhuangzi duben 㕘嬗匲⫸嬨㛔, 13th ed. (1974; repr., Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1996), p. 64. See the astute observation by Chad Hansen: “Lao turns his analysis back on the discourse dao. The Daode Jing analyzes the way in which discourse daos shape and polish us and our behavior. However, what Confucius took as their value, Laozi treats as a tragedy. He supports this by a theory of the mechanisms by which language guides us. It explains in greater detail the current theory of how names contribute to the guidance inherent in daos and how they influence behavior. This is the explanation that undermines Mencius’ status-quo claim that his existing inclinations are natural or innate” (A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], pp. 209–210). The essay “Jishan Shuyuan Zunjingge ji 䧥Ⱉ㚠昊⮲䴻敋姀” makes constant reference to the Six Classics (liu jing), and dates them to 1525. See Wang Wenchenggong quan shu 䌳㔯ㆸ℔ℐ㚠, 14 ce, 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shangwu, 1936), 4th ce: 47–48. A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1989), p. 219. For an illuminating discussion of this pair of terms, see “‘Being’ in Western Philosophy Compared with shih-fei and yu-wu in Chinese Philosophy,” in Graham, Studies in Chinese Philosophy, pp. 322–359. Graham is scrupulous in avoiding the diction of ontology when discussing and translating pre-Qin texts. On the other hand, Rudolf Wagner builds on the pioneering studies of Wei-Jin thought and language philosophy by Tang Yongtong 㸗䓐⼌ to argue for the peculiar contribution of Wang Bi’s commentary as precisely the elicitation of ontological implications in Laozi’s language. See Rudolf G. Wagner, Language, Ontology, and Political Philosophy in China: Wang Bi’s Scholarly Explorations of the Dark (Xuanxue) (Albany: State University of New York Press,

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31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

2003), esp. chaps. 1 and 2. For a critique of Wang’s approach from the point of view of a modern Daoist scholar, see Kristofer Schipper, Le corps Taoïste (Paris: Fayard, 1982), pp. 247–249. See the gloss in the Hanyu da cidian 㻊婆⣏娆℠ (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Company, 1987), 3:733. Karlgren, Grammata Serica, pp. 190–191, graphs 725a, 725e. See part of the spread-out scroll on which is produced a highly legible reproduction of the first four chapters of the DDJ in Stephen Little and Shawn Eichman, eds., Taoism and the Arts of China (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, in association with the University of California Press, 2000), p. 118. The scroll is identified as Pelliot Chinois 2584, part of the collection housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. I use the term co-verb as it is defined and discussed in Edwin G. Pulleyblank, Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995), pp. 47–50. Yang Jialuo 㣲⭞榙, ed., Xunzi jijie 勨⫸普妋 (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1987), juan 16, chap. 22, p. 276; John Knoblock, Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 3:129. Huang, Xinyi Zhuangzi duben, p. 156. The Chinese text of Mencius is cited from D. C. Lau, trans., Mencius (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1984), 2:222. Graham, Disputers of the Tao, p. 223. My translation, excepting the last line, follows Chen Guying, Laozi zhuyi ji pingjie 侩⫸㲐嬗⍲姽ṳ (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1984), pp. 205–208. Chen uses the term zhengzhao ⽝⃮ to translate ming 㖶 (ibid., p. 206), which certainly highlights the hermeneutical implications of the graph, but the DDJ (chap. 52), echoing its associative pairing of the word with wei (minute), defines ming as “to see the small 夳⮷㚘㖶.” This and the previous clause may be an ironic, nearly verbatim, echo of the Zuozhuan, Duke Xuan 4: “The sovereign, he is Heaven. Can one flee from Heaven ⏃⣑ ḇ炻⣑⎗徫᷶?” For this charming aspect of Laozi’s physique at the time of his birth and other mythological details of his person, the account is traceable to the Shenxian zhuan 䤆ẁ⁛, by the third-century Daoist writer Ge Hong 吃㳒 (283–343). We now have a magnificent translation and critical study of this important text in Robert Ford Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). See pp. 194–211 for the hagiography of Laozi. On this point, see Xiao Gongquan 唕℔㪲, Zhongguo zhengzhi sixiang shi ᷕ⚳㓧㱣⿅ ゛⎚ (Taipei: Zhongguo wenhua xueyuan chubanshe, 1980), 1:168–171. Hu Shi calls Laozi’s thinking “a revolutionary political philosophy” because of its antiestablishment attitude (Zhongguo gudai zhexueshi, pp. 46–49). The point is that Laozi’s rhetoric is equally critical toward unnamed rival thinkers whose teachings, in his judgment, continue to support contemporary values and institutions. It is important to note that although Confucius defines benevolence famously as “to love all” and “to love people” (Analects 1.6; 12.22), the priority of kinship is never far from his thinking. Thus “when the gentleman is devoted to his parents, the common people will be moved to benevolence” (8.2). See also Doctrine of the Mean 20: “Benevolence is the characteristically human, but loving one’s parents is the

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46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

greatest [expression] thereof (ren zhe ren ye, qin qin wei da ṩ侭Ṣḇ炻奒奒䁢⣏).” This definition is repeated often, including that given in the first dictionary, Shuowen. David S. Nivison, The Ways of Confucianism: Investigations in Chinese Philosophy, ed. Bryan W. Van Norden (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1996), pp. 25–26. My translation follows D. C. Lau’s emended collation of the received text with the Mawangdui B text. See Lau, Tao Te Ching, pp. 56–57. The limited space of this essay does not permit any detailed tracking of this term’s history of interpretation. I cite some notable examples from the works of Western scholarship during the last half century or so. Consistent with his long-held and asserted thesis of considering Daoist thinking as a form of protoscientific discourse, Joseph Needham contrasts the word wei 䁢炻ġ‥ (the latter favored by Xunzi) with wu wei. He translates the first two words as “action” or “action contrary to nature” that is typical of the intervention in nature and culture advocated by the Confucians, whereas wu wei of the Daoists signifies for Needham “nonaction” or “action not contrary to nature.” See Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 2: 68–71; 562–564. For a cogent discussion of wu wei (variously translated as “nonaction,” “doing nothing,” and “acting naturally”) in relation to the different principal discourses on rulership in the Warring States, see Roger Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1983), pp. 28–64. For a recent study that seeks to relate the term to the Confucian and Daoist agenda of moral self-cultivation, see Edward Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Jingmen Museum, Guodian, p. 118. Chen, Laozi zhuyi, pp. 67–70; Chen, Lao Zhuang xinlun, pp. 33–34. Chen’s citation of Fukunaga is taken from a Chinese translation (by Chen Guanxue 昛ⅈ⬠) of the Japanese scholar’s book on Laozi.

 13  ALTERED ACCENTS a comparative view of liberal education In Memoriam: Edward Shils

P

resident tse, Dean Hiebert, faculty and student colleagues, distinguished guests and friends, it is a distinct pleasure for me to address you this afternoon on one of these occasions that commemorate the fortieth anniversary of an institution that has done so much to educate the youth of Hong Kong. I am honored to be one of the few speakers selected from abroad to share in the university’s celebrations and generous hospitality. My particular gratification as a native son of Hong Kong, if I may be permitted to speak more personally, stems from another anniversary that parallels that of the university, for it was exactly forty years ago when I bade farewell to my family home located also in Kowloon Tong ( York Road, to be precise) to sail to America for my college and university education. Even though I have never been associated with Hong Kong Baptist University, your kind invitation has made it possible for me to experience, with peculiar poignancy, the joy of homecoming. On such an emotionally charged occasion as this one, it is also difficult for someone like myself not to mention the famous poem of the eighthcentury Tang poet He Zhizhang 屨䞍䪈, for his quatrain about “An Occasional Composition on Returning Home [Huixiang ou shu ⚆悱„㚠]” has been committed to memory by so many Chinese since their childhood and quoted so many times down through the ages, that it has become virtually a paradigmatic representation of the wish and feel of homecoming. The first two lines of that familiar poem, you may recall, go something like this:

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In youth I left home; agéd I return’d— My speech unaltered but my hairs have thinned.

The phrase I translated as “my speech” refers, of course, actually to the diction and manner of the poetic speaker, for xiangyin 悱枛, literally, hometown accent, embraces most likely both the stylistic idiom and the tonal accuracy of a particular dialect, a phenomenon of language that clearly indicates the linguistic regionalism obtaining not merely in medieval China but already even in high antiquity. By so describing his condition, the Tang poet is thus making more than a simple autobiographical reference. These two lines of poetry, which have elicited countless citation and repetition over the centuries, garner their sympathetic reception precisely because they bring to pithy expression an ideal both perennially affirmed and desired by the Chinese people. Although nature may change with the passing of time, by the telling modification of so intimate a personal possession as one’s own physical features (the thinning of hair), that person’s cultural acquisition—the hometown accent—somehow remains unchanged. Human learning, in other words, is affirmed to have triumphed over biology and genetics. In making such an observation about the poem, I am not suggesting that He Zhizhang wrote with consciousness of the distinction between culture and nature, categories dear to modern learning and based on the Western construction of the human sciences that started with fifth-century Athens. Most probably the Chinese poet was not even aware of our modern assumption that language as a particular form of speech is not endowed by birth but by labor. I am, however, saying that a modern reading of this Tang poem cannot be so inattentive to its ironic implications. Without questioning the veracity of the poet’s assertion about himself, I must raise the question nonetheless when I appropriate these poetic lines to gloss my current experience: how much of this assertion is applicable to a reader like myself? In my case, at least, I am only too conscious of the disparity between my own condition and the one affirmed in He Zhizhang’s verse. In the many times I have revisited Hong Kong since my departure in , I have been made increasingly aware of how my accents have steadily altered. Of course, I have not forgotten how to speak Cantonese, for I still use the language daily at home, as well as with students and visiting kin. Sharpeared Hong Kong friends and relatives, however, have spoken more than once over the years about the subtle shifts of elocution, the occasionally garbled syntax and stilted vocabulary that they readily detect in my speech.

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They have repeatedly laughed at my ignorance of the vast amount of newly invented idioms that constantly measure the vitality of Cantonese as a language. My homecoming, in other words, cannot avoid or conceal the reality of some conspicuously “altered accents,” but this phrase, which will serve as the focalizing metaphor of my talk, refers to much more than changes in speech patterns and habits. As someone who has spent the last forty years abroad, first as a student and then as a university teacher, it would be absurd for me to assert that I have not changed in other important respects such as my knowledge, my intellectual outlook, my emotional predilections, my system of values—in sum, the totality of my cultural identity. It is only with such open acknowledgment of personal alteration that I dare speak at all on the subject of my lecture, which is liberal education, because the very subject itself already bears the stamp of an “altered accent.”

the western model It is superfluous for me to remind my present audience that the term “liberal education” summons immediately into view the culture of ancient Greece, for the aims, processes, and materials of teaching both the young and the adult segments of the people have appeared as some of the most important and enduring themes of virtually all of their extant literatures. From Homeric poetry and the great dramas of the tragedians, through the reflective debates of the sophists and the academic philosophers, to the quest for historical truths in Thucydides and Herodotus, the consistent concern of the Greeks was for the exaltation of the ideal of aristocratic excellence (aretē), the formation of the perfection of mind and body (kalokagathia) that constitutes the program and goal of all Greek paideia, a word that can be translated as both education and culture.1 Those familiar with the ideas and life of Plato will readily recall why and how he was credited with having laid the foundation for so many aspects of the long, complex, pluralistic, and multilingual tradition that we now call Western culture. In many of his dialogues, but especially in The Republic and The Laws, the Platonic Socrates has discussed, repeatedly and intensely, the necessity, goal, and content of a curriculum that would serve the needs of general, public education, even as he disputes rivaling educational philosophy such as that of Protagoras. As Plato made clear in his analysis, only an educated citizenry could bring into existence and sustain an ideal city-state such as he had envisioned. For Plato, the task of educating the Athenian citizens had to be understood as nothing less than the inculcation of moral virtues,

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the equipment of service to society and state, and the transmission of right knowledge and culture. So stated, this summary of Platonic ideals in education may seem to bear remarkable resemblance already to the thinking of Classical and Neo-Confucianism, at least as interpreted by the contemporary scholar Tu Wei-ming.2 In making this last observation, I do not mean thereby to suggest that there is more similarity than difference in the traditions of China and the West. The reference underscores only the specific intent of my talk as one of comparison. Plato’s most famous pupil, Aristotle, had more disagreement with his illustrious mentor than agreement in terms of their total philosophies, but in the matter of education, the student’s discourse follows and develops, rather than refutes and re-formulates. Aristotle was certainly one of the early Greek thinkers to whom the term “liberal education” must directly be traced. In book  of his Politics, he speaks specifically of liberal arts or occupations (eleutheron ergon), stating that the freeman, who is the sole beneficiary of his curriculum, should learn only to a certain degree some of those liberal arts. With a further stipulation that may jar our modern ears, Aristotle says that “all paid employments,” like the mechanical arts, tend to degrade the mind, and therefore they should not be the object of education. Aristotle’s remarks reveal that his conception of liberal education reflects directly the fundamental assumptions and conditions of Athenian society. “Liberal” in his usage has a double meaning. First, with respect to content and aim, the training should not be directed toward the end of utility or profit, and this belief of his reaffirms his teacher, Plato’s, opposition to the Protagorean and sophist emphasis of technological education in their philosophy. Liberal education, in this understanding, is not concerned with the development of specialized skills, products, and knowledge for which one may be paid. It is not, in this sense, vocational training, as we might call it today, for the word Aristotle uses to indicate what he means by the illiberal arts, banausos, often translated as either “mechanical” or “vulgar,” points to something associated with the handicraft of artisans. With respect to the student, therefore, the second meaning of liberal education envisioned by Aristotle concerns a specific social class, the male Athenian citizen, who by definition is a freeman. Such a person has the presumed status and means to lead a mode of existence that, in Aristotle’s opinion, is the requisite context for the balanced quest for intellectual and moral excellence. Liberal education is ultimately linked with politics, since the Aristotelian state rests on the foundation of this class of citizenry. He who

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wants to pursue the free arts must be free to do so, unfettered by social or economic constraints. On such a premise the philosopher can claim that this is “the sort of education in which parents should train their sons, not as being useful or necessary, but because it is liberal or noble” (Politics .a). To those of us sitting in this hall today and living in an inescapable environment of frenetic commercialism and agonistic industrialism— inescapable, because the very survival of our own society often directly depends upon such activities—Aristotle’s emphasis on leisure as a necessary context for serious inquiry may sound rather quaint, impractical, and outdated. His view of the matter may well have led to the caricaturing statement later in Cicero, who once wrote: “He does not seem to me a free man who does not sometimes do nothing,”3 a remark that may, in turn, conjure up visions of those silly, prankish, and know-nothing Oxbridge graduates of Britain’s aristocracy that populate P. G. Wodehouse’s novels. A comic satire of such ilk, however, tells only part of the story, for no serious thinker about the fundamental task and cost of university education today can afford to ignore the germinal insight of this ancient philosopher. At a symposium organized to celebrate the University of Chicago’s centennial, it was no surprise to those present when one speaker flatly declared that the university’s fulfillment of its essential task directly requires “a publicly acknowledged area of disciplined leisure.” 4 Before we dismiss Aristotle outright, therefore, we may do well to ponder a bit further his argument for this type of education and thereby to understand its powerful persistence in the lengthy course of Western civilization. Consistent with the overall emphasis of his thinking, Aristotle’s theory of education rests on the distinction between ends and means. If in the very first sentence of his Metaphysics he avers that “all men by nature desire to know,” he is also quick to insist throughout his philosophical system that there are different kinds of knowledge to satisfy different kinds of desire. The distinction of ends, when brought to bear on his educational philosophy, provides the fundamental theoretical justification for liberal education, because the separation from such other ends as utility and profit steers us to contemplate whether there is a knowledge that is an end in itself, and beyond which there is no other purpose or telos. The Nicomachean Ethics provides a succinct articulation of Aristotle’s way of reasoning: If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not

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choose everything for the sake of something else . . . clearly this [end] must be the good and the chief good. (nicomachean ethics .a)

The pursuit of liberal learning can thus be called a chief good in education, not because other branches of skill or knowledge are not good, but because the other branches have different goals or objects. As examples of the many ends of various sciences, Aristotle in the Ethics cites health for medical art, vessels for shipbuilding, victory for military strategy, and wealth for economics. In his view of the matter, however, only certain arts can educate the freeman as he is, one “fit . . . for the practice or exercise of excellence” (Politics ). Across the centuries, John Henry Newman squarely identified this type of learning as “the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake,” which, for him, constitutes precisely the defining aim of liberal education (The Idea of a University, I.v). Liberal education concerns a form of knowledge that, in Newman’s own words, “is, not merely a means to something beyond it, or the preliminary of certain arts into which it naturally resolves, but an end sufficient to rest in and to pursue for its own sake” (I.v.). If our skepticism about the viability of such a view of education lingers on the question of whether it is formulated on too arbitrary a classification of knowledge, we should remember that Aristotle’s profoundly political concern is what underpins his reflections on education. From his knowledge of the history of Greek civilization, his experience in civic and academic life, and perhaps most of all, his tutelage of Alexander and other Greek leaders, Aristotle knows that his vision of the cherished polis depends on an educated citizenry. From Plato he has already learned the crucial lesson that there are no guardians above the guardians in the ideal republic. For the state to flourish, the citizens must work, in the sense that they must function properly. For that to happen, the constituent members of the body politic must be trained to live, to think, and to exercise a peculiar set of virtues that will ensure the state’s continuance and prosperity. The content of Aristotle’s proposed curriculum—reading and writing, gymnastics, music, and possibly drawing—may strike the modern reader as no more than grade school pedagogy, which, in fact, it was. But we should not allow its elementary character to obscure the philosopher’s basic point, which is the development of both mind and body of the Greek citizen. Such humble subjects and skills as he had enumerated were meant to inculcate in the young student those peculiar intellectual and moral virtues— rationality, discipline, judgment, and the capacity for continuous inquiry5— that are absolutely necessary for his effective participation in the life of the

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state. Liberal education liberates because, in theory at least, it enables the freeman to remain free, since the continuity of his society depends directly on the continuous exercise of his trained faculties, a disposition of mind and habit of body that imprint his character.

the historical development These two concepts from Aristotle—knowledge for its own sake and knowledge that sustains a particular conception of social community— provided a powerful impetus for the development of Western education, and they led ultimately to the founding of the modern research university. Venerating as they did Greek ideals and institutions, the Roman intelligentsia appropriated a great deal from Greek paideia for the structure and curricular content of their governmental schools. The arrival of Christianity and the gradual development of the church into an independent and powerful institution exerted further impact on education, for the medieval schools, though originally an apparatus of the church, also performed the important though ironic function of preserving and transmitting pagan learning during the Middle Ages. Eventually, however, the educational enterprise thus emerging in the early Renaissance became one of the three great European social institutions—the church (sacerdotum), the state (imperium), and the university (studium)—representing, respectively, the religious, the political, and the intellectual spheres of life.6 The content of the university’s curriculum, by its inclusion of special disciplines such as law, theology, and medicine (studium), and the structures designed to explore interdisciplinary issues (studium generale), again betokened a development that would have large consequences. Retrospectively, the curriculum harks back to classical antiquity, to the subjects such as those discussed by Plato and Aristotle, and makes apparent their influence on the formation of the trivium and quadrivium of the medieval liberal arts. Prospectively, it looks forward to the formulation of liberal education through the growing emphasis on core, on canon, and on standardized concentrations in the arts and sciences such as we encounter in British and American institutions of our own time. Although the European university, in this context, was undeniably a stepchild of both church and state, it is important for us to note at this juncture that it has enjoyed, from its inception, a degree of autonomy not known and not to be expected in the historical context of East Asia. The reason for that autonomy can be traced to the mission of the university as well as to the methods of inquiry. As it emerged from twelfth-

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century Europe and attained its first distinctive form at Bologna and at Paris, the European university’s founding mission has always been thought to be the discovery of fundamental knowledge. Knowledge in this sense is understood as the validation, extension, and critique of the traditional view of the world. Along with this aim comes the realization that such a quest for knowledge entails an immense cost in both sociopolitical and economic terms, because this kind of discovery can be made only by trained personnel in a particular setting of relative order and stability—in other words, in an “area of disciplined leisure.” In addition to educating persons devoted to the pursuit of a particular discipline or subject, the university in its second mission must, therefore, also teach people how to engage in the practical professions (the earliest being law, medicine, and theology), or in other words, how to manage social and political problems in an intellectually responsible manner. Underlying and uniting both these programs is the conviction that the theoretical and practical sciences are to be studied only through a system of cognitive and procedural rationality. This insistence on rational inquiry in every aspect of research and instruction, blossoming as an Enlightenment ideal, came to be the irrevocable principle of operation for the modern Western university for another good reason. If the basic drive for knowledge that justifies the university’s existence is Faustian in its intensity and scope—given to attain dominion that, in the words of Marlowe’s hero, “stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man,” or aspiring with Goethe’s protagonist to “learn what, deep within it, / binds the universe together”—that knowledge itself no less than the method of its acquisition is premised on neither the private, illusory realm of magic nor the autocratic authoritarianism of either church or state. Critical rationality, in this sense, is unabashedly secular and republican because it demands both public and democratic presuppositions in its application and use. George Eliot may say of her hero Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch that “he dreams footnotes,” but as a contemporary scholar has observed, “the footnote as an artifact is the very opposite of the dream; it is eminently public” because it is communicable and thus available for assessment and dispute. “The footnote invites reenactment and points beyond itself, and beyond the subject, to a source or text or body of data that can be shared and can presumably be reinterpreted through a challenge to the interpretation that has been offered.” 7 This is the reason why the eminent Chinese physicist and political dissenter Fang Lizhi can assert linkage between democratic praxis and the protocol of scholarship in his own field, for the principles of free communication and of public verifiability are as fundamental to the advancement of physics as they are to the

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operation of higher education. An agent of the state can no more tell Fang what and how to publish on celestial mechanics than the Pope can dictate to Copernicus or Galileo the structural movement of the universe.8

the chinese legacy How does such a view of knowledge and education comport with Chinese culture, which has been distinguished across so many centuries by its continuous desire to foster literacy and education? Many Chinese thinkers, of varying background and experience of the West, have pondered such a question during the last two centuries. For example, Zhang Boxi ⻝ỗ䅁 (–), the Qing educator and architect of China’s new school system at the beginning of this century, in his memorial of August , , to Emperor Guangxu ⃱䵺, compares the traditional Chinese system of education with the European model. He found that the two traditions had more similarities than differences, for he believed that Western subjects such as law, mathematics, and medicine taught in the late medieval and early Renaissance universities were comparable to certain subjects taught in the governmental schools of the Tang and Song dynasties. Zhang had further observed that the specialized curricula with fixed terms of study proposed by Song reformers, like Sima Guang and Zhu Xi, are again comparable to the Western segregation of studies according to different subjects and disciplines. In terms of the structure of different levels of education, Zhang even attempted to match the legendary four-tiered school system of preimperial China—allegedly family schools, schools for communities of , schools for communities of ,, and an advanced institution at the top for whole principalities—with such institutions of the West as the kindergarten, primary school, middle school, and the university. Divergence between China and the West on education, in Zhang’s view, was a late historical development. “The whole point of educational reform in ,” as Alexander Woodside has pointed out recently, “was [for Zhang] to devise a modern facsimile of the ancient school system, so that structures of education in China and the West would again resemble each other.” 9 Whether the traditional Chinese school systems did, in fact, and ought to resemble Western patterns are two separate and equally complex questions that my presentation this afternoon cannot hope to address adequately, let alone resolve. For the remainder of my talk, I can only lift up what seem in the present context to be the most noteworthy issues for comparative analysis and conclude with some personal observations.

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In history and in legend, China’s obsessive involvement with education manifests itself first of all in “a myth of a preimperial golden age of education.”10 In a text such as the Zhouli ␐䥖, the section on terrestrial offices (diguan situ ⛘⭀⎠⼺) details a massive and comprehensive system of schools and teaching officials for the instruction of the populace as citizens. The organizing principle for both the agents and content of instruction, as recorded in this early Han document, appears to be based squarely on the institutional structures of state, county, municipal, and local government. If juan  of the Zhouli is to be believed, the bureaucratic officials at various levels of government also double as educators, and the aim and instrument of their instructional efforts focus relentlessly and prescriptively on the issues of governance. As the first section of the juan makes clear, the established patterns of rites and rituals that form the government’s curriculum are all designed to modify the people’s behavior by instilling desirable social and political virtues. “Teaching about reverence with the rites of sacrifice will make the people not indifferent,” declares the text, “and teaching about deference with the rites of Yang will make the people desist from strife” (Zhouli .b [SBBY ed.]), and so forth, until twelve types of teaching and their twelve purposes are all enumerated. The modern reader of this ancient text today may be far less inclined than eighteenth-century Chinese literati, or even early republican educational theorists, to give credence to this idealized model of preimperial Chinese education. What we must acknowledge, however, is that such a model has persisted in its appeal and influence in the Chinese consciousness from high antiquity because it embodies the perennially affirmed unity between government (zheng 㓧) and teaching ( jiao 㔁). That unity, as Alexander Woodside has astutely observed, is basically “alien to the tradition in the Christian West of dividing spiritual and temporal power,” but in the Chinese context it implies “the symbiotic equality of schooling with all other government activities.”11 A symbiosis of such a nature, in fact, has always existed in the long course of Chinese history, and it is one of the most distinctive characteristics of the Chinese educational tradition. Whereas Western history has in various moments struggled to find the ideal balance between state and private sponsorship of education, and this struggle intensifies, particularly in our time, in the face of the ever-mounting cost of both early and higher education, the Chinese from the time of the Han to the present have never seemed to doubt the governmental obligation to be involved in such a process. However, the preponderant role of government in all phases of

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education not only skews the process by subjecting it to the intervention of the ruling ideology of the state,12 but such an intervention itself also necessarily defines and limits the nature and goal of education. In the Chinese history of education, the state’s ruling ideology reveals itself both in stipulating service to the state as the supreme goal of knowledge and in the recruitment and training of personnel for this enterprise. The practice of governmental solicitation and superintendence certainly began as early as the Han period. If such recorded edicts of Emperor Gaozu 檀䣾 ( b.c.), Wendi 㔯ⷅ ( b.c.), and Wudi 㬎ⷅ (, ,  b.c.), for example, expressly declared an imperial intention of locating worthies for the court, the repeated memorials submitted by such erudite ministers as Jia Shan 屰Ⱉ, Jia Yi 屰婤, Lu Jia 映屰, and Chao Cuo 溴拗 all articulated the reciprocal ideal that learning, ultimately, must be measured in terms of the successful establishment of order and permanence for the empire. Within this line of development, it is not surprising that a person who was reputed to have done so much in making Confucianism a virtual state orthodoxy as Dong Zhongshu 吋ẚ冺 (ca. – b.c.) also contributed decisively to the formation of the state’s educational philosophy. His consultative memorial to Han Wudi in  b.c. specifically urges the emperor “to revive the taixue and hire enlightened teachers so as to support the scholars throughout the empire,” for in his view, “educational transformation [jiaohua 㔁⊾]” must be “the supreme responsibility [da wu ⣏⊁]” of both ruler and subjects (Hanshu 㻊㚠, ). This model of education—state-initiated, state-defined, and statefinanced—has not only remained a fundamental paradigm in Chinese history down to the present century,13 but it has also functioned to shape and synthesize the distinctive ideal in Chinese culture that posits an inseparable linkage between knowledge and morality, between politics and ethics. That was the undeniable emphasis of the person whom Chinese down through the ages have honored as the exemplary teacher, Confucius himself. Whatever we may think of him as a private teacher, and however we may assess today the tenets of his teaching, we know that he was not primarily concerned with promoting knowledge for its own sake, nor certain branches of knowledge—for example, agriculture, medicine, or language—that may have ramifications beyond the immediate interest of the state. The preserved portrait we have of him, as with other thinkers both contemporary with and subsequent to him in the Warring States period, is as someone to whom the ruling nobility—Duke X or Y—came frequently and repeatedly to inquire about the principles of governance (wen zheng ⓷㓧). That Confucius was quite inept, in fact, in what we might

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call today scientific and practical knowledge may be gathered from the episode in the Analects (.) when an old man chided Zilu, one of the Master’s favored disciples, with the observation: “You seem neither to have toiled with your limbs nor to be able to tell one kind of grain from another. Who may your Master be?” Those persons, past or present, who favor Confucianism would, of course, not be troubled by this sarcastic remark, for the affairs of state in their view would be much more important than sturdy limbs or a discriminating knowledge of grain. Confucius, so they argue, had trained instead his steadfast attention on the Dao and how its operative efficacy in the state (bang 恎) might be tied to his personal, moral destiny. A modern Confucian advocate like Harvard’s Tu Wei-ming can, in fact, seek to update such an ancient discourse by contending that the Confucian core idea of the Dao “addresses the question of the ultimate meaning of human existence” and thus represents a sort of “transcendental breakthrough” in Confucian humanism.14 Against the modernistic veneer of such an interpretation, however, I should point out that Dong Zhongshu in his memorial offers a far more mundane definition. “The Dao,” he says, “is the road leading to proper governance.” For a person to enlarge the Dao, as Confucius once asserted, would mean that the educational content and process, the curriculum and pedagogy, must fulfill the Dao’s fundamental task of political transformation, for in the last Confucian analysis, the most learned person must also be the most moral citizen.

conclusion This last observation may conveniently bring me back to ancient Greece, for on the surface of the matter, did not the Platonic Socrates also advocate as well that knowledge is a form of virtue? An affirmative answer to this question, however, should not be permitted to obscure the basic divergence of thought and practice between the Greek and Chinese traditions. Although Plato and his Academy also advocated service to the state as one of education’s goals and functions, it is almost a certainty to classicists of our time that that Athenian institution was privately directed and financed. The city-state had little say in its operation or curriculum. Down through the lengthy course of Western civilization, as I mentioned earlier, the development of the academy in the form of the secular, research university has always maintained a paradoxical relation to its immediate, environing society. Despite the enormous social and political impact a university may generate, its prosperity and proper functioning depend

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directly on the degree of intellectual, financial, and administrative independence it can enjoy as an institution. Furthermore, the tradition of liberal education stemming from Aristotelian thought regards the process and product of learning as grounded upon the supreme good of individual self-fulfillment, just as a particular form of government may be said to represent the best institution for meeting the political needs of the individual citizen. In such a philosophical model, the intellectual virtues to be upheld, cultivated, and transmitted are premised upon their value for the discrete individual quite apart from his or her classification as a member of the body politic. This crucial point is in sharp contrast to traditional Chinese social thought, wherein political and moral virtues unite as an indivisible homology in which the communal and collective take precedence over the individual. The independent exercise of the mind and rational inquiry, from this Chinese perspective, can become as undesirable as dissent in the household or in the state. Whether the Western conception and model of learning are applicable within an East Asian context, and particularly in a locale such as Hong Kong, is a question that cannot be swiftly and simply resolved not only because it is a complex question, but also because part of that very complexity is produced by the uncertainty of this city’s social and political prospects after . Much as many Chinese resisted in this century the call for total Westernization (quan pan xi hua ℐ䚌大⊾) spawned by the May Fourth Movement, a few Asian leaders today are arguing that some Western institutions, including political ones, are by definition and custom ill-fitting for Eastern consumption. They are right up to a point, of course, for no one today would advocate with the Greeks a slave society or an educational program that excludes women. Against, however, a certain brand of convenient, but also self-serving, defense of cultural particularism, one must also ask whether East Asian societies can envisage values—intellectual and political—that transcend state power, as it is presently and locally conceived. As far as a place like Hong Kong is concerned, one must further point out that this city’s cultural tradition cannot avoid speaking with “altered accents.” For nearly a century, and perhaps even much longer, the freedom of commerce that has made Hong Kong world renowned has involved far more than economics. The vibrant and productive traffic of languages, ideas, and institutions that constitutes this island’s inalienable history includes the espousal of values more consonant than at odds with liberal education, values to which the university that now celebrates its fortieth anniversary bears proud witness.

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May such values long persist. For education to be truly liberal and thus liberating, the student must be free to think and write footnotes! Without such ability and such freedom, the capacity of learning, as well as knowledge itself, will suffer, and that in turn may adversely affect even the economic stability and growth that is the watchword of every developing region of the world. To speak in this vein, in view of what may, or will, happen to Hong Kong a year from now is, of course, to speak also with altered accents. I end with the poem with which I began. The last two lines of He Zhizhang’s poem, you remember, go as follows: Children see me but they do not know me. Smiling, they ask: Where does the guest come from?

The paradoxical consciousness voiced by the poetic speaker is that of his alien status; despite his earlier affirmation of unchanged speech and tone, there is a cultural divide or discontinuity, after all, between him and his home. Would the older folks of his hometown have recognized He Zhizhang? Does recognition depend on age or experience? Could there be recognition despite physical or cultural distance? Intriguing questions, these, but they must await another occasion for their exploration. As this native son of Hong Kong finishes his remarks, he, too, is keenly aware that he speaks only as a guest. I can only hope that the ideas expressed will receive as hospitable a reception as the speaker already has enjoyed.

notes 1. This essay was first written by invitation from the Hong Kong Baptist University as part of its fortieth anniversary celebration. It was delivered as a public lecture on April 17, 1996, in Hong Kong. A Chinese version of the essay was published by that University. The English version was subsequently published in Criterion. 2. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Vol. 1, Archaic Greece, The Mind of Athens, trans. Gilbert Higher, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 303. 3. See, for example, Tu Wei-ming, “The Sung Confucian Idea of Education: A Background Understanding,” in Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage, ed. Wm. Theordore de Bary and John W. Chaffee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989): pp. 139–150. 4. Quoted by G. H. Bantock, The Parochialism of the Present: Contemporary Issues in Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 71. 5. Walter Rüegg, “The Tradition of the University in the Face of the Demands of the Twenty-First Century,” Minerva XXX/2 (Summer, 1992), p. 195.

296 altered accents 6. This is, in fact, Aristotle’s justification for including reading and writing (gramma) as the first item of his curriculum, because it is considered an instrumental science through which “many other sorts of knowledge are acquired.” 7. See Hastings Rashdall, The University of Europe in the Middle Ages, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936; reissued 1958), I, 2ff. 8. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of the University, A Reexamination (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 50. 9. For a most informative study of how scientific inquiry has helped to foster political change and liberalization in China, see H. Lyman Miller, Science and Dissent in PostMao China: The Politics of Knowledge (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1996). 10. Alexander Woodside, “The Divorce between the Political Center and Educational Creativity in Late Imperial China,” in Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600–1900, ed. Benjamin A. Elman and Alexander Woodside (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 460. Zhang Boxi’s memorial may be found in Shierchao Donghualu: Guangxu chao ⋩Ḵ㛅㜙厗抬炛⃱䵺㛅, comp. Zhu Shoupeng 㛙⢥㚳 (Taipei: Wenhai, 1963), 9: 4884–85. 11. Woodside, p. 462. 12. Ibid., loc. cit. 13. See, for example, Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation,” in Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984). 14. See, for example, Chen Dongyuan 昛㜙⍇, Zhongguo jiaoyu shi ᷕ⚳㔁做⎚ (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936), pp. 22–23, 52. 15. Tu, op. cit., p. 139.

 14  READABILITY religion and the reception of translation For Eugene Eoyang

snout. O Bottom, thou art chang’ d! What do I see on thee? bottom. What do you see? You see an ass-head of your own, do you? Reenter Quince quince . Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated. —william shakespeare, a midsummer night’s dream, ..–

R

“

eadability” is perhaps the most frequently invoked watchword of all translators. It indicates that elusive quality at once defining both the necessary aim and the undeclared pride of the translator: the necessary aim because without it, the rendered text can become even more inaccessible than the original (think of English versions of Kant, Hegel, Gadamer); and the undeclared pride because readability betokens our conviction that translations can be successful, that we can, however momentarily and in whatever limited way, reverse Babel, overcome the confusion of tongues, defy the deity’s imposed fragmentation of human culture and meaning. What is alien and different can be made familiar and comprehensible. Readability, however, has also acquired a less than positive meaning in the emergent field of description translation studies. For a translator and a theorist like Lawrence Venuti, “the illusion of transparency is an effect of fluent discourse, of the translator’s effort to insure easy readability by adhering to current usage, maintaining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning.”1 In this revisionist view of the matter, the aim at readability inevitably incurs the unpardonable sin of domestication, of rendering innocuous that which is textually different and foreign. To counter this invidious emphasis and practice, Venuti vigorously argues for a form of translation that he labels “foreignizing,” that is, an effort in preserving the

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linguistic distinctiveness, peculiarities, and idiosyncrasies of the original text in the target language. As Venuti is quick to acknowledge, his elaboration of these two forms of translation practice is itself based on the praemetial and farsighted idea of the nineteenth-century German theologian Fredrich Schleiermacher that in translation, we can either move the reader toward the author or vice versa.2 More than Venuti has done in his stimulating treatment of certain segments of Western translation history, I argue here that this motion involves much more than formal linguistic concerns. Whereas texts related to scientific or commercial enterprises must perforce require the accuracy of informational transmission as the decisive concern for any work of translation, literary texts by definition embody a union of rhetorical and formal considerations. Semantics, in other words, cannot be divorced from aesthetics on the one hand and cultural politics on the other, and thus literary translation conscientiously undertaken can never be simply a matter of code switching. This depressingly mechanistic term favored by many who write on the subject of so-called translation science nonetheless has to be invoked, because it serves at least a useful purpose of pinpointing a recurrent concern of any translator and, by intimate extension, interpreter of texts. Not only must we take up constantly the question of the relative adequacy of one system of codes matching another, but in addition to the perplexing issues of lexical meaning, of equivalency and synonymity, are the elusive but no less real problems of grammatical meaning and rhetorical impact, of the intended or perceived effects of different sets of linguistic signs and codes always presupposed in any act of translation. My remarks thus far may betray a covert act to reopen the venerable question of whether poetry can be translated, a much debated topic since the time of the Enlightenment down to the present. If I affirm such a desire, I must hasten to point out that I have no intention of rehearsing the familiar ideas of Vico, Croce, Jakobson, and Bakhtin on the uniqueness and complete reflexivity of poetic language, and therefore its resistance to translation. My own experience of learning and writing classical Chinese poetry certainly bears out one premise of these thinkers. Since poetic diction and prosodic structure in much of premodern Chinese verse were determined by the tonal pitch of the words, this feature alone would render such poetry impossible for duplication in any of the ancient or modern Indo-European languages with which I have some familiarity. For that matter, it could not even be duplicated by Asian writers not completely conversant with tonal metrics, as early Japanese and Korean poetry employing the Chinese script readily testifies.

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Acknowledgment of such a difficulty, however, is not the same as ruling out any possibility for meaningful translation, but to examine the possible impossibility of translation in a different light. What I want to suggest here is that Western thinkers like Croce and Jakobson perhaps overemphasize the distinctiveness of poetry. I prefer the term literary translation precisely because the problem of “faithful ugliness” or “treasonous beauty,” to use old adages, unavoidably inheres in the translation of both poetry and prose. The advocates of poetic uniqueness, it seems to me, sometimes speak as if complete identity should be the undisputed ideal of literary translation. The point that should at all times be emphasized is not the equivalency of expression or that only a poet should translate poetry, just like a “plant must spring again from its seed,” as Shelley says eloquently, “or it will bear no flower.” My contention, rather, is that a literary translation is always a different flower, a progeny of crossbreeding (to continue the botanical metaphor), because a translated text is always a tissue of similarity and difference, of cultural continuities and contrasts, of opaqueness and transparency. In this sense, readability as the telos of translation is, in my view, what makes the activity unavoidably secular and transgressive. Against those thinkers who have argued—not without persuasiveness— that translation is impossible, that infidelity and betrayal are inevitable, I would assert that translation can work from an equally audacious premise that the secrets encoded in a particular linguistic and cultural tradition can be penetrated, disseminated, and shared. That premise acquires its sharpest relief from the biblical myth of Babel, for translation must proceed from the assumption that no language can lay claim to the hegemony of an original Edenic speech, of embodying the primal unity of a single lip. Even in the thought of Walter Benjamin, who has articulated an eloquent thesis of a pure, archival language based on the Genesis account of God’s primal speech of effective creativity wherein revelation (Offenbarung) coincides with expressibility, the actual language of human history is one of loss and deterioration. According to Benjamin, linguistic being, because of its very spiritual interiority ( geistige Inhalte), is what suffers decline and deprivation after the Fall.3 Thus for humanity as we know it, we have, in Jacques Derrida’s words, only “the irreducible multiplicity of idioms.” 4 Nevertheless, the translator is not content to abide in equating multiplicity with confusion. We may be scattered on the face of the earth, but we are always striving to overcome, as it were, the fact and effects of linguistic diaspora. We are not the hissing and incommunicative inmates of Milton’s hell. Because the biblical deity who disrupted the alleged primal oneness of human speech ironically also inaugurated the necessity of

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translation as human task and work, humankind must toil with the recognition, as Eugene Eoyang has put the matter so boldly, “that translations are what saved the original from oblivion.”5 In the lexical, semantic, grammatical, and contextual aspects of philological labor, we dare to seek to bridge the gulfs of geography and time. To the extent, however, that this bridge is always erected on language, itself an ineradicable index to the dispersed particularism of human culture, this artifact finds its best symbolization in the Tower of Babel itself, for it, too, can never be finished.6 That is the pathos of translation, a part of what I would consider its true impossibility, and the pathos has something to do also with readability, the ideal of translational transparency that would always ironically mask and distort the foreign text.

i It is customary for practitioners and critics of translation to argue how each generation must start again to find its own definitive version of a classic text, and the reason for that is precisely because human language is a wholly historical, and thus temporal, phenomenon. Readability as an ideal of translation not only seeks linguistic fluency, as Venuti alleges, but it also perforce privileges the present and the prejudices of the present. A contemporary translator has little choice but to adhere to “current usage,” for to undertake deliberately a rendition of a foreign text designed for the readership of the past would be an absurdity. In other words, for translation to be successful, it cannot avoid targeting the present audience, however defined, as the ideal audience, but this Sisyphean attempt to seize the moment in reception renders translation forever impermanent. I want to illustrate what I am trying to get at by recounting briefly a production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser by the Chicago Lyric Opera that had the whole city, and even national critics, buzzing in excitement in the – season. Determined that a contemporary setting would better serve their avowed purposes of prodding the audience to think about the characters in the musical drama, the director Peter Sellars and translator John E. Woods set about to transfer the story of Heinrich Tannhäuser’s sin and redemption from the thirteenth century to the twentieth, in which the titular hero had been transformed from a knight errant (Ritter) into, of all people, a televangelist! Venusburg in this case became a sleazy seaside motel illumined by prancing beach boppers and flashing neon lights; die Sängerhalle auf der Warburg took shape as Robert Schuller’s Crystal Palace in California; and the valley fronting the city was relocated

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to a waiting room with striking resemblance to part of Chicago’s O’Hare airport. It was clear from both the production itself and interviews that Sellars saw in the escapades of the American televangelist Jimmy Swaggart many parallels to Tannhäuser’s story. To help underscore the siege of contraries warring in the hero’s soul—the archetypical struggle between selfless, spiritual love embodied in Elizabeth and the carnal pleasures proffered by Venus—the poet-translator Woods accentuated both the overt and the tacit sexual suggestiveness of Wagner’s text. Thus in the whispering harmonies opening the drama, the choral invitation Naht euch dem Strande [Come to this shore]! Naht euch dem Lande [Come to the land], wo in den Armen [where in the arms] glühender Liebe [of glowing Love] selig Erwarmen [such blessed warmth] still eure Triebe [will calm your longing]!

became something like, “Come to the beach! Come to the beach! The action is red-hot.” And in the mounting fury of the singing debate on the nature of love, Tannhäuser’s climactic blasphemy of the second act (“zieht hin, zieht in den Berg der Venus ein”) came out as graphic topography— “Go! Go stick it up Venus!” If the reaction of the audience was an effective gauge of the opera’s communicative power, then the audible gasps and titters at the surtitles accompanying the performance would compel one to conclude that Sellars had scored a resounding triumph. Here is someone who understands what readability or transparency means for so large and complex a work as Tannhäuser, and I must report that there were, for me as well, magical moments created precisely by the production’s contemporary touches: the camp meeting setting that greeted the return of the prodigal hero in act , the utterance of Wolfram’s lovely prayer (“O du, mein holder Abendstern”) against darkening skylines silhouetted with jumbo jets that were to bring home the pilgrims, the savage satire of American religion by uplifted rifles and shotguns in the Crystal Palace’s congregational singing. It was the stated aim of Sellars that Jimmy Swaggart’s story should act as a catalyst for people to think about the plight and enigma of Tannhäuser without getting bogged down in the details of religion. After witnessing the entire performance, however, I submit that the details of religion were precisely the elements that made the Sellars’s staging less than totally

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satisfying. The difference between the original and the updated version of the opera is the difference between thirteenth-century Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism in late twentieth-century America. In both cases the temptations of the flesh and the reckless betrayal of true love and trust may possibly be similar, but Jimmy Swaggart’s religious ethos knows neither the intercessory merit of the holy Virgin nor the piacular benefits of pilgrimage, let alone papal pardon dispensed by the blooming of a wizened staff. That was why the audience at Chicago greeted with giggles and guffaws Tannhäuser’s loud declaration at the end of act , “Nach Rom!” No translation there was necessary, but a moment of supreme poignance and crisis had now only the effect of ridiculous incongruence. This brief excursion into an operatic text and performance will, I hope, begin to clarify some of my thoughts about readability in translation. Confronted by the perceived otherness of the text, the translator is always tempted to neutralize, to render it innocuous or less conspicuous by diction and syntax that supposedly speak more to the target audience. This is, as the distinguished music critic Andrew Porter also remarked in  when he reviewed several Wagnerian productions (including Chicago’s), “too blunt a way to supply ‘relevance.’ It implies a contempt for contemporary audiences, deemed to be without historical awareness, unable to comprehend life’s basic symbols or catch any allusion that is not spelled out. It turns opera—potentially the highest, subtlest, and most potent of all arts—into something ‘instantly’ communicative.” 7 If Porter’s critique of such practice in the staging of opera and the translation of operatic texts seems cogent and warranted, this kind of critique is no less applicable to a good deal of English reception of Chinese literature. Until only recent years, many Western and Chinese translators seem to have been dominated by excessive concern, if not contempt, for their contemporary audiences. They have been more than willing and forthright in deciding what would be appropriate or appealing for readerly consumption. This notion of a rather ill-defined and unexamined cultural essentialism could thus become a powerful criterion for determining what to translate and how to translate, always clouded by the rather myopic assumption that certain practices, concepts, or expressions of one culture can never be understood or appreciated by another. Consideration of this ilk would lead them to make the assertion, not unlike some unctuous waiter in a restaurant, that “you don’t want to order this dish. Only the Chinese will enjoy it!” My observation, let me hasten to say, does not intend to dispute the widely held conviction in our time that any act of literary translation has

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to be the product of conscious, and thus conspicuous, choice. Even the compilation of an anthology in a single language, according to this view, is itself already a process of deliberate choosing that often also betokens intellectual, political, and economic considerations. This kind of acknowledgment duly registered does not mean, however, that one can at once resolve the problems of inclusion and exclusion, of fidelity or falsification— in sum, of readability understood as the desire of instant communicativeness that confronts every literary translator. That was certainly the case when I worked on The Journey to the West.

ii I can never forget the shock I received nearly forty years ago when I first picked up Arthur Waley’s highly acclaimed translation of that novel, retitled Monkey: Folk Novel of China. Although I was immediately moved by the supple beauty of the translator’s English, I was at the same time beset by a recurrent question: how could this be the same novel that had captivated my attention since boyhood? Not only was Waley’s version drastically abridged, but there were also radical revisions of language and vast omissions of terms, episodes, recurrent poetic passages—all features the removal of which could vitally affect both textual integrity and meaning. Waley, as far as I know, never gave a succinct reason for the way he treated this Chinese narrative, but his brief allusion in his preface to the fact that the narrative was frequently read in abridged versions by the Chinese themselves might explain in part how he regarded the nature of the text. Clearly, the need for the foreign reader to behold the text’s totality was not deemed paramount. The remarks by Hu Shi 傉怑, whom Waley enlisted to write an introduction to the translation, however, shed further light on possibly the conception of the narrative held by these two men. Although Hu had been a pioneer in the modern critical study of classic Chinese fiction, and although his highly influential essay of  contributed enormously to our knowledge of the textual history and formative stages of this particular text, Hu’s peculiar notion of what The Journey to the West is about also betrays his bias. “Freed from all kinds of allegorical interpretations by Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucianism commentators,” he declares in the introduction to Waley’s version, “Monkey is simply a book of good humor, profound nonsense, good-natured satire, and delightful entertainment.”8 No doubt there is some truth to Hu’s characterizations, but no one, I think, who has read every line of the full-length narrative (or, for that matter, even

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some of the so-called abbreviated versions in Chinese) can consent to say that the book is simply that of Hu’s reductionist description. Above all, the reader may wonder if the religious interpretation of the narrative has been the result of arbitrary imposition or percipient response to the text’s language and rhetoric. Prior to the twentieth century, every annotated edition of the full-length narrative that I know of has treated this work as a developed and sustained religious allegory, a text of veiled mysteries that would divide its readership into the ignorant masses on the one hand and the fellowship of the few discerning cognoscenti on the other, an esoteric manual with a secret code that transforms it into a veritable sacred text itself. In retrospect, Hu’s remark in Waley’s translation can certainly be construed as part of modern China’s reaction toward its own history, particularly its own religious culture, as the vast majority of intellectuals caught up in the zeitgeist of the May Fourth Movement tended to regard any form of traditional religion as nothing more than superstition. That antipathy has its basis in factors of both history and class. To the extent that many of the intellectuals at the time continued to subscribe to the values and outlook of traditional Confucianism, they simply wrote off anything non-Confucian as popular and thereby hopelessly benighted. The view of the Confucian scholar-official, abetted by escalating contact with Western civilization that began with the arrival of Matteo Ricci and colleagues in the seventeenth century, was that religion had to be identified with the beliefs and practices of the people. Confucianism itself was spared such an appellation, for they denied that the way of Ruism, as Confucianism was liked to be known to its adherents, could have something essentially common to such traditions as Buddhism and Daoism. Such a view of the matter, I should point out, was actually an article of Jesuit apologetic theology as much as Chinese elite self-understanding, but it was promoted as well by nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. To this day, this characterization of Confucianism as a form of ethical humanism that is essentially secular persists in the attitude of many contemporary Chinese intellectuals and Western sinologists. Thus, to the further extent that late Qing and early republican savants tended to regard their own intellectual tradition as also hopelessly unscientific and unprogressive, it might have been exceedingly difficult for them to acknowledge that editors and commentators of the previous centuries, with fanciful noms de plume like Master Intuiting the One (Wu Yi Zi ぇᶨ⫸), could present a proper understanding of a text like the Xiyouji to the twentieth-century reader. That Waley titled his translation Monkey: Folk Novel of China should by itself tell volumes. That title is not without immense irony, since Wu

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Cheng’en, the putative author, is also prominently mentioned on the cover of Waley’s book. Wu, however, is no more to be equated with some member of the “folk” than the intricate and encyclopedic content of his book, for Hu Shi’s essay of  has already firmly placed the putative author amid the scholar-official class of late Ming. Subsequent research has shown that Wu Cheng’en, if indeed the true author, happened also to be an extremely erudite individual, even though he was less than successful in officialdom. In a real sense, therefore, Hu’s sweeping indictment that “for centuries the book had been damaged by monks and Daoists” has also inflicted its own kind of injury, because the modern reception history of the Journey has been, until only recently, characterized by its resistance to the presence of religion. Despite the nearly unanimous tendency of criticism of the previous three centuries to read the tale as an elaborate allegory of either Neo-Confucian self-cultivation or a Daoist journey in physiological alchemy, Chinese critics after Hu Shi focus their discussions almost exclusively on the novel’s explosive and pungent satire. The momentum reached its zenith in the decades after the creation of the PRC (People’s Republic of China), in . Sanctioned by Chairman Mao’s general endorsement of China’s vernacular literature, much of the mainland’s interpretation of the text tends to follow a crude Marxist paradigm and reads the story as the rebellion of popular heroes (e.g., Monkey) against all forms of feudal oppression. Mao’s special fondness for the book itself led him to his own brand of allegory. Writing in his favored classical mode of poetry, Mao likened himself in a well-known heptasyllabic regulated poem to the Great Sage Sun, who would wield the thousand-pound cudgel to rid the cosmos of all fiends and miasmas, all authorities and potentates.9 Spurred by the chairman’s approbation and appropriation of the taxonomy devised by the famous modern writer Lu Xun, books and articles on the Journey inevitably name it as “the fiction of gods and demons [shenmo xiaoshuo 䤆櫼⮷婒],” though that designation does no more than to identify the presence of such creatures in the text. The developed criticism of the narrative often gets bogged down by an anomaly: what to do with the rest of the novel’s ninety-three chapters after the first seven celebrating Monkey’s obstreperous heroics in Heaven. How will the chairman’s allegory accommodate Monkey’s defeat and imprisonment by the Buddhist patriarch, or the hero’s unquestioned submission to Buddhism after his release and his unrelenting devotion to the mission of scripture seeking? Questions like these in turn point up another irony not unfamiliar to all of us engaged in the study of linguistic texts. It is not only translation but interpretation as well that tends to privilege the present.

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Part of the present, as far as the Journey is concerned, is fortunately constituted by the work of some scholars living beyond the limiting confines of PRC governance and its most restrictive decades. When I began work on the tale in the early seventies, I had already followed the lead of Japanese annotators and tracked down a great deal more of the sources and citations of Daoist writings in my translation. In , the Australian scholar Liu Ts’un-yan (Cunren), in a series of five long essays, detailed exhaustively all the possible textual references and allusions to Quanzhen texts structured in the novel.10 The unprecedented documentation of sources led quickly to the reinterpretation of the Journey by academicians in Europe, the United States, Japan, and Taiwan, and some of these publications might have made their way back into China. Thus the publication in  of a small volume of essays by Wang Guoguang 䌳⚳⃱ in Shanghai significantly titled Xiyouji bielun 大㷠姀⇍婾11 betokens a sort of breakthrough for mainland Chinese criticism of the novel that radically departs from immediate scholarly antecedents. Although the critical discourse of Wang studiously avoids the use of the word “religion,” advocating instead that the novel’s allegory springs from the topoi of athletic and hygenic harness of vital energetics (qigong), his study nonetheless represents the most thoroughgoing and systematic correlation of the first half of the narrative with the Daoist canon. Stimulated by Wang’s discussion and model, Wang Gang, then a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, published an essay that searched out more Daoist sources and parallels, thereby taking this line of inquiry to the novel’s conclusion.12 The scholarly contribution of the two Wangs is of special merit, for prior to their painstaking labor, even the editors and commentators of the previous century had neither documented the ideological bases of their assertions nor made clear how their interpretation could enhance the reader’s understanding of plot structure or narrative logic. Why do we have to have all those episodes of captivity and release? Does not the invariable construction of demonic ambush, perilous imprisonment, and eventual triumph by means of frequent assistance of deities get a bit repetitious and wearisome? Given our modern emphasis that the true art of telling a story consists in making one part motivate another, the seemingly random, episodic structure of a novel like the Journey may offend, precisely because it seems to indicate again otherness as cultural inferiority, that the Chinese text just does not measure up to work by James or Proust or some other exemplum of the great Western canon of modern prose fiction. By making the long tale of Monkey’s birth and rebellion, through the enlistment of the human monk and renegade deities as his disciples, to the

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protracted trek to the Western Heaven a self-consistent and plenary allegory in which the successive stages of an adept’s alchemical self-cultivation is given unambiguous representation and embodiment, the critical labor of the two Wangs not only clarifies structural linkage but also directly reinforces the notion that serious study of China’s religion(s), where appropriate, must presuppose the ongoing work of literary and cultural criticism. Just as the student of Milton today cannot be satisfied with merely tagging that poet’s theological outlook as Puritan or Reformed but must be prepared to grapple with the nuanced differences in a subordinationist Christology or Arminian infralapsarianism in the doctrine of election, so the sojourner in the vast textual territory of historical China cannot afford to overlook or ignore its complex religious landscape of many hues and shapes. Although this essay is not the occasion for rehearsing in detail how each episode of the Journey may be seen to constitute and support the overall narrative as an allegory of alchemical self-cultivation, I can conclude with the assertion that taking religion seriously in the case of this novel has the paradoxical effect of retrieving historicity by attentiveness to contemporaneity, of preserving foreignness in the very quest for readability. Concerning the narrative’s historicity, Hu Shi’s damning remark on all those Daoists and Buddhists simply reveals his own ignorance of a certain segment of China’s religious history. Until only the recent decades, the meticulous and painstaking investigation of historical Daoism in its salient textual, institutional, and ritual aspects has rested during the last two centuries largely in the hands of Japanese and French savants, reinforced then powerfully by such contemporary historians of Chinese science as Joseph Needham and Nathan Sivin. Research by all of these scholars has recovered for us several major Daoist conceptions of life and the cosmos that are crucial for our understanding of a narrative allegory like the Journey: namely, that life from the moment of birth is a journey to decline and death; that this journey can allegedly be arrested, modified, or even reversed by the intervention of medicines, drugs, physiological activities and their combination; that one cardinal tenet of Daoism is the belief in the soteriological function of the human body, wherein anatomy is imagined and consequently imaged territorially and hierarchically as a landscape replete with towering peaks and plunging ravines, with winding rivers and even palatial edifices; and finally, that the process of Daoist self-cultivation is portrayed as a protracted agon with different gods and demons resident in the human body, an exercise fraught with dangers induced by faulty mentoring, erroneous methods, or lack of proper concentration.13 Readers familiar with the Journey

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will immediately be able to see linkages between these Daoist notions and the linguistic content of the fictive narrative. It is, however, the cumulative gain of present scholarship flourishing literally in three continents that, I would argue, serves to temper that sense of historical remoteness in the content, the conceptual and religious otherness that seems to impede the progress of its own native readers. In other words as well, it is the willingness to entertain seriously the indispensability of so arcane a religious system as Daoist alchemy that now seems to have attained readability for both the interpretation and translation of the Journey.

iii I hope my remarks have succeeded in a modest way to demonstrate the sort of costliness incurred in ascertaining the proper reception for translation. The costliness is usually factored as careful attention to language, but after our experience of the so-called linguistic turn in virtually most, if not all, of our intellectual enterprises, the avowal that language is all can mean a huge slice of culture. An extended process of minute reckoning with the language of the text, in fact, has taught me a valuable lesson, not merely of translation, but of criticism as well. Before he died, Hans van Buitenen, a Chicago colleague who achieved global acclaim for the towering but unfinished undertaking of a complete translation of the India epic Mahābhārata, once tried to encourage me (when I was feeling particularly despondent about how slow my own progress was) with this remark: “A translation, if properly done, is the best ‘close reading’ one can do.” Even before I finished my project, I had begun to appreciate the acumen of this lamented friend. I should point out that I’m not trying to argue that literary criticism and translation are the same thing. Many critics, even if they enjoy sophisticated command of different languages, can be poor translators, and the same is true of translators when it comes to criticism. Nonetheless, I would wager that just the experience of trying to replicate or represent a text in its totality in another language can be a most enlightening method of training someone how to read a text. The demand for understanding, and thus for interpretation, is literally continuous—from the simplest word to the most baffling kind of stylistic eccentricity, cultural and historical oddities, semantic, syntactic, and grammatical ambiguity, and (for me) most difficult of all, the tone and mood of certain kinds of linguistic constructions. Whereas the critic’s activity perforce must focus on only selected aspects

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of a text for discussion, for whatever generalization he or she wishes to make (complete repetition of a text is recitation, not criticism), a translator in principle does not enjoy that privilege. Nothing in the text—no matter how trivial or how difficult—should ever escape the translator’s notice: like the conscientious musician, he or she must “perform” every note set down on the score by attending to the text’s every detail (written or implied). The work of translation, I would like to think, has made me a better critic in the sense that it has helped me to be more alert in “seeing” and “hearing” what seems to be conveyed by the signs. Whereas, secondly, a critic also has the privilege of enumerating the various options of what a particular portion of a text may mean—indeed, undecidability, ambiguity, self-contradiction, or infinite deferral may be the most desirable feature of today’s critical fashion—the translator again does not enjoy such latitude of discourse. To preserve the translated text from fragmentation, from disintegrating literally into no sense or nonsense, the translator is obliged to make continuous sense of the text—that is, to choose a particular, and thus normative (if only for a fleeting moment), reading of the text that seeks to wrest some form of semantic coherence, if not permanence, out of the source text’s latent polysemy. That choice, of course, is subject to all the vicissitudes of the translator’s historicity and to the resources of the target language. But the translator cannot accept the luxury of deferred meaning; that’s an indulgence for the Derridean critic. To accomplish his or her task, the translator has no choice but try to “fix the precise meaning,” in Venuti’s phrase, even though he or she may realize constantly that this choice is but one of several possibilities. If this brief reflection on a Wagnerian opera and on my own work on The Journey to the West has taught me anything, it is the realization that translators like Schleiermacher and Venuti are right in insisting on the necessity to foreignize a translation. We should not allow the regard for beholding the past in this instant to supersede the importance of preserving a sense of otherness even in the rendered text, but paradoxically, the act of preservation may involve an honest reckoning with the pastness of a text as a historical artifact. “The first translation of a work,” wrote Richard Howard in an article of the New York Times Magazine five or six years ago, “always errs on the side of trying to make the work readable, of trying to naturalize the work and make it not sound like a translation. We can afford now to be a lot more direct.” That directness, I should argue, must derive from the historical and linguistic specificities of the source text, and our attempt to convey a feeling of it can succeed only if we reject, in Barbara Johnson’s words, “the separability of style and thought and the

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priority of the signified over the signifier.”14 To acknowledge this as our ideal is to affirm the paradox—the possible impossibility, the unity of history and contemporaneity, the foreign and the readable—in the act of translation. Faced with the heady prospect of recovering the ancient and the alien for the edifying perusal by our contemporary, we may find Wagner’s words particularly seductive. “The incomparable thing about myth,” he once wrote, “is that it is true at all times, its content eternally inexhaustible.”15 That may be the case, but once myth must find expression in such a temporally and culturally conditioned medium as language, it is not always so easy to disentangle the true from the peripheral, the eternal from the merely ancient, the dancer from the dance. notes 1. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 1. 2. Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens,” Philosophische und vermischte Schriften (Berlin: Reimer, 1838), 2:207–245. One passage pertinent to his highly influential thesis is as follows: “What of the genuine translator, who wants to bring those two completely separated persons, his author and his reader, truly together, and who would like to bring the latter to an understanding and enjoyment of the former as correct and complete as possible without inviting him to leave the sphere of his mother tongue—what roads are open to him? In my opinion there are only two. Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him. . . . The difference between the two methods . . . must be immediately obvious. For in the first case the translator tries, by means of his work, to replace for the reader the understanding of the original language that the reader does not have. He tries to communicate to the readers the same image, the same impressions he himself has gained— through his knowledge of the original language—of the work as it stands, and in doing so he tries to move the readers towards his point of view, which is essentially foreign to them.” The English text is found in André Lefevere, ed. and trans., Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig (Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1977), p. 74. 3. For a succinct rehearsal of Benjamin’s provocative ideas on the subject of language, translation, and theology, see Brian Britt, Walter Benjamin and the Bible (New York: Continuum, 1996), chaps. 2 and 3. 4. Jacques Derrida, “Des tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 165, 171. 5. Eugene Eoyang, The Transparent Eye: Reflections on Translation, Chinese Literature, and Comparative Poetics (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993), p. 56. 6. “The ‘tower of Babel’ does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics.” Derrida, in Graham, Difference in Translation, p. 165.

readability 311 7. Andrew Porter, “Musical Events: Distortion and Recognition,” The New Yorker, November 7, 1988, p. 148. 8. Hu Shih [Hu Shi 傉怑], introduction to Monkey: Folk Novel of China by Wu Ch’eng-en, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Grove Press, 1943), p. 5. 9. See the poem dated November 17, 1961, “He Guo Moruo tongzhi ␴悕㱓劍⎴⽿,” in Mao Zhuxi shici sanshiqi shou 㮃ᷣⷕ娑娆ᶱ⋩ᶫ椾 (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1963), p. 18. 10. Liu Ts’un-yan 㞛⬀ṩ, “Quanzhen jiao he xiaoshuo Xiyouji ℐ䛇㔁␴⮷婒大㷠姀,” Ming Bao Yuekan 㖶⟙㚰↲ 5 (1985): 55–62; 6 (1985): 59–64; 7 (1985): 85–90; 8 (1985): 85–90; 9 (1985): 70–74; also reprinted in Hefeng tang wenji ␴桐➪㔯普 (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1991), 3:1319–1391. 11. Published in Shanghai by Xuelin chubanshe. 12. Wang Gang 䌳ⲿ, “Xiyouji: Yi ge wanzheng di Dao jiao neidan xiulian guocheng 大 㷠姀—ᶨᾳ⬴㔜䘬忻㔁ℏᷡᾖ䃱忶䦳 ,” Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies 㶭厗⬠⟙, n.s. 25, no. 1 (March 1995): 51–86. 13. The classic investigation of these and related themes in religious Daoism is, of course, Kristofer Schipper, Le corps taoïste (Paris: Fayard, 1982). It has recently been augmented by the efforts of Catherine Despeux, Taoïsme et corps humaine: Le “Xiuzhen Tu” (Paris: Éditions de la Maisnie, 1994). 14. Barbara Johnson, “Taking Fidelity Philosophically,” in Graham, Difference in Translation, p. 145. 15. Cited by Porter, “Musical Events,” p. 147.

 15  ENDURING CHANGE confucianism and the prospect of human rights That which is above physical form we call the way; that which is below physical form we call instrument. That which transforms and regulates [things] we call change. To deduce [such principles] and act on them we call connection. To take up [such principles] and install them among the people of the world we call service and enterprise. —the classic of change, “commentary on the appended phrases,” .

continuity and change: a linguistic parable Whether there is such a thing as the “essence” or “soul” of China and whether it can change over time are hardly idle questions, questions that I’d like to examine on this occasion. Even for a single individual, the questions of the subject and personal identity-who am I and in what sense the I of today is the same as the I of yesterday-are questions of great complexity and much discussion.1 To note the difficulty inherent in my project does not mean that students of China have been reluctant to debate the peculiar or distinctive characteristics of that civilization. Indeed, throughout the long course of China’s existence, interested observers both past and present, both native and foreign, have not been hesitant in making pronouncements about that culture’s spirit and content-declarations that are most affirmative or most critical, wildly errant or astutely percipient. How to adjudicate between markedly conflicting visions or “sightings” (as Jonathan Spence calls them in his  book The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds) regarding any reputedly defining feature of China is not only hazardous, but as is often the case, the decision must also turn on further debate and interpretation. “Our understanding of Chineseness,” according to the wise suggestion of historian Wang Gungwu for some sort of guiding principle

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for the endeavor, “must recognize the following: it is living and changeable; it is also the product of a shared historical experience whose record has continually influenced its growth; it has become increasingly a self-conscious matter for China; and it should be related to what appears to be, or to have been Chinese in the eyes of the non-Chinese.”2 The history of Western sinology as a whole, in this light of Wang’s remark, can-and must-be understood as one long process of encounter wherein discovery has been constantly commingled with reaction and evaluation. From Marco Polo’s (ca. –) rhapsodic report of old Cathay’s material riches and architectural opulence, the Enlightenment’s marvel at Confucian texts, philosophy, and bureaucracy, through early European exaltation of Chinese as possibly an “Edenic” language, Hegel’s denigration of Chinese history and Bertrand Russell’s (–) captious remarks about “effeminate and cowardly behavior,” to Charles de Gaulle (–), Richard Nixon (–), and Henry Kissinger’s (–) reports of their audiences with Mao Zedong (–), the encyclopedic charting and survey of science and technology in Chinese civilization by the late Joseph Needham and colleagues, and the equally voluminous and collaborative writing of The Cambridge History of China, the West of the last  years has sifted and scrutinized the Middle Kingdom relentlessly.3 Virtually all salient aspects of historical and modern Chinese culturelanguage, behavior, social organization and kinship structure, religion, politics, finance, population, books and printing, the healing arts (to name a few that come readily to mind)-have been studied with increasing sophistication and intensity. In the twentieth century more than ever, the passion for knowledge about China has been fueled by historical circumstances, political necessity, and the advance in technology. Such knowledge, however, has less an unchanging reality as its object than a historical experience that is constantly subject to modification by anticipated or unexpected forces of change. Take, for example, the matter of the Chinese language, which, particularly in its scriptural form, may certainly be considered an enduring bequest of Chinese culture. Enjoying a virtually unparalleled history of longevity and continuous development over several thousand years, the language has exerted incalculable influence on every major aspect of Chinese civilization.4 “What was clearly Chinese [by the time of the first millennium before the common era] for the Chinese,” writes Wang Gungwu, “was their language of signs and symbols. It had overcome the limitations of speech and hearing and had united peoples who could not have understood each other otherwise.”5 What is enduring, however, is

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not synonymous with the unchanging, because the technological advance in the form of the personal computer during the last decade has wrought a revolution in the use and dissemination of Chinese that is wholly without precedent. The computer’s facilitation of reproducing the nonalphabet Chinese script has moved from laborious techniques of “translating” stroke-based constructions of Chinese graphs onto the alphabet-based keyboard, through breakthrough designs of graphic typesetting and storage coordinated with different systems of romanization (Wade-Giles and pinyin for Mandarin, and more recently, major Chinese dialects such as Cantonese, Hakka, and Taiwanese), to stylus or even voice-activated input for direct representation. As far as the keyboard is concerned, the massive utilization of a romanized system of representation has meant, first of all, another giant step in the globalization of the modern English alphabet, because the keyboard built on these twenty-six letters is now used by hundreds of millions of people, who themselves may know little or no English, to reproduce nonetheless effectively the Chinese script and, thus, to communicate in written Chinese. For native and foreign users alike, the computer’s alphabetical keyboard has perhaps unintentionally abetted the language reform measures pioneered by the PRC (People’s Republic of China) when it first introduced the pinyin system. This schematization, which has been severely criticized and resisted (myself included), has suddenly been transformed into a virtually universal practice, for assisted by the computer, what it has succeeded in doing more than government policy is to provide an irresistible linkage between script and sound, through the enforced adoption of an alphabetical syllabary. For the first time in their long history, the users of the Chinese language are compelled to confront a phonological method of comprehending, retaining, and reproducing their language; that is, to match script to phonological representations that are completely conventionalized, hence standardized. In its function, the pinyin system is exactly the same as the Guoyu zhuyin fuhao ⚳婆㲐枛䫎嘇 (phonetic symbols of the national language [Mandarin]), introduced in . Whereas those symbols, however, are still constructed variations or simplified versions of Chinese graphs, the pinyin system is fashioned entirely by the English alphabet. This is the crucial difference. Although the alphabetization of Chinese phonemes by the PRC reformers was at first intended primarily for facilitating uniform vocalization and easy comprehension, the introduction of the computer changes the picture radically by joining this phonetic representation of the language to the effective reproduction of the script. Pinyin not merely grants immediate utility to the keyboard but

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it also directly assimilates into the language-and thus domesticates-symbolic elements once thought to be completely alien.6 One not fully understood consequence of this development is precisely this necessity of thinking phonetically when using the computer. Whereas in the precomputer days a person writing in Chinese might well have reproduced a number of graphs on the page without knowing their precise or “correct” vocalization in the dominant vernacular, and this situation applies to even the clumsy Chinese typewriters, the current student taught to be reliant on the alphabet keyboard and a particular phonological system of representation in principle must master the proper phonemes that delimit the range of this individual’s working vocabulary. Wrong pronunciation or misvocalization while using a computer may mean complete stoppage of writing until the correct sound (i.e., correctly spelled phoneme) is ascertained. With this critical constraint, not only a tradition of several thousand years in acquiring, retaining, and reproducing a graphic-hence essentially imagistic (Fenollosa and Ezra Pound were both right and wrong!)-language has been drastically modified, but the very nature of that language itself may have been irreversibly altered. Since keyboard usage enforces strict reliance on mastery of a particular dialectal form of the language, the “limitations of speech and hearing”-Wang Gungwu’s phrase quoted earlier-are reimposed to a significant degree in the communicative process. On the other hand, the global familiarity of the English alphabet and the speed of the computer join to provide unprecedented rapidity in the use and dissemination of Chinese script. Seen in this light, what the PRC began as a programmatic reform to help educate its vast population by opting to adopt pinyin, a syllabary constructed out of the English letters, is now immeasurably aided and made irreversible by the computer, for in its global use a resolutely nonalphabetical language has forever been alphabetized at least in its vocalized mode. Confronted by the recurring phenomenon on the computer that the phoneme ma may actually betoken eighteen graphs and as many or even more meanings, the student may be led by habit to valorize a sonic unit constructed in an alphabetical syllabary as a sort of stable, if not superior, semantic unit over against the individualized characters. In this way, the computer also ironically assists the other salient plank of the PRC’s linguistic reform platform, for the composition of the Chinese word (traditionally made up of both logographic and, frequently, phonographic elements) now becomes correspondingly less important. The PRC’s systematic proposal to simplify the graphic complexity of the characters and to promote, whenever context allows, the interchangeable use of hom-

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onyms is thus undeniably a logical extension of the decision to privilege sound and speaking over the writing system.7 Whether this kind of development must eventuate in the gross distortion and impoverishment of the Chinese language, as many critics once charged, and how it will affect the long-term preservation and modification of Chinese are questions not relevant to the present inquiry. Nevertheless one paradox-the changeability of the culturally permanent-has become certain, for language as part of the quintessentially Chinese, has, because of the computer, been touched and transformed by some element essentially foreign and alien. The nonIndo-European has become in part Indo-European. Is this kind of development also possible in other domains of Chinese civilization, part of the Chinese “soul”? This is the question underlying the remaining portions of my essay, where I explore the perennially controversial issue of individual versus community or group in Chinese society and thought; the issue is focalized here as an examination of classical Confucianism and its compatibility with the modern advocacy of human rights. I have chosen to frame my inquiry along this line not merely because, as one scholar has put the matter, “the problem of human rights lies at the heart of modern political discourse.”8 Just as importantly, the discussion of the individual’s role and significance in Chinese culture inevitably encroaches on the central tenets of Confucian ethics and politics. For more than two millennia, the powerful and pervasive ideology sustaining imperial governance, kinship structures, social values, familial morality, and the formal educational system has been irrefutably Confucian. This cultural dominance has cast its long shadow even into contemporary China, as a passing journalistic remark today can still refer, justly, to Confucianism and Communism as that nation’s “sustaining (albeit collapsing) value systems.”9 Abroad the tradition continues its influence on diaspora Chinese communities the world over. Even more impressively, attempts in the rehabilitation and retrieval of the Confucian tradition, among certain educated elites enjoying also apparent support from state and local governments, have been steadily escalating in China itself during the post-Mao era that began in the seventies. Witness the series of conferences devoted to Confucius and his teachings that were held in Hangzhou, , in Beijing,  (an international symposium to celebrate the sage’s ,th birthday anniversary), and again in Beijing, , during which gathering Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew was the keynote speaker. On September , , the celebration for the ,th birthday anniversary was held with great fanfare at Confucius’s birthplace, Qufu, Shandong province, and it coincided with the completion of the first phase of construction of a size-

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able Research Institute of Confucius ⫼⫸䞼䨞㇨.10 An exercise such as that here, therefore, cannot avoid querying the persistent relevance of this tradition for Chinese communities looking toward the next millennium.

the weight of ancestors In his thoughtful essay, significantly titled “Early Civilization in China: Reflections on How It Became Chinese,”11, historian David N. Keightley has enumerated many factors during the time of the Neolithic to the early imperial age that helped to answer his titular question. These include hierarchical social distinctions; massive mobilization of labor; an emphasis on ritual in all dimensions of life, including the early institutionalization of ancestor worship; an emphasis on formal boundaries and models; an ethic of service, obligation, and emulation; little sense of tragedy or irony; the lack of significant foreign invasions; and the absence of any pluralistic national traditions.12 Another distinctive aspect of early Chinese civilization, “an emphasis on the group rather than the individual,” finds striking illustration in Keightley’s comparison of a fifth-century kylix vase by the Penthesileia Painter with a hu wine vase dated to the Eastern Zhou period (late sixth to fifth centuries b.c.). Whereas the lone figures of Achilles and the Amazon queen occupy virtually the entire surface of the Greek vase, the decor of the Chinese vessel displays scenes of group activities-battles by land and sea, banquets, hunting, and the picking of mulberry leaves. Because these scenes are “stereotypical silhouettes” of nameless hordes, “the overwhelming impression conveyed by these tableaux is one of contemporaneous, regimented, mass activity.”13 This treatment of early Greek civilization by Keightley, to be sure, is vulnerable to criticism because he has concentrated exclusively on one depiction of archaic heroism and ignores completely both geometric pottery and the all-important implications of polis (city) and domos (house) present even in Homeric epics, not to mention later philosophers, dramatists, and historians. Whatever decorative motif that might have been preferred by early Greek pottery, a culture showing little concern for communitarian values, however defined, could hardly be expected to produce Plato’s Republic, Thucydides’s History of the Pelopennesian War, and Aristotle’s Politics. On the other hand, Keightley’s observation about the prevalence of the group already manifest in early China seems to me to be keen and unerring. Once more, however, iconographic suggestiveness needs to be enhanced and particularized by verbal artifacts. From preserved material

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inscriptions of the Neolithic to the formal writings of the early Han, a culture that displays so voluminous a record and so large a vocabulary of ancestral gradation and ranking, lineage, and kinship structures must be, even on a prima facie basis, interested in the life in and of the group. Similarly, the documents on rituals all center on court, clan, and household duties and activities, and they hardly qualify as prescriptions for personal ethics or individual behavior.14 Ritual events inscribed on bronze vessels, ritual behavior attributed to a practitioner like Confucius (e.g., Analects ), and ritual patterns codified in various classic texts (Zhou Li ␐䥖, Yi Li ₨䥖, Liji 䥖姀) are not writings intended to induce proper behavior based on sound knowledge and critical judgment of a single individual (note 'Ἐκαστος), the starting point of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (a– a). They provide, rather, the purpose and plan of action already selected, established, and judged as worthy of persons or various kinds of person, the meaning of whose very existence is at the same time unalterably defined by their social status. Just as it is unthinkable for the ordinary plebian to behave like a minister, for that would indicate inordinate insolence, so a father is considered perverse if he engages in actions deemed appropriate only for his children, a sure sign of moral weakness. It is the recognition of this feature of ancient Chinese society, in fact, that must presuppose any discussion of the relations of the individual to the group by Confucius and followers, a period that spans the sixth century to the common era. In a well-known passage when Duke Jing of the state of Qi asked the Master about government, Confucius answered, “let the ruler be a ruler, the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son.” The Duke said, “Splendid! Truly, if the ruler be not a ruler, the subject not a subject, the father not a father, the son not a son, then even if there be grain, would I get to eat it.”15

The marvelous feature of this dialogue is its purposive opacity. Neither the sage nor his interlocutor feels obliged to explain what letting a subject be a subject means, although subsequent Confucian disciples and commentators show little hesitancy in spelling out what they would consider the proper implications of these terse, laconic exhortations. In the immediate context of the anecdote, however, both men seem to know exactly well beforehand the practical content implied in Confucius’s dicta no less than the serious

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consequences of the success or failure of action on the part of persons thus classified. The punch clause of the duke’s utterance is especially illuminating in this regard, for the force of his rhetorical question is premised on his belief (and by extension, his listener’s as well) that agricultural success (“if there be grain”) can guarantee neither biological gratification (a human like him must eat) nor entitled benefit (as ruler and father, he might expect filial sharing of food from sons or tributes of grain from subjects). Rather, the duke’s enjoyment of sustenance in the taxonomic ideal depends on each differentiated class of persons in the social order, including the duke himself, fulfilling the unspecified but understood moral obligations. There should be no mistake, however, that the implied rank and status of the persons thus classified already express concretely a set of unequal relations. In the biological realm, the son within the context of his own household may eventually attain the rank and status of a father. In the political sphere, on the other hand, the subject, unless he happens to be one who eventually overthrows the ruler, will likely remain forever a subject. It is the asymmetry of such relations, later to be permanently codified by Confucian disciples into the so-called Five or even Ten Relations (wu lun Ḽΐ, shi lun ⋩ΐ), that makes the meaning of the individual person in traditional Chinese culture not easily reconcilable with the basic presuppositions informing the Western discourse on human and civil rights. If one were to pose at this juncture the question as to what is the most significant and representative feature of Chinese social thought that has endured through the centuries, my own reply would point to the intimate homology that countless writers and thinkers have drawn between the state ( guo ⚳) and the family or clan ( jia ⭞). Furthermore, the single social practice that offers both compelling illustration and underpinning of such a homology is also one that has rendered Chinese culture extremely distinctive, if not entirely unique, in the long course of its history. Long antedating the time of Confucius, ancestor worship has found ample documentation in the Shang oracle bone inscriptions. This familiar cultural practice within the affairs of the Shang state played a “central, institutionalized role,” because, as Keightley has astutely observed, it “promoted the dead to higher levels of authority and impersonality with the passage of generations, encouraged the genesis of hierarchical, protobureaucratic conceptions and . . . enhanced the value of these conceptions as more secular forms of government replaced the Bronze Age theocracy.”16 The decisive contribution of Shang ancestral worship was precisely this union in itself of the three realms of power that determine and constrain

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human existence: the sacral, the biological, and the political. In contrast to the Greek concern for questions of origins, “first causes,” or “first principles,” the more social and biological conception of identity among the Chinese, says Keightley, led to a corresponding concern for “genealogy and history. A hierarchy of ancestors leading back to a dimly perceived founding ancestor or ancestress was answer enough because it satisfied the kinds of questions that were being asked.”17 Although classic Chinese texts did not raise the questions of origin or first cause in the same abstract manner as those of Greek antiquity, there should be no doubt that the name and status of ancestors belong to the realm of the sacred, because their act of procreation was thought to possess primordial significance. Keightley’s insight is, in fact, confirmed by a passage in the section on “Special Livestock for Suburban Sacrifice” ( jiaotesheng 恲䈡䈚) in the Han anthology Record of Rites (Liji), which declares that because “all things originate from Heaven [and] humans originate from the ancestor, this is why one offers food and drink to the High God or Di. The Suburban Sacrifice magnifies the repayment of origin and the return to the beginning [叔䈑㛔᷶⣑炻Ṣ㛔 ᷶䣾炻㬌㇨ẍ惵ᶲⷅḇˤ恲ᷳ䤕ḇ炻⣏⟙㛔⍵⥳ḇ].”18 Notice that this statement aligns Heaven (⣑ tian), High God (Di ⷅ), and ancestor (zu 䣾) all in a continuum of power, and this power is by definition religious or sacral because it has to do with one’s ultimate origin, the arche of the individual and the community. To dishonor or betray one’s parents and ancestors is to spurn or transgress one’s origin.19 Conversely, because ancestors and Heaven are functional equals in this formula, the sacral significance of parents is enormous, for they are always on their way to becoming ancestors. Hence filial acts, as acts of “repayment of origin and the return to the beginning,” are always sanctioned by Heaven, whereas a statement such as that by Jesus in Matthew :ff. on the cost of discipleship becomes virtually incomprehensible to this day for many Chinese.20 Although the date of the Record of Rites as a Han anthology, incontestably and thoroughly Confucian in its outlook and authorship, may be separated from the Shang period by close to , years, the interpretation of the royal sacrifice and its reference to shangdi (high god) may well have articulated an archaic ideal that would far outlive its initial, genetic impact to shape and influence subsequently vast stretches of imperial culture. Keightley’s words from another source must be cited: Shang religion was inextricably involved in the genesis and legitimation of the Shang state. It was believed that Ti [Di], the high god, conferred fruitful harvest and divine assistance in battle, that the king’s ancestors were

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able to intercede with Ti, and that the king could communicate with his ancestors. Worship of the Shang ancestors, therefore, provided powerful psychological and ideological support for the political dominance of the Shang kings. The king’s ability to determine through divination, and influence through prayer and sacrifice, the will of the ancestral spirits legitimized the concentration of political power in his person. All power emanated from the theocrat because he was the channel, “the one man,” who could appeal for the ancestral blessings, or dissipate the ancestral curses, which affected the commonality.21

Keightley’s observation calls attention to the pivotal role of the political leader or sovereign in mediating religious meaning and participation in religious activities as an integral function of his political authority. Such a function, I must emphasize, has remained constant in all of Chinese imperial history, for the emperor or sovereign was never exempted from the duty to offer appropriate sacrifices, to ancestors and to other related transcendent powers variously conceived, that were deemed crucial for the state’s health and well-being. The most significant development in respect to the union of religion, politics, and kinship structures in China’s imperial history-the phenomenon that some scholars have termed “institutionally diffuse religion” 22 came at the moment when the first emperor of China took for his dynastic title the name Qin Shihuangdi 䦎⥳䘯ⷅ (First August Emperor of Qin) in  b.c. The word for emperor here is indeed di, frequently translated as God in the scholarship on Shang religion and chosen by Mateo Ricci (–) centuries later as the appropriate nomenclature for the Christian deity. Vatican rejection in the Rites controversy led to Ricci’s eventual choice of the term tianzhu ⣑ᷣ, but di was revived by Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth century, and the term shangdi since has existed for nearly two centuries in their biblical translation as another accepted name for God. Even more significantly for our discussion here is the fact that the term di may, as a number of scholars have argued, etymologically connote the sense of ancestor.23 When, therefore, the first emperor who united China assumed this title for himself, that single name would weave together in itself the related strands of Chinese conceptions of transcendent origin, paternity, authority, and power. As if fearing that this single term would be insufficient to make apparent the symbolic significance of the ruler, the word zu, a much more common term for ancestor, was incorporated into the dynastic title of the first emperor of the Han. Henceforth, in the different appellations of individual

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reigns since  b.c., the ruler named as di or zu could mean quite literally that the ruler was a “god of martial prowess” (wudi 㬎ⷅ) or “high ancestor” ( gaozu 檀䣾), as many of them were called. Still later, in the opening years of the Tang, the dynastic title of the second emperor was established as taizong ⣒⬿ (supreme ancestor). With this string of names forever canonized in the official annals of imperial history, as one can see, transcendence has been nominally immanentalized and made familiar as kin, but such appellations also purport to indicate unambiguously that the ruler’s power and authority remain godlike and, therefore, absolute. Moreover, they are meant to facilitate the venerable understanding obtaining even in Confucius’s time that between state and family there exists a complete and practicable homology.24 If the ruler, king, or emperor is, in fact, the grand ancestor of his subjects, political virtues must find their expression in kinship terms, much as the household patriarch, the rulerlike paterfamilias, will be enabled by such discursive propping to reign with impunity as god and ruler within his family and clan.

the homology of virtues To be fair to the historical Confucius (– b.c.), his teachings-at least those collected in the Analects-have little to say about ancestors as such, but we must remember as well that they never dispute the important necessity of sacrifices ( ji 䤕), including those established for ancestors (e.g., Analects ., ). Although there are only a few remarks about parents ( fumu 䇞㭵) and father scattered throughout the Analects, it cannot be denied that his observations on filial piety (xiao ⬅) in conjunction with how to serve one’s parents (shi fumu ḳ䇞㭵, e.g., Analects .; .) and how to serve one’s ruler (shi jun ḳ⏃, Analects .; .–; .; .) are more abundant throughout his collected sayings. Significant in this regard is the homologous relationship already drawn by Confucius between service to one’s family and that to the state. When queried by someone as to why he was not taking part in government, Confucius replied: The Book of History says, “Oh! Simply by being a good son and friendly to his brothers a man can exert an influence upon government.” In so doing a man is, in fact, taking part in government. How can there by any question of his having actively to “take part in government”?25

Herein lies the seed for his famous doctrine adumbrated in the Great Learning that the state’s proper governance (zhi guo 㱣⚳) must be a direct

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consequence of one’s success in regulating one’s family (qi jia 滲⭞) and the cultivation of oneself (xiu shen ᾖ幓). The putative commentary on this doctrine by his disciple Zeng Shen 㚦⍫, with a pointed allusion to the Analects text cited above, makes the connection even more taut and explicit: What is meant by “in order rightly to govern the State, it is necessary first to regulate the family,” is this: It is not possible for one to teach others, while he cannot teach his own family. Therefore, the gentleman, without going beyond his household [or clan], completes the lessons for the State [㓭⏃⫸ᶵ↢⭞炻 侴ㆸ㔁㕤⚳]. There is filial piety: therewith the sovereign should be served [⬅侭炻 ㇨ẍḳ⏃ḇ]. There is fraternal submission: therewith elders and superiors should be served. There is kindness: therewith the multitude should be treated.26

This comment indicates clearly the appropriation of an essentially family virtue, xiao (filial piety), and its direct application to the political realm, all as part of the gradation of ethical obligations in accordance with social rankings. In another instant, the Han Record of Rites will grandly argue how altruism and administration of justice are directly dependent on the proper filial regard for clan ancestors and kin. In the section titled “Great Commentary” (Da zhuan ⣏⁛), we find this remarkable summation, which deserves full citation: Now kinship is the bond of connection. Where the starting point is affection, one begins with the father and ascends by rank to the ancestor; where the starting point is rightness, one begins with the ancestor and descends in natural order to the deceased father [note how hierarchy privileges the distant over the recent]. Thus the way of humans is to love one’s parents [shi gu rendao qinqin ye 㗗㓭Ṣ忻奒奒ḇ]. Because one loves one’s parents, one honors the ancestors; honoring one’s ancestors, one also reveres the clan. Because one honors the clan, one also keeps together the members of the family branches. Keeping together these members dignifies the ancestral shrine; dignifying the ancestral shrine, one attaches great importance to the altars of land and grain. Valuing the altars, one therefore loves the hundred names [the metaphor for the people], and when one loves the people, there will be the accurate administration of punishment and penalty. When punishment and penalty are accurate, the ordinary people will find security, and when people are secure, resources and expenditures will both suffice.27

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Since the anthology defines the clan as those who share in the patrilineal name (tong xing cong zong ⎴⥻⽆⬿),28, this passage makes plain that the needs and aspirations of the basic family unit, whether the king’s household or the commoner’s, must first be satisfied before attention can be directed to other units. The crucial turn in this line of argument comes in the somewhat puzzling contention that love of people would derive from the regard for the altars of land and grain. In the context of Confucian writings, however, one point seems evident: altruism is thought to be motivated primarily through the concerns of self-preservation, concretely expressed in the attempt to maintain sufficient sustenance for proper sacrifices to one’s ancestors. Distributive justice in the Confucian view thus cannot be premised on the equal provision of justice for the constituent members of society, irrespective of kinship affiliations, because in principle, what is due the people (the hundred names [baixing 䘦⥻]-a number that, incidentally and ironically, remains largely intact in twenty-first century China to provide family or surnames to . billion plus people!) is meted out in a centrifugal movement from the family or clan as the anchoring unit of that society. If that fundamental unit fails in its filial obligations, according to the logic of the passage cited above, the rest of society cannot hope to find security or even the proper administration of retributive justice (punishment and penalty). Such an understanding of altruism will accord with how the cardinal virtue of ren ṩ has been glossed and developed by Confucius and his follower. Antedating, in fact, the Confucians, an ancient source like the Classic of Documents already hints at the intimate association between ren-a word that has been variously rendered in English as benevolence, humaneness, human-heartedness, and even sublime generosity of the soul-and virtues valorized in clan rules and ethics (zong fa lunli ⬿㱽ΐ䎮). In the scribal prayer preserved in the section titled “Metal Bond” ( jinteng 慹㹽), the clause “we are kindly as well as filial” (yu ren ruo kao = xiao Ḷ ṩ劍侫=⬅) has been read by a modern authority as “we are obedient to the will of our ancestors.” 29 The observation by Fan Wenzi 劫㔯⫸ recorded in the Zuo Commentary also asserts that “not forgetting one’s origin is ren [ᶵ⾀㛔炻ṩḇŞ].”30 Again, the words of Li Ji 樒⦔, set down in the “Jinyu” (㗱婆) section of the Guoyu ⚳婆, declare that “for those who practice benevolence, loving one’s parents is called ren [䁢ṩ侭炻ッ奒ᷳ媪 ṩḇ].” 31 Finally, we have, included with obvious approbation in the Analects itself, the statement by the philosopher Youzi 㚱⫸ (or You Ruo 㚱劍) that “being a filial son and an obedient brother is the root of ren [⬅⻇ḇ

enduring change 325 侭炻℞䁢ṩᷳ㛔冯].” 32 As we shall see momentarily, this conclusion makes

sense only in the context of the rationale structured in the entire assertion of the philosopher. Read together with the declarations cited, the gloss preserved in the Doctrine of the Mean is both illuminating and instructive. “Ren is people,” declares the text, “but loving one’s parents is its greatest [manifestation] [ṩ侭Ṣḇ炻奒奒䁢⣏]” (). This explicit exegesis provided by the second clause finds repeated and sympathetic echoes in a text like Mencius, which reiterates the same definition: “Loving one’s parents is benevolence [奒奒炻 ṩḇ]” (A.). For Mencius the philosopher, ren is an affect that obtains primarily and most fully between parent and child, in such a special way, in fact, that one may regard it as something as natural or decreed (see B.: “The way benevolence pertains to the relation between father and son . . . is the Decree, but therein also lies human nature [ṩᷳ㕤䇞⫸ḇ . . . ␥ḇ炻㚱⿏䂱]”). In another passage (A.), Mencius differentiates the proper affect toward kin and nonrelations with this striking gradation: Toward living creatures a gentleman would be sparing but show them no benevolence; toward the people he would show benevolence but not love. [Only] when he loves his parents would he show [proper] benevolence to the people. When he shows people benevolence, he would be sparing toward the living creatures [⏃⫸ᷳ㕤䈑ḇ炻ッᷳ侴岎ṩ烊㕤㮹ḇ炻ṩᷳ侴⺿ 奒ˤ奒奒侴ṩ㮹炻ṩ㮹侴ッ䈑]. 33

The logic of Mencius and the compilers of the Han anthology on rites, as we can see, remains consistent, because according to them, one cannot even show benevolence to the people (ren min) without first loving one’s parents (qin qin). By what I have called here the homology of virtues, Confucians have insistently maintained that the most intimate affect appropriate to a kinship environment (the home, the household, the clan) and the ethical action thus formed and motivated are literally and equally applicable outside that environment. Since in imperial principle there is no space “under Heaven that is not the ruler’s territory,” the domain of the state both encircles and encompasses the domestic one. United, moreover, in symbolic significance in the person of the patriarch are the figures of the sovereign and the father, and it is this equation that grants viability and authority to the ethical homology. According to the Confucian formula set forth in the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing ⬅䴻),

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when we take that by which we serve the father to serve the mother, the love is the same. When we take that by which we serve the father to serve the ruler, the reverence is the same. Thus the mother takes one’s love, whereas the ruler takes one’s reverence. He who takes both is the father. Therefore, when one uses filial piety to serve one’s ruler, he will be loyal [屯㕤ḳ 䇞ẍḳ㭵炻侴ッ⎴烊屯㕤ḳ䇞侴ḳ⏃炻侴㔔⎴ˤ㓭㭵⍾℞ッ炻侴⏃⍾℞㔔炻ℤᷳ 侭炻䇞ḇˤ㓭ẍ⬅ḳ⏃炻⇯⾈]. 34

Notice that the logic implied in the above passage is what enables the Confucian to posit that the obverse of such prescriptive behavior is equally true: i.e., when one serves the ruler with loyalty, the person must be a filial son 㓭ẍ⾈ḳ⏃炻℞Ṣ⽭⬅. Only in the light of such reasoning can one grasp to the fullest extent the powerful argument of You Ruo’s assertion preserved so prominently in the Analects .: For a man who is both filial and obedient as a younger brother, it is rare that such a person would love to affront his superiors [ fan shang 䉗ᶲ]. In fact, there has never been such a person who, being disinclined to affront his superiors, is still fond of inciting a rebellion [zuo luan ἄḪ]. A gentleman works at his roots; once the roots are established, the Way will grow therefrom. Are not filial piety and being obedient as a brother the roots of humaneness [ren]?

Filial piety, a practice of personal rectitude, is now decisively recognized for its true worth-an apposite model for public political virtue-because its attitudinal assumptions and behavioral manifestations (i.e., “the roots”) can benefit not merely parents and kin but also supremely those in power and authority. The Confucian discourse, moreover, does not emphasize this homology of virtue merely to shore up the formulated claims of personal and domestic ethics. In its writing the state and history, this line of teaching serves as one linchpin of its overall world-regulating ( jingshi 䴻ᶾ) intent and design, as when the phrase qinqin is expanded from the basic meaning of loving one’s parents to the love or regard for one’s blood kin within a primarily political context. Witness the pronouncement on the defeat of Earl Xi 〗ὗ by Duke Zheng 惕ỗ: among the several causes mentioned that would seal the former’s destruction, the historian-commentator included the observation that Xi did not cherish kin relations (bu qinqin), for his feuding with Zheng represented a repudiation of the fact that they had the

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same surname. 35 Even in realpolitik, apparently, the obligations and demands of kinship retain their normative force. Why such a construct of human relations conjoining ancestry, paternity, rulership, and ethics succeeds in such a compelling and lasting fashion has been well summarized by a contemporary scholar: It was the ancestors who created the human species, and while all humans were “born equal,” they were “equal” in the sense of being equally human and different from animals. Moreover, only humans could recognize ancestors. Thus ancestors took precedence over nature. Thus also filial piety quite rapidly became a core value in the Chinese web of interpersonal relationships, an axis linking the individual human being, his family, and his society. By the Han dynasty, filial piety had already become institutionalized as a criterion for selection of persons into officialdom. 36

In the light of Youzi’s observation, that criterion could not be more appropriate!

the contemporary debate Certain scholars who would like to reconcile classical Confucian teachings with liberal political thought of the West and the contemporary promotion of human rights frequently attempt to do so on the supposed basis that “the true person [in the Chinese tradition] is construed as a thoroughly social being.”37 This anthropological concept is in turn construed usually as an epitome of the desirable emphasis on moral duties and obligations. For many observers of China, the Confucian exaltation of group over individual is not even simply a legacy of a single culture. To the extent that historical Confucianism has been a known cultural export over the centuries, East and South Asian societies deeply influenced by such traffic are also indisputably implicated. The extent of Confucian impact in a particular society, whether as a result of conscious promotion (Korea, Tokugawa Japan, contemporary Singapore, Nationalist China on Taiwan) or as lingering habits of thought and action in diaspora communities, may be variously measured. The effect of its undeniable presence, however, has often been praised, for the principal emphasis on state and family over the individual person is routinely touted as a core element of the so-called Asian values that would effectively curb what are perceived as the corrosive excesses of Western individualism. In a much quoted interview, Lee Kuan Yew declares that

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Eastern societies believe that the individual exists in the context of his family. He is not pristine and separate. The family is part of the extended family, and then friends and the wider society. The ruler or the government does not try to provide for a person what the family best provides.38

Sharpening the polemical tone of the debate, Ian Buruma, in his review of the recent book by Hong Kong’s last governor, Christopher Patten, has this observation: Patten’s experience in Hong Kong made him reexamine his political instincts. And he concluded that his taste for free market economics, the rule of law, and the universality of liberal ideas was more than a matter of instinct. These were big ideas. And the propaganda for “Asian values,” putting loyalty to the state above individual liberty, and duty and obedience above democratic rights, was a challenge to the Big Ideas: Lee Kuan Yew versus Locke, Mahathir versus Adam Smith. Was the “Asian” combination of capitalist economics and authoritarian rule exceptional?39

Possible answers to Buruma’s rhetorical question divide even further those scholars interested in accommodating or reconciling the so-called Asian reality with both contemporary economics and politics. In the view of Hong Kong’s Ambrose King, who thinks that the “East Asian experience demonstrates that democracy and modernity are not necessarily inseparable from individualism,” the ideal would be the development of a “democratically Confucian political system or society” in which human rights are to be defined in “communal” or “social” terms.40 For King as for others sympathetic to the accentuation of “communitarian” values, the Confucian tradition seems to be a rich and viable cultural resource for instilling and reinforcing such values. Thus, according to Sumner Twiss, “human rights in general are compatible in principle not only with cultural traditions that emphasize the importance of individuals within community (which is a more apt characterization of Western liberalism) but also with cultural traditions that may emphasize the primacy of community and the way that individuals contribute to it-that is, both more liberal individualist and more communitarian traditions.” 41 Such a line of argument dwelling on “communitarian values” and the human person as a “social being,” regrettably, tends to de-emphasize or overlook the fact that in Confucian teachings, different social groups have different ethical and political claims on that “social being.” It tends to forget as well that in the Confucian state, groups, communities, classes,

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and stratifications that constitute and define all those relations (lun) are no more equal than the individual. On the other hand, as one historian in the very first volume of the The Cambridge History of China has observed, already discernible among the trends characteristic of intellectual development from the period of the Warring States (– b.c.) to the Han and beyond would be an “emphasis on the ideal of social harmony, albeit a harmony based on inequality. In other words, the emphasis is on the readiness of each individual to accept his particular place in a structured hierarchy, and to perform to the best of his ability the social duties that pertain to that place.” 42 It need hardly be said that such an emphasis would find the staunchest support and the most eloquent exposition in the Confucian elite, who at every opportunity seems ready to draw on the statefamily homology to buttress the cardinal principles of rulership. Thus in the chapter on “Governing the Family” (Zhijia 㱣⭞) in his pioneering Manual for Family Instruction ( Jiaxun ⭞妻), which became the model for countless subsequent imitations, the Sui official Yan Zhitui 柷ᷳ㍐ (– ) bluntly declares, “When the anger expressed by the cane is abolished in one’s house, the faults of the rebellious son immediately appear. When punishment and penalty are inaccurate, the people have no basis even to lift their hands and feet. Leniency and severity in governing one’s house are the same as those in the state.” 43 And, even if Confucius himself did not initiate the practice of ancestor worship, this ancient ritual and its correlative ideal of filial piety, as we have seen, were already deftly appropriated by his first and second generation disciples as decisive expressions of domestic propriety, itself deemed indispensable for political order. Under the impact of Neo-Confucian revivalism of the Song onward, in fact, the ancestral cult and its rituals would not only crowd the pages of the popular genre of family instruction manuals, but the design and erection of the family shrine, a custom increasingly adopted by Song elite officials, would come to dominate even domestic architecture as well.44 This Confucian insistence on the priority of sociopolitical relations embedding the individual and their immutable claims on that person has not been spared from fierce critique by a wide group of Chinese intellectuals early in the twentieth century. When one examines, for example, the content of the polemics that made famous the early republican iconoclast Chen Duxiu (Ch’en Tu-hsiu 昛䌐䥨 [–]), one can readily discern that his attack of Confucian ideals and practices was based squarely on the charge that they had historically deprived major social groups like “sons and wives” of their “personal individuality” and “personal property.” 45 Although Chen eventually became one of the leading theoreticians for the

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Chinese Communist Party, which succeeded in building probably the most totalitarian state known in Chinese history, it should be remembered as well that his early contributions to the intellectual ferment of his time stemmed again from the conviction, shared by many of the so-called May Fourth thinkers, that what the new and modern needed in China was a revolutionary discovery and appreciation of the individual.46 Although it is true that there had not been many persons who “declared themselves anti-Confucian” resolutely during more than two millennia of Chinese imperial history, as Chow Tse-tsung has remarked,47 the fortunes of Confucianism in the twentieth century, understandably more varied because of vast and cataclysmic change, have fluctuated between hostile opposition and arduous rehabilitation both on the mainland and in diaspora communities elsewhere.48 The gyrating vicissitudes of Confucian reception in recent Chinese experience are thus not only conducive to creating immense historical ironies, but those ironies themselves may also betoken the ongoing but halting efforts on the part of the Chinese to come to terms with part of their most cherished and stubborn cultural legacy. Within the People’s Republic itself, at times sponsoring not merely virulent attacks on the person and ideals of the ancient sage but also brutal attempts to uproot virtually all traces of the tradition, there has been nonetheless in the post-Mao period some movement also to retrieve and revive a Confucius more compatible with its own understanding of national modernity. On the other hand, in an island nation like Taiwan, which prides itself as the keeper and sustainer of genuine Confucian values in both government and society,49, the last two decades of the twentieth century have witnessed the flowering of stringent critique, a discourse of ressentiment unsparing in both scope and severity against this venerable tradition even as the nation strives to become a full-fledged democracy enjoying unprecedented forms of freedom. Among sinological savants working outside of China, there are those who would advocate the retention and possibly the revival of Confucianism by contending that its principal tenets may have even anticipated certain aspects of Western liberalism and that the Confucian insistence on the priority of sociopolitical relations embedding the individual may not be incompatible with the Western discourse of human rights. Thus in his thoughtful essay of , Wang Gungwu had already anticipated much of the rhetoric and tactics employed by contemporary Confucian loyalists by trying to link “the idea of reciprocity” with the “idea of implicit rights.” Adducing from various prescriptions in the Analects, the Zuo Commentary,

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and Mencius for the ideal behavior appropriate to various social ranks (e.g., “The ruler should treat the subject with propriety, the subject should serve the ruler with loyalty”), Wang would argue that these duties and obligations might well be thought of as a form of rights, in the sense of reciprocal obligations categorically demanded of the sovereign, the subject, the father, the son, and the spouses. 50 Similar arguments have also been repeatedly advanced by Tu Weiming and Wm. Theodore de Bary. According to the latter, the long line of elite officials studding Chinese imperial history and nurtured in both the letter and spirit of Confucian orthodoxy could be seen to have among its ranks a number of thinkers whose political philosophy seemed to promise transcendence over its own cultural ethos and limitation. Noted late medieval figures like Wang Fuzhi 䌳⣓ᷳ (–), Huang Zongxi 湫⬿佚 (–), and Tang Zhen Ⓒ 䒬 (–) could be gathered in what might be called the liberal tradition of China, because they clung to the Confucian insistence of the subject’s duty of fearless remonstrance and advocated in their writings various forms of “egalitarianism.”51 It is this tradition, in the view of de Bary and other like-minded colleagues, that may even help explain how a certain phrase of Confucian rhetoric, first proposed by the then existent Republic of China, came to find adoption in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by members of the United Nations in . Humane and persuasive as such a line of argument may seem, the problem lies in its failure to confront squarely the issue that, although the concept of reciprocity in Confucian thinking refers to “differentiated but mutual and shared”53 obligations, they are for that very reason not equal claims or obligations. De Bary is fond of citing the Mencian passage in A. where different obligations are spelled out for different classes of people: for example, affection between parent and child, rightness between ruler and ministers, distinctive duties for spouses, gradation for old and young, and trustworthiness between friends.54 This schematization, unfortunately, is always upheld without the concomitant but necessary acknowledgment that even these five relations and their idealized obligations themselves embody an inherent hierarchical preference. Since our debate involves the consideration of textualized tradition and historical reality, we must again refer to the Record of Rites, in which the section “Jitong” (䤕䴙 [Summary of Sacrificial Principles]) declares that in sacrifices are ten relations which may be seen in the way of serving the ghosts and spirits, in the obligations between ruler and subject, in the

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relation between father and son, in the ranks dividing the noble and the lowly, in the distance separating the kin, in the bestowal of title and reward, in the distinction of duties between husband and wife, in the impartiality of governmental affairs, in the observance of order between old and young, and in the boundaries set between high and low. 55

This statement has elicited in turn from Fei Xiaotong 屣⬅忂 (Fei Hsiaot’ung, –), the father of sociology in modern China, the observation that “Lun [relations] is order based on classifications” conceived on the very commingling of “concrete social relationships” with “abstract positional types [e.g., noble and lowly, high and low].” According to him, “the basic character of traditional Chinese social structure rests precisely on such hierarchical differentiations. . . . Therefore, the key to understanding networks of human relationships is to recognize that such distinctions create the very patterns of Chinese social organization.” Because “the framework of social structure” confuses the symmetric and asymmetric models of the social and remains “unchangeable”56 unless the very categories for its construction are dismantled or reconceived, the thesis of contemporary Confucian revivalists-that the ideal of moral reciprocity prescribed for those relations would provide an adequate analogue to the concept of right-becomes highly questionable. Since the Confucian notion of reciprocity always embodies preference and priority, it must perforce enjoin unequal sanctions against disparate social ranks in the event of legal infraction, a notion directly contradicting the modern Western conception of equality before the law. Because humans cannot avoid or escape moral failures, the question that Confucianism must confront is not about the necessity to inculcate and practice virtue, or even about the possibility of “self-renewal” (zixin 冒㕘) and “selfcorrection” ( gaiguo 㓡忶).57 In the public realm of society, it has to do rather with what happens when virtue fails and how will those in power be held accountable. Subjects, wives, children, and inquisitive journalists may be swiftly penalized if they err, but who will effectively censure, curb, or bring to justice the transgressive emperor, the patriarch, the judge, the senior minister, or the members of the ruling party? The question of human rights, in this context, is not about mutual kindness, assistance, and cooperation, however noble such acts may be in themselves. Rather, it is about the lower and lowest levels of human society and what recourse they have and do not have when they are abused and ill-treated. Must they rely merely on the “fearless remonstrance of loyal ministers” that de Bary’s books exalt repeatedly? Are exile, imprisonment, or remonstration till execution-

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the exemplary fate met by worthies in the Shang and singled out for praise by Confucius in the Analects .-the only viable alternatives when rulers and subjects disagree in a contemporary Asian society? The question of how the ruling classes are to be judged, in fact, finds an illuminating discussion in a well-known passage of Mencius. When a subject fails in his duties, according to Confucian doctrine, he may be killed after the ruler has made a thorough investigation of the matter (Mencius B.). On the other hand, even a tyrant as famous as the last king of the Shang could not induce Mencius to permit regicide as a general principle. Since, however, Mencius could not alter recorded history, his justification for killing Zhou, the last king of Shang, was ingenious: the latter had degraded himself so badly by his immoral despotism that he could no longer be classified as king, but merely “a fellow” ( yi fu ᶨ⣓). Hermeneutics had thereby saved both official history and morality, for then Mencius could declare resoundingly: “I have heard that a fellow Zhou had been executed, but I have not heard that a sovereign had been executed” (B.). History, however, may prove to be more stubbornly intractable than this brilliant piece of sophistry. Despite Mencius’s unambiguous and repeated counsel that the people and the officials have what seems a right to leave and abandon an unprincipled or evil ruler, thereby depriving him of his so-called legitimacy (B.),58 what is recorded in history presents a wholly different picture. In the long annals of the Chinese tradition, there has not been a single change of dynastic power without violence and bloodshed. On the contrary, even the infrahousehold competition for power between, say, a crown prince and his rival siblings or cousins, more often than not begin and end in the sword, the rope, or the poisonous cup. The only accounts of peaceful transmission of rulership are those attributed to the reigns of the sage-kings Yao, Shun, and Yu, but their mythic status at the dawn of Chinese history should also warn us that their examples betoken more of Chinese desire than veracity. This irrefutable phenomenon of Chinese history, I would argue, indicates something more than the unavoidable clash “between ideal values and their implementation in historical practice,”59 a judgment that smacks more of romantic hermeneutics pervasive of certain phases of scholarship treating Buddhist and Christian histories than a sound conclusion. In that view, the founding ideals of these two traditions are allegedly so rarefied and pure that they were almost immediately misunderstood by their followers; they can be recovered only by the sympathetic perspicacity of modern interpreters. For me, rather, the basis for doubting the Confucian tradition and its modern viability must center on something more funda-

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mental: namely, the essentially biological model of the patriarchal family and its use as a luminous mirror of the state that Confucians had extolled from the beginning. One may well ask whether the family, even at the level of a large, extended household of the clan, can justly reflect the complexity and the necessity of impersonal arbitration that must obtain in the political body of a contemporary nation. Can such a family model provide the adequate underpinning for the ideals of social equality and minimal human rights? I suspect not, not because the Chinese do not or cannot envision such ideals as desirable ends, as some advocates of cultural particularism have erroneously argued, but because the model itself long cherished and defended by the Confucian discourse is not conducive to the establishment of these ends.60 Even in extremely liberal societies today, families are not thought to be organized around a scripted and contracted system of rights but fundamentally by an unspoken or loosely specified code of duties, obligations, and expectations that are posited as the proper behavior of kinship. This is the reason why in the United States today there is growing vexation, in the courts no less than in social commentary, as to when and how the impersonal state should intervene when the fundamental rights of citizens as household members are violated or denied by other members of the same household.61 By contrast, Confucius and his disciples, as I have tried to show, have articulated a meticulously specified code that directly grounds political virtues on familial ones. The logical question that must be asked at every formulation of Confucian social and personal ethics is this: what recourse does a Chinese have when such prescribed norms are not observed or abused, that is when reciprocity is withheld or rejected? Confucius was forthright in answering a disciple’s query by declaring: “The ruler should employ his subject according to the rules of propriety; the subject should serve his ruler with loyalty.” But the question the disciple failed to bring up next is: what happens when the ruler fails the rules of propriety? As we have seen already in the Mencian discussion of tyranny, that ruler’s failure has enormous consequence, because the philosopher recognizes clearly the possibility that “innocent people” could be killed by such a person (Mencius B.). Here the classic Confucian homology of the state and family breaks down. On the one hand, parents and children in any society and at any time may inflict on each other unspeakable cruelty and abuse, but their relations would not necessarily dissolve even after such atrocity, nor would they be likely to depose parents or disown ancestors in the name of the “Mandate of Heaven.” Politics may abound in any family, but the bio-

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logical relations of humans, now even certifiable across the centuries by DNA testing (as in the recent case of Thomas Jefferson’s descendants), are thus not exactly the same as the essentially social nature of state governance. On the other hand, therefore, when government and rulers prove oppressive and tyrannous, the inevitable remedy must focus on accountability and change, preferably by peaceful means. We need to hear again the lesson given at the side of Mount Tai 㲘Ⱉ, where Confucius inquired of a grievously weeping woman by several graves. Queried by Confucius as to why she did not quit her region after her father-in-law, her husband, and her son were all devoured by tigers, she gave this decisive reply: “There’s no harsh government here.” Whereupon Confucius was moved to say to his disciples: “Remember this, little ones. Harsh government is worse than tigers!” 62 This enlightened insight, alas, yielded no further reflection for possible change in the fundamental form of governance, for both Confucius and Mencius could only counsel withholding of service or withdrawal from the territorial state entirely when the ruler was without the dao 忻. Even under dire circumstances, the Confucians throughout China’s imperial history never bothered to examine whether the state-family homology could truly withstand scrutiny from the perspective of either the origin of these two different forms of community or the basis of their possible dissolution. Because the foundation of the Confucian social order is the teleology of the group, the charge, so frequently voiced by academicians committed to Asian cultures and values, that the philosophy of human rights promotes individualism seems to me a premise begging the crucial point of this modern and still emergent philosophy. As I see the matter, the philosophy of human rights cannot be simply interested in “communitarian values,” as most contemporary Confucian advocates would have it, because those values may not be sufficient substitutes for rights. At the level of fundamental principles in social organization and civic governance, a community that can be injurious, whether by accident or design, to some members of the community hardly qualifies as a desirable community for all. For that reason, the bottom line of the theory of human rights must concern itself with individuals, indeed in principle with every single human being, because “the justified interests in question,” as Alan Gewirth has articulated the matter so incisively, “are distributively common to all human beings.”63 Before those “interests in question,” some principles must be established whereby both ruler and commoner would exist only as two individuals who may lay equal claim to those interests, and that claim should not be jeopardized by any prevenient hierarchical ordering.

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concluding reflection: revising confucianism Since much contemporary discussion of the theories of human rights and the Confucian tradition is premised on the alleged conflict between “communitarian values” and the Western concern for the single person, does it mean that the advocacy of any form of human rights must presuppose an understanding of an individual who is “unassailable,” “anarchic,” and obsessed with “radical autonomy”? Put in the most succinct manner and the bluntest term, is there any strand of Confucian thinking that places greater value on the individual, on what may properly belong to a single human being-whether life, possession, freedom of belief or choice-that the community, whether familial or sociopolitical, cannot alter, co-opt, or remove without just cause? The answer to this last question may register serious pessimism if one invokes and clings to such form of hierarchical authoritarianism as enshrined in the popular, proverbial saying: “When a sovereign requests a subject to die and he does not, he is disloyal; when a father wants a son to perish and he does not, he is unfilial” (⏃㔁冋㬣炻冋ᶵ㬣ᶵ ⾈烊䇞㔁⫸ṉ炻⫸ᶵṉᶵ⬅).64 On the other hand, there may be hope for mitigating such pessimism if one takes into consideration certain strands of the Confucian discourse since the seventeenth century that began to query received orthodoxy on rulership. If such a movement might not quite measure up to a “liberal tradition” thus named by some scholarship of the twentieth century, some Confucian elite did seem to respond to some liberalizing impulses, and, in hindsight, their ideas might have begun to “individualize” (gerenhua ᾳṢ⊾), “privatize” (sirenhua 䥩Ṣ⊾), and “quotidianize” (riyong changxing hua 㖍䓐ⷠ埴⊾) Confucian values and practices.65 Thinkers such as Li Zhi 㛶岬 (–), Huang Zongxi, and Gu Yanwu 栏䀶㬎 (–) not only began an escalating questioning of the concept of the sovereign as absolute inherited power, but the widening discussion of what constituted the public and the private (gong, si ℔炻䥩) increasingly focused attention on the meaning of the solitary person’s moral worth along with its obligations.66 In the light of this development, some words of Dai Zhen ㇜暯 (– ) may be regarded as taking on unanticipated significance, as when he declares that “one person’s desires are the same desires of all persons under Heaven” (ᶨṢᷳ㫚炻⣑ᶳṢᷳ㇨⎴㫚).67 Taken from Dai’s famous expository commentary on certain key concepts of Mencius, this statement in its context is merely one expanding on the commonality of origin and similarity of response in the genesis and manifestation of desires as ad-

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umbrated in an ancient text like the Record of Music (Yueji 㦪姀). Indeed, Dai’s expansive discourse on nature, affect/disposition, and desire (xing, qing, yu ⿏炻ね炻㫚), undeniably creative and synthetic, still appears largely as yet another attempt at reconciling the sometime conflictive observations of Mencius and Xunzi 勨⫸ with those of Song Neo-Confucians on these venerable categories.68 What is noteworthy is the new object of desire that Dai posits for moral disposition and action: In human life, there is nothing worse than the inability to fulfill one’s life. Desiring to fulfill one’s life while also fulfilling the lives of others, this is humaneness. Desiring to fulfill one’s life to the extent of injuring without regard to the lives of others, this is inhumanity [ Ṣᷳ䓇ḇ炻卓䕭 Ḷ䃉ẍ忪℞䓇ˤ㫚忪℞䓇炻Ṏ忪Ṣᷳ䓇炻ṩḇ烊㫚忪℞䓇炻军ḶㆽṢᷳ䓇侴ᶵ 栏侭炻ᶵṩḇ].69

Later, Dai further clarifies the first part of his assertion with the formulation: “Humaneness is the virtue of life productive of life [literally, the hard-to-translate phrase shengsheng has the tautological force of making life alive]. . . . When one person fulfills one’s own life and infers from this principle to help all under Heaven to fulfill their lives, this is humaneness [ṩ侭炻䓇䓇ᷳ⽟ḇ. . . . ᶨṢ忪℞䓇炻㍐ᷳ侴冯⣑ᶳℙ忪℞䓇炻ṩḇ]” (p. ). The Mencian overtones of Dai’s assertions become audible if we recall the famous discussion on competitive desires recorded in Mencius A.. That ancient thinker’s acknowledged fondness for both fish and bear’s palm serves on that occasion as a pretext for differentiating desires with far weightier consequence. Declaring that life and dutifulness are both objects of his desire (yu), Mencius proceeds to make the grand claim that he would forsake life because he desires dutifulness more. Immediately realizing, however, that such nobility may not be common, Mencius attempts valiantly to make universal the virtue of choosing virtuously by specifying how one’s acceptance of food, an indisputable necessity of life, depends on the condition of its provision. If food is given with abuse, according to Mencius, “even a traveler would not receive it [埴忻ᷳṢ⺿ッ].” Such an attitude (xin) is allegedly common to all (ren jie you zhi Ṣ䘮㚱ᷳ), but immediately, Mencius feels obliged to equivocate: it’s just that the worthy person is able not to lose it (岊侭傥⊧╒俛). This distinction between attitude and ability, unfortunately, revises and limits the intended scope of the Mencian claim. In contrast to his master’s text, what is new in Dai’s formulation is precisely how his view of the human condition and the supreme good of

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humaneness or benevolence (ren) is based on the universality of desire and its object without further qualification. For a reader conscious of Western social thought, it is difficult to read the first sentence of Dai’s without noticing its remarkable affinity with Aristotelian premises. Just as the Greek philosopher has sought to ground his systematic investigation of ethics and politics on “the good life,” “doing well,” and “happiness or wellbeing” (eu zēn, eu prattein, eudaimonia) as synonyms for the supreme good that all humans seek (Nicomachean Ethics b), Dai’s singular notion of “life fulfillment” (suisheng) is no less all-encompassing a foundation for his claims. The drive to fulfill one’s life, let us notice here, has nothing to do with human relations, because it is not dictated by kinship duties, or occasioned by culturally prescribed social position, or dependent on the sanction by a particular community. Because they are common to all humans-from the highest ruler to the lowliest peasant-the desire and its object as universals possess the condition of equality as both phenomenon and quality. One can no more say that only some people have such a desire than asserting that a peasant ought to aim at a lesser degree of self-fulfillment than a prime minister. Precisely because it is fundamental to humanity as such, the desire’s life- and thus self-affirming potency perforce must carry with it a negative possibility. Just as the quest for one’s own well-being and happiness can be undertaken at the expense of the other, the drive toward life fulfillment can also hurt others. Like the antecedent Aristotle, who had hardly begun his monumental treatise before he felt obliged to mention the notion of self-restraint, Dai’s remark also immediately proceeds to forestall the possible negative consequence of such a desire. By setting the reckless injury of another life (qiang ren zhi sheng er bu gu ㆽṢᷳ䓇侴ᶵ栏) as the limit of this desire, the Chinese thinker, it may plausibly be argued, has put his finger on one crucial issue animating the debates of ethics and politics in different civilizations down through the ages: how to reconcile the most essential values cherished by an individual with those values of other individuals. Dai, to be sure, did not think or write in a vocabulary of rights as developed and used in the post-Enlightenment discourse on the subject. No student of Chinese history and thought, however, would deny that the concept of humaneness or benevolence (ren) has functioned as virtually a categorical imperative for the history of Confucian thought. It is to Dai’s credit, I believe, that his definition of virtue as life productive of life (shengsheng zhi de) has succeeded in injecting new content into the familiar concept of ren. Though Dai’s notion may be interpreted as having stemmed

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from such a familiar source as Confucius’s dictum in the Analects .— “to love someone is to want the person to live [ai zhi yu qi sheng ッᷳ㫚℞ 䓇],” Dai’s innovation and strength, I would argue, lie exactly in detaching the content of ren from the altruistic but kinship-based implications of the Confucian injunction to “love people” (ai ren) scattered in the Analects (e.g., .–; .) and in Mencius (B.).70 Dai’s idea, when coupled with the concept of the desire for self-fulfillment (yu sui qi sheng 㫚忪℞䓇), bears the enormous importance of recognizing, and thereby legitimating with greater clarity and force, the reality of self-affirmation and thus self-love, self-interest, and self-preservation. We should remember that already in Mencius A., there seems to be the recognition that a person’s self-love is unitary because, according to that thinker, there is no self-discrimination of bodily parts. Hardly has he finished with this observation, however, when Mencius proceeds to offer his own self-contradictory hierarchy of preferences by claiming that “the parts of a person differ in value and importance.” Thus, “a man who takes care of one finger to the detriment of his shoulder and back without realizing his mistake is a muddled man” (D. C. Lau’s translation). In contrast to Mencius again, Dai’s definition of humaneness or benevolence as “the virtue of life productive of life” avoids precisely this sort of inconsistent account of desire. The first verb of the punning binome shengsheng, though acknowledged by Dai to bear the meaning of cosmic procreation when linked with the consideration of Heaven or Nature (zai tian wei qihua zhi shengsheng ⛐⣑䁢㯋⊾ᷳ䓇䓇 [p. ]), hardly refers to mere biological reproduction when it relates to the human (zai ren). Instead, it has the reflexive sense of making or keeping life alive, and thus the definition directly involves the maintenance and preservation of life, for self and for others.71 If life productive of life is truly the quintessential content of ren, any violation of life through destruction or injury, whether on the individual or communal level, is potentially as well as actually a violation of the supreme ideal. Both the affirmation of the universal desire for selffulfillment and the correlative injunction to avoid reckless destruction of other lives in quest of the same fulfillment thus provide a firm basis for true egalitarianism. Could not such an idea serve also as a seed or seminal motif in developing a Confucian understanding of human rights that attends to the irreducible worth and dignity of the life of the individual? Could Chinese culture be led to recognize that the moral obligation of the state or body politic, no less than that of the individual, must be dedicated to “join all [people] under Heaven to fulfill together their lives” (yu tianxia gong sui qi sheng 冯⣑ᶳℙ忪℞䓇)?

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Such a focus on the individual, let it be emphatically stated here, is not synonymous with the espousal of individualism, and one should point out that the opposition between “individualism” and “communitarian values” so often central to the present topic is typically drawn in a manner far too crude to formulate what is at stake. To affirm the individual in the sense implied by the concept of universal human rights is not necessarily to affirm individualism in the sense that one’s fulfillment is privatized or defined independently of his or her communal relatedness and participation. Conversely, to affirm communitarian values is not necessarily to subscribe to the traditional values of a given community in the sense that a person’s fulfillment depends on his or her participation in the community so defined. Pondered in the light of our contemporary debate on rights, the striking quality of Dai’s words may well be their potential for self-transcending implication and application, because in those remarks I cited, the single person and the community (“all under Heaven”) are indissolubly and dialectically related. Although the phrase “under Heaven” (tianxia) in context undoubtedly means the imperial empire, in principle its significance may surely be so developed that it transcends its local or national delimitation. “When one person fulfills one’s own life and infers from this principle to help all under Heaven to fulfill their lives”-does not such a statement carry an ideal germinal and germane to honoring universal humanity without dismissal or sacrifice of the individual? If one’s quest for self-fulfillment must not be carried out to the extent of injuring another who, in principle, is engaging in the selfsame quest, does not the community act as a check and limit on the individual’s anarchic or antinomian impulse? To fashion a conception of the individual’s inviolable dignity and worth from the thought of a Qing philosopher, or, for that matter, from any other source, Chinese or otherwise, need not therefore be taken as a total repudiation of the so-called communitarian values. How could one disagree with any injunction for those in power to treat subjects and citizens with respect, kindness, and trustworthiness, as Confucian teachings had done for millennia? What modern advocates of Confucianism need to realize is that even the noble prescription for reciprocity among various social strata is itself conditioned by that very unequal stratification. Once the imperial system of governance has been dismantled, and the republican revolution of  is an irreversible fact of history, the same fate has also been handed to its undergirding system of social organization. How could one continue to invoke, for example, the relations between sovereign and subjects ( jun chen ⏃冋) as part of the basis for morality and action? Exiled from the

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imperial society, Confucian teachings have become, in the poignant phrase of Yu Yingshi, “wandering souls” ( you hun 㷠櫪).72 Such spirits may be retained in the collective memory of the Chinese people, but they need to embody modified content or restructured substance if they are to address realistically and effectively the altered social contexts. If not all Confucian values are in principle antithetic or inimical to the modern advocacy of human rights, it must be acknowledged that that advocacy does presuppose a radically different evaluation of the person and the group. From the latter perspective, the rulers and the state are no more moral or virtuous than the ordinary individual, and this belief directly contradicts the notion, held in large part of the Confucian tradition, that the sovereign or the collective governing body, by virtue of power, must be superior even in morality. The belief, perhaps first articulated in Mencius’s pointed lesson for Prince Xuan of Qi 滲⭋䌳 that the “failure to become a true King is due to a refusal to act, not to an inability to act” (Mencius A. [trans. D. C. Lau]), remains a stubborn legacy. I thus agree with Lucian Pye’s criticism of Zhao Fusan, once the vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who remarked (and in so doing reversed the insight enshrined in the title of Reinhold Niebuhr’s well-known text Moral Man and Immoral Society) that in China’s cultural tradition, “individuals have never been placed above society, and the values of individuals have always been unified with the responsibilities of society.” 73 The question posed by human rights and their advocacy concerns precisely what happens when society or its governing persons fail in goodwill and virtue. What recourse does a powerless person have not merely to redress a grievance or injustice but also to protect his or her life from arbitrary injury, detention, or destruction? What safeguard or limit does a society possess that prohibits and prevents the group from the abuse of power? It is to such questions that Niebuhr’s (–) sagacious aphorism holds the greatest relevance: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”74 On the assumption that leadership may fail on an individual or corporate level, the advocacy of rights, of participatory democracy and the rule of law from which no official is ever exempt, may in principle be taken as a rejection of a notion, long cherished by the Chinese, that we should “use people [and not laws] to govern the state” ( yi ren zhi guo ẍṢ㱣⚳). In reply to Zhao Fusan’s contention, we can say that human rights, properly articulated and implemented, do not place the individual above society so much as attempt to respect and do justice to the well-being of both the individual and civil society. The advocacy of rights represents, even in

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minimalist expectations, an advocacy for both individual and community forms of safeguard that derive from the establishment of more viable and soundly conceived institutions. Those institutions are desirable and necessary because, in a larger context, the political question posed by human rights is not even exhausted by the prevention of injustice or the abuse of power. What Dai Zhen might not have realized when he wrote those interesting words is a sense-now felt and embraced by so many communities globally-that equal participation in the exercise of political power must be a necessary condition for the full realization of human capacities. Democracy, an independent, effective judiciary, and a free press thus not only protect against the invasion or harm of each individual’s fundamental dignity; they also enable communal participation constitutive of human fulfillment (sui ren zhi sheng). It should be quickly added, of course, that better conceptions (as theory) or even better institutions do not guarantee a more perfect society in the sense of a flawless realization of exalted ideals. The advocacy of rights, therefore, ought not to be construed as a blind endorsement of existent Western societies and their values. Just in the United States alone, the problems stemming from entrenched racism and its resultant unmitigated violence, through corporate greed, corruption, and wastefulness, to bias, sloth, and ignorance that miscarry the law, and to state secrecy and duplicity form a litany of imperfections that truly shocks and dismays.75 After more than two centuries, the republic that is the United States of America is still grappling daily to live up to the better ideals inscribed in its founding constitution. I began this study by referring to Professor Wang Gungwu’s appeal to a “shared historical experience” of the Chinese to help us understand what Chineseness means at any particular moment. A quick glance at part of that shared historical experience now may render moot some of the scholarly controversies that I have hitherto reviewed. For in the world we know today, ancestor worship exists in a much reduced scale and scope among most Chinese communities, and the large, clannish households for most families are virtually a thing of the past. Nearly a century has transpired since China’s last emperor was deposed. Only a so-called dictatorship of the proletariat remains in the world’s most populous nation, but even that government is changing as it struggles to cope with the imperatives of change. China, I’m pleased to note, has signed two crucial treaties—the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in , and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in — although neither of them has yet been fully ratified. The thorniest and toughest issue remains the insistence on the sole legitimacy of the Chinese

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Communist Party and its exclusive right to govern, resulting in the continued practice to harass and arrest dissenters trying to organize dissent or a new political party. Its recent practice of brutal suppression of the followers of Falun Gong may also indicate a tenacious clinging to the venerable conviction in historical China that the state itself must be the final arbiter of what constitutes acceptable religious ritual and belief, and thus the consequential reluctance to accommodate any freedom of practice and faith. Whatever official justification for its current policy and action that the PRC government may offer, and however small and insignificant a group the dissenters may appear at the moment, we should not be led to concur with the sentiment that China is somehow not yet ready for human rights because of its particular social and political conditions. Apparently the tens of thousands who congregated in Tiananmen Square in  already thought otherwise, and the thousands that have continued to assemble and march in Hong Kong in commemoration of June  seem also to be of the same mind and conviction. In addition to its formal signatures on the two international covenants, the Chinese government has, since , issued a series of lengthy and detailed papers concerning its evolving understanding of human rights and related issues.76 Despite the skillful apologetics for Asian authoritarianism exploited by the likes of Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad, the people of South Korea and Taiwan are firmly and steadily implementing a rule of law and a comprehensive participatory democracy. The surprising result of Taiwan’s March  election, in fact, should give the lie to the contention of cultural and regional particularism that somehow Asian Chinese are not receptive to political and social practices that presume a lofty view of the individual. Ought not this kind of “shared historical experience” count, too, in the contemporary debate on human rights? Perhaps the time has come when revolutionary changes in the culture of politics will occur as swiftly (though perhaps not as painlessly and surreptitiously) as those in the Chinese language with the alphabetization of the computer keyboard. Let me close by citing Long Yingtai 漵ㅱ⎘ (–), an activist of Taiwan who is also a widely read author and respected cultural critic. With a doctorate in English from the University of Kansas, she caused considerable stir in the early eighties by writing scathing critiques of the autocratic KMT government. She persisted in her publications despite repeated threats of arrest and incarceration, winning eventual recognition as one of the handful of writers who played a major role in the liberalization of that island community. Asked to reflect on her experience of the past decade, she ended a recent article with this conclusion:

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One who has lived through the eighties in Taiwan has to be an individualist through and through: someone who will continue to dream about the dawn while confronting the deepest personal darkness. Never blink!77

These are the words of enduring change, because they teach us the difficult but rewarding lesson that the change that must be endured is the change that endures. notes This essay began as an invited lecture in a yearlong lecture series in 1998 on “The Souls of Nations and the Prospect for Democracy,” sponsored by the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy, University of Chicago. I acknowledge with gratitude the generosity and kindness of my colleagues Professors Nathan Tarcov and Joseph Cropsey, directors of the center. The essay has also benefited from the discerning comments of my colleagues and friends Professors Alan Gewirth, Jean Beth Elshtain, Franklin Gamwell, Bruce Lincoln, Victor Mair, Henry Rosemont, and Lisa Raphals. The first version of the essay, with full citations of the Chinese texts in the original, was published by the Lingnan Journal of Chinese Studies, n.s., no. 2 (October 2000): 27–70. Translated into Chinese, the essay also appeared in Newsletter of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica 11, no. 3 (September 2001): 1–52. A slightly revised English version, without Chinese citations, was subsequently published in Human Rights Review 3, no. 3 (April–June 2002): 65–99. The current version, further edited and with some crucial Chinese terms and texts restored, is based essentially on the Lingnan piece, collated with still a third version published in Does Human Rights Need God? ed. Elizabeth M. Bucar and Barbra Barnett (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 104–132; 309–317. This essay is published by permission of all three previous English publications. 1. See, for example, Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 2. Wang Gungwu, The Chineseness of China: Selected Essays (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 2. 3. A convenient summary of this history is found in Jonathan Spence, “Western Perceptions of China from the Late Sixteenth Century to the Present,” in Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, ed. Paul S. Ropp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 1–14. A longer account will be found in Jerome Ch’en, China and the West: Society and Culture 1815–1937 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). For accounts of various aspects of the discovery and reception of China in the West, see such studies as Joachim Bouvet, Histoire de l’empereur de la Chine (Paris: La Haye, 1699); David E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1985); Knud Lundbaek, T. S. Bayer (1694–1738): Pioneer Sinologist, Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series, no. 54 (London: Curzon Press, 1986); Knud Lundbaek, Joseph de Prémare (1666–1736), S.J.: Chinese Philology and Figurism, Acta Jutlandica 66:2, Humanities Series 65 (Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1991); Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), chap. 7; G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 111–138; Bertrand Russell, The

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Problem of China (New York: Century, 1922). For a recent and brilliant discussion of the perils and possibilities of cross-cultural understanding, see Zhang Longxi, Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), chap. 1 (“The Myth of the Other”). See, for example, Jerry Norman, Chinese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): “Few language names are as all-encompassing as that of Chinese. It is made to serve at once for the archaic inscriptions of the oracle bones, the literary language of the Zhou dynasty sages, the language of Tang and Song poetry and the early vernacular language of the classical novels, as well as the modern language in both its standard and dialectal forms” (p. 1). Also see Christoph Harbsmeier, Language and Logic, vol. 7, part 1 of Science and Civilisation in China, ed. Joseph Needham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): “There is only one culture in the world which has developed systematic logical definitions and reflections on its own and on the basis of non-Indo European language. This is the Chinese culture. The history of logical reflection in China is therefore of extraordinary interest for any global history of logic and hence for any global history of the foundations of science” (p. xxi). Wang Gungwu, Chineseness, p. 3. During a brief tour of China in 1987, I was astonished to discover that virtually all of the street names of a huge city like Shanghai had signs written only in pinyin. Unaware of my own ignorance, I asked my university guide why no Chinese characters were visible on the signs. Pointing to the English letters, my guide bellowed: “These are Chinese signs!” In Taiwan, decades of chaotic romanization have never been resolved. The desperate need of standardizing romanization of all street and road names of the island with the pinyin system is currently stymied by politics. I have noticed an increased tendency in myself, in colleagues and students, and even occasionally in Hong Kong and Taiwan journalism to use the wrong homonyms, typographical errors most likely generated by computer-based word processing or typesetting. For an eloquent but somewhat uncritical eulogy of the alphabet, see Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s “Didascalicon” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): “The alphabet is an elegant technology for the visualization of sounds. Its two dozen shapes trigger the memory of utterances that have been articulated by the mouth, the tongue, or the lips, and filter out what is said by gesture, mime, or the guts. Unlike other writing systems, it records sounds, not ideas. And in this it is foolproof: readers can be trained to voice things which they have never heard before. This much the alphabet has done, and with incomparable efficiency, for the last two millennia” (pp. 39–40). In this and other passages, Illich has taken ancient Cratylism to new heights. Ann Kent, Between Freedom and Subsistence: China and Human Rights (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 5. New York Times, November 17, 1999, A15. Shijie ribao ᶾ䓴㖍⟙, September 27, 1999, p. 2. David N. Keightley, “Early Civilization in China: How It Became Chinese,” in Ropp, Heritage of China, pp. 15–54. Keightley, “Early Civilization in China,” pp. 31, 48–53. Ibid., p. 17. The classic work of modern scholarship that links decisively the early Chinese kinship system to ritual performance is, of course, Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, rev. and trans. James Harle Bell et al. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 311–392. It is another irony of Chinese history that, owing to rapid modernization,

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26 27. 28. 29.

dual-career families (conditions obtaining in China and in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other diaspora Chinese communities), and the one-child policy officially implemented in 1981 on the mainland, the massive vocabulary of extended kin relations may become progressively lost to children of current and future generations. Confucius, The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1992), 12.11:113. Keightley, “Early Civilization in China,” p. 31. Ibid., p. 35. D. C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds., Liji zhuzi suoyin 䥖姀徸⫿䳊⺽ (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1992), 11.20:71. Among the many formal sacrifices associated with the state and the ruler, according to the Han scholar-official Dong Zhongshu 吋ẚ冺 [179 b.c.–104 b.c.], “none is more important than the Suburban Sacrifice 卓 慵᷶恲” Chunqiu fanlu 㗍䥳䷩曚 [Sibu beiyao, hereafter cited as SBBY], 15.7a). For further discussion of this rite, see Xu Zhuoyun 姙῔暚, “Xian Qin zhuzi dui tian di kanfa ⃰䦎媠⫸⮵⣑䘬䚳㱽,” in Qiu gu bian 㯪⎌䶐 (Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1982), pp. 427–429. For this reason, the most dreaded form of punishment, developed later for the most severe offense against family and clan and administered by the community and not by the government, is the removal of one’s name from the ancestral shrine (e.g., the scene in the contemporary film Ju Dou 卲寮). “Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and man’s foes will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Revised Standard Version). David N. Keightley, “The Religious Commitment: Shang Theology and the Genesis of Chinese Political Culture,” History of Religions 17, nos. 3–4 (February–May 1978): 212–213. See, for example, C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society: A Study of Contemporary Social Functions of Religion and Some of Their Historical Factors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961); Robert P. Weller, Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987). For a succinct argument based on a thorough review of the pertinent scholarship, see Robert Eno, “Was There a High God Ti in Shang Religion,” Early China 15 (1990):1–26; also Xu Zhuoyun, Xi Zhou shi 大␐⎚ (Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1984), pp. 95–106. For a dissenting and somewhat reactionary view, see Xu Fuguan ⼸⽑奨, Zhongguo sixiangshi lunji xubian ᷕ⚳⿅゛⎚婾普临䶐 (Taipei: Shibao chubanshe, 1982), pp. 239–244. I use this term in a sense analogous to how it is used in the biological sciences: structural similarity of two parts of one organism based on a common developmental origin. Analects 2.21:17. Zeng Shen, The Great Learning, in James Legge, The Chinese Classics, 2nd rev. ed. (Taipei: Wenshijie chubanshe, 1972), 1:370 (emphasis mine). Lau and Chen, Liji, 16.12:92. Ibid., 16.3:91. For the clause, see Qu Wanli ⯰叔慴, Shangshu jinzhu jinyi ⯂㚠Ṳ㲐Ṳ嬗 (Taipei: Com-

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30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

mercial Press, 1969), p. 85. For the reading, see Feng Youlan 楖⍳嗕, Zhongguo zhexueshi xinbian ᷕ⚳⒚⬠⎚㕘䶐 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1980), vol. 1, chap. 4. Fan Wenzi, Zuo Commentary ⶎ⁛, Duke Cheng ㆸ℔, ninth year. Li Ji, Guoyu ⚳婆, 7.10a (SBBY). Analects 1.2. D. C. Lau, following Qian Daxin 拊⣏㖽 [1728–1804], the Qing philologist, emends ren ṩ to ren Ṣ. Accordingly, Lau’s translation of the last part of the statement reads: “the root of a man’s character” (Analects, p. 3). My translation here follows D. C. Lau’s rendering of ai ッ as “sparing.” See D. C. Lau, Mencius (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1984), 2:285. Lai Yanyuan 岜䀶⃫ and Huang Junlang 湫ὲ恶, Xinyi Xiaojing duben 㕘嬗⬅䴻嬨㛔 (Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1992), p. 31 (chap. 5) (emphasis mine). Zuozhuan, Duke Yin 晙℔, 11: “⏃⫸㗗ẍ䞍〗ᷳ⮯ṉḇ. . . . ᶵ奒奒.” D. W. Y. Kwok, “In the Rites and Rights of Being Human,” in Confucianism and Human Rights, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 85. Sumner B. Twiss, “A Constructive Framework for Discussing Confucianism and Human Rights,” in de Bary and Tu, Confucianism and Human Rights, p. 32. Fareed Zakaria, “Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (March/April 1994): 113. Ian Buruma, “Don’t Say Goodbye,” review of Christopher Patten, East and West: China, Power, and the Future of Asia, New York Review of Books 45:14 (September 1998), p. 18. Ambrose C. Y. King, “Confucianism, Modernity and Asian Democracy,” in Justice and Democracy: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Ron Bontekoe and Marietta Stepaniants (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 174, 175. Sumner B. Twiss, “Constructive Framework,” p. 34. Derk Bodde, “The State and Empire of Ch’in,” in The Cambridge History of China, Volume 1: The Ch’in and Han empires, 221 b.c.–a.d. 220, ed. Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 30 (emphasis mine). “䫆⾺⺊㕤⭞炻⇯寶⫸ᷳ忶䩳夳烊↹优ᶵᷕ炻⇯㮹䃉㇨㍒ㇳ嵛ˤ㱣⭞ᷳ⮔䋃炻Ṏ䋞⚳ḇ.” Wang Liqi 䌳⇑☐, Yanshi jiaxun jijie 柷㮷⭞妻普妋 (Beijing: Guji chubanshe, 1980), p. 54. For a recent and stimulating discussion of the “text” of the Chinese house and related topics, see Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), esp. chaps. 1–3 on “the construction of Chinese social space.” Ch’en Tu-hsiu, “The Way of Confucius and Modern Life,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition, comp. Wm. Theodore de Bary, Wing-tsit Chan, and Chester Tan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 2:153–156. A hint of editorial bias is apparent when the introductory notes of this entry declares: “Ch’en directs his fire at social customs and abuses which seemed to have Confucian sanction but had no place in the modern age” (emphasis mine). To this observation, Hamlet’s words to his mother may seem an appropriate response: “Seems, madam? Nay, it is, I know not seems.” As the Columbia editors themselves so meticulously demonstrate in their annotations, Ch’en’s excerpted essay of no more than three pages (in English translation) cites the Record of Rites no less than seventeen times and the Yi Li (I-li [Anthology of Propriety and Ritual]) once for documentation of these “customs and abuses.” If more documentation is desired, one can simply turn to the bountiful pages of imaginative and anecdotal literature from China’s imperial past down to the twentieth century. Ch’en Tu-hsiu, “The True Meaning of Life,” in de Bary, Chan, and Tan, Sources of Chinese Tradition, pp. 167–169. For an account of the critique of Confucianism dur-

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47.

48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54, 55. 56. 57.

ing the early decades of the twentieth century by Ch’en, Wu Yu, and others, see Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 300–313. Chow, May Fourth Movement, p. 300. To Chow’s observation, however, one may also add this rhetorical question: how could the male elite make such a declaration of open resistance to Confucian ideology, when for the most part of China’s imperial history, the only recourse that men had for a vocation of scholastic success, officialdom, and upward mobility was to master the Confucian classics? Wang Gungwu, Chineseness, chaps. 11–12; Jing Wang, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 64–117. See, for example, Emily Martin Ahern, Chinese Ritual and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Allen Chun, “An Oriental Orientalism: The Paradox of Tradition and Modernity in Nationalist Taiwan,” History and Anthropology 9, no. 1 (1995): 27–56; Huang Huang-ping and Chiu Lian-hwang, “Moral and Civic Education,” in The Confucian Continuum: Educational Modernization in Taiwan, ed. Douglas C. Smith (New York: Praeger, 1991), pp. 367–420; Robert P. Weller, Resistance, Chaos, and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts, and Tiananmen (London: Macmillan, 1994); S. Harrell and C. C. Huang, eds., Cultural Change in Postwar Taiwan (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), pp. 22–46; Ambrose Y. C. King, “State Confucianism and Its Transformation: The Restructuring of the State-Society Relation in Taiwan,” and Thomas G. Gold, “Civil Society in Taiwan: The Confucian Dimension,” both in Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity: Moral Education and Economic Culture in Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons, ed. Tu Wei-ming (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 228–243, 244–258. Wang Gungwu, “Power, Rights, and Duties in Chinese History,” in Chineseness, pp. 165–187. Wm. Theodore de Bary, The Liberal Tradition in China (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1983; New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). The thesis of the book is briefly rehearsed and reemphasized in de Bary’s more recent Asian Values and Human Rights: A Confucian Communitarian Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 158–167. For a detailed critique of the latter book, see Anthony C. Yu, “Which Values? Whose Perspective?” Journal of Religion 80, no. 2 (April 2000): 299–304. De Bary, “Introduction,” in Confucianism and Human Rights, p. 5; Twiss, “Constructive Framework,” p. 41 and n. 35; Irene Bloom, “Mencian Confucianism and Human Rights,” in de Bary, Confucianism and Human Rights, pp. 96–97. De Bary, Asian Values, p. 18. Ibid., pp. 17ff. Lau and Chen, Liji, 26.11:131. Fei Xiaotong 屣⬅忂, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 66. These are the concepts in the traditional Chinese juridical system singled out for praise by Heiner Roetz in his thoughtful essay “Confucianism and Some Questions of Human Rights,” Institute Designate of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica (July 1999), pp.9–11. Assuredly, Confucian teachings advocate the importance of self-reform or mending one’s behavior in the face of mistakes or errors (Analects 1.8; 15.30). The problem of what to do, however, remains when the supreme ruler does not practice such an ideal of self-correction.

enduring change 3 49 58. De Bary, Asian Values, p. 8. 59. Ibid., p. 10. 60. For a recent critique of cultural particularism, see, for example, Bo Yang 㝷㣲 (Guo Libang 悕䩳恎), “Renquan nalai Zhongguo tese Ṣ㪲恋Ἦᷕ⚳䈡刚” (How could human rights have a special Chinese character!), Central Daily News (overseas edition), February 23, 1998, p. 5. 61. The Chicago Tribune of May 9, 1998, bore the front-page, headlined story of a Chinese couple, resident immigrants to the United States, who had been threatened by the Cook County state’s attorney’s office with the criminal charge of domestic battery and possible deportation for alleged physical abuse of their eight-year-old daughter (p. 1). The father especially was accused by the state of “hitting his . . . daughter in the face, arms and legs” (p. 2) on account of her alleged loss of a ring. Believing that they were merely exercising their own right of meting out appropriate discipline for their errant child, the parents were bewildered by “the American way.” Confronted by both outcries from the Asian community and coverage by the media, the state eventually dropped the deportation threat and settled with the family by imposing on the father “a penalty of one year of court supervision” and “counseling” (p. 1). However one may interpret this story, the events of the episode may well serve as an ironic commentary on the quoted remark of Lee Kuan Yew that “the ruler or the government does not try to provide for a person what the family best provides.” In pondering possible examples drawn from Chinese history, past and present, the issue confronting Mr. Lee is whether “what the family best provides” is always the best for an individual member. 62. Lau and Chen, Liji, 4.45: 28. 63. Alan Gewirth, “Common Morality and the Community of Rights,” in Prospects for a Common Morality, ed. Gene Outka and John P. Reeder Jr. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 34. 64. To the best of my knowledge, there is no original source for this proverb, but one convenient textual embodiment can be found in chap. 78 of the novel Xiyouji 大㷠 姀 (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1954), p. 893. See also Anthony C. Yu, trans. and ed., The Journey to the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 4:43. My citation of this saying does not mean to ignore the fact that in the systems of military discipline maintained in even the “liberal, individualist West,” there is the similar construal of a subject’s refusal to die on command as a form of treason. What is much more heartening is the development in a place like Taiwan, where the dawning consciousness that alternative forms of service may substitute for the military draft has found recent legislative enactment. See Central Daily New (overseas edition), January 17, 2000, p. 3. 65. This is the thesis of Yu Yingshi ἁ劙㗪, Xiandai ruxue lun 䎦ẋ₺⬠婾 (River Edge, N.J.: Global Publishing, 1996), pp. 1–59. 66. Ibid., pp. 23–24. 67. Dai Zhen ㇜暯,Mengzi ziyi shuzheng ⬇⫸⫿佑䔷嫱, in Dai Zhen quanji ㇜暯ℐ普 (Beijing: Qinghua daxue chubanshe, 1991), 5:152. 68. Ibid., pp. 176–194. 69. Ibid., p. 159. 70. The space of this essay precludes a detailed consideration of Zhao Jibin’s provocative but controversial thesis that the meanings of ren Ṣ and min 㮹 are sharply and consistently differentiated throughout the Analects. According to Zhao, the former refers only to the aristocratic strata of society, whereas the latter term signifies the

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71.

72. 73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

populace or common people. See Zhao Jibin 嵁䲨⼔, Lunyu xintan 婾婆㕘㍊ (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1959), pp. 1–27. The binome shengsheng derives from the “Commentary of the Appended Phrases 专录,” 5, of the Classic of Change. Two lines of the received text read: “Producing life is called change; completing [an] image is called the ‘Key’ 䓇䓇ᷳ媪㖻炻ㆸ尉ᷳ媪Ḧ.” The parallel construction makes it obvious that the second graph of both sentences must be read as nominals, objects of the antecedent verbal graphs “to produce/ beget” and “to complete.” The received text thus puts “greater emphasis on the generative capacity of the Way,” as Edward Shaughnessy observes in his translation of the Mawangdui version of the classic. Instead of a binome, however, that version has only a single sheng, and the line’s slightly different vocabulary also makes for a different reading: “Giving life to [something] is called ‘the image’ 䓇ᷳ偫(媪)楔(尉).” See Edward L. Shaughnessy, trans., I Ching: The Classic of Changes (New York: Ballantine, 1996), pp. 192–193 for text and translation, p. 237 for comment. Yu Yingshi, Xiandai ruxue lun, p. 36. Lucian Pye, “The State and the Individual: An Overview Interpretation,” in The Individual and the State in China, ed. Brian Hook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 20. To be fair to Zhao, as Pye recognizes, such generalizations merely echo or repeat similar ideas held by someone like Lee Kuan Yew. Furthermore, one can hardly open a newspaper published in Taiwan for very long without reading pundits and educators exalting students to let society educate them. Moral society and immoral man, indeed! Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: Scribner’s, 1944), p. xiii. For a recent example of unbridled racism that ends in open killing, see the story on one Buford Furrow in Los Angeles, who reported shooting a Filipino American postal worker in cold blood simply on the ground that the latter was “nonwhite.” The report can be found in the Chicago Tribune August 13, 1999), sec. 1, p. 3. For a powerful critique of certain American values and practices in relation to a consideration of human rights, see Henry Rosemont Jr., “Human Rights: A Bill of Worries,” in de Bary, Confucianism and Human Rights, pp. 54–66. For the white papers released by the State council on the subject, one may cite the following: “Human Rights in China” (1991), “Criminal Reform in China” (1992), “Tibet—Its Ownership and Human Rights Situation” (1992), “The Situation of Chinese Women” (1994), “Family Planning in China” (1995), “The Progress of Human Rights in China” (1995), “The Situation of Children in China” (1996), “Progress in China’s Human Rights Cause in 1996” (1997), and “Freedom of Religious Belief in China” (1997). Needless to say, the political stance of all these papers is consistent with the ideology of the PRC. For further discussion of China’s concern for garnering international understanding and support on these and related issues, see Deng Yong and Wang Feiling, In the Eyes of the Dragon: China Views the World (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). For a convenient anthology of writings on rights by various Chinese intellectuals, including dissidents, during the twentieth century, see Stephen C. Angle and Marina Svensson, eds., The Chinese Human Rights Reader: Documents and Commentary 1900–2000 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2001). Long Yingtai 漵ㅱ⎘, “Baling niandai zheyang zouguo ℓ暞⸜ẋ忁㧋崘忶” (This Was How We Walked Past the Decade of the Eighties), in Zhongguo shibao ᷕ⚳㗪⟙, August 12, 1998), p. 37.

 16  CHINA AND THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN RIGHTS ancient verities and modern realities

L

ecturing on the topic of China and the problem of human rights on various occasions, I have encountered a number of questions that have been repeatedly asked by audiences far and near. These questions have helped to identify for me a core set of issues related to the topic, many of which, mentioned continuously by the news media, have also been examined and debated in an ever-growing mountain of scholarly literature. For this essay, therefore, I have decided to organize my thought around such a series of questions, in hopes that this experimental format will anticipate some of the reader’s concerns and thereby stimulate further thinking on the subject.

some china scholars argue against the notion of universal human rights being applied to china, on the basis that such advocacy tends to ignore or deny the particularity or even the uniqueness of china’s culture and history. what is your reaction to such a view? Although I do not believe that China as a national and cultural entity is unique any more than any other such human entity past or present globally, the advocacy of universal human rights, in my view, need not ignore or deny any community’s cultural particularity. For us to ponder this question in the context of our contemporary society in the United States,

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the first thing we need to remember is that the formal definitions and enumerations of rights may differ significantly in language and substance even between Great Britain and the United States, two nations that, for reasons known to all, have supported each other’s claim to enjoy special intimacy of relations on historical, institutional, and ideological grounds. When we extend the comparison to other Western democracies, the difference continues to widen. Because of both the disparity of cultures in Western nations and the diversity in the precise understanding and definition of rights, the discussion of the topic relative to a civilization like China can hardly expect fruitful progress if it is premised on only the contrast between absolute difference: that is, monolithically on one side an avowal of certain principles alleged to be “self-evident” (in the language of the U.S. Constitution!) and commanding universal assent versus the alleged ignorance and rejection of, or opposition to, such principles on the other. The tendency in so many reports flooding the popular media of the United States these days is to ignore or belittle the undeniable fact that, since , the Chinese government has issued a series of papers in lengthy detail concerning its understanding of human rights and related problems. Even more significantly, the government has signed two formal treaties: the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in , and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in . Both the promulgated papers and the signatures represent, even minimally, the People’s Republic of China’s (hereafter PRC) serious effort to come to grips with virtually all of the issues pertinent to the subject. That the Chinese interpretations, priorities, and conclusions reached in the process may differ from Western judgment, and that the actual governmental practices and policies frequently do not live up to the ideals and their implications already espoused (a failure, by the way, no Western democratic state is innocent of ) do not diminish the significance of this attempt by the Chinese state to grapple with balancing what it perceives to be internal constraints and exigencies and the compliance with international expectations and norms. My discussion, however, does not focus merely on the current situation but more so on the PRC’s view of human rights, which, as a scholar has pointed out, has evolved from “a complex mix of socialist and Maoist ideas, and of traditional thought and practices, as well as of the historical experience of the Chinese revolution” (Kent , ). As a student of premodern letters and thought, I am drawn to the shaping influence of ideological lineage and constraint. Because language and practice are unavoidably

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intertwined, one aspect and ready example of what I call problem in this essay literally surfaces in the terms themselves of the issue at hand. The bisyllabic name used for human rights, renquan Ṣ㪲, and the related concept of civil rights, minquan 㮹㪲, are relatively modern inventions for the Chinese language, dating only to the nineteenth century (Kent , –; Zhang , –). However, when these words are used singly, the terms ren, min, quan (humans, people/citizens, and rights) have a vintage that harks back to the literary language of high antiquity. In this context, quan, the word selected in the language to denote rights, is especially noteworthy, because its etymological sense is the weight on a steelyard or that of a scale (e.g., Analects .), and its derivative meaning is “weight” or “measurement” (Analects .). As a verb, its classical meaning is “to weigh,” and thus also the derivative meaning is “to assess critically,” “choose,” or “select” (Analects .).1 Because the society historically privileged the educated, the aged, and the politically powerful, the word very quickly evolved to combine with other words to form the various cognates relative to the concept of potency: quanneng 㪲傥 (power, capacity), quanbing 㪲㝬 (authority), quanli 㪲≃ (power in the sense of authority or strength), quanli 㪲⇑ (power in the sense of inherent or conferred right, hence literally, an authorized or legitimate advantage), quanshi 㪲⊊ (power in the sense of influence), and quanwei 㪲⦩ (powerful presence, but developing into the modern concept of specialized knowledge in a certain area). The subtext of the term points to the accepted assumption that only those with power and authority can properly weigh weighty matters, as when Confucius observed in the last citation: One with whom we may learn together may not be suitable as a fellow seeker of the Way; one who is fit to be a fellow seeker may not be one with whom we should stand together; and one with whom we can stand together may not qualify [ke ⎗] to join us in weighing quan [matters of consequence]. (Analects .)

My manner of translating quan in the last clause as “weighing matters of consequence” derives from a passage from the thinker Xunzi (–? b.c.). At the end of book , “Nothing Casual” (Bu gou ᶵ劇), of his collected teachings, Xunzi says: Desire and aversion constitute the power [quan] of taking or leaving. When one sees what is desirable, one must consider its every aspect to see how it may become detestable. When one sees something advantageous, one

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must consider its every aspect to see how it may become harmful. Only after weighing [quan] both sides of the matter and thoroughly calculating them should one determine whether it is desirable or detestable, whether it should be taken or abandoned. In this manner he will constantly avoid falling into his own trap. (xunzi , juan , .–; knoblock –, :)

Xunzi’s remarks touch on a concern pervading the different strands of moral and political discourse in the Warring States (– b.c.). Virtually every savant at the time attempted to find the proper philosophical formulation for accommodating the ineradicable surges of human desire for personal fulfillment, social order, and normative control. Realist philosopher in many ways that he was, Xunzi invokes here the consideration of “advantage and harm” (li hai ⇑⭛), categories common to many of his contemporary thinkers, to serve as the basis of assaying an impulse or appetite by its implied positive or negative consequence. In another section of his collected teachings, Xunzi has argued perceptively that, although the human disposition makes it natural for one to desire wine and meat for food and silk for raiment, a person would delay or postpone his desires, not because they are lacking but because “the extended concern [chang lü 攟ㄖ] and regard for consequences [ gu hou 栏⼴]” will make people apprehensive about whether they can sustain the satisfaction of such desires (Xunzi , juan , .; Knoblock –, :).2 Xunzi’s unambiguous observance of how humans can take the long, evaluative view of things relative to immediate needs and wants thus anticipates to a remarkable degree what Charles Taylor, a modern philosopher, has written on the capacity for reflexive thought as peculiar to “human agency.” Building on H. Frankfurt’s distinction between first-order and second-order desires in his elaboration on freedom of the will and the concept of a person, Taylor has asserted that “what is distinctively human is the power to evaluate our desires” (Taylor , –). In the fully developed human person, according to such a view, calculation and choice may often intervene to modify the promptings of instinct, appetite, or need. Not all occasions of evaluation, of course, permit leisurely deliberation. In the well-known reference by Mencius to a man’s obligation to reach out with his hands to save a woman drowning in water, despite the explicit ritual prohibition of his time against a man touching a woman, 3 the word quan must denote a split-second decision. The man’s life-and-death response to the overriding claim of kinship (the woman in the passage is a sao, an elder sister-in-law) and perhaps the equally urgent summons of

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their common humanity has to be swift. Whether, however, it is the careful reflection of plausible alternatives and consequences or whether it is an instantaneous reaction to a crisis, quan in all the Confucian thinkers cited presupposes the background of educated cultivation. The exercise of quan in the sense stemming from classical discourse may arguably imply the existence of a cultural and “moral” space, to quote Charles Taylor again, “a space of questions . . . to which our framework-definitions are answers” that will also be indispensable to formulating a notion of the self (Taylor , ).4 This implication of the term’s meaning as connoting on the one hand social and political power and, on the other, the agency of evaluation and enactment is thus not quite the same as our modern conception of right as entitlement, whether natural or conferred. The sense of the sentence “I have the right but not the power to do something” is readily comprehensible to a user of the English language. Its Chinese equivalent, wo you quan dan mei you neng qu zuo shi ㆹ㚱㪲Ữ㰺㚱傥⍣ ḳ, will require a bit more explanation almost in any context. Nevertheless, what has perhaps not been fully recognized hitherto is that part of the word’s etymological trace in the Chinese language may, ironically, confer on its modern usage a shade of meaning more compatible with the liberal Western emphasis of an educated citizenry as a necessary pillar to upholding a democratic republic.

some scholars have argued that the universal declaration of human rights means the rights of the autonomous individual must prevail over the communal-family and society. scholars who oppose an advocacy of rights based on this alleged understanding would side with many political leaders, the so-called champions of asian values, that extreme individualism is to be resisted at all costs, especially in asian societies. how do you view this? Although I cannot claim that I have skimmed even a tiny fraction of the literature devoted to the subject, I know of no responsible advocate of human rights expressing the conviction that the individual must necessarily prevail against the human community of either family or state. To dispense entirely with the family is, as far as our current knowledge goes, biologi-

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cally impossible, because human reproduction, first of all, is premised upon natural resources that cannot be supplied by a solitary human being. Until the highly controversial and experimental science of human cloning and its feasibility can reach some sort of cultural and scientific consensus, the phenomenon of parthenogenesis remains a religious myth. Moreover, even if cloning were to become an accepted mode of reproduction, the time necessary to protect and nurture the human infant is longer than that needed for most animals. The family, whether it be in the traditional form of heterosexual parents rearing children, or in some modern variation thereof, remains not only a viable but a necessary biosocial unit for human perpetuity. As for the state, there is no denial that one perennial issue of debate, reaching back to Greek antiquity in the West, is whether some forms of government are better than others. Relative to our discussion of China, this question can, as we shall see, take on pivotal significance, but even in this disputative context, I know of no responsible advocate of universal human rights arguing for the individual’s total triumph over social collectivity exemplified by the family or the state. For, if rights were only a matter to be defended against the encroachment of the body politic, the individual existing without family or state (like Robinson Crusoe or the Tom Hanks character in the film Cast Away) would not need rights. That, however, is not the bottom line of rights advocacy. In historical experience familiar to those of us living in the United States, we know that the state, in fact, must be allowed to intervene quite frequently on behalf of the individual’s interest or right against a family unit or another part of the state, much as the federal government had to take action in the case of the Cuban boy rescued at sea whose mother had drowned while en route to Florida to seek asylum. The idea that universal rights depend on the promotion of an autonomous individual free of all restraints and constraints is thus for me a red herring. A person with diminished capacity or reduced to a vegetative state because of accident or illness cannot in that condition be said to possess autonomy in the strict sense of the word, but he/she still has rights. When this issue of human rights is explored in the Chinese context, what I want to emphasize now and at all times is that the discourse on the worth and dignity of the individual is not to be equated with an advocacy of individualism. Whatever contrast one may find in the alleged Confucian understanding of the person in community, what complicates the discussion is the often one-sided emphasis of certain modern representations of the tradition. To cite the succinct observation by Henry Rosemont, an esteemed friend with whom I love to disagree:

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For the early Confucians there can be no me in isolation, to be considered abstractly: I am the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others. I do not play or perform these roles; I am these roles. When they have all been specified I have been defined uniquely, fully, and altogether, with no remainder with which to piece together a free, autonomous self. (rosemont , ; see also rosemont )

Rosemont’s devoted engagement with the Confucian writings, including an informed and provocative new translation of the Analects recently published (see Ames and Rosemont ), commands genuine admiration, but his sweeping generalization can be disputed at least on three points. First and linguistically, early Chinese thinkers had quite a few terms and expressions available in their discourse whereby they might express a strong sense of the person as an individual entity, if not as an isolated abstraction. The famous negative formulation of the Golden Rule, adumbrated in Analects ., “What you yourself do not desire, do not impose on others” (⶙㇨ ᶵ㫚炻⊧㕥㕤Ṣ), will lose all force of a categorical imperative if the word “yourself” or “self” (ji) becomes modified to read “the communal self”! This word ji ⶙ (self) alone5 and quite a few other related cognates that stud the huge corpora of Warring States thinkers still await systematic analysis. Perhaps the most conspicuously assertive description of the mind as the presiding organ of agency in the individual self is to be found in the Confucian thinker Xunzi. Invoking, not unexpectedly, the metaphors of feudal royalism, he declares that: the mind [xin ⽫] is the ruler [jun ⏃] of the body and lord [zhu ᷣ] of mental comprehension. It issues commands but does not receive any command. It prohibits on its own; orders on its own; decides on its own; takes on its own; initiates on its own; and stops on its own. Thus the mouth may be forced to be silent or to speak, and the body may be forced to bend or stretch out. But the mind cannot be forced to change its intention. If the mind approves something, it will accept it; if it disapproves of something, it will reject it. Therefore, it is said that the mind is all-embracing; 6 its choices being limitless, it will perforce hold its own view. (xunzi , juan , .)

Notice, first of all, that the emphasis of this passage is executed with deliberate rhetorical excess: the brevity of the statement is nevertheless laced with the term zi 冒 (its own, by itself) for at least seven times. At first glance, the argument seems merely intent on distinguishing between the capacity

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of different anatomical parts or physical organs in terms of how they respond to force or influences external to them, a train of thought not unlike Aristotle’s more extended discussion of motion and causality. Upon closer scrutiny, the malleability of such bodily parts as the mouth or the body is contrasted pointedly with the superior mind precisely because the latter’s fierce independence is alleged to be self-induced and self-maintained; nothing could effect change if it did not wish to. The word zi, we should note further, will eventually combine to form the canonical designation in both literary and demotic Sinitic of oneself (ziji 冒⶙). Whether these two words, zi and ji, can be understood as remote but apposite parallels of the two stems of aut and auto in ancient Greek that are so instrumental in forming a huge vocabulary crucial for the notions of identity and character of oneself, a vocabulary that, in turn, contributed decisively to establishing the enduring influence of Greek thought and letters in Western culture, would be an interesting exercise in comparative philology and philosophy. This, however, is not our concern here. What we note in Xunzi’s text instead is that this affirmation of the selfdirected capability of the mind to decide and act on its own does not make the further claim that it is thereby free of all cultural conditioning and historical constraint, for that would contradict completely Xunzi’s own advocacy of a particular curriculum of rituals and texts designed for Confucian self-cultivation. Taught and disciplined from birth that an individual must always regard himself/herself in conjunction with predetermined human relations (renlun Ṣΐ), as Rosemont rightly outlines the Confucian position, the individual mind, according to Xunzi’s quoted assertion, nonetheless retains fully its own independent power to choose and act. Were that not the case, there would have never been any form of dissent in the teeth of Confucian—or any other ideological—regimentation, historically or in the contemporary world, because the supreme burden confronting a Confucian Chinese in any period involves a personal decision on whether the sovereign he is enjoined to serve absolutely is worthy of such commitment.8 On the other hand, sustained and exercised by the mind that chooses and acts, such autonomy nonetheless still must act in dialectical relations with its cultural context and content, much as the “autonomous, freely choosing individual self” that Rosemont (, ) posits for the Western person must decide and act on the very basis of a presupposition that socially valorizes and gives meaning to this form of autonomy in the first place. Second and philosophically, Rosemont’s claim about “the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others” seems to understand it as an ethically

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and psychologically harmonious totality. But the alleged harmony, I would argue, is begotten more likely as a product of a partisan Confucian rhetoric. The notion, echoed by another contemporary scholar, that in “Confucianism . . . a genuine community is not composed of mutually disinterested egoistic individuals, but is composed of virtuous members thinking of shared goals and values over one’s own” (Lee , ) is directly contradicted by Xunzi as well. That ancient Chinese thinker, in fact, based his entire theory on the origin of rituals as arising from the need to curb the behavior of “mutually disinterested egoistic individuals” who could exist even as family members (Xunzi , chap. , “On Rituals”). Because modern interpreters like Rosemont and Lee are inclined to side with the Mencian line of interpretation than with Xunzi, they tend to miss a significant voice of difference on human nature and behavior in the received tradition of classical Confucianism. Even in the Mencian discourse, however, undetected cracks and fissures may undermine the notion of communal totality that defines the person, as Rosemont has just presented it. For this discussion, we need to recall the familiar debate already alluded to earlier, between Mencius and one of his many tricky interlocutors, on whether a man should rescue his sister-in-law, wife of his elder brother, with the hand if she were found to be drowning (Mencius A.). The man who put this question to Mencius sought to vex the Confucian disciple by posing a seemingly irreconcilable opposition between ritual propriety and the exigency of life and death that was augmented by the claim of kinship (the woman unambiguously was a sao ⩪, wife of an elder brother, and thus hierarchically a superior kin). Without contradicting himself, Mencius answered the bait of difficult query by unhesitantly endorsing the ritual proscription capped by a further ringing declaration: “Not to help by the hand an elder sister-in-law drowning is to be a wolf! In the matter of giving and receiving, a man should not touch a woman; this is ritual. When a sister-in-law drowns and one helps her with the hands, this is weighing [quan].” Most commentators past and present have considered the parable to be the locus classicus of Confucian affirmation of humaneness over ritualism. What they seldom notice in the story is that, suddenly, a person at the time of Mencius is faced with conflictual claims on his several roles imposed by both nature and culture: as kin, as a practitioner of values based on gender, and as a human being. The meaning and obligations of these roles betoken, of course, persistent and powerful voices of ancient Chinese culture learned from infancy that continuously emphasize their harmoni-

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ous hold on the individual, but in this case one claim must defer to another. The myth of the harmonious order of human relations (lun) is for that moment shattered. To act properly, the man facing a drowning woman who is his elder brother’s wife must decide instantly, not call a committee meeting of the village elders! If the male protagonist here senses no conflict of cultural constraints or the necessity of choice as an individual, especially in the sense that he can no longer live out “the totality of roles [he] lives in relation to specific others,” the Mencian identification of quan as the decisive factor in personal decision making becomes completely superfluous. “The totality of roles . . . in relation to specific others” breaks down, and only his choice to extend his hand to save her—a deliberate violation of prescribed ritual norm—would certify his humanity. The difficulty of confronting and choosing between incompatible norms, the awareness of which may well betoken another distinctive hallmark of human agency, is a familiar theme in Western thought and literature. The famous tale of the young man in Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’existentialisme est un humanisme, who must decide whether he should remain home to care for his ailing mother or join the Resistance and fight, however, is hardly unique when read in the light of the history of Chinese literature. In the latter tradition, there are literally countless examples of such painful agonies of volition, exacerbated, I would argue, precisely by the cultural emphasis that ethics and politics are primarily a matter or principle of human relations (lun li ΐ䎮), of relating the individual to the group, and thus supremely of adjudicating between competing claims on one’s desires. All too often and in too real a manner, the Chinese will discover that one set of relations and its implied moral imposition must take priority and precedence over the other. Whereas Sartre’s young man is exhorted to seek solution for his existential dilemma in the radical act of simply choosing, the contrastive Chinese characteristic of deferring to hierarchical considerations finds exemplification in the sentiment enshrined in the well-known proverb: “To complete political loyalty, it will not be possible for one to complete filial piety” ( jin zhong bu neng jin xiao 䚉⾈ᶵ傥䚉⬅). That saying brings us to the third and final critique of Rosemont’s generalization that Chinese cultural roles define the person “uniquely, fully, and altogether, with no remainder with which to piece together a free, autonomous self.” Even the surface meaning of these words fly in the face of the teachings by Zhuangzi, but, leaving that aside, the alleged perfection of role definition for the person provided by classical Confucian norms cannot be sustained by the fact of cultural change. Historically, it was the ideology deriving from the institution of the absolute sovereign that gave

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credence to my cited aphorism: to exhaust political loyalty, one cannot perfect filial piety. The traditional Chinese formulation of the principles of social relations has thus always betrayed a preference for a pyramidal model of power lodged in the sovereign and radiating outward to all parts of the state. Hierarchically, it means that the primacy of group over an individual is the logical consequence, because it is thought to be structured in the natural order of things. Once the machinery of imperial governance was forever broken in , however, the question confronting thinking Chinese everywhere is whether their society still need cling to an absolutist view of state power as the only viable mode of national governance, and the urgency of the question is abetted by the fact that the PRC continues to carry a lot of totalitarian baggage stemming from both native and foreign sources. Similarly, with the destruction of the imperial state, the Confucian discourse as its most perduring and articulate ideological prop must now confront the question of whether that traditional taxonomy of roles can continue to provide an adequate delineation, in theory and practice, of the individual Chinese in contemporary society. Considerations like these end our lengthy detour on the topic of individual and community in relation to the consideration of rights. Whether we agree with Lee Kuan Yew’s government and its flogging of the American youth or not in the incident in Singapore that caused international uproar a few years ago, we have to understand that disagreement cannot, and has not, centered on the government’s legitimate interest in protecting the property of citizens from random, individual acts of destructive violence. The point of dispute, in Singapore or elsewhere, must revolve around the thorny consideration of how the communal or public interest can be protected without the unjust disregard, even sacrifice, of the individual or that person’s legitimate interest.

quite a few china scholars have argued that reciprocity, a notion central to traditional confucian ethics, may hold the key to facilitating the development of a chinese view of human rights. what do you think? I have tried to tackle this very complex issue in a longer paper recently published (see chap.  of the present volume). Here I can only summarize a few main points of my thought. In a word, my reply to the question is a yes and a no. I strongly believe that traditional Confucian thinking may

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contain principles and implications that are not completely at odds with the modern Western notion of rights. On the other hand, the way that contemporary scholars, Chinese and non-Chinese, who have focused on developing Confucian tenets as a possible alternative to the advocacy of rights, in my judgment, have in the main presented a wrongheaded interpretation of Confucianism. In my longer study, my critique of the traditionalist position is based on several points. First, of the fivefold relations of society endorsed by classical Confucianism (sovereign and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder brother and younger brother, friend and friend), at least four sets are designed to demonstrate and uphold social hierarchy, because one member of each set of this relation is inevitably regarded as naturally inferior to the other and is therefore obligated to be subservient to the other. The ethical and political norms derived from such a scheme of social stratification can never be conducive to the promotion of egalitarian ideals, for thought or behavior. Nonetheless, the familiar teaching of Confucians (Analects .) that “the ruler should treat the subject in accordance with the rites, and the subject should serve the ruler with loyalty” remains a popular proof text for traditionalists eager to see in such expression of “communitarian values” the principle of reciprocal obligations that can supposedly replace the Western concept of rights. The Mencian prescription of normative obligations for the fivefold relationships—“love between father and son, duty between ruler and subject, distinction between husband and wife, precedence of the old over the young, and faith between friends” (Mencius A., in Lau , )—is said to provide the paradigm for “moral relationships and the priorities among them,” all of which involving “reciprocity” (de Bary , –). The problem with such a view is that, strictly speaking, there is no single word in classical Chinese that corresponds accurately to the English “reciprocity,” particularly as it is construed in de Bary or other modern works of Western scholarship. The term closest to the meaning of mutuality is sometimes identified in shu ⿽, defined by Chinese lexicons usually as ren ṩ (benevolence) and first rendered in English by James Legge in the nineteenth century as “reciprocity,” although its repetition is resisted by more recent translators (e.g., Ames and Rosemont ; Lau ). Used only once in both Confucius (Analects .) and Mencius (A.), it is the key term underlying the formation of the so-called negative Golden Rule—what you yourself ( ji) do not desire ( yu), do not inflict on others— referred to in both passages. This injunction to protect someone other than oneself from such ills as misfortune, injury, poverty, and death, often

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deemed universally disliked or detested by ancient Chinese thinkers, understandably led subsequent philologists and commentators to gloss shu as “the capacity to measure others by one’s own considerations.” The second Chinese word that may connote a sense of reciprocity is bao ⟙. In the two ancient thinkers under discussion (four times in the Analects, twice in Mencius), bao in context has to do with how one should respond when treated with kindness or ill will. The word, as its later usage in the developed Confucian discourse consistently attests, refers thus to the intent and act of repayment, and it is only in this sense that it has implications for the normative obligations prescribed for the fivefold human relations. Even if one were to allow for the use of “reciprocity” by Western scholars to characterize such obligations, however, the English word in this context can never serve as a synonym for equality or the advocacy for egalitarianism. Those obligations are no substitutes for rights precisely because they represent unequal demands or expectations of unequal classes. “To regard docility and obedience as the norm,” declares Mencius, “this is the way of a wife or concubine” (B.), a verdict that seriously undercuts his own typology, stated in the passage (A.) just cited that what separates husbands and wives are, according to de Bary’s reading (), merely gender or functional distinctions. Whatever bie ⇍ (distinction, dissimilarity, difference) may mean in the Mencian passage, manifestly it is not a word used to assert that the wife or concubine is “equal” to the husband in any social, ethical, or political sense. My second point of critique of the traditionalist position centers on its confusion of a biological community with a social community. Classical Confucianism has insisted from the beginning down to the present that, because no essential difference exists between personal ethics and social or public ethics, there can be unity of moral virtues. Just as a son should serve his parents with filial piety (xiao), it would argue, so should a subject serve his ruler with loyalty (zhong). Based on this flawed analogy, the Confucians promoted a virtue of personal ethics as the supreme equivalence of a public and political virtue, and as early as the Han period, filial sons were said to have been sought out as fit candidates for appointment to public office. Failure to implement this ideal, as a modern anthropologist has aptly pointed out, would entail the most drastic consequence: Disorder (luan) is the breakdown of the moral order implied by xiao. It is to have forgotten, neglected or discarded ties of obedience to and recognition of duties and roles. In either direction, upward or downward in the status hierarchy, commoner or imperial, neglect of this recognition of du-

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ties is, according to the imperial ideology, equally threatening. And the threat is to lose Chinese status and respect, to become alien or to become “mean.” (feuchtwang , )

Against this traditional Confucian line of reasoning, a counterargument must point out that in a condition of kinship, ties and relations between parents and children do not come into existence merely as a social fact or phenomenon. The biological necessity of years of rearing may, for the vast majority of households, foster the deepest bond of affection and mutual accommodation between parent and child. By the same reasoning, the social bond thus created may not readily or necessarily dissolve even in the presence of hurt, antagonism, and injurious violence. In a familial situation with young children, on the other hand, loving indulgence may have to yield to stern intervention if, for example, the toddler insists on playing with boiling water. By contrast, the state in the form of government is an entirely social creation. As such, its institutionalization in principle must have contingent provisions that would allow for these several possibilities: namely, a clearly delimited set of boundaries for the exercise of its power; the proper modification, if such need arises, of its behavior by peaceful and legal means in both preventive or punitive measures; and its vigilant monitoring by an independent judiciary and press. If the political order deteriorates, the formative principle of the state must also permit the possibility of its dissolution—again preferably by peaceful means such as through suffrage— when it becomes dysfunctional and injurious to its citizens. It should be only obvious that within such a vision of the state, the reciprocal obligations thought to be obtaining between those governing and those governed must be in significant ways different from the morality of the common household. Unfortunately, the homology between sovereign and the patriarchal parent in traditional Confucian discourse tends to absolutize the ruler and father in their respective spheres of power and authority. In their historical experience, the Confucians acknowledge the wisdom of their Master’s words when he declared in a well-known parable that “harsh government is worse than tigers.”9 Nevertheless, the Confucian discourse upholding the Chinese conception of the imperial state for more than two millennia can envision no means for changing effectively the behavior of the state government apart from violence born of armed rebellion, and this phenomenon is irrefutably attested by every known record of dynastic change. This fear or inability to envisage change as peaceful transfer of

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governmental power persists to the very present. In view of this limitation in the Confucian tradition, the advocacy of rights, therefore, must be formulated as an advocacy for seeking new conceptions of the body politic and new means to curb governmental excess and abuse. What recourse does a citizen or, for that matter, a group of citizens—even that of an entire town, village, or province—have for redressing unjust or wrong actions proposed, ordered, or carried out by the state? What social mechanism is there for providing equal consideration and treatment to a lesser community within a larger community?

china’s political leaders and many scholars, native and foreign, have sought to argue for each national culture to develop her own view of rights. there should be no coercive imposition of an alleged universal standard. what do you think? There are two sides to this issue. I agree first of all that there should be no coercive imposition, although we know also we can expend hundreds of pages arguing and defining what constitutes legitimate pressure and what is coercion. Our own experience in the academy should make us very sensitive to the difficulty of disentangling the thorny issue of particularism versus universalism in any philosophical debate. However, even the partial concession to cultural particularism that has my sympathy does not mean that any nation of whatever particular culture and history it claims to embody is thereby exempt also from the counterclaims of universal civil society in which it asserts to be a participant. Just as the United States should not be allowed to practice unchecked hegemony in any world body, so China herself cannot pursue similar policies in Tibet—to the horrible detriment and destruction of that land’s language, culture, history, and institutions—and think that immunity from foreign censure is an unquestioned right guaranteed by the doctrine of national sovereignty. The Chinese policy of transplanting language, religion, and history onto Tibet is certainly no different from imperialistic practices of her own past with respect to border civilizations. When China disagrees with Japan on junior high school textbook accounts of World War II or her permission for a former Taiwan president to visit Osaka for health reasons, or objects to the Japanese prime minister’s visit to the Yasukuni Shrine to honor souls of soldiers killed in World War II, including many of those convicted as

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war criminals, Beijing shows little hesitancy in intruding into the internal affairs of another sovereign nation. Even more pointedly, only a laughable but desperate nationalism would maintain that a so-called foreign culture, however conceived and defined, should never be permitted to undermine or dilute a nation’s discrete cultural integrity. If this were true or practicable, the Communists would have to assert that China should never have been encouraged to overthrow completely a form of imperial governance that had lasted for more than , years, or that Marx and Lenin were covert members of the Han race. Cultural entities, conceived as national entities, are not insular blocks of static identities, to be determined, exploited, and manipulated by only the purpose and convenience of a privileged communal unit (e.g., the government), with the self-imposed mission of guarding and maintaining the purity of what it conceives to be its communal essence. The history of the modernization of China for the past three centuries, beginning with her first encounter with the European West and then with Japanese and American realities, has been one long tale of both profound foreign influence and prodigious fomentation by native children on native ground. Beginning with the end of the Opium War in the first half of the nineteenth century, the devastating recognition by Chinese elites and commoners alike that a politically and socially bankrupt China could never hope to avoid national humiliation or even outright conquest by foreign powers gained steady momentum. The momentum itself was fueled by increasing contacts of Chinese nationals with foreign culture in foreign lands—in Japan, in North America, and in Europe—no less than with non-Chinese residents and institutions right in their own homeland. It was this sustained but wrenching exchange of cultures that led to the climactic and unprecedented act, on the part of the Chinese people, of overthrowing once and for all a form of imperial governance that had lasted for more than two millennia.10 To acknowledge this bit of familiar history is not to overlook, of course, the many atrocities perpetrated by foreign imperialism that have so severely scarred the collective memory of the Chinese people—and the lingering effects of such trauma should not be lightly taken. On the other hand, Chinese modernity and its ongoing process of reordering and transforming cultural norms could not have occurred at all without the ab extra insertion—whether by explicit design and intervention or by unconscious adoption and assimilation—of so-called non-Chinese values and ideals into native civilization on the part of the Chinese people themselves. In the late twentieth century, the Chinese government is on record in

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declaring as “irreversible” the historical trend of globalization in economic integration and technological development (Wang ). The efforts of the PRC to widen its participation in many international forums leading to multilateral agreements in sundry projects and contracts no less than the signatures to formal conventions on rights should indicate in some way China’s willingness “to act in accordance to international customs, to follow global customs” (Deng and Wang , ). To skeptics on China, such an interpretation may sound overly optimistic or naive, but considered in the lengthier duration of history these recent developments ought not to be belittled. When we remember that one paramount issue dividing the Qing court of early nineteenth-century China was whether “foreign devil” envoys should kowtow to the emperor, the behavior of China toward the global community today, even when represented by official pronouncements, must indicate, quite plausibly, momentous changes in the interpretation of self-identity and the normative values of society. Such changes, of course, will also incite recalcitrance. In the contest to control or resist the traffic of human culture, the very capital of the mind and spirit, censorship is as old as the policy of Athens and as new as the latest PRC governmental unit established to police the Internet. What we must remember is that its aspirant and actual success can enjoy little effective measurement except by the ironic yardstick of historical and cultural change that is taking place even now at this moment of our reflection.

china’s political leaders see maintaining social order and stability as their top priority. a large measure of such stability, taking again the cue from the nation’s history, derives from its capacity to feed its ever-growing population. providing the citizens with sufficient food, so the argument goes, is also the fulfillment of a fundamental form of human rights. what do you think? For someone like myself, who spent five infant years in China during the Sino-Japanese War and has both witnessed and experienced appalling suffering, including widespread and horrendous famine, I most certainly would not fault the emphatic desire of the Chinese leaders to feed their own enormous populace. One ready example of this concern, routinely voiced by both government and academic personnel, may be found in the

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words of President Jiang Zemin uttered during a widely reported interview on August , . I can tell you with certainty [he said] should China apply the parliamentary democracy of the Western world, the only result will be that . billion Chinese people will not have enough food to eat. The result will be great chaos, and should that happen, it will not be conducive to world peace and stability.11

These words surely possess a certain ring of truth, if for no other reason than the obvious need that the people must be fed. That having been acknowledged, however, I must point out also that the leaders’ argument for “food first, liberalization later” is itself an illustration of what I said about quan and its meaning of power in relation to the concept of rights at the beginning of this essay. It reveals once more the tendency of the Chinese to accede to the tradition that social order, construed as one key to communal well-being, can quickly become an end in itself, to be sought or maintained regardless of other equally important values. Upon closer scrutiny, Jiang Zemin’s words, for me, possess actually a revealing resonance with ancient sentiment, for they echo the very diction employed by the third-century Xunzi I alluded to earlier. In his chapter “Discourse on Ritual” (Li lun 䥖婾), the philosopher had this to say: How did ritual arise? I say, a human is born with desire. If what is desired cannot be found, the attempt to seek it cannot be avoided. Seeking without regard for measure and limit will inevitably end in conflict. Conflict begets chaos [luan], and chaos begets exhaustion. The former kings despised such chaos, and they therefore established ritual principles to limit it so as to make proper provisions for human desires and satisfy what humans seek. (xunzi , juan , .)

In the venerable tradition of Chinese social thought, there certainly was not a single Confucian thinker who would deny that food, and the need to satisfy hunger, would constitute one most fundamental ingredient of human desire. Not only can it be argued that Xunzi’s generalized remark here about human desires would include the matter of food and subsistence, but in his reference to remedial measures being introduced to ensure the proper satisfaction of legitimate desires, Xunzi’s words also reveal how this question of meeting the most basic of human needs—justly and equitably

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(i.e., with regard for “measure and limit”)—has thus been a taxing and urgent issue for Chinese civilization from its beginning. What makes Jiang Zemin’s diagnosis of one form of modern reality tally with ancient verities is the envisaged effect on the social order when there is no food, not enough food, or food inadequately distributed or allotted. “Seeking without regard for measure and limit will inevitably end in conflict,” declares Xunzi. “Conflict begets chaos [luan, a frightful word, as noted previously by Feuchtwang, in the vocabulary of Chinese politics and tellingly used by Kurosawa Akira when he renamed King Lear in his remake of the play with the Japanese Ran], and chaos begets exhaustion.” So, too, opines Jiang Zemin, if . billion Chinese people do not have enough food to eat: “The result will be great chaos [da luan, the same word reported in the Chinese press], and should that happen, it will not be conducive to world peace and stability.” Just as Xunzi also refers immediately to the institution of ritual by “the former kings [xian wang],” a posited a priori authority, in order to forestall such drastic chaos that would lead to “exhaustion [qiong]” or the collapse of the social order, so Mr. Jiang similarly makes an all too apparent claim for indigenous and internal means to maintain “peace and stability.” The pointed observation is that “the parliamentary democracy of the Western world” is not applicable to China. An interesting issue for me arising from Mr Jiang’s words does not necessarily lie solely in the reason or justification for his dismissal of Western parliamentary democracy, although probing some of the salient implications of his judgment may produce a provocative and illuminating debate. For me, rather, I would like to ask whether that president, now formally retired, has represented an adequate understanding of the problem in the context of historical tradition. For students of Chinese historical culture, how do we assess Jiang’s version of contemporary reality in the light of ancient verities? Against the view that the ultimate goal of feeding the people is to maintain the social order, which can also elide easily into a call to preserve and defend the power status quo, the Chinese themselves, especially those who appeal to Confucianism for ballast of thought and policy, might point out that the Confucian discourse would shed a different light. Although one must never belittle the task of feeding so large a nation, because the right to live and survive must implicate food and feeding, Confucius and his disciples have consistently maintained that there can be a value higher than food. The Master’s discussion in Analects . deserves full notice. When the disciple Zigong asked about government, the Master said, “Sufficient food, sufficient arms and the people’s trust.” Zigong said, “If one had no alternative but to give up one of these three,

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which should go first?” “Give up arms.” Zigong said, “If one had no alternative but to give up one of these two, which should go first?” “Give up food. Death has been with us since antiquity, but without trust, the citizens [min] cannot stand together [as a people].” Similarly and characteristically, Mencius goes on to tease out the crucial implications of his Master’s dicta by asserting that “there is something a person desires more than life, and there is something that man loathes more than death.” It is on this basis, in fact, that food given with abuse will not be accepted by even a starving wayfarer, an attitude, Mencius further claims, resident in every human being (Mencius A.). Recalling what Confucius and Mencius said about the need for adequate food for the people, one should also notice the exact ethical and political inference that both thinkers sought to draw from the hypothetical crisis. Their remarks clearly indicate that, for them, there are considerations just as, if not more, important than the issue of whether the dread of death stemming from inadequate food will result in social chaos. Even acknowledging the fundamental importance of feeding the people, of enabling the modern state to honor and fulfill this economic and biological right, therefore, one can still query whether the ability to enjoy that right alone sufficiently defines the meaning of the fulfillment of rights for all Chinese people.

your remarks thus far seem to intimate that certain themes in premodern chinese thought may provide accommodation or alternatives in contemporary discussion of human rights. do you think some distinctive contribution of traditional chinese thinking, confucian or otherwise, is possible? The answer to this question could fill a hefty tome, and many books have, in fact, been written with such an attempted purpose. My approach since developing an interest in relating contemporary rights issues to classical philosophical discourse departs from the customary focus on sets of human relationships and their prescribed, and thus idealized, moral obligations. Students of China must recognize once and for all that the primary set of those relationships, that between the sovereign and subject, is an obsolete and obliterated social structure. If we turn away from the language of reciprocal duties and turn to another topic that has, in fact, occupied the attention of Confucian thinkers from antiquity, the possibility of find-

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ing a basis for framing the conception of human rights in indigenous Chinese discourse can be far more promising. That topic is human desire: what a human likes and dislikes passionately and even obsessively; what a human, in summary, craves so badly that he/she cannot live without it. When the question is posed this way, it is no surprise that the somewhat tautological reply provided by virtually all thinkers, including Confucians, is: the love of life. What everyone delights in, as thinker after thinker of this tradition is ready to affirm, is to be alive. As an old Chinese proverb says, “Even an ant covets life.” Or another proverb, “A good death is not as good as a nasty life.” It is against such a background that the reply by Mencius to a query by a prince on how an empire can be settled and made one (ding yu yi ⭂Ḷᶨ)—that condition of “stability and peace” longed for by today’s leaders no less—becomes extremely arresting: “One who is not fond of killing,” declares Mencius, “can unite it. . . . If there is amongst the shepherds of humans [ren mu Ṣ䈏] one who is not fond of killing . . . then the people in the Empire will stretch their necks to watch for his arrival” (Mencius A.). The injunction not to take life, for me, has implications that exceed even its surface nobility, because the counsel is not based on other considerations such as kinship ties or class prescriptions that predominate in the discourse of ethics as reciprocal obligations. Moreover, the interesting implication of not taking life for someone enjoying royal power has an inherent drive toward an egalitarian assessment of individual worth, because it does not make sense to say that the king can be a morally virtuous ruler by killing only a handful of people and not dozens of them, or by killing only peasants and not the nobles. And finally, this prohibition brings into sharper focus a part of the implicit content embodied in the famous negative Golden Rule articulated by both Confucius and Mencius, that what oneself does not desire—namely, the taking, injury, or impoverishment of life—one should not impose on others. This incipient recognition of the importance of preserving life in ancient Confucian thinkers, I believe, eventually led to some remarkable observations across the centuries in the early eighteenth century, by another thinker firmly within the Confucian tradition. I cite some crucial sentences of the eighteenth-century scholar-official Dai Zhen ㇜暯 contained in his Expository Commentary on the Meaning of Mencian Words, for they provide a remarkable development of ancient thought in a new and possibly distinctly modernistic direction. One person’s desires are the same desires of all persons under Heaven. . . . In human life, there is nothing worse than the inability to fulfill one’s life.

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Desiring to fulfill one’s life while also fulfilling the lives of others, this is humaneness. Desiring to fulfill one’s life to the extent of injuring without regard for the lives of others, this is inhumanity. . . . Humaneness is the virtue of life productive of life. . . . When one person fulfills one’s own life and infers from this principle to help all under Heaven to fulfill their lives, this is humaneness. (dai , , , )

Of first and foremost importance in Dai’s statement is this totalizing, universalist claim that one person’s desire is the same as that of all: namely, it is life and the fulfillment of life. The unusual character of the assertion stems from the fact that such a sweeping declaration has no other qualification, because “life fulfillment” (sui sheng 忪䓇) has nothing to do with human relations necessarily. The gratifying condition is not dictated by kinship ties, or occasioned by culturally prescribed social position, or dependent upon the sanction by a particular segment of a community. Because they are common to all humans—from the highest ruler to the lowliest peasant—the desire and its object as universals possess the condition of equality as both phenomenon and quality. One can no more say that only some people have such a desire than asserting a peasant ought to aim at a lesser degree of self-fulfillment than a prime minister. Since high antiquity, Confucians, Daoists, and even Legalists of the Chinese philosophical tradition have all acknowledged the ubiquitous reality of desire, and their attempts at controlling this primordial human reality form a great part of their various ethical and political agendas. The agendas tend to induce subsequent interpreters of Confucianism to emphasize the inculcation of disparate moral virtues deemed appropriate to different human relations as the most distinctive contribution of the classical Chinese tradition. Dai’s remark, in this light, restores in a most striking manner the radical insight of ancient Chinese thought shared virtually by all of the schools or lineages of thought: prior to the establishment of human relations, there is only desire. Desire, therefore, may be termed the great leveler, in the grip of which each person is the same as, or equal to, the other. Much like Xunzi’s acute awareness of how the clash of desires can beget at once destructive social conflict, Dai’s remark also reveals such consciousness and he is quick, therefore, to highlight the concomitant need for limit. Every person may share the same driving impulse to fulfill one’s life, but this can be allowed only if it does no injury to another life. Dai’s stipulation thus may be seen as an attempt to treat one crucial issue ani-

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mating the debates of ethics and politics in different civilizations down through the ages: how to reconcile the most essential values cherished by an individual with those self-same values of other individuals. Because the desire for life and life’s fulfillment, in Dai’s thinking, carries both positive and limiting connotations, it may for that very reason provide a suggestive beginning for developing the notion of universal human rights that bears an audible Chinese accent. Despite long centuries of elaborate formulations whereby any sense of personal fulfillment, for the Chinese, is said to reside in, or be easily exchangeable with, the vicarious satisfaction of relations—to siblings, elders, parents, spouses, and rulers—Dai’s assertion here reverses the myth of affective displacement and bluntly legitimates, with greater clarity and force, the reality of self-affirmation, and thus self-love, self-interest, and self-preservation. Notice that this view of the human person does not even utilize such idealistic and abstract terms as worth and dignity (let alone the theological myth of the imago dei) to characterize its importance. Human desire as an irrepressible force of life is simply stated as it is. On the other hand, the unambiguous affirmation of desire as a universal phenomenon of the individual in Dai’s thinking in no way abrogates the individual’s necessary connection to the community. Indeed, both the positive and the limiting implications of desire make certain that the one and the many, the self and community, must be dialectically conceived. “When one person fulfills one’s own life and infers from this principle to help all under Heaven to fulfill their lives,” says Dai, does not such a statement carry an ideal germinal and germane to honoring universal humanity without dismissal or sacrifice of the individual? Conversely, if one’s quest for self-fulfillment must not be carried out to the extent of injuring another who, in principle, is engaging in the selfsame quest, does not the other person—and by extension, the community—act as a check and limit on the individual’s anarchic or antinomian impulse? The answers to these two questions alone, I would like to think, can open up many productive lines of inquiry and thought.

concluding reflection: law, religion, and rights I have, in the foregoing sections, concentrated on elaborating how a constructive critique of traditional Confucian ideas can bring out at the same time noteworthy notions about the individual person embedded in the tradition. Crucial to my undertaking is the conviction that the worth and

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significance of the individual are not alien to parts of the native intellectual discourses of China, philologically or philosophically. These resources, of which my essay has only begun to tap into modestly, should be explored more systematically, because a proper formulation of the individual’s meaning, not indiscriminate advocacy of antinomian individualism, is the true bedrock of any teaching on human rights. I should emphasize as well that, unlike much modern scholarship in the Western academy treating the subject of human rights, my discussion has not appealed to the assumptions of theistic religions. The human individual, based on the remarks by classical Confucian thinkers and Dai Zhen’s commentary, is accorded ultimate significance not by the belief that the human is a creature made in the “image of God” or brought into existence by some other agent of transcendent power. Rather, as I have argued, the Confucian tradition’s recognition of individual desire as a universal human phenomenon may be used as one key to a more modern, albeit humanistic and secular, articulation of rights theory. The so-called negative Golden Rule promulgated by Confucius himself—“What you yourself do not desire, do not impose on others” (Analects .; .; see also .)—thus affirms both the reality and limit of individual desire dialectically related to any human other as the necessary other, and not the obedience to a command by an absolute other, human or divine. Because that human other’s yearning for flourishing in life is identical to my own, according to Dai’s additional insight, and has, therefore, equal claim to my obligatory consideration for self-restraint even in my very quest for self-fulfillment, this egalitarian understanding of self and other can become the vital link to human rights as they have been understood and developed by democratic liberalism stemming from the Enlightenment in the West. Without a steadily escalating appreciation of why the individual must constitute an irreducible and indispensable counterpart to state and community (in the forms of clan, family, school, church, temple, and corporation), no genuine progress can be expected in the betterment of legal and political cultures in any modern state, let alone in China, where so great a burden is borne by both its historical past and cultural present.12 A huge part of that burden, in fact, owes its persistence to how religion and law have assumed different forms of social existence from those to which the modern West is accustomed. Archaeology has amply shown that law and religion emerged from the dawn of Chinese civilization,13 but their ancient modes and functions already indicated abundantly how their operations from the beginning were ineluctably tied to the state. Unlike the Western tradition, in which the origin of law is attributed to divine

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revelation (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) or to philosophers and lawgivers (ancient Greece), Chinese legal practices, from the earliest records, seem to have sprung from orders and proclamations of the rulers themselves. Increasing complexity of royal government uneasily astride a group of feuding “feudal” princedoms during the Warring States period also saw the addition of new documentary terms (zhi 㖐, “edict”; zhao 姼, “decree”) to denote royal command and injunction. The Qin kingdom that eventually became the short-lived dynasty (– b.c.) made significant contribution toward the compilation of a set of laws for “all manner of human activity in which the government was concerned,” the imperial commands usually rendered as lü and ling, “statutes” and “ordinances,” respectively (Loewe ). The ensuing Han added to this heritage “a detailed code and a fully laid down system for procedure in criminal cases, with the possibility of submitting some of these to a senior official, or even to the emperor himself, for final decision” (ibid.). Even prior to the formal beginning of the Warring States period, however, noted thinkers of China’s high antiquity were debating the merit of law in the process of political governance. The familiar maxim attributed to Confucius (Analects .) stands as an epitome of his attitude: Guide them with means of governance and keep them in order with punishments, and the common people will refrain from waywardness but will be shameless. Guide them with virtue and keep them in order with ritual [li],14 and the people will develop a sense of shame and change themselves.

Consistent with such an emphasis, his most well-known disciples such as Mencius and Xunzi continue in their teachings to accentuate the superiority of ritual as the indispensable path to moral self-cultivation for the highest to the lowest echelons of society. The posited success of ritual regimentation, according to Confucian idealism, would eliminate or minimize the need for ruling by fa 㱽, a word denoting the prescriptive model handed down by authorities including the ruler, the laws themselves, and the juridical process of litigation, ascertaining culpability, and meting out punishment. Instead of fazhi, therefore, the Confucians promoted rule by humans (renzhi) through the medium of ritual (lizhi). Against the Confucians came the so-called Legalists and a later splinter faction named Huang-Lao. Their chief spokesman being Mozi (ca. – ), the Legalists were among the first serious critics of Confucius and his followers, although, depending on one’s dating of the documents, the authors/compilers of the Daodejing 忻⽟䴻, traditionally attributed to Laozi,

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also represented sustained and pointed opposition from a different perspective in almost the same time. In spite of the fact that the Legalists advocated certain fixed standards of law and an allegedly impartial application of the codes, theirs was actually a rule by law. In Peerenboom’s succinct summary, law was simply a pragmatic tool for obtaining and maintaining political control and social order. In the Legalist view, humans are self-interested. To avoid conflict and achieve order, they must be manipulated through a reliable and impartial system of rewards and punishments. Clear, codified, public law lets every person know what is expected and what the consequences will be of one’s actions. (peerenboom , –)

Despite such clarity of purpose bequeathed to the legal system, so to speak, the Legalists did not in any way minimize the role and potency of the ruler, who remained “the ultimate authority, both in theory and practice” (Peerenboom , ). Whereas the Legalists and the Confucians both honored the political sovereign implicitly and explicitly as the final source and arbiter of the law, a motley group of Warring States thinkers and later elite officials was named retroactively first by Sima Qian ⎠楔怟, the Grand Scribe and first historian in the early Han, as followers who extolled the teachings attributed to the mythical emperor Huangdi and the legendary philosophermystic Laozi. Hence the name Huang-Lao, but the group’s identity and character have always caused confusion even among specialists of early China. The discovery, however, of four silk manuscripts (bearing titular and internal references to Huang-Lao) in  at the Number  Han Tomb of Mawangdui in Hunan province has radically altered our understanding of the nomenclature. More than a general synthesis of classical Daoist and Legalist thought, Huang-Lao, in Peerenboom’s investigations, represents a distinctive attempt to ground the sociopolitical order of the human world in “natural law” or “the normatively predetermined natural order or Way” (Peerenboom , ). Perhaps in syncretic reformulations of certain themes already evident in both Laozi and Zhuangzi, the Huang-Lao school did argue for the ruler’s necessity to “abide by the laws” thought to be based ultimately upon the Way of the cosmos (Peerenboom , –). Despite this noble precept, the school did not come up with any practicable means in curbing imperial power or exacting accountability from any wayward emperor. Its effectiveness against imperial abuse of authority is no more

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significant than the Legalist’s exaltation of sociopolitical order through techniques and stratagems designed to enhance imperial postures and policies, or the Confucian remonstrative advocacy, even at the risk of death, of moral self-cultivation for the patriarchal sovereign himself. Throughout its nearly three-millennia history of preimperial and imperial governance, codes of law increased exponentially with the accumulation of dynastic changes, but law in Chinese civilization never had the possibility of evolving into an institution separate from the executive powers of the state, for promulgation of laws and their enforcement belonged to the same loci of power. In one of its ostensibly most “democratic” utterances on politics, Mencius was recorded to have quoted a passage deriving from the Classic of Documents 㚠䴻, to the effect that Heaven “sees and hears” with “the eyes and ears of the people” (Mencius A.). In context, however, this remark actually refers to how “Heaven was pleased to accept the sacrifices” by the legendary sage-king Yao when he abdicated in favor of Shun. The Mencian passage never became an inducement to develop institutional mechanisms that would enable the people’s direct participation of selfgovernance through popular suffrage and legislation. For these reasons, Peerenboom’s critique of the Chinese legal tradition’s “inherent limitations” is unerring. In addition to the failure to provide “effective restraint” on the ruler’s power and protection for the individual against the state, traditional Chinese culture also failed to adopt, however gradually, “three key tenets of the Western liberal tradition”: First, that to treat one with respect and as one’s equal requires that one refrain from imposing one’s view on that person (the toleration or normative equality premise). Second, that each person usually knows what is best for him or herself, and/or people reasonably disagree about what constitutes the good (the epistemic equality premise). And third, that the interests of the individual and state are not always reconcilable. (peerenboom , )

That such tenets, on a prima facie basis, betoken enormous implications for the understanding and practice of religion even in the modern West should be self-evident. With respect to China past and present, they may be regarded as some of the most revealing assumptions that delimit historical and cultural difference. Since the discovery in the late nineteenth century of the oracle bones and other materials for divination in high Chinese antiquity, scholarship over the past plus century has attained unanimity on the pervasive presence and importance of religion for the

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investiture and maintenance of state power. Continuous archaeological discoveries and studies have demonstrated powerfully how the classical dynasties of Shang (ca. – b.c.) and Zhou (ca. – b.c.) had persisted in basically two major kinds of religious activity: divination by different methods and materials, and sacrifices to different objects of worship that included Heaven and a host of subsidiary deities associated with nature (i.e., sky/heaven, river, mountain, forest, grain, and soil), ancestors established through both kinship and ritual, and selected humans apotheosized through meritorious service to state and local communities. Although such activities were not organized into a central ecclesiastical structure, they were insistently and ubiquitously undertaken as obligatory forms of royal religion. They proved to be so crucial to so much of Shang sociopolitical life that the word “theocracy” is used increasingly in scholarly writings to refer to the nature of the government.15 When imperial government was established after the Qin ascension and China was reputedly unified as an empire in  b.c., all such activities survived and persisted, in fact, in modified and even expanded forms. In the ensuing Han dynasty ( b.c.–a.d.  ), when bureaucrats succeeded in turning Confucian teachings judiciously seasoned with Legalist concepts into official orthodoxy, the state cult ideology and ritual system for which they elaborated systematic theoretical justification in several major treatises served for all subsequent dynasties until  as, in fact, an unmistakable form of state religion. Already in the Zhou, the elevation of the ruler as a symbol or human representation of absolute power can be found in his newly acquired title as tianzi ⣑⫸, or Son of Heaven. While worship of imperial ancestors remained a staple of the emperor’s life, his assumption of the titles of di ⷅ (high god, supreme ancestor), zu 䣾 (ancestor) and zong ⬿ (ancestor, lineage) from the time of the Qin to the Tang (seventh century) progressively rendered immanent in the sovereign’s person the transcendent potency attributed to ancestors in ancient theology. Even as the emperor continued to worship his own ancestors and Heaven, the patriarchal ruler himself became the oxymoronic living ancestor to his people. As for other humans euhemeristically honored through worship and the reception of state-sponsored sacrifices, Confucius was petitioned to be canonized as early as  b.c. Subsequent centuries saw his rapid ascendancy to become another most prominent figure in state orthodoxy, and his temple, from early medieval time to the Qing, along with royal clan temples and the worship of Heaven, endured as “the most important ritual institution for rulers” (Huang , ).16 Since Chinese society until now

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has always been thoroughly elitist and hierarchical, the activities of worshipping Heaven, one’s own ancestors, and Confucius were promoted, taught, and encouraged through regional and local officials to spread to the lowest strata of the populace. The state cult ideology with both its religious commitment and ritual enactment, supported by an educational system of civil service examinations administered exclusively by the state throughout imperial history with only short-term disruptions, thus functioned “as an integrative force” in much of historical Chinese community (Yang , ). There are at least two important implications for this way of understanding the religious orientation of the traditional Chinese state. On the one hand, its own legitimacy depends not merely on justifying and promoting its own ideals. Perforce it must also be wary of, and competitive with, rivaling ideologies of ritual and reverence. While its own unexamined religious commitment must be taught and disseminated by educational indoctrination and bureaucratic coercion, the state itself must also practice a policy of control, regulation, and co-optation of other religions for the sake of its own legitimacy and survival. To the extent that the central government, on the other hand, has not always been effective in imposing total control of its domain throughout China’s long history, there has also existed a running conflict with local customs, beliefs, and rituals. This condition obtained even with the much more organized and highly visible communities of Daoism and Buddhism, one native and one foreign tradition that have formed with Confucianism the three major, proverbial religions of China. Confucianism presiding as orthodox ideology of the state has thus existed throughout imperial history alternately in patronage of, or tension with, the other two religions no less than with a host of local ones. Tension over time and particular circumstances often led as well to open conflict: armed rebellion and resistance on the part of religious movements and dissenters and massive military campaigns of brutal suppression by governmental forces (Chan ; Feuchtwang ; Hsiao ; Overmyer –; Schipper ; Yang ; Yu ).17 With regard to such relations between state and religion(s), the events of  that resulted in the unprecedented overthrow of more than two millennia of imperial government were undeniably revolutionary, because among other accomplishments and aspirations it was supposed to have ushered in for China a truly democratic and secular government. Article  of the Constitution of the Republic of China eventually adopted by the National Assembly and promulgated by the government in  states unambiguously that “the people shall have freedom of religious belief”

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(Republic of China Yearbook , ). This assertion, however, does not mean that the newly formed Chinese republic or its eventual Communist successor abstained from intervention in the nation’s religious affairs and traditions. Because the unprecedented attempt to create an entirely new form of government for one of the oldest continuous civilizations was fueled by the all-consuming passion for modernization, elite leaders of nearly all stripes of political persuasion almost inevitably were driven to engage religion in one way or another. Sharing the traditional Confucian contempt for both popular religions and even the more developed forms and doctrines of Daoism and Buddhism, the vast majority of modern Chinese intellectuals tend to regard religion as virtually synonymous with “superstition,” a debilitating and decadent remnant of all that was bad with the old Chinese culture that should be swept away entirely. Even political reactionaries who might have been tempted by certain dictatorial, if not imperial, pretensions were campaigning against religion (particularly in the form of local institutions and customs) in the early decades of the republic (Duara , –). Deeply aware of how various groups and movements of religious dissenters throughout Chinese history often ended as political rebels and revolutionaries, the Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang [KMT]) banned all “redemptive societies” once they achieved consolidated power after Chiang Kai-shek’s successful northern expedition of  (Duara , –). Various governmental agencies such as the Ministry of the Interior and the Bureau of Social Affairs oversaw a number of either established ecclesiastical organizations like the Buddhist Association of the Republic of China and other less-known ones. Sporadic campaigns against religions like Christianity and Buddhism also enjoyed official sanction during the decade of the twenties (Duara , –). Despite Christianity’s checkered political history in China since the seventeenth century, one associated paradoxically with both Western imperialism and the effective introduction of new culture (educational, scientific, and political) to China, first-generation and second-generation leaders of the KMT tended to exploit that religion continuously for their own profit. Throughout his revolutionary struggles against the Manchu government, Sun Yat-sen found shelter and support from missionaries and Christian congregations overseas both Chinese and non-Chinese. Chiang Kai-shek himself promoted different political movements that adroitly blended Confucian tenets with Christian teachings (Oldstone-Moore ). During the protracted struggle against the Japanese and later against the Communists, Madame Chiang’s Christian profession and polemics provided probably

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the single most effective instrument in swaying Western public opinion, especially in the United States. After World War II, Taiwan’s retrocession first as a province of China only to become the island nation ruled by the defeated Nationalists in  added unexpected twists and turns in the relationship between state and religion in that particular Chinese society. The KMT’s autocratic governance of the first two decades yielded eventually to the rapid modernization, economic expansion, and political liberalization during the late s that simultaneously deepened the rule of law and broadened the independence of the press. This process, in turn, heralded unprecedented liberty for the practice of religion, including the most dramatic revitalization of . the Buddhist san gha in a contemporary Asian community. The economic prowess of this religion on Taiwan manifested itself in the proliferation of educational institutions and eleemosynary agencies under its sponsorship. Their worldwide impact in social and relief work and health care also directly measures now “the freedom of religion” increasingly realized as a constitutional right of the island’s citizens. That freedom extends beyond established traditions of Daoism and Buddhism to encourage the prosperous flourishing of distinctive local deities, temples, and movements (Jones ; Katz ). If Christianity has had a peculiar alliance with the early leaders of the KMT, it has functioned also ironically to undermine and, eventually, to undo—at least through the ballot box—the Nationalists’ monolithic grip of power. Although that religion was introduced to the island through Dutch settlers in the seventeenth century, sustained and effective Christian presence came with Canadian Presbyterian missionaries during the nineteenth century. Their ministry carried out in local congregations, schools, and hospitals had produced a lasting impact on the native Taiwanese, to such an extent that many of their current leaders in the Democratic Progress Party (occupying the presidential mansion until May ) are Christians. Lee Teng-hui, the Cornell-trained agricultural economist who was elected as Taiwan’s first native-born president in  under the KMT banner but eventually left the party upon retirement, used to invite severe criticism and ridicule from both the news media and political opponents alike for lacing his speeches with too many biblical allusions and comparisons of himself to Moses. Unlike the people of contemporary Taiwan, Chinese religious adherents on the mainland, although making significant gains during the recent decade, face a much steeper uphill struggle in acquiring greater freedom to practice their beliefs if only because the central state government is

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committed to a manifestly different political ideology and ruling structure (see Pitman B. Potter’s most informative study in Potter ). The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that triumphed in  and went on to establish the PRC is unambiguous in its espousal of a classic Marxist profession of atheism. Nonetheless, Article  of the  constitution clearly states: Citizens of the PRC enjoy freedom of religious belief. No state organ, public organization or individual may compel citizens to believe in, or not to believe in, any religion: nor may they discriminate against citizens who believe in, or do not believe in any religion. The state protects normal religious activities. No one may make use of religion to engage in activities that disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the state. Religious bodies and religious affairs are not subject to any foreign domination. (potter , ; citing the constitution of , published by beijing’s publishing house of law, )

“Document ,” published by the official party journal Red Flag on June , , adds a brief but illuminating account of the party’s understanding of religion. “Religion,” it tells us, “is a historical phenomenon pertaining to a definite period in the development of human society. It has its own cycle of emergence, development and demise.” Insofar this was an undeniable historical phenomenon, “the earliest mentality reflected the low level of production and the sense of awe toward natural phenomenon of primitive peoples” (MacInnis , ). Although the constitution allows for religion to exist in China, it is to be understood as a necessary concession, strictly provisional and temporary, to the poor economic and educational condition of the vast majority of her citizens. The CCP, however, is committed to rid China’s religious traditions and communities from their “erroneous” ties to the “feudal” past and the complete severance from any link to colonial or imperialistic agencies from abroad. No party members, in fact, are permitted to be a follower of any religion. This has been, parenthetically, one specially galling offense committed by the sectarian movement called Falun Gong (literally, Merit of the Dharma Wheel) that, although condemned and outlawed on the mainland, is still very much active worldwide. At its initial phase of conflict with the central government, what alarmed political leaders was the discovery that many party members, including retired officials both civil and military, belonged to the group.

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If it is to exist within the new China, religion must fulfill the state-mandated obligation of being “patriotic,” in the sense that religion would never, in the words of “Document ,” “be permitted to make use in any way of religious pretexts to oppose the Party’s leadership or the Socialist system, or to destroy national or ethnic unity” (ibid., ). Its current existence, moreover, does not mean that its future or flourishing is thereby assured. With greater social, economic, and educational developments such as those advocated and instituted by socialism and Communism, the document confidently asserts that “religion will eventually disappear from human history” (ibid., ). Although these official Chinese statements may astonish readers from Western nations who routinely regard the free exercise of their religious beliefs as a proper right to be guaranteed and enjoyed, the  declarations already represented significant advance from the brutal suppression and ruthless campaigns against religion in the first three decades of the PRC. In that period of rampant and repeated Maoist incitation for the dictator’s fanatical followers to stamp out everything deemed the refuse of a decadent past or a hated bequest of foreign cultures, practitioners of all religions were persecuted. There was wholesale laicization of Buddhist and Daoist priests and nuns together with Catholic clergy, and there were indiscriminate jailing and execution of Confucian “reactionaries” and Christian traitors. Forced marriages of laicized clergy also were routinely imposed (Welch ). Countless religious edifices were destroyed and land owned by different communities were confiscated. Only after the death of Mao Zedong in  did the nation gradually return to a more civil and tolerant form of government. In China today, all religious groups and movements must be formally registered with the Bureau of Religious Affairs (with national offices in Beijing, and provincial and municipal branches throughout the country) directly under the supervision of the CCP and certified to be “patriotic” before they can operate legally. The major religions thus recognized are Daoism, Buddhism, Islam, Christian Catholicism, and Christian Protestantism. Although each of these traditions appears to be enjoying a measure of growth and security undreamt of during the Maoist era, each also faces problems with the state that are peculiar to its own ethos and history. Religious Daoism, as all students of Chinese history realize, arose in the Han as political dissent that sought to overthrow, in fact, the imperial government by force. Historically, it has always been a religion intimately connected to regional sympathies and local pieties, such that it was consistently viewed with suspicion by the central government. Despite impe-

38 4 china and the problem of human rights

rial patronage by several emperors and consorts who were ardent believers, Daoism’s frequent alliance or cooperation with sectarian movements and uprisings led to regular suppressions. The abrogation of priestly ordination was ordered by the late Qing government and repeated under both Nationalist and Communist rule, and this ritual was only restored by permission in the late eighties (Lai ). As for Buddhism, many temples have been reopened and allowed to operate, and the number of clergy has slowly been permitted to increase. The woeful lack of educational facilities has created serious hardships for the training of clerical and lay leaders, and the stigma of Buddhism’s essentially foreign origin is at the moment compounded manifold by the contentious and acrimonious situation in Tibet (Birnbaum ). A religious tradition’s tie to foreign communities is almost an invitation to skeptical scrutiny by the government on its “patriotic” qualification and its independence from foreign domination. Thus Islam, usually identified with “ethnic minorities” of the nation, can be suspected of abetting seditious efforts to “divide the motherland.” The particular conflict with the Roman Catholic Church since the inception of the PRC, revolving inevitably around the thorny question of the clergy’s allegiance to a foreign papacy, has never been resolved despite earnest attempts at formal relations by the Vatican. Even now, this denomination with significant growth in the numbers of its congregation (current estimate approaches  million) must face the anomaly of being run by a “legal” church, whose priests are ordained by the state, and an “underground” one whose clergy remain secretly loyal to the Pope. Protestant Christianity, ostensibly less vulnerable to the liabilities of foreign alliances, can be hampered in any churchgrowth efforts because of severe constraints on the recruitment and education of its clergy. Congregations and believers of a more evangelical persuasion will encounter suppressive measures no different from those meted out to the followers of Falun Gong. At the close of this essay, our quick topical tour of law and religion in historical and contemporary China returns us perforce to the subject of human rights. One obvious question at this final juncture may be stated thus: do fundamental rights universally conceived include the right to believe and practice religion? Readers with the presuppositions nurtured by the Western liberal tradition may be tempted to answer in the affirmative, but I should point out that the regard for the individual, as I have tried to tease out from a critically reformulated Confucianism, does not necessarily uphold such an inference. Whether the fulfillment of life that each individual is posited to be desirous of encompasses the desire to believe

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and act religiously depends on one’s ideal of what ought to be the meaning of that fulfillment. That ideal is a product of philosophical anthropology that may or may not include religion as an indispensable constitutive component. During the immediate past few years, as Don Pitman has so carefully reported in his China Quarterly study, “Belief in Control: Regulation of Religion in China,” the concern with managing China’s religious affairs has occupied the highest national leaders at such a level of frequency and intensity that it far surpasses any comparable efforts on the part of Western governments, especially of American political leaders, whose ignorance of religion as a serious subject in native and world cultures is simply appalling. In the light of the Chinese constitution’s declaration about the people’s freedom to engage in “normal” religious activities, one can always say that this derogation to the state the power to determine what constitutes normality in such activities already exceeds a strictly “secular” conception of state power. Moreover, the prohibition of CCP members from engaging in religious activities is itself contradictory to the universal language of the constitution. Lest this criticism of China become too easily one-sided, we should notice that the separation between religion and the state that almost all Western nations pledge to practice in one way or another is, at best, only a noble ideal. In historical life, the entanglement and often conflict with religion occurs incessantly and unavoidably on a daily basis—at the largest communal level or the smallest individual one, on matters of national security or of personal whim (e.g., a U.S. judge displaying the Ten Commandments in the courtroom). When “a fundamentalist Muslim organization unexpectedly won a large number of seats in an election for [France’s] first national council of Muslims,” the French interior minister immediately threatened to expel such leaders and “make sure that the council would not be used to spread views that run counter to French values, particularly the promotion of Islamic law” ( New York Times, April , , A). When a Muslim mother and homemaker declined to have her photograph taken in Florida for a driver’s license on religious grounds, the Miami judge overruled by reasoning that “public safety” must supersede religious freedom (Chicago Tribune, June , , sec. , p. ). Although the government’s views or policies in these and other similar events can, in principle, be contested legally until a final judicial verdict is reached (and that contest, let us remember, is always disputative and subject to future revisions, for there are no self-evident formulas valid for all time), the reactions and sentiments expressed by Western representatives of the

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state seem strangely similar to the reference to “social stability” as the paramount concern of state policy interminably voiced by China’s leaders. The citizens of the liberal West may cherish religion and its “free exercise,” but the nature and limit of that freedom fluctuate constantly according to the exigencies of law, politics, and the clash of religions themselves. Between principle and practice, verity and posited reality, the gulf may not only be wide but often unbridgeable. Let that be our guiding light when we discuss law, religion, and human rights—in China or anywhere else. acknowledgments

The initial form of this essay was used as a lecture given on various U.S. campuses during my appointment in – as the Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar and Visiting Campus Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa. In December , the lecture was presented at Cambridge University, under the sponsorship of its Faculty of Oriental Studies, Trinity College. For the honor and the generosity of my host institutions, I hereby express my deep gratitude. references Ames, R. T., and H. Rosemont Jr., trans. 1998. The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine. Birnbaum, R. 2003. “Buddhist China at the Century’s Turn.” China Quarterly 174:440–449. Chan, K. 1973. The Chinese Transformation of Buddhism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Dai Z. 1991. Mengzi ziyi shuzheng ⬇⫸⫿佑䔷嫱. In Dai Zhen quanji ㇜暯ℐ普. Beijing: Qinghua daxue chubanshe. De Bary, Wm. T. 1998. Asian Values and Human Rights: A Confucian Communitarian Perspective. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Deng, Y., and F. Wang. 1999. In the Eyes of the Dragon: China Views the World. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. Duara, P. 1995. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2003. Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Feuchtwang, S. 2001. Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor. Richmond, Va.: Curzon. Hsiao, Kung-ch’uan. 1960. Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Huang, C.-S. 1995. “The Confucian Temple as a Ritual System: Manifestations of Power, Belief and Legitimacy in Traditional China.” Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, n.s., 25 (2):115–136. Hulsewé, A. F. P. 1985. Remnants of Ch’in Law. Leiden: Brill.

china and the problem of human rights 387 Jones, C. B. 1999. Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State 1660–1990. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Katz, P. R. 2003. “Religion and the State in Post-war Taiwan.” China Quarterly 174:395– 412. Keightley, D. N. 1978. “The Religious Commitment: Shang Theology and the Genesis of Chinese Political Culture.” History of Religions 17 (3):4. ———. 2000. The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China (ca. 1200–1045 b.c.). Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2004. “The Making of the Ancestors: Late Shang Religion and Its Legacy.” In Religion and Chinese Society, vol. 1, Ancient and Medieval China, ed. J. Lagerwey, 3–64. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Kent, A. 1993. Between Freedom and Subsistence: China and Human Rights. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999. China, the United Nations, and Human Rights: The Limits of Compliance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Knoblock, J. 1988–1994. Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works. 3 vols. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Lai, C.-T. 2003. “Daoism in China Today, 1980–2002.” China Quarterly 174:413–427. Lau, D. C., trans. 1983. Analects. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. ———, trans. 1984. Mencius. 2 vols. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Lee, S.-H. 1992. “Was There a Concept of Rights in Confucian Virtue-Based Morality?” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 19 (3):241–261. Loewe, M. 1999. “The Heritage Left to the Empires.” In Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 b.c., ed. M. Loewe and E. Shaughnessy, 967–1032. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loewe M., and E. Shaughnessy, eds. 1999. Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 b.c. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Long, Y., and W. Zhu, eds. 1998. Wei wancheng di geming: Wuxu bainian ji 㛒⬴ㆸ䘬朑␥:ㆲㆴ 䘦⸜䲨 . Taipei: Commercial Press. MacInnis, D. E. 1989. Religion in China Today: Policy and Practice. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis. Oldstone-Moore, J. 2000. “Confucianism and the New Life Movement: Transformation of Salvific Continuity and Cultivation for a Modern China.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago. Overmyer, D. L. 1989–1990. “Attitudes Toward Popular Religion in Ritual Texts of the Chinese State: The Collected Statutes of the Great Ming.” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 5:191–221. Peerenboom, R. 1993. Law and Morality in Ancient China: The Silk Manuscripts of Huang-Lao. Albany: State University of New York. ———. 2002. China’s Long March Toward Rule of Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Potter, P. B. 2003. “Belief in Control: Regulation of Religion in China.” China Quarterly 174:318–337. Republic of China Yearbook. 1999. Taipei: Government Information Office. Rosemont, H. 1988. “Why Take Rights Seriously? A Confucian Critique.” In Human Rights and the World’s Religions, ed. L. S. Rouner. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. ———. 2002. “Confucian Perspectives on Freedom, Human Rights, and Justice.” ASIANetwork Exchange 10 (2):16–22.

388 china and the problem of hum an rights Schipper, K. 1993. The Taoist Body. Trans. K. C. Duval. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schwartz, B. I. 1985. The World of Thought in Ancient China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Spence, J. D. 1990. The Search for Modern China. New York: Norton. Sun, L.-K. 2002. The Chinese National Character: From Nationhood to Individuality. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe. Taylor, C. 1985. Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Wang, Y. 2000. “Civil Society and China’s Foreign Policy.” Zhongguo shehui kexue ᷕ⚳䣦㚫 䥹⬠ (March), http://steelan.8u8.com/yizhou.html. Welch, H. 1972. Buddhism Under Mao. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Xunzi. 1987. Xunzi jijie 勨⫸普妋, ed.Yang Jialuo 㣲⭞榙. Taipei: Shijie shuju. Yang, C. K. 1967. Religion in Chinese Society: A Study of Contemporary Social Functions of Religion and Some of Their Historical Factors. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yu, A. C. 1997. Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in “The Dream of the Red Chamber.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ———. C. 2000. “Enduring Change: Confucianism and the Prospect of Human Rights.” Lingnan Journal of Chinese Studies (Hong Kong), n.s., 2:27–70. ———. 2002. “Enduring Change: Confucianism and the Prospect of Human Rights.” Rev. version, Human Rights Review 3 (3):65–99. ———. 2003. “On State and Religion in China: A Brief Historical Reflection.” Religion East and West 3:1–20. Zhang, C. 1988. Renquan lun Ṣ㪲婾. Tianjin: Renmin chubanshe.

notes 1. One of the most succinct statements exemplifying the range of meanings for the word can be found in Mencius 1A.7, where the thinker is counseling Prince Xuan of Qi: “Weigh it, and then one knows whether a thing is light or heavy; measure it, and one knows whether it is long or short. If things are so, it is even more with the heart-and-mind. My King should measure it.” All translations of Chinese texts in this essay, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. 2. For a detailed analysis of this and related passages on the topic in the Xunzi, see Yu (1997), chap. 2. 3. Mencius 4A.17: “Not to help by the hand an elder sister-in-law drowning is to be a wolf. In the matter of giving and receiving, a man should not touch a woman—this is ritual. When a sister-in-law drowns and one helps her with the hands, this is weighing [quan].” 4. See the rest of the chapter in this book for the development of the idea of the moral self. 5. Originally deriving from the vocabulary of Chinese astronomy, the word served as the name for the North Star. That constellation and an associated string of stars were given imperial titles, such as Star of the Heavenly Emperor and Imperial Concubine (tiandi xing, zheng fei), and the whole group was also called the Central Palace (Zhong gong). According to the first-century lexicon Shuowen jieji 婒㔯ġ

china and the problem of human rights 389

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

妋⫿ (Explaining Lines and Analyzing Composite Graphs), compiled by Xu Shen, the graph in its paleographic form “imitates a human belly (xiang ren fu 尉Ṣ儡)” (14B). The Qing philologist Duan Yucai’s gloss on this passage argues that from this “the meaning is extended to indicate the human self (ren ji Ṣ⶙) as that which is different from others.” If anything, the etymology of the word seems to place more emphasis on the distinctiveness of physical shape and form than on the psycho-moral role fashioned by culture. This sort of distinctiveness, moreover, is more appropriate to individuals than to groups. All-embracing: reading rong ⭡ as all-embracing, accepting, accommodating, or capacious, similar to the usage in the Daodejing 16. Citation, to facilitate easier access, is taken from the chapter titled “Jiebiġ 妋哥” (Dispelling Blindness). My translation obviously differs from that in Knoblock (1988–1994, 2:105), for I do not agree with his needless textual emendation. The astute observation in Schwartz (1985, 113) deserves a full citation: “On the side of ‘individualism’, we have the fact that while an individual is linked to his social roles, his behaviour is not simply a function of these roles. He has a potential moral autonomy which makes it possible at least for some individuals to realise the full moral potentialities of their roles and to convey to others their full humanity, whether through the framework of the ‘role structure’ or outside of it. Such individuals possess a spiritual self-sufficiency which renders them independent of ‘popularity’ or dependence on the powerful. Even the ‘people’ taken as a whole— when a proper environment is created for them—enjoy a degree of moral autonomy which governs them in their familial and community relations. If individualism refers to something like Kantian moral autonomy, some of it can certainly be found here.” Confucius’s remark is found in the little parable of his passing by Mount Tai, when he made inquiry as to why a woman was weeping grievously by several freshly dug graves. Queried by Confucius as to why she did not quit her region after her fatherin-law, her husband, and her son had all been devoured by tigers, she gave this decisive reply: “There’s no harsh government here.” Whereupon Confucius was moved to say to his disciples: “Remember this, little ones. Harsh government is worse than tigers!” See C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds., Liji zhuzi suoyin 䥖姀徸 ⫿䳊⺽ (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1992), 4.45:28. The accounts are varied and familiar. For a recent and elegant treatment, see Spence (1990, 137–268). As reported in the New York Times, August 10, 2001, A1. For more provocative studies of these and related topics, see Sun (2002) and Long and Zhu (1998). Keightley (2004), Hulsewé (1985), and Peerenboom (1993). Peerenboom (2002), which provides the most up-to-date and authoritative account of law and its evolving meaning and function for contemporary Chinese society, defines li as “customary norms that gain favor within a particular historical tradition at a particular time and that constitute not unchanging, determinant rules of behavior but culturally valued, though negotiable, guidelines for achieving harmony in a particular context” (p. 31). See Keightley (1978) and his chapter “The Shang,” in Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 b.c., ed. Michael Loewe and Edward Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 232–291. Huang’s essay details most incisively the perduring and pervasive practice of wor-

39 0 china and the problem of hum an rights shipping Confucius in historical Chinese society, a topic too often overlooked or neglected in the study of Chinese religion. 17. See also all the essays in The China Quarterly, vol. 174 (2003). This last issue of The China Quarterly is most timely in that its entirety is devoted to an up-to-date survey of all aspects and movements of religion in China today.

INDEX

Abrams, M. H., 104, 135 Achilles, 6, 7, 41, 211, 233, 317 Adam, 80, 91, 136; and Eve, 63–72; in Paradise Lost, 52, 53, 54, 55–72 Aeneas, 212 Aeschylus, xiv, 6, 8, 24–48 afterlife. See underworld Agamemnon, 38, 42 Ahlström, G. W., 75n29 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 99 alchemy, 161, 165, 237n39, 273; and Journey to the West, 140, 147–50, 153, 173– 77, 305, 307, 308 Alcuin, 13 Alethia (Marius Victor), 14 Alexander the Great, 287 alphabet, phonetic, xiii, 240, 242, 243, 253n7, 313–16, 343, 345n7 Ambrose, 52 Ames, Roger, 243 Amoghavajra (Bukong), 169 Analects (Lunyu; Confucius): on ancestors, 322, 323; on Confucius, 293; dao in, 268–69; and Daodejing, 257, 260, 261, 266, 272, 274; on food, 369–70; on ghosts, 207, 208; and individual rights, 318, 324, 326, 333, 339, 350n70, 353, 375; on names, 244, 245; negative Golden

Rule in, 357, 362, 371, 374; on reciprocity, 330, 362–63 ancestor worship, 317–22, 329; modern, 342; and morality, 322–27; and the state, 378, 379 Annals of Lü Buwei (Lüshi chunqiu), 258 Antigone (Sophocles), 101 Aquinas, Thomas, 13, 57, 132 Āran.yakas, 3 Archimedes, 11 Areopagitica (Milton), 68 Aristotle, 7, 8, 9, 104; and education, 285, 286, 287, 288, 294, 296n6; and individual vs. group, 317, 318, 338, 358; and Journey to the West, 122, 161; on names, 240; and Paradise Lost, 58; and Prometheus Bound, 26, 35, 46, 48n7 Arminius, Jacob, 165 Ars poetica (Horace), 97 Art of Chinese Poetry (Liu), 102 Asimov, Isaac, 149 Association for Asian Studies, 96 astronomy, 388n5 Aśvaghosa, 163 atē (god-sent delusion), 8–9, 161 Auerbach, Erich, 1, 12, 104, 132

392 index Augustine, Saint, 11, 12–13, 72; and Paradise Lost, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 76n41; and pilgrimage, 131, 132 avadāna tales, 205 Avison, Charles, 104 Ba Jin, 99 Babel, biblical myth of, 297, 299–300, 310n6 Baihei lun (On Black and White; Huilin), 211 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 298 Bao Gong, 104 Baopuzi, 205 Barth, Karl, 62–63 Barthes, Roland, 20 Baxter, Timothy M. S., 252n5 Beatrice (Commedia), 136, 137, 138, 143, 145 Bede, the Venerable, 13 Bengali language, 4 Benjamin, Walter, 299 Beowulf, 14 Bhagavadgītā, 4 Bible, 9, 160, 170; epistolary literature in, 10–11; humor in, 180; Job, 13, 24, 82, 89; as literature, 10, 17–18; Matthew, 77, 78, 79, 80, 85, 92, 130, 320; and pilgrimage, 130–31, 135; poetry in, 13, 14; and Prometheus Bound, 44, 45; temptations of Christ in, 77, 78, 79, 80, 85, 89, 92, 94n15; translations of, 16–17, 18. See also Genesis Bibliotheca Sinica (Cordier), 98 Bo Juyi, 100, 164–65, 191 Bodde, Derk, 162, 209 Boltz, William, 257 Bonaventura, Saint, 132 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 61 Boniface, Pope, 138 Book of Mormon, 15 Bowers, Fredson, 76n40 Brecht, Bertolt, 99 Bremmer, J. M., 9 Brewitt-Taylor, C. H., 100 Buddha-carita kavya sūtra (Aśvaghosa), 163 Buddhism, 1, 4, 103, 190, 333; and Chinese literature, 104, 158, 162–65; and Chi-

nese poetry, 164–65; vs. Confucianism, 192–95, 304, 380; Consciousness-Only school of (Weishi zong), 198; vs. Daoism, 169; and ghosts, 205, 211–17, 218, 223, 233; in Journey to the West, 125, 140, 142–44, 149, 151–53, 167, 170–72, 175, 178, 303, 305, 307; modern, 192, 380, 381, 383, 384; Pure Land, 113; redemption in, 174, 176; and the state, 192–95, 379, 380, 381, 383, 384. See also Chan (Zen) Buddhism Buddhist scriptures, 15, 188–89; translations of, 18, 141, 163, 166, 188, 189, 190– 91, 198–99; and Xuanzang, 193, 198 Buitenen, Hans van, 308 Bultmann, Rudolf, 19 bureaucracy, Chinese, 291, 327, 379; of underworld, 220, 231 Burke, Kenneth, 102 Burmeister, Joachim, 104 Buruma, Ian, 328 Bury, J. B., 48n3 Cai Yan, 231 Cairns, David, 75n29 calligraphy, 104, 230 Calvin, John, 60, 73n11, 81, 85, 92 Calvinism, 93n10 The Cambridge History of China, 313, 329 Campion, Thomas, 104 Camus, Albert, xiv, 47 Canglang shihua, 164 Cantonese language, xi–xii, 283–84, 314 Cantongqi. See Kinship of the Three Cao Pi, 205 Cao Yu, 99 Carmen Paschale (Sedulius), 13 Cast Away (film), 356 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 162 catharsis, 7–8 Cathemerinon (Prudentius), 13 Catholicism, 12, 18, 136, 302; in PRC, 383, 384 Central Asia, 188, 189, 191 Chan (Zen) Buddhism, 146, 186n33; and Chinese poetry, 164–65; and humor, 180–81; in Journey to the West, 171–72 Chang, H. C., 161, 233 Chang’an, 188, 191–92, 201n7

index 393 Chang’e, 126, 127, 144 The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (Spence), 312 Chanson de Roland, 14 Chao Cuo, 292 Chastellux, Jean, 104 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 180 Chekhov, Anton, 99 Chen Duxiu, 329–30 Chen Guangrui (Journey to the West), 108–28 Chen Guying, 255, 276 Chen Han, 206 Chen Hui, 193 Chen Kang, 193 Chen Menglei, 207 Chen Shibin, 112, 122–23 Chen Shixiang, 102 Chiang, Madame (Song Meiling), 380 Chiang Kai-shek, 380 China, People’s Republic of (PRC): human rights in, 343, 351–88; and human rights treaties, 342, 343, 352, 367; and Journey to the West, 305, 306; language reform in, 314, 315; religion in, 330, 381–85 China, Republic of (ROC), 379–80. See also Nationalist Party; Taiwan China in Western Literature (comp. Yuan Tongli), 98 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 330, 343, 366, 382, 383, 385 Chinese culture: changeability of, 312– 17; and education, 290–93, 294; family and religion in, 317–22; vs. Greek culture, 317, 318, 320; and human rights, 351–88; and Indian culture, 190–92; individual in, 316, 317, 318–19, 356–61, 374; and language, 251–52; and religion, 161, 380; uniqueness of, 351–52, 370–73; Western study of, 312–13 The Chinese Knight Errant (Liu), 103 Chinese language, xv, 3, 345n4; concept of self in, 357–59; and Daodejing, 259– 60; dialects of, xii, 315; God in, 320–21, 378; vs. Greek language, 241–42, 249; homophones in, 242–43, 244, 256–57, 267–68, 315–16, 345n7; Mandarin vs. Cantonese, xi–xii; on names, 239, 241–

43; and phonetics, 314–16; “rights” (quan) in, 353–55, 359, 360, 368; romanization of, 313–16, 345n6; and Sanskrit, 190, 191; vernacular (yutiwen, baihuawen), xi–xii, 100, 162, 205, 207, 230, 261, 305 Chinese language, written, 253n7; and computers, 313–16; simplified, xii, 315– 16; vs. spoken, 240–42, 243, 244 Chinese literature: ancient, 99–100; and Buddhism, 104, 158, 162–65; and Daoism, 104, 165; and historiography, 190; incompatible norms in, 360; Indian influence on, 162–64, 190; mythical characters in, 115, 124; and religion, 1, 104, 158–61; supernatural in, 160–62, 204–38; translations of, 99–100, 101, 102, 302–3; vernacular, 162, 305; vs. Western literature, 96–107, 158–59, 160, 306. See also particular works Chinese Revolution (1911), 340, 352, 379, 380 Ching, Julia, 159 Chow Tse-tsung, 330 Christ, 9, 10, 11, 104; crucifixion of, 81–82, 90; vs. filial piety, 320; in Paradise Lost, 70, 71; passivity of, 83, 90; and pilgrimage, 130; and Prometheus, 47; as Son of God, 79, 80, 85, 87, 90, 92; temptations of, 77–95 Christianity: and art, 11–12; and Chinese culture, 265, 320, 321, 380; and education, 288, 289, 290, 291; food in, 152; and Greco-Roman culture, 9–10, 11, 12; and history, 333; and infancy, 272; and KMT, 380, 381; law in, 375; literature of, 12–13, 15; and pilgrimage, 130– 33, 135, 153; poetry in, 13–14; in PRC, 383; and Prometheus Bound, 41, 44, 45, 47–48; and the state, 198, 380, 381, 383; theodicy in, 9, 24, 47–48, 52, 69, 82, 91; and Western literature, 1, 9– 14, 159. See also Bible; Catholicism; Protestantism chuanqi (transmissions of the marvelous), 205 Chuci (Songs of the South), 100 La chute (Camus), xiv Cicero, 286

394 index City of God (Augustine), 13 civil service examinations, 232, 379 Classic of Change (Yijing), xi, xiv, xv, 175, 258, 312, 350n71; on ghosts, 207–8 Classic of Documents (Classic of History; Shujing; Shangshu), 196, 202n14, 258, 322, 324, 377 Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing), 194, 325– 26 Classic of Poetry (Book of Odes; Shijing), 100, 242, 256, 258, 260, 264 Classic of Ritual. See Record of Rites; Yi Li Claudel, Paul, 99 Clement of Alexandria, 13, 52 cloning, 356 Coffin, Charles, 56 Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, 160 Combarieu, Jules, 104 The Combate Between Christ and the Devill Expounded (Perkins), 79 Comestor, Peter, 165 Commedia (Dante), 14, 129–57, 180; culinary symbolism in, 136, 137, 152; Inferno, 133, 134, 136, 139, 150, 212; and Journey to the West, 129–39, 143, 145, 149–50, 153; Paradiso, 136, 137–38, 139, 236n14; as pilgrimage, 133–39; Purgatorio, 133, 134, 135, 136, 143 Communism, 316. See also Chinese Communist Party computers, 313–16, 343 Comus (Milton), 68 Confessions (Augustine), 13 Confucianism: vs. Buddhism, 192–95, 304, 380; in Chinese culture, 316–17; and Chinese literature, 1, 104; and Christianity, 380; classics of, 194, 196– 97; and Dai Zhen, 336–39; dao in, 268–69; and Daodejing, 261, 266, 267, 268; vs. Daoism, 159, 258–59, 304, 380; on desire, 368, 371–73; and education, 285, 292–93, 316; of elite, 316, 348n47; on food, 369–70; and human rights, 202n15, 312–50; and humor, 180; on the individual, 356–61, 374; and Journey to the West, 167, 170, 172, 303; and law, 376; modern, 316–17, 327–35, 383; on names, 243–44, 245–49, 251; vs. popular religion, 304, 380; reciprocity

in, 275, 330–31, 332, 334, 340, 361– 65, 370, 371; revision of, 336–44; revival of, 330; and rulership, 273, 274– 75; secularism of, 159–60, 304; and the state, 356–61, 378. See also NeoConfucianism Confucius, 280n45, 316–17, 322, 324; and education, 292, 293; on food, 369–70; on ghosts, 207, 208; and Laozi, 255, 258–59, 272; on law, 375; on names, 243–44, 245; negative Golden Rule of, 357, 362, 371, 374; on reciprocity, 362–63; on remonstrance, 333; on “rights,” 353; and ritual, 318; on the state, 278n26, 335, 364, 389n9; worship of, 378–79, 389n16. See also Analects Cordier, Henri, 98 Cratylus (Plato), 239–54 Creel, H. G., 244 A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (McGann), 16 Croce, Benedetto, 298, 299 Culler, Jonathan, 20, 243 culture: changeability of, 312–17; GrecoRoman, 9–10, 11, 12; Greek, 284–88, 317, 318, 320; and human rights, 352, 365–67; Indian, 190–92; and language, 251–52, 308, 310. See also Chinese culture; Western culture Curtius, E. R., 9 Cyprian, 12 Dai Zhen, 336–39, 342, 371–73, 374 Dalby, Michael, 218 dance, 191 Dante Alighieri, 5, 14, 100, 104, 165, 180, 212. See also Commedia dao (the Way), 249, 260–61, 262, 266–70, 276, 278n26, 293, 312; in Confucianism, 268–69; and reversion, 271–73; and rulership, 274–75 Daodejing (Classic of the Way and Virtue), 99, 176, 183, 255–81, 375; new texts of, 255–56, 257, 259, 266; rhetoric of, 259– 66; and rulership, 273–77; themes of, 266–77 Daoism: and alchemy, 173–77, 305, 308; vs. Buddhism, 169; and Chinese literature, 1, 104, 165; vs. Confucianism, 159,

index 395 258–59, 304, 380; and desire, 372; and ghosts, 218, 228; and Huang-Lao, 376; and humor, 180–81; infancy in, 275; in Journey to the West, 125, 148, 149, 151–53, 167, 169, 170, 173–77, 178, 180, 217, 303–8; reversion in, 272–73; and the state, 379, 381, 383–84 Dartmouth Conference (International Conference, Dartmouth College, May 1998), 256, 259 Davie, Donald, 102 Dawe, R. D., 9 Dazai Osamu, 99 de (virtue), 267–68, 274–75 de Bary, Theodore, 159, 331, 332, 362, 363 De Doctrina Christiana (Milton), 54, 69 de Gaulle, Charles, 313 de Groot, J.J.M., 224 de Rougemont, Denis, 104 De trinitate (Augustine), 58, 59 deconstructionism, 19, 20, 21 Delphi oracle, 94n20 Demaray, John, 139 democracy, 341, 355, 368; and Confucianism, 330; in Daodejing, 274; and individualism, 328, 342; and knowledge, 289–90; in ROC, 343, 379–80; and social order, 369 Democratic Progress Party (Taiwan), 381 Derrida, Jacques, xiii, 20, 21, 241, 299 description translation studies, 297 desire, 368, 369, 371–73, 374 Di Renjie, 222 Diamond Sūtra (Jin’gang jing; Vajracchedik āprajñpāramitā sūtra), 215 Didascalia apostolorum (Teachings of the Apostles), 11 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 11 divination, 161, 319–20, 321, 377, 378 Divine Comedy. See Commedia Dodds, E. R., 41 Don Juan, 104 Dong Zhongshu, 292, 293, 346n18 Donne, John, 104 Dragon-Prince (white horse; Journey to the West), 113, 144 drama, 2; Chinese, 100, 104, 122, 140, 161; Journey to the West as, 174; Noh, 1;

Western, 118–19, 158. See also Shakespeare, William Dravidian language, 4 Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong-lou meng), 100, 207 Du Fu, 100, 191 Duan Yucai, 242, 389n5 Dudbridge, Glen, 108–9, 110, 111, 114–15, 122, 123, 124, 127 Dumezil, Georges, 4–5 Dunhuang texts, 163, 164, 165, 205, 266 “Early Civilization in China: Reflections on How It Became Chinese” (Keightley), 317 Eberhard, Wolfram, 159 economics: and education, 286, 287, 289, 295; free-market, 328; and globalization, 367 education: Aristotle on, 285, 286, 287, 288, 294, 296n6; Chinese, 290–93, 294, 316; and Christianity, 288, 289, 290, 291; Confucian, 285, 292–93, 316; and economics, 286, 287, 289, 295; in Greece, 284–88, 293–94, 296n6; Indian influence on Chinese, 191; and knowledge, 287, 288, 289, 292–93; liberal, 282–96; and morality, 284, 292, 293; Plato on, 284, 285, 287, 288; and politics, 285–86, 287, 291–93, 296n9; and religion, 383, 384; and “rights,” 355; and the state, 287–88, 291–93, 294, 379; in Taiwan, 350n73; technical vs. liberal, 285–86, 289; Western model of, 284–91 Egypt, 130, 133, 135, 139 Eliade, Mircea, 2, 204, 233 Elijah, 86 Eliot, George, 289 Eliot, T. S., xv, 104, 137–38, 236n14 elite, Chinese, 304, 329; and Confucianism, 316, 348n47; and ghosts, 207–9; and rulership, 273–74 emperor, Chinese, 199, 342, 366, 370, 378; accountability of, 376–77; and law, 375–77; in modern world, 340–41, 360–61; terms for, 321–22. See also individual emperors Empson, William, 102

396 index Endō Shūsaku, 99 English language, xii–xiii, 191; alphabet of, 313–16, 343; translations into, 302–3 enlightenment, 178, 181 the Enlightenment, 289, 313 Enuma elish, 2 Eoyang, Eugene, 102, 103, 300 epic form, 2, 5, 103–4 Epic of Gilgamesh, 2 Epicurus, 11 Eratosthenes, 11 Eriugena, John Scottus, 13 Etiemble, René, 97 Eumenides (Aeschylus), 38 Euripides, 8, 36, 101 Europe, 98–99. See also Western culture Eusebius, 12, 94n20 Eve, 53; guilt of, 70–71; in Paradise Lost, 56–57, 63–72; and temptations of Christ, 77, 84–85, 94n15 evil, problem of, 8, 9; in Paradise Lost, 52, 55, 70; in Prometheus Bound, 36– 42. See also theodicy exile, theme of, 113, 131, 135 L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Sartre), 360 Expository Commentary on the Meaning of Mencian Words (Dai Zhen), 371 The Faerie Queene (Spenser), 14, 103, 180 the Fall, 52–72, 299; and Commedia, 135– 36; and Prometheus Bound, 45; and temptations of Christ, 82, 84–85 Falun Gong, 200, 343, 382, 384 family, 123, 218, 280n45, 345n14; and Buddhism, 192–95; vs. individual, 316, 327–35, 355–56; and morality, 322–27; reciprocity in, 362–64; and the state, 317–27, 334–35, 349n61; in U.S., 334; of Xuanzang, 193–95 fan (reversion), 270–73 Fan Wenzi, 324 Fan Zhen, 211 Fang Dongshu, 104 Fang Lizhi, 289–90 Faure, Bernard, 181 Faust, theme of, 98, 104, 289 Fei Xiaotong, 332

feminist criticism, 19 Feng Menglong, 206, 230 Fenollosa, Ernest, 315 Feuchtwang, Stephan, 369 filial piety, 194, 274, 280n45, 329; and ancestor worship, 320, 322; as basis for morality, 322–27; vs. loyalty, 326, 360–61, 363; and underworld, 215–17. See also Classic of Filial Piety Findlay, J. N., 252n6 Fish, Stanley, 20 Five Human Relationships (wu lun), 319, 331–32, 362–63 Five Phases (wuxing), 148–49, 161, 176–77 food, 191, 214, 216; as human right, 367– 70; as symbol, 86, 136, 137, 152 The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel (Plaks), 178 fox spirits, 227–28, 237n46 Frankfurt, H., 354 freedom, 25; in Paradise Lost, 52–72; of the press, 342, 364, 369, 381; of religion, 200, 379–80, 381, 382, 383, 385 Freudianism, 19 Frodsham, J. D., 103 Frye, Northrup, 4, 102 Fu, James, 120 Fu Yi, 193 Fucha, king of Wu, 224–25 Fukunaga Mitsuiji, 276 Gadamer, Hans, 19 Gan Bao, 205 Gao Panlong, 146 Gao Yougong, 102 Gaozi, 270 Gaozu (Han emperor), 292 Ge Hong, 280n42 gender: and imago dei, 61–63; and inequality, 63–72. See also Eve; women Genesis, 18, 299; and Paradise Lost, 53, 55, 59, 63, 66, 68; and Prometheus Bound, 45 genre theory, 19 George, Arapara Ghevarghese, 74n29 Gewirth, Alan, 335 ghosts (gui), 204–38, 331; amorous, 224– 30; apologues for, 207–17; avenging, 207, 217–24; and Buddhism, 205, 211–

index 397 17, 218, 223, 233; Confucius on, 207, 208; and Daoism, 218, 228; of evil stepmothers, 218–20; as gods, 221; skepticism about, 207–9; sounds made by, 211 Gilgamesh, 2 Girard, René, 20 globalization, 367 God, Christian, 131–32, 139, 265; Chinese terms for, 320–21, 378; Christ as Son of, 79, 80, 85–92; image of (imago dei), 18, 61–63, 91, 92, 136, 373, 374; and language, 297, 299–300, 310n6; in Paradise Lost, 52–72, 85. See also Bible; theodicy gods: in Chinese literature, 110–14, 124, 126, 144–45, 160, 161, 162, 179, 217, 221, 307; in Greek literature, 2, 5–9, 24– 51, 84, 161; and humanity, 44–45; in Indian literature, 3, 4–5; pre-Hellenic, 5–6; in Shang religion, 320–21 Goethe, J. W., 289 Goheen, R. F., 101 Gold Cicada (Xuanzang), 109, 110, 112, 113–14, 123, 143, 170, 176 Golden, Leon, 39 “The Golden Hairpin,” 226–27 Graham, A. C., 101, 253nn7,9, 254n20, 259, 262, 270 Great Britain, 12, 131, 352 Great Learning (Daxue), 172, 322 Greco-Roman culture, 9–10, 11, 12, 97 Greek culture: vs. Chinese culture, 317, 318, 320; education in, 284–88, 293– 94, 296n6; and language, 251–52; law in, 375 Greek language, 12, 16; vs. Chinese language, 241–42, 249; concept of self in, 358; names in, 239–41, 244 Greek literature, 1, 5–9; vs. Christian texts, 9–10; gods in, 2, 5–9, 24–51, 84, 161; tragedy in, 7–8, 97 Gregory I, Pope (the Great), 165 Gregory VII, Pope, 131 Grene, David, 48n7 Grotius, Hugo, 165 Gu Yanwu, 336 Guan Yu, 104 Guanyin (Avalokiteśvara), 104, 110–14, 124, 144–45

Guanzi, 264 Guillén, Claudio, 96 guilt, 41, 42, 70–71, 144 Gujin tushu jicheng (comp. Chen Menglei), 207 Gujin xiaoshuo (Fiction Old and New; Feng Menglong), 206 Guo Moruo, 99 Guodian texts, 256, 263, 276 Guoyu, 324 Habermas, Jürgen, 19 Hakka language, 314 hamartia (tragic error), 8, 9 Han dynasty, 161, 292, 375; religion in, 320, 321, 378 Han Shan (Cold Mountain), 158, 164, 165 Han Yu, 192 Hanan, Patrick, 101 Hanfeizi, 271 Hanford, James Holly, 67 Hansen, Chad, 278n26 Harbsmeier, Christoph, 239 A Harmonie of the Gospels (Calvin), 92 Hartman, Geoffrey, 17, 99 Hawkes, David, 100, 158–61, 164, 174 He Zhizhang, 282–83, 295 Heart Sūtra (Xinjing), 116, 146–47, 171, 175 heart/mind (xin), 147, 171–72, 174, 176 Hebrew language, 18 Hebrew literature, 1, 2, 3, 13, 37. See also Bible Hector, 7 Hegel, G.W.F., 313 Heidegger, Martin, 19 Hendricks, Robert, 263 Henry IV (king of England), 131 Hephaestus (Prometheus Bound), 27, 29, 40 Heracles, 47 Heracles (Euripides), 8, 36 Herbert, George, 12, 164 Hermes (Prometheus Bound), 28, 33, 35, 40, 41, 42, 46 Hermogenes (Cratylus), 246 Herodotus, 5, 6, 40, 284 heroes, 4–5, 6, 7, 43 Hesiod, 5, 8, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44

398 index Hesse, Hermann, 99 Hiero of Syracuse, 39 Hightower, James, 101 Hindi language, 4 Hinduism, 1, 168, 202n7 Hippolytus (Euripides), 101 Hirsch, E. D., 20 Historia evangelica (Juvencus), 14 historiography, Chinese, 190, 207, 320, 322 History of Chinese Vernacular Literature (Baihua wenxueshi; Hu Shi), 162 History of Love (Feng Menglong), 230 History of the Pelopennesian War (Thucydides), 317 Homer, 2, 5, 7, 17, 36, 38, 100, 317 homophones, 242–43, 244, 256–57, 345n7; and simplified characters, 315–16; in Zhuangzi, 267–68 Hong Kong, 294, 295, 328, 343 Hong Kong Baptist University, 282 Hong Mai, 206 Hong Pian, 206 Hopkirk, Peter, 201n7 Horace, 97 Howard, Richard, 309 Hsia, C. T., 99, 103, 160 Hu Shi, 162–63, 178, 190; on Journey to the West, 149, 303–5, 307; on Laozi, 255, 280n44; on Xuanzang, 197 Huang Suqiu, 108–9, 111, 114, 115, 116–17, 124 Huang Tingjian, 164 Huang Zongxi, 331, 336 Huangfu Xun, 215 Huang-Lao, 375, 376 Huilin, 211 Huiyuan, 211 human nature (xing), 245, 249, 269, 270, 325, 337, 359 human relations (renlun): and concept of self, 358, 360; and desire, 372; Five (wu lun), 319, 331–32, 362–63; reciprocity in, 362–63, 370 human rights: and Chinese culture, 351– 88; and Confucianism, 202n15, 312–50; and food, 367–70; individual, 318, 324, 326, 333, 339, 350n70, 353, 375; international treaties on, 342, 343, 352, 367;

particularistic vs. universal, 365–67, 373; and religion, 373–86 humor, 140, 150, 179–82 hunpo (soul, spirit), 205, 207 Huo Shixiu, 163 Iliad (Homer), 6, 7, 50n27 imago dei, 18, 52–72, 91, 92, 136, 373, 374; and gender, 61–63 immortality, 161, 211, 273; in Journey to the West, 148, 151–53, 173, 174, 179, 182 imperialism, 366, 380, 382 India: culture of, 190–92; influence on Chinese literature of, 162–64; in Journey to the West, 120–21, 123, 140, 166, 167, 170; languages of, 3, 4, 189, 190, 191, 199, 239; literature of, 2–5, 9; Xuanzang’s journey to, 188–89, 198 individual: in Chinese culture, 316, 317, 318–19, 356–61, 374; and democracy, 342; and desire, 371; and education, 294; vs. family, 316, 327–35, 349n61, 355–56; vs. group, 317, 318, 336–42, 355–61, 373, 374; vs. hierarchical social structure, 327–35; vs. individualism, 340, 356, 374; limits on, 372–73, 374; moral autonomy of, 389n8; and religion, 374, 384–85; rights of, 318, 324, 326, 333, 339, 350n70, 353, 375; vs. the state, 327–35, 339, 356, 374, 377 individualism, 344, 355, 389n8; and democracy, 328, 342; vs. individual, 340, 356, 374; Western, 327, 335 Indo-European languages, xiii, 199, 316 Inferno (Dante), 133, 134, 136, 139, 150, 212. See also Commedia Institutes (Calvin), 60 Io (Prometheus Bound), 28, 31, 34, 36, 37, 41, 47, 49n8 Irenaeus, 18, 52, 54 Iser, Wolfgang, 20 Isidore of Seville, 13 Islam, 200, 265, 375, 383, 384, 385 Israel, 89 Ivanhoe, Philip J., 263 Jacquot, Jean, 104 Jaeger, Werner, 24 Jakobson, Roman, 20, 298, 299

index 399 James, William, xiii Japan, 306, 327, 365, 366; language of, 249, 298; literature of, 1, 103 Jauss, H. R., 20 Jefferson, Thomas, 335 Jerome, Saint, 12, 130 Jerusalem, 10, 130, 133, 135, 139 Jesuits, 304 Jia Shan, 292 Jia Yi, 292 Jiandeng xinhua (New Tales Written While Trimming the Wick; Qu You), 206 Jiang Zemin, 368, 369 Jiao Hong, 146 Jin Ping Mei, 100, 166 Jingshi tongyan (Comprehensive Words to Admonish the World; Feng Menglong), 206 Job, 13, 24, 82, 89 Johnson, Barbara, 309 Jonestown, 9 Journey to the West (Xiyouji), xv, 100, 129– 56, 158–87; alchemy in, 140, 147–50, 153, 173–77, 305, 307, 308; antecedents of, 140–41, 173–74; authorship of, 122, 129, 140, 166, 173, 304–5; Buddhism in, 125, 140, 142–44, 149, 151–53, 167, 170– 72, 175, 178, 303, 305, 307; central characters in, 124–27; Chen Guangrui in, 108–28; and Commedia, 129–39, 143, 145, 149–50, 153; and Confucianism, 167, 170, 172, 303; Daoism in, 125, 148, 149, 151–53, 167, 169, 170, 173–77, 178, 180, 217, 303–8; humor in, 140, 150, 179–82; as pilgrimage, 139–53, 166, 170, 171, 177, 178; religious themes in, 166–83, 303–8; return motif in, 175– 76; satire in, 140, 179, 180, 303, 305; sources for, 168–69; supernatural in, 207, 217; translations of, 303–5, 309; underworld in, 212, 213–14. See also Xuanzang Joyaux, Georges, 97, 105 Judaism, 1, 10, 130, 180, 202n7, 265, 375; texts of, 15, 18. See also Bible; Hebrew literature judiciary, independent, 342, 364 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 211

junzi (superior man), 244, 245, 247, 250, 268 justice: Chinese, 323, 324; of gods, 6, 8, 29, 36, 38, 39, 41, 54, 70; and human rights, 332, 341, 342; retributive, 212, 216, 218, 221, 222, 232, 233 Juvencus, 14 Kadeer, Rebiya, 200 Kannada language, 4 karma, 4, 123, 140, 144, 164, 211 Kasulis, T. P., 239 kāvya style (Indian literature), 4 Kawabata Yasunari, 99 Keightley, David N., 317, 319–21 Kerényi, Karl, 50n34 Kermode, Frank, 20 King, Ambrose, 328 Kinship of the Three (Zhou Yi cantongqi; Wei Boyang), 153, 175 Kissinger, Henry, 313 Kitagawa, Joseph, xiv–xv KMT. See Nationalist Party Knoblock, John, 250, 253n9, 389n7 knowledge, 45, 60; and democracy, 289– 90; and education, 287, 288, 289, 292– 93; and suffering, 24, 25, 42 Korea, 327, 343 Korean language, 298 Kratos (Prometheus Bound ), 27, 41, 44 Kroll, Paul, 165 Kurosawa Akira, 369 Lacan, Jacques, 19 Lactantius, 94n20, 165 Lang, Olga, 99 language, xi; Chinese view of, 251–52, 267; in Christianity, 297, 299–300, 310n6; and culture, 251–52, 308, 310; and dialects, 283–84; Indian studies of, 163; and politics, 248, 251; spoken word in, 3, 27, 31–33, 34, 49n13; temporality of, 300, 305; Western views of, 20, 239, 241; written vs. spoken, 240– 42, 243, 244. See also names; particular languages . Lan kāvatāra Sūtra, 165 Laozi (Lao Dan), 255, 280n44, 375; biography of, 256–58; and Confucius, 255,

4 0 0 index Laozi (Lao Dan) (continued) 258–59, 272; and infancy, 273; in Journey to the West, 124, 181; on law, 376; on rulership, 274–77. See also Daodejing Laozi’s Scripture of the Way (Laozi Daojing), 266 Latin, 12 Lattimore, Owen, 100 Lau, D. C., 244, 263, 270 Lau, Joseph S. M., 99, 227 law: in education, 284, 288, 289, 290; equality before, 332; and religion, 197, 199, 200, 374–77, 384, 385, 386; and revenge, 218; Roman, 11; rule of, 328, 341, 343, 381; U.S., 342 The Laws (Plato), 284 Leclerq, Jean, 131 Lee Kuan Yew, 316, 327–28, 343, 349n61, 350n73, 361 Lee Teng-hui, 381 Legalism, 273, 372, 375–77, 378 Legge, James, 362 Lenin, V. I., 366 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 20, 345n14 Lewalski, Barbara, 66, 91 Lewis, C. S., 55 Li Bo, 100, 165, 191 Li Daliang, 196 Li Fuyan, 206 Li Hua, 218 Li Ji, 324 Li Mei, 206 Li sao, 103 Li Shangyin, 100, 102 Li Shimin. See Taizong Li Si, 3 Li Yu, 230 Li Zhi, 336 Liang Qichao, 200n1 Liaozhai zhiyi (Tales of the Unusual from the Leisure Studio; Pu Songling), 206, 216, 218, 226–29, 232 The Libation Bearers (Aeschylus), 38 liberalism: and Confucianism, 327–35, 336; in education, 282–96; and individual, 374, 377; and religion, 384–86 Lieb, Michael, 90 Lieyi zhuan (Records of Marvels; Cao Pi), 205

life fulfillment (sui sheng), 371–73, 384–85 Liji. See Record of Rites Lin, Julia, 99 Ling Mengchu, 206 literacy, 104, 158, 159, 290, 296n6. See also education The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Liu Xie), 96 literature: Bible as, 10, 17–18; comparative, 96–107, 129; epistolary, 10–11; examples of religion in, 2–14; genetic relations of, 96–97, 98; imaginative, 162–63; mythical characters in, 104, 115; of pilgrimage, 133; and religion, 1–23, 78; secular, 1–2, 158–59; translation of, 298–300; travel, 133, 140, 142; vernacular, 12, 14, 162, 305. See also literatures of particular cultures Liu, James J. Y., 102, 103 Liu Cunren (Liu Ts’un-yan), 173, 306 Liu Dakui, 104 Liu Fu, 206 Liu Xi, 243 Liu Xie, 96 Liu Yiming, 182 Liu Yiqing, 205 Liushi jia xiaoshuo (Sixty Stories; pub. Hong Pian), 206 Liuyi zhuan, 210–11 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, 25, 37, 38 Locke, John, 328 Long, John H., 104 Long Yingtai, 343–44 Lotus Sutra, 18 Lovejoy, A. O., 52, 98 Lowe-Porter, H. T., 100 Lu Gwei-Djen, 148 Lu Ji, 102 Lu Jia, 292 Lu Xun, 305 Lucy, Saint, 136 Lun heng (Carefully Weighted Arguments; Wang Chong), 205, 208 Lunyu. See Analects Luo Genze, 278n17 Luo Qinshun, 146 Luo Xianglin, 200n1 Lüshi chunqiu (Annals of Lü Buwei), 258 Luther, Martin, 73n11

index 4 01 Ma, Y. W., 227 Ma Danyang, 173 magic, 161, 215, 228, 289. See also supernatural Mahābhārata, 3–4, 5, 308 Mahathir Mohamad, 328, 343 Mair, Victor, 163, 191, 263 Malayalam language, 4 Malraux, André, 99 Mandate of Heaven, 333, 334 Manetti, Giannozzo, 75n36 Mann, Thomas, 100 Manual for Family Instruction (Jiaxun; Yan Zhitui), 329 Mao Zedong, 305, 313, 352, 383 Marius Victor, 14 Marlowe, Christopher, 289 marriage, 54, 56–58, 63–72. See also Five Human Relationships Marx, Karl, 366 Marxism, 19, 305, 382 Mather, Richard, 103 Matthiessen, F. O., 16 Maudgalyāyana, 212 Mawangdui texts, 350n71; of Daodejing, 255–56, 262–63, 264, 276; on HuangLao, 376 May Fourth Movement, 294, 304, 330 McColley, Diane Kelsey, 74n27, 75n33, 76n39 McGann, Jerome J., 15, 16 the Mean (Zhongyong; Doctrine of the Mean), 244, 280n45, 325 Mei Zulin, 102, 191 Melville, Herman, 16 “Memorial Against the Buddha’s Relics” (Han Yu), 192 Mencius, 194, 250, 256, 325; and Dai Zhen, 336–39; and Daodejing, 259, 269–70; on desire, 370, 371; on law, 375, 377; on reciprocity, 331, 362–63; on rescue of sister-in-law, 354, 359– 60; on “rights,” 354–55, 377; on rulership, 274, 333, 334, 335, 341 Mesopotamian literature, 2 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 286 Methodius, 13 Middlemarch (Eliot), 289

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 297 Miller, James W., 103 Milton, John, xiv, 11, 13, 14, 104, 165, 299, 307; and Barth, 62–63; and Prometheus Bound, 26, 30. See also Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained; Samson Agonistes mind. See heart/mind Ming dynasty, 122, 140 Mingxiang (disciple of Xuanzang), 196 Mingxiang ji (Dark Omens Recorded; Wang Yan), 205–6, 211 Minturno, Antonio, 162 Minucius Felix, 12 Miram Bai, 164 Mishima Yukio, 99 modernization, 366; and imperial state, 340–41, 360–61; and religion, 200, 380, 381 Mohism, 246, 273 Monkey. See Sun Wukong Monkey: Folk Novel of China (Waley’s translation of Journey to the West), 303–5 Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 14 Moral Man and Immoral Society (Niebuhr), 341 morality: and Chinese family, 322–27; communitarian, 328, 335, 336, 355– 61, 362, 373; conflicts of norms in, 359–60; and education, 284, 292, 293; of gods, 7, 36–42; Greek, 46; and individual, 316, 389n8; political, 326–27, 340–41 Mori Ōgai, 99 Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), 15 mortality, 45, 150–51 Moses, 73n11, 85, 90 Mozi, 205, 375 Mulian, 104 music, 104, 191, 230, 231, 337 “The Myth of the Fall” (Yu), xiv names, 239–54; and actuality (shi), 246– 48, 251; in Daodejing, 266–67, 268; definitions of, 240, 245, 246; in Greek, 239–41, 244; maker of, 239, 249–52; meaning of, 239, 241–43; purpose of,

4 02 index names (continued) 239, 243–49; rectification of (zheng ming), 244, 261, 266; School of, 248 nationalism, 193, 366, 384 Nationalist Party (Kuomintang; KMT), 380–81, 384 Natsume Sōseki, 99 Natural Supernaturalism (Abrams), 135 nature, 103, 283, 339; in Daodejing, 268, 274–75; in Paradise Lost, 54, 56, 57; in Prometheus Bound, 39 Needham, Joseph, 173, 175–77, 201n6, 239, 281n48, 307, 313 Neo-Confucianism, 285, 329, 337; and Journey to the West, 146, 147, 171–72, 174, 305 Neroni, Baccio, 162 Nestorianism, 94n11, 202n7 New Criticism, 19, 101 Newman, John Henry, 287 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 286–87, 318, 338 Nie Xiaoqian, 227–29 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 341 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 21 Niu Sengru, 206 Nixon, Richard, 313 Norwood, Gilbert, 48n2 Obituary of Xuanzang (Mingxiang), 196, 197 “An Occasional Composition on Returning Home” (He Zhizhang), 282–83, 295 Oceanus (Prometheus Bound ), 28, 29–30, 31–32, 33, 35, 36, 40, 49n8 Odysseus, 7, 182, 212, 233 Odyssey (Homer), 5, 6, 7, 51n34, 233 Oedipus, 98 Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles), 84 Okuno Shintarō, 113 On Christian Doctrine (Augustine), 13, 131 On Christian Doctrine (Milton), 88, 91, 92, 93n11 “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (Milton), 94n20 O’Neill, Eugene, 99 oracle bone inscriptions, 319–20, 377

oral tradition, 103–4 Oresteia, 8, 25, 38, 39, 42, 48n3, 50n28 Ovid, 53 paganism, 14, 86, 89, 94n20, 158, 288 Paget, Nathan, 79 Paidagōgus (Clement of Alexandria), 13 Paideia (Jaeger), 24 Pakistan, 3 Palestine, 130, 139 Pali language, 4, 189 Pandora, 36 Pān.ini, 3 papacy, 131, 138, 165 paper, 191 Paradise Lost (Milton), xiv, 14, 52–72, 78; and Christ, 70, 71; and Daodejing, 267; Eve in, 56–57, 63–72; and Genesis, 53, 55, 59, 63, 66, 68; and Paradise Regained, 81, 82; Satan in, 65, 66–68, 71 Paradise Regained (Milton), 11, 77–95; and Paradise Lost, 81, 82; Satan in, 79– 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87–89 Paradiso (Dante), 136, 137–38, 139, 236n14. See also Commedia Parry-Lord technique, 103 Patroclus, 211 Patten, Christopher, 328 Paul, apostle, 10–11, 56, 63, 73n11, 170, 180 Paula, Lady, 130 Peerenboom, R., 376, 377, 389n14 Penthesileia Painter, 317 Peregrinatio aetheriae, 130 Peristephanon (Prudentius), 13 Perkins, William, 79, 81, 85, 87 The Persians (Aeschylus), 8, 46 Phaedrus (Plato), 241 phenomenology, 18 Pichois, Claude, 97 Pigsy. See Zhu Bajie pilgrimage, 129–57; benefits of, 129, 131– 32, 150; in Christianity, 130–33, 135, 153; group, 130; Journey to the West as, 139–53, 166, 170, 171, 177, 178; symbolism of, 131–34; in Tannhäuser, 302 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 180 Pindar, 5, 8, 46, 50n28 Pitman, Don, 385 Plaks, Andrew, 146, 178

index 4 03 Plato, xiii, 104, 317; and education, 284, 285, 287, 288; on names, 239–54 Plutarch, 6, 94n20 Poan jingqi (Striking the Table in Amazement at the Wonders; comp. Ling Mengchu), 206 Podlecki, Anthony J., 38, 39 Poetics (Aristotle), 7, 35 poetry: in Christianity, 12, 13–14; criticism of, 19, 20, 102; Hebraic, 37; Japanese, 1; and religion, 2, 104; theory of, 96; translation of, 159, 298–99 poetry, Chinese: and Buddhism, 164–65; ci (lyric), 99, 100, 191; and Daodejing, 260, 267; and ghosts, 230–31; imaginative, 162–63; Indian influence on, 190, 191; in Journey to the West, 174, 303; by Mao, 305; and painting, 104; within prose, 100, 110, 127; religion in, 158, 164; secularism of, 160; Tang, 100, 103, 165; tonal metrics in, 191, 298; translation of, 159, 298 politics: cultural, 298, 303; and Daodejing, 271, 273–77; and education, 285–86, 287, 291–93, 296n9; and family, 317– 22, 334; and language, 248, 251; and morality, 326–27, 340–41; and religion, 317–22, 386 Politics (Aristotle), 285, 317 Polo, Marco, 313 Porter, Andrew, 302 Potter, Pitman B., 382 Pound, Ezra, 99, 315 Prakrit language, 4 PRC. See China, People’s Republic of Preface on the Holy Religion (Shengjiao xu), 116 press, free, 342, 364, 369, 381 printing, 158, 191 Prometheia (trilogy; Aeschylus), 25, 28 Prometheus, 6, 24–48, 98, 104; love for humanity of, 27, 42–48 Prometheus, The Firebearer (Aeschylus), 48nn2,3 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus), xiv, 8, 24–48; chorus in, 26, 27, 28, 29, 33, 34; and Christianity, 41, 44, 45, 47– 48; gods in, 42–48; problem of evil in, 36–42; structure of, 25, 26–27;

suffering in, 25, 28, 34, 39, 40–42, 43, 45, 46, 47–48 “Prose Elegy for an Ancient Battlefield” (Li Hua), 218 prose fiction, Chinese, 103–4; classical, 205; didactic, 210, 212–13, 217, 221; Indian influence on, 190, 191; male authorship of, 230; poetry within, 100, 110, 127; supernatural in, 160–62, 204– 38; translation of, 299; vernacular, 205, 207, 230; vs. Western, 306. See also particular works Prošek, Jaroslav, 101 Protagoras, 284, 285 Protestantism, 12, 18, 302; in China, 304, 321, 383, 384; and Paradise Lost, 55, 61 Prudentius, 13, 14, 94n20 pseudo-Sibylline Oracles, 13 psychoanalysis, 19 Psychomachia (Prudentius), 13 Pu Songling, 206, 216, 228 Purgatorio (Dante), 133, 134, 135, 136, 143. See also Commedia Pye, Lucian, 341 qi (vital breath), 175, 205 Qin dynasty, 375, 378 Qin Shihuangdi, 321 Qing dynasty, 384 Qingshi leilue (A Classified History of Love; comp. Feng Menglong), 206 Qingsuo gaoyi (Lofty Opinions Under the Green-Latticed Window; comp. Liu Fu), 162, 206 Qiu Chuji, 173 Qu You, 206 Quan Tangshi (Complete Tang poems), 100 Quanzhen (Perfection of Authenticity) school, 173, 174, 175, 177, 306 Rabanus Maurus, 13 Rabelais, François, 180 Rāmāyan.a (Vālmīki), 4 Rao Zongyi, 191 Raphael (angel), 55, 67 reception theory, 19 reciprocity: Chinese terms for, 362–63; and human rights, 275, 330–31, 332, 334, 340, 361–65, 371

4 0 4 index Record of Music (Yueji), 337 Record of Rites (Liji), 251, 258, 259, 318, 347n45; on ancestors, 320, 323; on ghosts, 208; on hierarchy, 331–32 Record of Western Territories (Xiyu ji; Xuanzang). See Western Territories of the Great Tang Recorded Sayings of Chan Master Benji of Mount Cao, 182 redemption, 4, 300; in Buddhism, 174, 176; in Christianity, 13, 14, 135; in Dante, 134, 136; in Journey to the West, 120, 140, 143, 170, 178, 179; in Milton, 70, 82, 93n10; through suffering, 170– 71, 175 Reinhardt, Karl, 50n30 religion: Chinese, 317–22; comparative, 129; freedom of, 200, 379–80, 381, 382, 383, 385; and humor, 179–82; and literature, 1–23, 78; texts of, 15–18; and translation, 297–311; and Western culture, xiv. See also particular faiths remonstrance, 331, 332–33, 377 ren (benevolence, humaneness), 324–25, 326, 362, 372; and individual vs. group, 337–38, 339; vs. ritual propriety, 354, 359–60 Ren Bantang, 164 Renaissance, Western, 12, 161–62 The Republic (Plato), 284, 317 Ricci, Matteo, 304, 321 Richards, I. A., 102 Ricoeur, Paul, 20, 46 Rites controversy, 321 ritual, 291, 317, 318, 345n14; and concept of self, 358, 359; in Daoism, 258–59, 275; and desire, 368, 369; and ghosts, 222–23, 228, 232; vs. humaneness, 354, 359–60; and the state, 274, 375, 378, 379. See also Record of Rites Roberts, Moss, 263 Robertson, D. W., 104 Robinson, Richard, 240–41 Roetz, Heiner, 348n57 Roman literature, 97 Rome, 138–39 Rose, H. J., 48n2, 49n9 Rosemont, Henry, 356–61 Rousseau, André-M., 97

Roy, David, 99 Ruan Ji, 208 Ruan Xiu, 208 Ruan Zhan, 208 rulership: and Confucianism, 273, 274–75; and Daodejing, 273–77; and inequality, 329; and law, 375– 77; Mencius on, 274, 333, 334, 335, 341; and modernization, 336, 340– 41, 360–61; transmission of, 333, 334 Russell, Bertrand, 313 sacred space, 129, 130–31, 139, 150, 165 sage-kings, 231, 247, 250, 274, 333, 377 Saigyō, 1 Samson Agonistes (Milton), 26, 68, 83–84 Sandy. See Sha Wujing Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), 100, 166 Sanjiao (Three religions), 167, 185n27. See also Buddhism; Confucianism; Daoism Sanjiao kaimi guizheng yanyi, 185n27 Sanskrit, 3, 4, 189, 190, 191, 239 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 360 Satan, 76n39; in Paradise Lost, 65, 66–68, 71; in Paradise Regained, 79–80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87–89 satire, 286, 301; in ghost stories, 215, 232; in Journey to the West, 140, 179, 180, 303, 305 Saussurean linguistics, 20 Sayers, Dorothy, 100 Schafer, Edward, 165 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 18, 298, 309 Schmid, Wilhelm, 39 The Scholars (Wu Jingzi), 100 scholasticism, 132 Schwartz, Benjamin, 99, 159, 389n8 Sedulius, 13 Segal, Charles P., 101 self, concept of, 357–59, 360; in Paradise Lost, 55, 56, 58–59 self-cultivation, 323, 358, 375; of emperor, 377; in Journey to the West, 140, 145–46, 150, 171–72, 175, 305, 307 Sellars, Peter, 300–301 Seneca, 2 The Seven Against Thebes (Aeschylus), 38

index 4 05 sexuality, 65, 224, 227–28, 301 Sha Wujing (Sandy; Journey to the West), 110, 115, 124, 127, 144, 174, 175, 178, 179 Shakespeare, William, 191, 211, 218, 265, 297 shamanism, 2, 161 Shang dynasty, 319–20; religion in, 320– 21, 378 Shangshu. See Classic of Documents Shao Yong, 146 Shaughnessy, Edward, 350n71 Shawcross, John T., 93n2 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 47, 299 Shenbumie lun (On the Indestructibility of the Soul; Huiyuan), 211 Shenmielun (On the Destructibility of the Soul; Fan Zhen), 211 Shiji (Record of the Grand Historian; Sima Qian), 205, 257 Shijing. See Classic of Poetry Shiming (Explanations of Names; Liu Xi), 243 Shishuo xinyu (A New Account of Tales of the World; Liu Yiqing), 205 Shklovsky, Viktor, 20 Shuowen jiezi (Elucidating Patterns, Explaining Graphs; Xu Shen), 3, 242, 243, 256, 388n5 si (private, selfishness) vs. gong (public), 196–97, 336. See also individual Silk Road, 188 Sima Guang, 290 Sima Qian, 256–58, 376 Sinai, Mount, 133, 134 Singapore, 327, 361. See also Lee Kuan Yew Singleton, Charles, 136 Sivin, Nathan, 307 Six Dynasties period, 161, 205 Smith, Adam, 328 Snyder, Gary, 99 social structure, Chinese, 318–19; and family, 323; hierarchy in, 327–35, 336, 361, 362–65; and reciprocity, 330– 31, 340; and social order, 368, 369, 376, 386 socialism, 352 Socrates, 89, 284, 293; on names, 240–52 Solmsen, Friedrich, 39 Solon, 8

Song dynasty, 100, 162, 290 The Songs of the South (Chuci; trans. Hawkes), 159 Sophocles, 8, 84 Soushenji (In Search of Spirits; comp. Gan Bao), 162, 205, 206, 209–10 South Korea, 343 Spence, Jonathan, 312 Spenser, Edmund, 13, 14 Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu; Confucius), 257 the state: and Buddhism, 192–195, 379, 380, 381, 383, 384; and Christianity, 198, 380, 381, 383; and Confucianism, 356–61; and Daoism, 379, 381, 383– 84; and education, 287–88, 291–93, 294, 379; and family, 317–27, 334–35, 349n61; and food, 369–70; Greek, 293; vs. individual, 327–35, 339, 356, 374, 377; and knowledge, 289–90; legitimacy of, 333, 334, 379; and literature, 159; modern, 340–41, 360–61; vs. the personal (si), 196–97; and religion, 319–22, 343, 374–86; restraints on, 364–65; and ritual, 274, 375, 378, 379; and Xuanzang, 195–200 Steadman, John M., 94n12 Stesichorus, 5 Stinton, T.C.W., 9 The Story of the Stone (trans. Hawkes), 159 structuralism, 19 Su Dongbo, 100 Su Shi, 191 Subodhi, Patriarch, 181, 182 suffering: in Chinese underworld, 212– 17, 233; and knowledge, 24, 25, 42; in Prometheus Bound, 25, 28, 34, 39, 40– 42, 43, 45, 46, 47–48 Summa theologica (Thomas Aquinas), 132 Sun Kaidi, 111 Sun Wukong (Monkey; Journey to the West), 113, 124, 125, 127, 151; and alchemy, 148, 175; and Buddhism, 171, 172, 175, 178; and Daoism, 149, 169; as hero, 305; and immortality, 148, 174, 179; origins of, 110, 144, 167; on selfcultivation, 145–46; as trickster, 181, 182; and Xuanzang, 111, 117–18, 120, 121, 142–43, 145–46, 147, 171

4 0 6 index Sun Yat-sen, 380 supernatural, 160–62, 204–38; vocabulary for, 204–5, 206. See also ghosts The Suppliant Maidens (Aeschylus), 25, 37–38, 39 Sura Dasa, 164 Suzong (Tang emperor), 169 Swaggart, Jimmy, 301–2 Swift, Jonathan, 180 symbolism: Christian, 1, 10, 64, 65, 90, 136; in comparative literature, 98, 101; culinary, 86, 136, 137, 152; Greek, 26, 39, 49n7; in Journey to the West, 120, 145, 149, 167, 175; of pilgrimage, 131–34 Symposium of the Ten Virgins (Methodius), 13 Taiping guangji, 162, 206 Taiwan, 193, 349n64, 350n73, 365, 381; Confucianism in, 327, 330; democracy in, 343, 379–80; dissent in, 343–44 Taiwanese language, 314 Taizong (Li Shimin; Tang emperor), 108, 109, 169, 195, 202n7; and Journey to the West, 111, 116, 141, 142, 166, 167; in underworld, 213–14, 217; and Xuanzang, 189, 198, 199–200, 202n8 Tamil language, 4 Tang dynasty, 290; multiculturalism of, 163, 201n7; poetry of, 100, 103, 165; prose fiction in, 162, 205; religion in, 169, 322 Tang Sanzang Xiyou shini zhuan, 112 Tang Yongtong, 278n30 Tang Zhen, 331 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, 99 Tannhäuser (Wagner), 131, 300–302, 309 Tanwuchen, 163 Tao Qian, 100, 165 Taylor, Charles, 354–55 Telugu, 4 Tertullian, 10, 12 Tetrachordon (Milton), 53, 54, 59 textual criticism, 15–21, 164; comparative, 96–107, 129; of poetry, 19, 20, 102; and translation, 308–9 Theaetetus, 241 theodicy, 9; and Paradise Lost, 69, 82, 91; and Prometheus Bound, 24, 47–48

Theognis, 8 Theogony (Hesiod), 5, 37, 39, 44 Thomson, George, 28, 48n2 Thucydides, 284, 317 Tiananmen Square demonstrations (1989), 343 Tibet, 103–4, 365 Tongzhi (comp. Zheng Qiao), 256 tragedy, 7–8, 9, 97, 161 translations, 12; of Bible, 16–17, 18; of Buddhist texts, 18, 141, 163, 166, 188, 189, 190–91, 198–99; of Chinese literature, 99–100, 101, 102, 302–3; of Daodejing, 259–66; foreignizing, 297, 309; Indian influence on, 163–64; of Journey to the West, 303–5, 309; of Mahābhārata, 308; and otherness, 302, 308, 309; of poetry, 159, 298–99; and politics, 298, 303; readability of, 297– 311; by Xuanzang, 166, 199 trickster figure, 182 Trinkaus, Charles, 75n36, 104 Tu Wei-ming, 159, 285, 293, 331 Turner, Edith, 153 Turner, Victor, 153 Twiss, Sumner, 328 Ulysses, 104 Ulysses (Joyce), 16 underworld, 204; bureaucracy of, 220, 231; journeys to, 212–17; vs. life, 232–33 United States (U.S.), 334, 356, 366, 381; and human rights, 351–52, 365, 385; racism in, 342, 350n75 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 331, 355 Upanis.ads, 3 upāya (skillful means), 181 Vālmīki, 4 The Variety of Religious Experience (James), xiii Vaughn, Henry, 164 Vedas, 3, 5 vengeance, 217–24 Venuti, Lawrence, 297–98, 300, 309 Veronica, Saint, veil of, 139 Vico, Giambattista, 298 Víga Glímssaga, 14

index 4 07 Virgil, 2, 5, 133, 134–35, 136, 139 Virgil of Toulouse, 13 Virgin Mary, 136 Wagner, Richard, 131, 300, 309, 310 Wagner, Rudolf, 278n30 Waley, Arthur, 100, 101, 202n8, 244, 303–5 Wang, C. H., 103 Wang, William S.-Y., 239 Wang Bi, 276, 278n30 Wang Chong, 205, 208 Wang Danyi, 111, 112, 116, 122 Wang Fuzhi, 331 Wang Gang, 306, 307 Wang Gungwu, 312–13, 315, 330, 331, 342 Wang Guoguang, 306, 307 Wang Guowei, 99 Wang Wei, 100 Wang Yan, 205–6 Wang Yangming (Wang Shouren), 146, 262 Wang Yao, 161 Wang Zhe, 173 Water Margin (Shuihuzhuan; All Men Are Brothers), 100, 166 Watson, Burton, 101, 160 Weber, Max, 159 Wei Boyang, 175 Wei Zheng, 116, 213 Weil, Simone, 47 Weisinger, Herbert, 97, 105 Wendi (Han emperor), 292 Western culture, xiii–xiv; and China, 294, 304, 312–13, 319, 366; education in, 284–91; human rights in, 351–52, 360, 362, 365, 385; humor in, 182; individual in, 327, 335, 356, 358; and language, 20, 239, 241; Renaissance in, 12, 161–62 Western literature: vs. Chinese literature, 96–107, 158–59, 160, 306; and Christianity, 1, 9–14, 159; drama in, 118–19, 158; humor in, 180, 182; rationalism of, 161; themes of, 98; understanding, 1, 165; vernacular, 12, 14. See also Greek literature Western Territories of the Great Tang (Da

Tang xiyu ji; Xuanzang), 141, 142, 168, 199 “What Is a Classic?” (Eliot), xv Whichcote, Benjamin, 204 Williams, N. P., 52 Williamson, George, 55 Wodehouse, P. G., 286 women, 73n11, 78, 86, 294; as ghosts, 218– 30; kingdom of, 168; in Paradise Lost, 54, 56–57, 59, 63–72. See also Eve Woods, John E., 300–301 Woodside, Alexander, 290, 291 Works and Days (Hesiod), 36, 38, 40 World War II, 365 Wriggins, Sally, 195 Wu Cheng’en, 122, 129, 140, 166, 304–5 wu wei (nonaction), 276–77 Wudi (Han emperor), 292 Wuliang Shrine, 258 wu/you (nonbeing/being), 262–66, 267, 272 Wuzhenpian (Poetical Essay on the Primary Vitalities; Zhang Boduan), 175 Xiao Yu, 202n8 Xiaojing. See Classic of Filial Piety Xie Lingyun, 100, 165 xin. See heart/mind Xingshi hengyan (Lasting Words to Awaken the World; comp. Feng Menglong), 206 Xinshuo Xiyouji (ed. Zhang Shushen), 112 Xiyou Zhengdao shu (Wang Danyi), 111 Xiyou zhenquan (comp. Chen Shibin), 112 Xiyouji bielun (Wang Guoguang), 306 Xu Fuguan, 255, 259 Xu Shen, 3, 242, 243, 389n5 Xu Xuanguai lu (A Sequel to Accounts of the Mysterious and Strange; Li Fuyan), 206 Xuanguai lu (Accounts of the Mysterious and Strange; Niu Sengru), 206 Xuanshi zhi (Records of a Palace Chamber; Zhang Du), 206 Xuanwu Gate Incident (626), 213 Xuanyan lu (Records of Manifest Retributions; Liu Yiqing), 205, 211 Xuanzang (Tripitaka; Journey to the West), 108–56; and Chinese state, 195–200; as Gold Cicada, 109, 110, 112, 113–14, 123,

4 0 8 index Xuanzang (Tripitaka; Journey to the West) (continued) 143, 170, 176; as historical figure, 166– 68, 170, 178, 188–89, 193–200; religious devotion of, 193–200; salvation of, 120, 140, 143, 170, 178, 179; suffering of, 142– 44, 150, 153, 167, 170–71, 175; and Sun Wukong, 111, 117–18, 120, 121, 142–43, 145–46, 147, 171; translations by, 166, 199. See also Journey to the West Xuanzong (Tang emperor), 169 Xunzi (Xun Qing), 269, 274, 281n48, 337, 375; concept of self in, 357–59; on desire, 368, 369, 372; on names, 244–52, 266; on “rights,” 353–54 Yan Zhitui, 205, 329 Yang Weizhen, 230–31, 238n55 Yao Nai, 104 Yen Fu, 99 Yi Li (Book of Ritual ), 318, 347n45. See also Record of Rites (Liji) Yijian zhi (Records of Yijian; comp. Hong Mai), 162, 206 Yijing. See Classic of Change yin and yang, 127, 150, 161, 175, 205, 225 Yinshun, Master, 200n1 Yiwenji (A Collection of Strange Events; comp. Chen Han), 206 Yogācāryabhūmi śāstra, 141 Yong Fanggang, 104 Youming lu (Records of the Dark and Light; Liu Yiqing), 205 Youzi (You Ruo), 324, 326 Yu Yingshi, 341 Yuan dynasty, 122 Yuan Mei, 206 Yuan Tongli, 98 Yuan Zhen, 165 Yuanhun ji (Accounts of Ghosts with Grievances; comp. Yan Zhitui), 205, 211, 218–20 Yue Fei, 104

Zen Buddhism. See Chan (Zen) Buddhism Zeng Shen, 269, 323 Zeus, 5–6, 8, 24–32, 34; tyranny of, 36–42 Zhang Boduan, 175 Zhang Boxi, 290 Zhang Du, 206 Zhang Shushen, 112, 147 Zhao Fusan, 341 Zhao Jibin, 350n70 Zhao Ye Jiaying, 102 Zheng Qiao, 256 Zheng Shibian, 214 Zheng Xuan, 253n7 Zheng Yue, 214 zhiguai (records of the strange), 205, 211 Zhou Cezong, 99 Zhou Dunyi, 172 Zhou dynasty, 378 Zhou Li (Rites of Zhou), 291, 318 Zhu Bajie (Wuneng; Pigsy; Journey to the West), 111, 113, 119, 143–44, 152, 168, 174; and humor, 180; origins of, 110, 115, 124, 125–27, 167; salvation of, 179 Zhu Dingchen, 108, 111–12, 116, 127 Zhu Xi, 146, 186n33, 290 Zhuangzi, 180, 246, 258, 360, 376; and Daodejing, 259, 261, 267–68 Zhuanyi zhi (Bizarre Events Recorded; Li Mei), 206 Zibuyu (What the Master Disdains to Speak of; comp. Yuan Mei), 206 Zigong, 369–70 Zilu, 293 Zion, Mount, 139 ziran (self-so, nature), 268, 274 Zongbing, 211 Zoroastarianism, 202n7 Zuo Commentary (Zuozhuan), 197, 205, 256, 257, 280n41, 324, 330; on ghosts, 217–18, 222