“The Rhetoric of Chin p’ing mei”
The Conclusion of
Chin p’ing mei
The last chapter of Chinp’ingmei tells us the fates of the remaining significant characters. P’an Chin-lien’s maid Ch’un-mei has risen to rank and wealth, but like Hsi-men Ch’ing she dies of sexual exhaustion. Hsi-men Ch’ing’s mistress Wang Liu-erh moves to Hu-chou and prospers, but she loses her daughter Han Ai-chieh first to a nunnery and then to death. Wu Yüeh-niang lives on, as the narrator has promised in Chapter 75, but her son Hsiao-ko is taken as a disciple by the wandering monk P’u-ching. And on the novel’s final pages, we see P’u-ching speak to the spirits of the novel’s dead protagonists. Through his intercession, all are promised relatively benign fates in the next life. He demonstrates to Wu Yüeh-niang that Hsiao-ko is the reincarnation of Hsi-men Ch’ing, reborn to repair the damage Hsi-men Ch’ing had caused on earth. This conclusion may seem at first to suggest a note of optimism, prefiguring the regeneration of the household and thereby of the society at large.1
I believe that such an interpretation of the novel’s final chapter is misguided. The author’s ironic use of literary conventions, and the parallels he draws between the conclusion and earlier events in the novel, all suggest pessimism rather than hope. To find optimism in the final chapters is to accept Hsiao-ko’s discipleship as redemption, and P’u-ching as a figure capable of offering such redemption. This, I believe, the novel itself will not permit us to do. Chinp’ingmei is built on a firm Confucian base, emphasizing as it does the importance of earthly government, the force of the ruler’s example, and the parallel between the family and the state. Hsi-men Ch’ing’s six wives may correspond numerically to the Buddhist Six Roots of Evil, as well as to the six ministers of state, but the author of Chinp’ingmei does not share the Buddhist ideal of renunciation as a way of dealing with these evils. Despite P’u-ching’s promises, Hsiao-ko cannot expiate his father’s sins by leaving the world. Chinp’ingmei is only coherent if the conclusion is read as a warning in Confucian terms, the loss of posterity figuring as retribution for the family’s misdeeds. Sectarian religion, in the person of the monk P’u-ching, is invoked to remind us of the credulity that allowed these misdeeds to continue unchecked.
This concern with credulity, with the nature of true as opposed to false enlightenment, is consistent with many of the writings of the author’s literati contemporaries. When these writers turned to questions of self-cultivation, they often found it natural to use language drawn from the Buddhist tradition, and to speak of the “apprehension of true emptiness” as their spiritual goal. This did not, however, make them Buddhist: the playwright Li K’ai-hsien, for example, whose importance to the author of Chinp’ingmei we have seen above, uses Buddhist terminology fluently but speaks of Buddhists themselves as heretics.2 Men like Li K’ai-hsien used this language to signal their desire to break away from petty care and inappropriate striving, precisely so as to be able to see, and to act in accord with, the true order of things. And precisely because they found Buddhist terminology useful, they disliked those whose use of it seemed insincere. The mere act of taking religious vows, or donating money to temples, or distributing scriptures, was not equivalent to the apprehension of emptiness. Indeed, Li K’ai-hsien says that without enlightenment those who take such vows are “thieves in the house of Buddha.”3 Thus the gestures that close Chinp’ingmei cannot in themselves be taken as evidence of redemption. We must, instead, ask how the author prepares us to evaluate them. We will see that he labels his characters as insincere by having them make opportunistic (and sometimes unorthodox) use of Buddhist or Buddhist-inspired popular religious practice. Moreover, he seems to reject the fundamental renunciatory tenets of even orthodox Buddhism, just as I have suggested above in my discussion of tsa-chü.
First let us look at the literary conventions that the author uses and undermines in the last two chapters. Then we will return to the meaning of the religious dimension in Chinp’ingmei.
Literary Conventions and the Conclusion of the Novel
The Structure of Chapters 99 and 100
We can begin by examining the structure of the last two chapters. By Chapter 99, the Hsi-men household has been reduced to Wu Yüeh-niang, her son, and her servants. Han Tao-kuo and Wang Liu-erh, the erstwhile employee and mistress of Hsi-men Ch’ing, are living with their daughter Ai-chieh in a riverfront inn, and supporting themselves by the prostitution of mother and daughter. P’an Chin-lien’s maid Ch’un-mei has married a Commander Chou, and Ch’en Ching-chi has been installed in the household as her “cousin.” (He carries on an adulterous affair with her despite the fact that he has been provided a wife of his own.) Upheavals within these three households are interleaved with those destroying the empire, in such a way as to emphasize the correspondences between the two spheres. Ch’en Ching-chi visits the daughter of the Hans, and is witness to a jealous scene whose final consequence is his own death at the hand of one of Chou’s retainers. Border disturbances cause the installation of the crown prince, a change of reign period, and a military campaign that takes Commander Chou away from home. The Hans’ daughter Ai-chieh insists on maintaining chaste widowhood for the rogue Ch’en Ching-chi, along with his legitimate wife Ts’ui-p’ing. (She persists despite the efforts of Ch’un-mei and her parents to dissuade her.) The Hans leave her behind when they depart for Hu-chou; Wang Liu-erh is utterly disconsolate. These events are followed by those in Chapter 100, which can be summarized as follows:
Han Ai-chieh and Ch’en Ching-chi’s wife console each other in verse. Ch’un-mei, bored and fretful, attempts unsuccessfully to seduce one of her husband’s servants. When Commander Chou sends for her and the children, she seduces the son of one of his retainers.
Battles and invasions erupt everywhere, and Commander Chou is killed. Ch’un-mei and her servants return home with his ashes; the whole country is now at war. An insatiable lust consumes Ch’un-mei, and she dies in the act of sexual intercourse. Ch’en Ching-chi’s wife is taken back by her parents, and Han Ai-chieh sets out to find her own family. A chance meeting with her uncle leads her to her mother; her father having died, uncle and mother marry and succeed to the property on which they have been living. Han Ai-chieh refuses to marry any of the local gentry, becomes a nun instead, and dies.
Wu Yüeh-niang sets out with her brother, son, and servants to escape the Chin invaders. It is her intention to make her way to the home of one of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s sworn brothers, to whose daughter she has betrothed Hsiao-ko, now turned fifteen. Enroute, however, they meet the monk P’u-ching to whom Hsiao-ko had been promised as an infant, and he demands the boy. When they refuse, astonished, he conducts them to the Yung-fu temple, where they spend the night. As the others sleep, Wu Yüeh-niang’s maid Hsiao-yü peers through a crack in the old monk’s door, and sees him speak to the ghosts of those who have died in the Hsi-men household, promising them his intercession to mitigate the penalties of karma. All, including Hsi-men Ch’ing, announce their imminent reincarnation in the Eastern Capital, as sons and daughters of families of rank approximately equal to that held in the life just ended.
In her maid’s absence, Wu Yüeh-niang dreams that she has reached the home of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s sworn brother, who murders her son and insists on marrying her. When she wakes, she and Hsiao-yü recount these visions to each other, and are silent and fearful. In the morning P’u-ching asks whether she has become enlightened or not, and she says that she has. He then repeats his demand for her son, saying that the boy is in fact a reincarnation of Hsi-men Ch’ing. P’u-ching touches Hsiao-ko with his wand, and the boy turns into Hsi-men Ch’ing; he touches the boy a second time and turns him back into Hsiao-ko. Wu Yüeh-niang, convinced, weeps and gives up her son.
P’u-ching announces that peace is at hand, and that the family must return to Ch’ing-ho hsien. The Chin empire is established in the north, and the first emperor of the Southern Sung ascends the throne to rule over his diminished territories. Upon their return home, Wu Yüeh-niang gives the Hsi-men surname to the servant Tai-an, and makes him heir to her diminished property, where he maintains her in her old age.
Nearly the entire first half of Chapter 100 is devoted to the Chou and Han families, as Ch’un-mei dies and Ai-chieh wanders in search of her parents, Ai-chieh’s mother and uncle establish an abbreviated household when Ai-chieh becomes a nun and dies. Similarly, Hsi-men Hsiao-ko is taken away to join the celibate Buddhist clergy just as he is enroute to be married, and his mother adopts Tai-an to establish another abbreviated household. The loss of Han Ai-chieh and Hsi-men Hsiao-ko to the celibate religious life is presented as bringing their families to a simultaneous end, and as these events take place, the Southern Sung (a truncated empire) is established under Sung Kao-tsung (r.1127-1162). The disintegration of Ch’un-mei’s household is similar to the disintegration of the Hsi-men household after Hsi-men Ch’ing’s death, and it takes place against a background of Chin invasions and triumphs, as history closes in on the Hsi-men household and the households of their associates. This is a chapter devoted to loss, juxtaposing the extinction of family lines to the loss of half the empire.
Though he closes Chapter 100 with an apparent account of religious redemption, the author undermines that account by placing it in a matrix of literary conventions that he explodes one by one: the chaste widowhood of Han Ai-chieh, Ch’un-mei’s response to Ai-chieh’s vows of chastity, and the verses with which Ai-chieh and Ch’en Ching-chi’s wife Ts’ui-p’ing lament his death. The improbability of chaste widowhood on the part of a prostitute has been discussed above in connection with the tsa-chüPan-yehch’ao-Yüan. And when Han Ai-chieh announces her intentions, Ch’un-mei attempts to dissuade her with another cliche from the dramatic tradition: she fears that such a vow will “ruin the girl’s good years.”4 This solicitude is conventional when young wives in Ming drama refuse to remarry, and it is often voiced by an older person who is a fairly positive figure in the play in question. (In P’i-p’achi and Pao-chienchi, for example, these or analogous sentiments are expressed by the hero’s parents.5 The young wife then seems all the more virtuous, in contrast to her well-meaning but misguided relatives.) Such a speech is preposterous when it comes from a figure like Ch’un-mei, who will die of lust herself. The author pokes fun at Han Ai-chieh’s chastity by linking it with figures like Ch’en Ching-chi and Ch’un-mei. The final effect produces the same sort of irony as do Hsi-men Ch’ing’s deathbed arias. The saccharine verses that Ai-chieh and Ts’ui-p’ing recite for Ch’en Ching-chi create a similarly incongruous effect.6
By using and exploding these recognizable clichés, the author of Chinp’ingmei appeals to our superior knowledge, strengthening the private bond with the reader that is essential to irony. Now, can we observe similar appeals to our knowledge in his account of the monk P’u-ching?
I believe that we can. P’u-ching has a tradition behind him, that of the omniscient sages who figure in a variety of Chinese literary genres: drama, hua-pen, pao-chüan. As in the folklore of many cultures, there often appears in these genres a mysterious figure with supramundane wisdom, who states the terms in which the central conflicts of the narrative will be resolved. In Chinese literature the famous Judge Pao and sometimes even the emperor himself have affinities with this archetypal figure of folklore, but usually he is a sage with Buddhist or Taoist attributes. Chinp’ingmei, which transforms but remains acutely conscious of these popular literary forms, draws on this tradition by using an apparently omniscient sage to conclude the story. The author thus introduces P’u-ching not to make a specifically Buddhist statement, but in order to close his narrative in a culturally familiar way. Here as everywhere in the novel, however, he revalorizes the cultural stereotype and has it perform a new function. In the Confucian world of Chinp’ingmei, the traditional otherworldly attributes of such a sage cannot have positive significance. The author of Chinp’ingmei labels P’u-ching as a menace to the family when he has the monk demand an unborn child as his reward for saving Wu Yüeh-niang. This is another motif common to Chinese and Western tales, and it deepens the sense of loss we feel as the novel draws to a close.
The old monk of the hua-penHsin-ch’iao-shihHanWumaich’un-ch’ing (Han Wu Sells Love at Newbridge) is an example of the sort of figure the author of Chinp’ingmei could expect his readers to know. (He quotes the hua-pen in Chapters 98 and 99.)7 After a prologue about the fall of dynasties under intemperate rulers, the young man of this story overexerts himself sexually and suffers a recurrence of an old disease. He then sees visions of a monk come to claim him as a disciple. (The monk is doomed to wander in the afterworld as a result of his own sexual intemperance.) The terrified young man confesses all to his father, who is able to placate the monk and bring his son back to health. The story states explicitly that the son’s death would have brought his family to an end; this is a conventional tale linking sexual excess to the extinction of family and state, and like Chinp’ingmei it uses a celibate monk as the instrument of the family’s extinction.
Monks of this sort figure similarly in tsa-chü. The point of P’u-ching’s contradictory demonstrations with regard to Hsi-men Ch’ing’s reincarnation - Hsi-men Ch’ing’s spirit’s announcement that he is to be reincarnated in the Eastern capital, followed by P’u-ching’s own demonstration that the boy Hsiao-ko is already the reincarnation of his father - is to convince Wu Yüeh-niang that the world perceptible to her senses is illusory, and that the only truth lies in the discipline that he, as a monk, represents. P’u-ching’s transformation of Hsiao-ko is the culmination of a series of dreams and visions juxtaposed to each other in this chapter, all of which confuse Wu Yüeh-niang and render her susceptible to his authority. This sequence of events is precisely analogous to what we have seen in the framing-tales to the two tsa-chüLiang-shihyin-yüan and Pan-yehch’ao-yüan, where the protagonists do penance in the world of illusion for their lustful thoughts, before returning to the Paradise that is their rightful home. This conventional tale is mentioned in Chinp’ingmei in its most complete form as the tsa-chüChin-t’ungYü-nü (Golden-boy and Jade-Girl), where the Taoist immortal Ironstaff Li causes a rapid sequence of visions to pass before the eyes of the hero, thus convincing him of the insubstantiality of earthly life. (Ch’un-mei’s two children are named Chin-t’ung and Yü-nü, in an obvious allusion to this tale.) P’u-ching’s question to Wu Yüeh-niang - “Are you enlightened now?” - is a cliché common to these plays on Taoist immortality, and just as in the plays, Wu Yüeh-niang’s positive answer to the question puts her in a defacto condition of sterility. By becoming “enlightened,” she loses her son and therefore the possibility of continuing her family line. What is enlightenment in the plays becomes false enlightenment in the novel, as Wu Yüeh-niang is led to betray the trust reposed in her as the mother of a family. The boy’s very name (hsiao or “filial”) is a clue to his significance, and his loss is juxtaposed to the loss of half the Chinese ancestral lands - a grave transgression of filial piety on the part of the emperor.
The author of Chinp’ingmei thus draws on the conventional meaning of literary stereotypes to show that the Hsi-men family will come to an end. In the tsa-chü this would be a positive outcome, but in Chinp’ingmei it is not: certain recurrent motifs charge the novel’s conclusion with pessimism. Just as a series of parallels deepen the sense of loss in the last two chapters, so the final events of the book are structurally congruent with earlier episodes that have a clearly negative weight in the novel.
When Wu Yüeh-niang gives Hsiao-ko away to the monk P’u-ching (thus failing to keep her own vow to Hsi-men Ch’ing), she continues a pattern that began in the first chapter when P’an Chin-lien was given away to the household where she would be deflowered. The author of Chinp’ingmei has added this detail to the story of P’an Chin-lien as found in in Shui-huchuan, and it shows the mother’s lack of proper care for her daughter’s future. Wang Liu-erh relinquishes Han Ai-chieh (who, like Hsiao-ko, will enter the celibate religious life) to a similarly uncertain future.8 (Ai-chieh loses all when Sung Hui-tsung’s “bad last ministers” fall from power.) And Li P’ing-erh is alternately overprotective and careless of Kuan-ko throughout his short life, taking him out to the family tombs despite his frail health, leaving him unattended at critical moments, and overpaying the corrupt Nun Hsüeh to distribute scriptures when he lies near death. This sort of carelessness ultimately costs Kuan-ko his life, and the description of Kuan-ko’s death foreshadows the loss of Hsiao-ko in many of its details. By giving us a full account of the first, the author is able to prepare us to see the significance of the second, which is simply sketched in a paragraph or two. The brief phrases in which we bid Hsiao-ko farewell remind us of his antecedent in the novel, and charge the second loss with the force of the first. Let us re-examine Kuan-ko’s death in Chapter 59.
Language hinting at the loss of sons closes Chapter 58, preparing us for what is to follow. (An old mirror-grinder hoodwinks two of the Hsi-men wives, when he weeps and lies to them that he has no son to provide for his old age.9 His mirror is a traditional symbol of the self-knowledge that ought to shield them from falsehoods, while his very falsehood reminds us of the novel’s concern with the loss of sons.) Chapter 59 then opens by exploding a favorite convention of Ming fiction and drama, that of the elegant, flowerlike courtesan. We see Hsi-men Ch’ing on his first visit to the superior singing-girl Cheng Ai-yüeh, who is mortified by the crudity of his sexual demands. As with the contrasts pointed out above between the language of song and the actuality of this novel, we are reminded here of what the author expects us to know about the actuality of sex in the world he has painted for us. Ai-yüeh quickly descends to the level of her sister singing-girls: in Chapter 68, we find her suggesting an incestuous seduction to Hsi-men Ch’ing.10 Here in Chapter 59, she wears plum-blossom ornaments and gold-inlaid hairpins; the author thus links her to other agents of sexual chaos in Chinp’ingmei, P’an Chin-lien and Ch’un-mei. And the hyperbolic language in which she is described also hints ever so lightly at the religious dimension that dominates the rest of the chapter: this “spirit” in her secluded grotto is described in terms equally conventional for the Taoist paradise.11
We then move back to the Hsi-men household, to watch Kuan-ko driven to convulsions and death by P’an Chin-lien’s cat. The wives call in the healer Granny Liu and try a host of remedies: medicine, cauterization, distribution of the scriptures already printed up in the previous chapter because of Kuan-ko’s chronic ill-health. Nothing, however, can stave off the baby’s death, and he is buried with his little Taoist garments in the arms of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s deceased first wife.12
These almost subliminal references to Taoism remind us of the novel’s equation between sexual overspending (here seen as Hsi-men Ch’ing’s visit to Cheng Ai-Yüeh) and infertility (the death of his son). (Here Granny Liu’s surname reminds us of Eunuch Liu, in a verbal resonance like that between Nun Hsüeh and Eunuch Hsüeh.) This infertility is always linked to the violation of hierarchy in Chinp’ingmei. The author implicates the rest of the household women when he describes the over-elaborate coffin provided for Kuan-ko: it is encrusted with gold or chin (for P’an Chin-lien), jade or yü (for Meng Yü-lou), jade plums (mei, for Ch’un-mei), and a snow-white banner over all (snow, hsüeh, for Sun Hsüeh-o).13 These details link the immediate events of the chapter to the other disruptive forces operating within the household. Kuan-ko’s death is then explained to the wives (and thus to the reader) by various religious figures in a manner that shows it to have significant parallels with Hsiao-ko’s fate at the end of the book.
First, the local Yin Yang Master, named Hsü, is called in to perform the conventional rite of p’i-shu, in which the cause of Kuan-ko’s death will be related to his actions in his former life. Kuan-ko is found to have been a scoundrel, sunk in sensual pleasure, presuming on his power in order to usurp other people’s goods, and generally flouting the will of Heaven. He therefore met a “cold breath” sort of death (ch’i-hanchihping), bedridden and unclean. Reincarnation and rebirth into a prosperous Cheng family are predicted. This conventional explanation supports Nun Hsüeh’s consoling statement that “he was not your child to begin with.” Nun Hsüeh uses this conventional assertion to calm Li P’ing-erh and to absolve her of responsibility for the baby’s death. But we readers cannot take the nun’s statements at face value: at this point in the novel she is fighting with Nun Wang, having made off with Nun Wang’s share of the money for printing and distributing scriptures. Any consolation she offers is thus discredited by her actions. This places us on our guard in evaluating the comforting little story she then tells Li P’ing-erh (a story typical of reincarnation tales in both the Taoist and Buddhist traditions), about a demon who repeatedly attempts to kill his mother by entering her womb and destroying her vitals in the process of birth. The bodhisattva Kuan-yin finally demonstrates the demon’s true nature to the woman, explaining that the woman herself has injured the demon in a previous incarnation, but that her present piety has prevented the demon from killing her. Kuan-yin touches the woman’s child with her wand, and he is revealed as a yeh-ch’a; he throws himself into the river and disappears.14
What strikes us immediately about this story is that while it bears no particular relation to Li P’ing-erh, it is precisely appropriate for Wu Yüeh-niang, whose son Hsiao-ko is revealed by a touch of P’u-ching’s wand as the “yeh-ch’a” Hsi-men Ch’ing, but whose life of piety insures her own longevity. And Yin Yang Master Hsü’s p’i-shu findings have also identified Kuan-ko with his father: the baby’s previous life is characterized by the sins associated with Hsi-men Ch’ing, and the chill and foulness of his death foreshadow the death of his father. Moreover, the reincarnation that Yin Yang Master Hsü predicts for him is just the sort that the monk P’u-ching obtains for Hsi-men Ch’ing and those who have died with him: a new life in comfortable circumstances not so very different from the old.
The two sons are conflated by all these parallels into one son, the symbol of sons, of posterity. We recall that Kuan-ko was born and died on a jen-tzu day; Hsiao-ko is conceived on a jen-tzu day. (The cyclical characters “jen-tzu” are homophonous with characters meaning “to be pregnant.”) Both babies are made ill by their visits to the family tomb.15 Together they symbolize the lost posterity of the Hsi-men family, the sons who will be unable to offer sacrifice at his tomb. Kuan-ko’s death is carefully presented as retribution - we have only to remember Li P’ing-erh’s dreams of her murdered husband, demanding the child from her - and this identity between the two sons demands that we read Hsiao-ko’s fate as retribution also. The structure of the narrative precludes our reading Hsiao-ko’s fate as regeneration. (As noted above, the Yung-fu Temple setting itself reminds us of Hsiao-ko’s questionable conception.) The author reminds us not to take Kuan-ko’s death as an orthodox Buddhist account, when he has the baby reincarnated in a Cheng household, directly after the detailed description of the prostitute Cheng Ai-Yüeh! The “Buddhism” of this conclusion is thus far less important, in terms of its own doctrinal integrity, than is the author’s narrative design, which accords with Buddhist belief only insofar as it teaches us to look beyond surface appearance. At these key moments in the novel the author is primarily interested in the question of posterity, which occupies a very different position in the Confucian and Buddhist traditions. We can see the author’s intent by examining the adoption that closes the novel.
The real son of Hsi-men Ch’ing, in terms of psychological affinity and the carrying out of filial responsibilities, is the servant Tai-an (whose name is homophonous with tai, replacement). The author creates both verbal and structural links between Hsi-men Ch’ing and Tai-an, as they mirror each other’s language and behavior. Some have seen Wu Yüeh-niang’s adoption of Tai-an as another sign of potential regeneration (the household draws in new blood and is able to live on), but for the reasons below it seems unlikely that the author intended it to be so understood.
Tai-an’s imitation of Hsi-men Ch’ing is concentrated at the climactic midpoint of the novel, when Hsi-men Ch’ing acquires the aphrodisiac that will be the immediate cause of his death. In Chapter 50, Hsi-men Ch’ing engages in perverse sexual activity with Wang Liu-erh; this account follows directly upon Tai-an’s threatening the homosexual servant Shu-t’ung with the same sexual act. Tai-an, seeing his master occupied with Wang Liu-erh, visits a singing-girl at a brothel in the neighborhood. Finding her with a client, he causes an uproar reminiscent of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s outrage at finding Li Kuei-chieh similarly occupied in Chapter 20. Tai-an succeeds in ousting his rival, and has himself entertained with wine and song, just as Hsi-men Ch’ing and Censor Sung, pages before, have been entertained by Shu-t’ung. (Tai-an’s favorite, Chin-erh, plays her p’i-p’a for him; P’an Chin-lien is a sexual favorite of Hsi-men Ch’ing, and is identified in the novel with the p’i-p’a.) The language used by Tai-an in his forcible embrace of Shu-t’ung recurs when Hsi-men Ch’ing, returning from his visit to Wang Liu-erh, insists on sexual intercourse with Li P’ing-erh, even though she is still bleeding after giving birth to Kuan-ko. Tai-an experiences fatigue (his “sore legs”) when he accompanies the mysterious monk who presents the aphrodisiac to Hsi-men Ch’ing. Hsi-men Ch’ing will complain repeatedly of sore legs, in the interval before overuse of the monk’s medicine causes his death in Chapter 79. In Chapter 78, Tai-an and Hsi-men Ch’ing both have sexual intercourse with the wife of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s employee Pen Ssu. Here in Chapter 78, the narrator comments explicitly that servants can be expected to imitate their masters. At the close of the novel, Tai-an succeeds even to the Hsi-men name, as Wu Yüeh-niang rechristens him and turns to him for support. Hsi-men Ch’ing, the miniature monarch of his domain, has passed on; the manipulative Tai-an is now the miniature Hsi-men Ch’ing of the abbreviated household.16
Can this be taken as a positive conclusion for the Hsi-men family? Two factors argue against such a judgment: Ming attitudes toward adoption, and the traditional Confucian stress on filial piety.
The virtue of hsiao (filial piety) was fundamental to the tie between family and state, and as such underlay the entire social order of Confucian China. To be without posterity was the gravest harm that could be done to one’s parents, who would be left without sacrifices. Though a graded series of formal mechanisms existed for adoption, they were hedged round with qualifications and caveats which suggest that an inherent stigma attached to the process.17 Adoption might be an unavoidable practical solution, but it was never equivalent to producing heirs of one’s own. (There was always concern over the loyalty of adopted sons: Confucius is said to have associated them with the generals of defeated armies and the ministers of defeated states.)18 The Ming legal code stipulated that where adopted children were to serve as heirs, they were to be adopted from within one’s own surname group.19 Wu Yüeh-niang does not adopt Tai-an formally (she merely gives him the Hsi-men surname), but the novel suggests that he will in effect serve as the Hsi-men heir. Surname-bestowal by masters was not unknown during the Ming, but it would not have been seen as a very successful way of continuing the family line.20 It is but another in a series of improper adoptions that have already been presented in the novel: Ts’ai Ching’s adoption of the false prizewinner Ts’ai Yün, the adoption of singing-girls by the Hsi-men wives, and Hsi-men Ch’ing’s own adoption of the dissolute Wang San-kuan, not to mention Hsi-men Ch’ing’s acceptance by Ts’ai Ching as his adopted son.21 The second and third of these, as noted above in Chapter 2, go so far as to violate incest taboos. The point of adoption in Chinp’ingmei seems to be to show the failure of the protagonists to practice filial piety, rather than the reverse. Instead of insuring the continuity of their families, these adoptive parents are simply arranging to replicate their own social behavior. The reconstituted Hsi-men family at the end of the novel will be managed by Hsi-men Ch’ing’s servant, who marries Wu Yüeh-niang’s maid: they are their masters writ small, and I think the point of this adoption is to make the cynical comment that the evils of the book can be expected to recur.
Wu Yüeh-niang gives up her son and turns to Tai-an for support because of a credulity evident throughout the novel, a credulity finally mocked even by her own servants.22 It is a measure of her failure of self-awareness, and this kind of failure is the root transgression from which all others grow in Chinp’ingmei. The narrator has already told us, in Chapter 75, that Wu Yüeh-niang would lose her son to an “old Buddha” as a consequence of listening to pao-chüan during her pregnancy, and he draws on recent history to discredit her final enlightenment. The monk P’u-ching has the same name as a famous sectarian religious leader of the Wan-li era, who was active in north China between 1578 and 1586, and is said to have been the author of an enormous quantity of proselytizing literature.23 Thus the religious consolation that P’u-ching offers is associated with the sectarian pao-chüan that have been discredited in earlier chapters. P’u-ching presides over reincarnation and transformation; in this way he parallels the corrupt Nun Hsüeh in Chapter 59, with her tale of reincarnation and transformation. We cannot take the religious language of the final chapters at face value.
Nevertheless, the scenes in which P’u-ching summons the spirits of the dead, or transforms Hsiao-ko into the image of his father, are compelling moments in the novel. The author undermines the literal meaning of his own text, but narrates scenes of such intensity that the reader cannot remain unmoved. Why did he feel it appropriate to close the novel with this glimpse of a world beyond our senses? The reason, I believe, lies in his deep concern over false goals and false striving, a concern shared by many of his literati contemporaries. In their classical-language essays, these men lament their attachment to delusions that may have nothing to do with the flesh: delusions such as the notion that knowledge is found in books rather than in the heart, or the goal of establishing an official reputation. But they were not above turning to popular literary forms and to metaphors of earthly love or quarrels as a way of illustrating these delusions. The great Hsi-Yuchi embodies earthly attachment in the figure of a comical pig, and on a smaller scale we can see an analogous use of metaphor in Li K’ai-hsien’s two extant Yüan-pen, Yüan-linwu-meng (Dreaming in the Garden in the Afternoon) and Ta-ya-ch’an (The Zen Charade). By the late Ming, Yüan-pen (short dramatic skits, thought to be forerunners of the tsa-chü) were not necessarily written to be performed. Like tsa-chü during the Ch’ing, they became a species of belles-lettres, written to amuse one’s literate contemporaries. And just as Li K’ai-hsien was thought to have poured out his political resentment in Pao-chienchi, so his contemporaries read his yüan-pen as signifying more than met the eye. Yüan-linwu-meng represents the quarrels of deluded bureaucrats by means of a ladies’ shouting match, and Ta-ya-ch‘an shows us the mutual incomprehension of a deluded abbot and a stupid butcher, each complacent in his mistaken view of the world. Prefaces and colophons make it clear that these Yüan-pen were intended and understood as metaphorical injunctions to awaken to the True Way.24 Here it is not Ming political evils that Li K’ai-hsien seems to attack, but rather the vanity of being attached to politics at all. What is interesting for our purposes is that in Ta-ya-ch’an Li K’ai-hsien chose to represent his ideas about politics through the language of religion (or at any rate by means of conventional images of religion). He was really making statements that had nothing to do with Ch’an Buddhism as such. And Chinp’ingmei, whose author held Li K’ai-hsien in high esteem, is part of this tradition of metaphor, greatly extended so as to speak to a wide range of personal and political concerns. The religious visions that close the book remind us of realms of meaning far beyond the Hsi-men household, and suggest again that for Chinp’ingmei, as for Hsi-Yuchi and the Yüan-pen of Li K’ai-hsien, the question of self-cultivation is central. Not only do P’u-ching’s contradictory demonstrations hoodwink Wu Yüeh-niang, they remind us of the larger truth that appearances in general are deceptive and that we must seek the truths beyond them. When P’u-ching intercedes for the dead and has them reborn in households much like those they left behind, the religious setting adds gravity to the obvious inference that the deluded protagonists will merely repeat the disasters of the lives just ended.25 And when P’u-ching shows us that Hsiao-ko stands for his father, the author is really making a statement about the moral meaning of karma: not that we are to take reincarnation literally, but rather that our acts continue to have consequences after our death. The literal meaning of reincarnation is irrelevant in the novel’s terms, but its moral meaning, namely the persistence of consequences, is central. The monk P’u-ching is a charlatan, given his presentation in the novel, but when we take his statements as metaphor they turn out to be true.
The narrative method of Chinp’ingmei is perfectly suited to this sort of extended metaphor, in that it teaches the reader to perceive immutable truths behind shifting appearances. The novel’s puns and patterns are a constant sleight-of-hand, continually resolving surface phenomena into assertions about those phenomena. In a remarkable way, the author teaches us to avoid false attachment by keeping us from being attached to the surface of his own narrative. Thus one can say that the book itself is written in a moral fashion, if we accept for a moment the Confucian, hierarchical solutions that the author implicitly prescribes. We would also have to accept the notion that political solutions depend primarily on individual self-cultivation. That is to say, the most worthwhile political action is to rid oneself of illusion and false attachment, so as to “rectify the mind,” in accordance with the core of the Ta-hsüeh’s prescription for good government. This may not be a natural progression for modern readers (especially modern Western readers), but it was something the author could demand of his contemporaries, given the education he shared with them.
Not all readers rose to the demands of this novel (or of the other great Ming novels). The critic Chin Sheng-t’an (1610?-1661) and his follower Chang Chu-p’o sometimes write as though they were preaching to the heathen, lazy readers content with the surface of a text. But at least Chin Sheng-t’an and Chang Chu-p’o could count on the Chinese tradition of allegorical interpretation, and on a number of like-minded contemporaries who were avid literary detectives. When we come to Chinp’ingmei from the West we have to recreate this allegorical tradition for ourselves. We must steep ourselves in the culture that allowed Chang Chu-p’o to savor the complexity of Chinp’ingmei. By its narrative method Chinp’ingmei undercuts the simplistic judgments of its traditional narrator, just as the provocative thinkers of the age worked to undercut the simplistic formulas imposed by the examination system. At its best, Ming thought was a search for a different kind of simplicity: a stripping away of convention and illusion, so as to put oneself in harmony with ethical principles. Confucians, Buddhists, and Taoists searched each other’s texts for these principles, achieving in the process a heightened consciousness of metaphor, which found expression in fiction and drama as well as in philosophical discourse. Thus it is no surprise to find the empire embodied in the Hsi-men household, or the self-delusion of the age embodied in the person of Hsi-men Ch’ing. From the distance of centuries we can see Chinp’ingmei take its place with the other great Ming novels and their questions: the moral meaning of history in San-kuoyen-i, self-cultivation and the Three Teachings in Hsi-Yuchi, and the ruler’s responsibility for rebellion in the beloved Shui-huchuan. The same dangers menace all of these works; analogous prescriptions (self-cultivation, the rectification of names) are implicit in each of them for turning the dangers back. None of us, says the preface to Chinp’ingmei, escapes the wheel of life and death, but the author of Chinp’ingmei was at pains to show his readers what mistakes to avoid in this difficult world.
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