Soothsaying and the Manipulation of Fate

The fates of the major characters are foretold in Chapters 29 and 46 of Chinp’ingmei. (Separate predictions concerning Li P’ing-erh’s and Hsi-men Ch’ing’s deaths are given in Chapters 61 and 79.) The predictions are accurate: the precise causes are given for Hsi-men Ch’ing’s and Li P’ing-erh’s deaths, as is the violent end that awaits P’an Chin-lien. Thus we may at first be led to assume that the author found these fortune-telling practices valid, and expected us to believe in them. We soon find, however, that the author undermines his own accounts of this soothsaying. Paul Martinson has shown that the novel’s predictions are based on impossible combinations of the “stems” and “branches” that make up an individual’s “eight characters [of fortunetelling]” (the written characters associated with the date and hour of birth.)² Moreover, the “eight characters” for various individuals are given differently at different points in Chinp’ingmei.³ The author apparently could not be bothered to make his horoscopes plausible or even consistent, and this suggests that however seriously he took the predictions themselves, he was skeptical or agnostic about the mechanical means used to reach them. (The Ch’ing critic Chang Chu-p’o suggests that inconsistencies in the novel’s chronology are intended to convey a similar message, namely that we are to look beyond the surface of the narrative for its true meaning. In Chang’s view these are not instances of carelessness on the author’s part.)⁴ Such an attitude would have been consistent with that of contemporaries or near-contemporaries like the literati playwright Li K’ai-hsien, whose drama is quoted in Chinp’ingmei. (Li agreed with Hsün-tzu that physiognomy, another popular form of divination, was internally inconsistent, and a distraction from the proper investigation of human motives.)⁵

But if the author was a skeptic, why are the predictions accurate? Ming readers could have answered this question more quickly than we can, because they were familiar with such predictions from drama and stories, where prediction worked simply to let the audience anticipate the conclusion. As in any number of traditional Chinese tales of detection, the outcome was never in doubt; what mattered was the moral drama involved in reaching that outcome. Divination in Chinp’ingmei is simply one in a host of conventions warning the Ming reader that the novel would end in a reversal of fortunes.

How rigid, then, was the contemporary idea of fate on which the author drew? Apparently fate was considered highly manipulable: the morality books of the late Ming are prescriptions for laying up merit and so affecting the future; the facial marks on which physiognomy was based were considered to change with an individual’s change of heart; and even the karma of Buddhism could be softened by personal virtue or the compassion of a bodhisattva.⁶ The Tzu-p’ing or “eight-character” method popular in Chinp’ingmei took such a variety of factors into account that the soothsayer had ample room to interpret and to suggest remedies.⁷ In all of these cases human action carried more weight than did any other circumstance: certain conditions of one’s life might be set by external factors, but there was much room for change.

The fiction and drama on which Chinp’ingmei drew had its own rules for the manipulation of fate, and one of them was the generic convention that the only way to alter one’s fate for the better was by acts of virtue. A false show of piety could do nothing to improve the lot of an immoral character. Virtue was rewarded by the impartial justice of Heaven, and it was just this generic convention that attracted the late Ming literati authors who would turn the hua-pen into an even more didactic sort of story than it had been originally. Whatever the range of belief in the population at large, Ming vernacular fiction and drama required pao or retribution to supersede any form of fate-manipulation. Formulations of pao can be found in all of the Three Teachings: Buddhism in its conviction that lack of compassion will be punished in the next life; Taoism in its abhorrence of distortion in man’s equilibrium with nature; and Confucianism in its emphasis on the impartial justice of all-seeing Heaven. As Patrick Hanan has shown, this pao is the “moral grammar” of the Ming hua-pen, especially the folly-and-consequences story.⁸

Chinp’ingmei, with its roots in the folly-and-consequences story, is governed by these same generic laws. Attempts to manipulate Heaven for undeserved gain are exposed and punished. The Buddhist scripture that Li P’ing-erh distributes in a desperate rush does not add any merit to her dying baby’s store; he perishes in the following chapter.⁹ The Taoist rituals that are discussed below have equally little positive effect. The only spiritual security lies in virtuous intent.

Taoist Rites of Passage and Promotion

In Chapter 39, Hsi-men Ch’ing commissions an elaborate Taoist ceremony for his first son, at the temple he typically frequents with his friends. In Chapter 66, he commissions another Taoist rite, as part of the funeral observances for his sixth wife Li P’ing-erh. Neither of these rites is heterodox; the second, in fact, is celebrated by an eminent monk enroute to conduct Taoist rituals at court. But as we will see, both of these rites are inappropriate to their occasions, and the author shows us that neither gains Hsi-men Ch’ing the end he seeks. Far from succeeding, these rituals are associated with sterility and disaster.

The ritual in Chapter 39 is commissioned by Hsi-men Ch’ing in fulfillment of a vow made earlier to the abbot of the temple.¹⁰ It is an elaborate ceremony, intended to add a full 120 “points” (fen) of religious merit to the baby’s spiritual account. The ceremony itself is in the form of a transaction, as the ritual explicitly cancels the spiritual debt that Hsi-men Ch’ing incurred in his original vow. At the ceremony, Kuan-ko is given a Taoist name and his tiny Taoist priestly garments are blessed.¹¹ These precautions are meant to safeguard his health and insure his longevity. The ritual in Chapter 66 is a funeral service conducted in the family courtyard, a water-fire liturgy intended to insure the passage of Li P’ing-erh’s soul from the underworld to the heavenly realms of Jade.¹² The first of these rituals shows us the quantified and transactional view of religious merit in one strain of late Ming religious Taoism. The second, as Paul Martinson points out, is a ritual of promotion. This is underscored when the service is interrupted by a messenger with news of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s own official promotion.¹³

But do these rituals represent successful passage and promotion? Chapter 39 opens with a poem about the inefficacy of Taoist practice, reminding us that despite the Taoist fervor of the Han emperor Wu-ti, he is now in his grave and his palace is overgrown and cold. Events subsequent to both Chapters 39 and 66 bear out the pessimism of this verse. Kuan-ko’s illnesses are not abated; they increase. (As if by premonition, he cries when he is dressed in his little priestly robe and hat.) We are not shown the disposition of Li P’ing-erh’s soul, but the subsequent rite to be conducted at court will certainly fail, as we see from the empire’s continued decline. Hsi-men Ch’ing’s civil promotion, the earthly analogue of Li P’ing-erh’s spiritual progress, is no more lasting than the transitory glory of Han Wu-ti: he dies thirteen chapters later, of a deficit of water and an excess of fire. The recurrence of this water-fire terminology in the context of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s death mocks the efficacy of the ritual supposed to insure Li P’ing-erh’s ascent.¹⁴ As with the Taoist exorcism performed for Li P’ing-erh before her own death, nothing can stay the conventional, inexorable working of pao.

And why should we suppose that anything can? These Taoist rituals are coupled in the novel with signs of the excess that is leading the family to its doom. Both the ceremony for Kuan-ko and the funeral observance for Li P’ing-erh are conducted with an extravagance that confuses the priests and guests, who act as though a first wife or her son were being honored. And all of this extravagance is coupled with subtle clues pairing the Hsi-men household and the extravagant court: not only do they use the services of the same eminent monk, but the opening poem of Chapter 39 is about an emperor, and the ritual in Chapter 39 takes place on the birthday of the Taoist Jade Emperor.

These rites must also be seen in light of Taoist teachings about self-cultivation, which we see violated throughout the novel. The regimen of Taoist self-cultivation that we hear most of in Chinp’ingmei is the search for immortality. No one in Chinp’ingmei is actually engaged in the practice of such a search, but the eunuchs Liu and Hsüeh, frequent visitors to the Hsi-men household, call repeatedly for tales about the attainment of Taoist immortality.¹⁵ Such immortality was celibate and asexual, a transcendence of the entanglements of the world. It depended on restraint, the channeling of the physical desires to nourish the purified inner self. In Chinp’ingmei this restraint is wholly absent, and the notion of Taoist immortality thus serves to underscore the protagonists’ self-indulgence. But given its emphasis on transcendence, the search for immortality serves another function as well. When Taoist symbols are associated with Hsi-men Ch’ing’s first-born son, the effect is to link these symbols and their associated notion of immortality with the offspring of a union that recalls the causes of the empire’s afflictions: unbridled lust, covetousness, the willingness to murder those who stand in one’s way. Taoist symbols associated with Hsi-men Ch’ing’s son thus effectively link the notions of renunciation, danger to the family, and danger to the empire. The extravagance of the rites is finally coupled to sterility, since the first son and his mother both perish. This conjunction is underscored by the constant association of Taoist symbols with the corrupt eunuchs, who in their very persons combine asexuality with danger to the empire.

These references to Taoism also recall the Ming philosophical debate over enlightenment and sincerity. While certain Taoists emphasized the use of drugs and charms in the search for immortality, others subordinated such physical alchemy to a spiritual alchemy that emphasized the homology of man and the cosmos.¹⁶ The aim of this “Inner Alchemy” was to shed the desires that obstructed one’s sense of the correspondence between the human and heavenly spheres. This was the sort of self-cultivation that could be used to emphasize Confucian values, and some of the “Taoist” plays that are referred to in Chinp’ingmei may have been written with such a revalorization in mind. The eunuchs who call for these plays, however, practice no self-cultivation at all. Involuntarily free of sexual desire, they are sunk in the desire for their own safety and comfort. They associate themselves with a kind of enlightenment that they take no responsibility for attaining. But as the Ming religious teacher Lin Chao-en reminds us, no one can claim freedom from desire who has not attained genuine freedom from desire.¹⁷ The “Taoism” of Hsi-men Ch’ing and the eunuchs thus makes them emblems of the false consciousness decried by Ming writers of many persuasions.

The Taoist rituals in Chapters 39 and 66 are attended only by men. Chapter 39 ends with a parallel scene of pao-chüan narration for women. Here as elsewhere in the novel, the recital of pao-chüan poses the same moral danger to the Hsi-men family as do the extravagant Taoist rites.

Sectarian Buddhism and Pao-chüan

Chinp’ingmei was written in an age that had been greatly influenced by Buddhist ideas, and the novel refers to Buddhism in many implicit and explicit ways. One of these is the numerical correspondence between Hsi-men Ch’ing’s six wives and the Buddhist Six Roots of Evil (liu-ken). It is principally through the quarrels and jealousies of the six wives that we witness the self-delusion springing from the Six Roots, and two of the wives occasion the sexual desire that is the most dangerous delusion of all. One did not have to be a professing Buddhist in the late Ming to draw on this metaphor: Lin Chao-en commented on it, and people like Ho Liang-chün touch on it as well.¹⁸ (The major Buddhist teachings - as opposed to strict Buddhist practice - were part of the education of any literate person.) But as in the case of Taoism, with its higher and lower vehicles, there were various ways of employing the metaphor. Someone like Lin found it quite unnecessary to withdraw from the world to free oneself of the Six Roots; what was needed, instead, was the assumption of personal responsibility, the decision to be free of delusion.¹⁹ A similar attitude informs Chinp’ingmei. Hsi-men Ch’ing is not brought low by his wives, but by himself. It is his refusal to regulate his own behavior or that of his wives that gives the Six Roots their power over him. In this the author of Chinp’ingmei is quite at one with his literati contemporaries.

But the wives themselves, in their Buddhist practice, diverge quite sharply from this sort of basically Confucian approach to the Three Teachings. The pao-chüan to which Wu Yüeh-niang is devoted represent a different sort of Buddhism: the sectarian religion that expanded independently of established Buddhism and Taoism during the Ming. These sects had their roots in T’ien-t’ai, Pure Land and Ch’an Buddhism, in the Manichaeism which had played a part in the rise of the dynasty, and in a complex of Maitreyan beliefs (which looked forward to the coming of the Maitreya Buddha and his reign of egalitarian prosperity).²⁰ They were lay movements with their own teachings and scriptures. Their first texts date from the early sixteenth century, and the sects flourished from the early years of Wan-li to the end of the dynasty. The new movements were not a sudden phenomenon of the Ming: religious sects with roots in Buddhism, Taoism, or Manichaeism had existed in China since the Han. The new sectarian religions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were in some senses a natural extension of the lay associations that had flourished within Buddhism at various times since the Sung - vegetarian associations, Pure Land associations devoted to the chanting of Buddha’s name, and the like. But in each era, new sectarian movements were viewed as heretical against the background of what had come to be accepted, and in the eyes of skeptical Ming officials, the sectarian movements of the Ming were distinguished by their independence of traditional Buddhism and Taoism. The new religions transformed the Buddhist and Taoist symbols that they appropriated, establishing new centers of spiritual authority over which the governmental Buddhist and Taoist offices had no control. The sects influenced each other, and their texts show mutual borrowing. They were founded sometimes by lay people and sometimes by priests and nuns (whose new affiliations earned them the censure of the priesthood). To spread their teachings, the new religious movements turned to pao-chüan ("precious scrolls"), vernacular texts combining prose narration, Buddhist and secular verse forms, and songs to melodies from the drama.²¹ These pao-chüan owed their form to Lo Ch’ing (1443-1527), the founder of the Wu-wei ("Inaction") sect, who in his Five Books transformed traditional Buddhist preaching materials into the accepted vehicle for new sectarian thought.²² (The earlier Buddhist materials, also called pao-chüan, had simply been popular exegeses of orthodox scriptures.) Women as well as men wrote pao-chüan and headed sects; here, in fact, outside the confines of the nunnery, was an important avenue to authority for Ming women.

Pao-chüan have close ties to Buddhism, and we might expect that this would have won them a place in literati discourse about the Three Teachings. Pao-chüan quote more copiously from Buddhist sutras and commentaries than from any other single kind of literature, and where they draw on folk tales and folk beliefs, these are typically coupled with Buddhist names or symbols (such as the idea of the compassionate bodhisattva).²³ This sectarian religious literature seemed “Buddhist” to its contemporaries, and pao-chüan were typically called Fo-shuo, Buddhist tales, without any particular regard for sectarian orthodoxy.

But in fact, the pao-chüan texts differed markedly from Buddhist preaching materials of earlier ages, and their teachings were not incorporated into the mainstream of literati thought. While early sixteenth-century pao-chüan typically developed the Ch’an-inspired thought of Lo Ch’ing, a different complex of beliefs dominated extant pao-chüan by mid-century. Now they centered on the myth of a compassionate mother-creator, who had sent the various Buddhas to earth in order to reclaim her vagrant children.²⁴ This and related teachings put pao-chüan at odds with both Buddhism and the hierarchical tendencies of Confucianism. The millenarian eschatology of the Maitreyan sects seemed to promise justification for rebellion, since the right sort of emperor had to be on the throne before the Maitreya could arrive. Even Lo Ch’ing’s Five Books, which had become highly influential by the late Ming, preached the abolition of distinctions between priests and laity, and between men and women: enlightenment and. true emptiness could be sought by all. Lo repudiated conventional conceptions of good and evil, insisting that they were mere signs of dependency upon the material world, impediments to the enlightenment that would transcend them.²⁵ And while Lo himself had nothing to say about the Eternal Mother, by the end of the Ming a belief in the Eternal Mother seems to have been common to all the sects, Lo’s included. This put them in conflict with Confucianism, since allegiance to the Eternal Mother was alleged to weaken ties to one’s earthly parents, undermining Confucian notions of filial piety. (A Ming Wan-li memorial states that the sectarian teachings weaken family ties, contribute to cliquishness, and give dictatorial powers to sect leaders - all charges that were simultaneously leveled at private Confucian academies.)²⁶

The lists of donors who published Ming pao-chüan give us some sense of who the sectarian followers were. They included court eunuchs and palace women, local officials, and men and women of commercial prosperity. Even prominent men of letters could be found, on occasion, in their ranks.²⁷ The audience for pao-chüan must have been even broader, from the wealthy who could afford to have them recited at private household observances to the illiterate who could hear them in public places.²⁸ In the oversimplified view of critical Ming officials, however, the sectarian preachers of pao-chüan preyed upon the uneducated and inexperienced (and particularly upon women), leading them away from accustomed forms of Buddhist and Taoist worship that could be found at court as well as in the countryside. Buddhist authorities echoed these complaints.²⁹

The author uses this conventional condemnation as a way of criticizing the lax credulity of the Hsi-men wives, as we see from the audience for pao-chüan in Chinp’ingmei, and the effect of pao-chüan on that audience. In Chapter 75, directly following a scene of pao-chüan narration, the narrator comments as follows:

There follows a description of steps taken by the ancients during a woman’s pregnancy to insure the intelligence and virtue of offspring: everything heterodox is avoided, and all contemplation is directed to the Confucian classics and other worthy objects. By passing her pregnancy listening to tales of karma, says the narrator before returning to the story proper, Wu Yüeh-niang contributes by her own actions to her son’s joining the celibate Buddhist clergy, and to the resultant extinction of the Hsi-men family line with which the novel closes. Far from leading to that “regulation of the family” prescribed in the Ta-hsüeh, Wu Yüeh-niang’s version of self-cultivation helps bring the family to its end.

The narrator bases his objection on the fact that Wu Yüeh-niang is pregnant, and he thus gives us our clue to the significance of pao-chüan in this novel: where these particular pao-chüan are concerned with birth they tie it to renunciation, rather than treating birth as continuity, as the safeguard of the family.

Parts of pao-chüan are quoted into Chapters 39, 73, and 74 of Chinp’ingmei, and another pao-chüan is named in Chapter 82. A popular exegesis of the Diamond Sutra, the Chin-kangk’o-i, is also quoted in Chapter 51, in a manner identical to pao-chüan narration.³¹ Four of these five occasions are birthdays of one or another of the wives, and on each of these birthdays, Hsi-men Ch’ing neglects his conjugal duty to the wife in question, preferring his damaging attachments to Li P’ing-erh or P’an Chin-lien. The pao-chüan quoted in Chinp’ingmei, with their emphasis on a salvational scheme that has no place for legitimate sexual activity, are thus coupled with Hsi-men Ch’ing’s neglect of his family responsibilities. Wu Yüeh-niang presides over these pao-chüan evenings and is the wife most deeply affected by them; they distract her from managing the family as she ought to do.

The setting for this Buddhist narration in Chinp’ingmei is the same in all cases. Nuns are invited for a vegetarian meal, the wives are then assembled, and the recital begins. Generally only women are present. In Chapter 39, the Wu-tsuHuang-meipao-chüan (The Precious Scroll of the Fifth Patriarch at Huang-mei) is recited in honor of P’an Chin-lien’s birthday, even as she suffers torments of jealousy over Hsi-men Ch’ing’s absence at the Taoist ceremony for the son of her rival. In this pao-chüan, the householder Chang renounces his eight wives and their children, retires to a Buddhist monastery, and after appropriate purification is reborn as the Fifth Buddhist Patriarch. A number of clues tie this tale directly to the Hsi-men household. The householder Chang has eight wives, and by this time Hsi-men Ch’ing has had eight wives. Wu Yüeh-niang is seen trimming the wicks of the lamps, just as are Chang’s wives. The Fifth Patriarch’s transmigration takes place at Cho-ho ("Muddy River"), while the action Chinp’ingmei is set, ironically, in Ch’ing-ho ("Clear River") hsien. Finally, the Fifth Patriarch of the tale corresponds numerologically to the fifth wife P’an Chin-lien. This is the sort of preposterous parallel that we will see time and again in the novel’s allusion to drama, leading us to suspect that the author is laughing at both his own protagonists and their idealized counterparts.

The overt meaning of this pao-chüan is the efficacy of reclusion, of solitary purification, since it is Chang’s renunciation of family ties that enables him to be reborn as the Fifth Patriarch. The same point is made in the recital of Chin-kang k’o-i on Li Chiao-erh’s birthday in Chapter 51. Here the nuns go through an elaborate set of questions and answers about the ways in which various Buddhas and pious laymen have renounced their earthly ties.³² This recital of the Chin-kang k’o-i takes place immediately after Nun Hsüeh has given a fertility potion to Wu Yüeh-niang, and those who are reading Chinp’ing mei for the second time can feel the retroactive chill of the narrator’s warning in Chapter 75.

In Chapters 39 and 51, P’an Chin-lien is moved to bitterness by Hsi-men Ch’ing’s obvious preference for Li P’ing-erh, but in Chapters 73 and 74, she herself keeps him away from Meng Yü-lou, whose birthday it is. Meng Yü-lou is left to listen to the Wu-chiehch’an-shihpao-chüan (Precious Scroll of the Five-Prohibitions Ch’an Master) in Chapter 73, and the Huang-shihnüpao-chüan (Precious Scroll of Madame Huang) in Chapter 74. The first of these tales, despite what it is called here in Chinp’ingmei, was not originally a pao-chüan at all, but a popular anti-clerical hua-pen story of the Ming. (In it, the Five-Prohibitions Master succumbs to sexual temptation, is gently admonished by his friend, promptly dies of remorse, and is reborn as the poet Su Tung-p’o.) By recasting this tale as a highly incongruous pao-chüan, the author shows us his utter lack of allegiance to the pao-chüan as such. Once again, however, he draws a numerological parallel between the Five-Prohibitions Master and P’an Chin-lien, and the whole tale satirizes the illegitimate sexual attraction that draws Hsi-men Ch’ing to her room.

Wu Yüeh-niang is blind to the incongruity of the tale, and she listens just as attentively to Huang-shihnüpao-chüan in the following chapter. In this pao-chüan, the pious Madame Huang recites the Diamond Sutra daily, is summoned by the Lord of Hades, is reborn as a man, becomes a worthy official, and after revealing her true identity to her erstwhile family, transports them to Paradise. Such piety and its rewards are clearly Wu Yüeh-niang’s ideal, but they conform to the worst expectations of Ming officials. (The closing poem of the pao-chüan as performed in Chinp’ingmei lists various loyalties, and that to one’s sect master is placed on the same footing as loyalty to family and state.) In Chapter 82, it is even clearer that Wu Yüeh-niang’s piety is inappropriate, since she insists that Ch’en Ching-chi listen with her to the final pao-chüan of the novel, Hung-lopao-chüan (Precious Scroll of Hung-lo). In this tale a childless couple manage to conceive after making a vow to the Fifth Lord of Hades; an unforseen result of the vow, however, is that the wife is summoned to the underworld. A cruel stepmother raises the child, who is eventually chosen by the Princess as her husband. (The mother, in a happy ending worthy of the drama, is released from the underworld to join them.) At the time of this recital, Ch’en Ching-chi is engaged in a passionate affair with his “mother-in-law” P’an Chin-lien, culminating a flirtation that had been restrained until Hsi-men Ch’ing’s death. The usual numerological parallel between the Fifth Lord of Hades and the fifth wife points the tale at their relationship, of which Wu Yüeh-niang has managed to remain ignorant. Ch’en Ching-chi might indeed profit from this lesson about mothers and sons; Wu Yüeh-niang, however, could profit still more from an awareness of the state of her household.³³

The pao-chüan in Chinp’ingmei thus point up Wu Yüeh-niang’s credulity, P’an Chin-lien’s illegitimate demands, and the danger that the ideal of renunciation poses to the household. This is brought home to us when the author has Nun Hsüeh, who narrates most of the pao-chüan in the novel, assist Wu Yüeh-niang in conceiving the son Hsiao-ko whom she will later lose. This requires separate consideration, since it is bound up with the “Taoist” means that achieve the same ends for Hsi-men Ch’ing.

Fertility Magic and Sexual Hygiene

At the midpoint of the novel, a pair of events occur that seem to promise fertility and sexual success, but ultimately lead to neither. Hsi-men Ch’ing obtains a powerful aphrodisiac from a mysterious monk, and Wu Yüeh-niang receives the fertility potion that she has ordered from Nun Hsüeh. Neither of the drugs is necessary for the characters’ own ends, as Hsi-men Ch’ing’s sexual prowess is already established, and Wu Yüeh-niang has been able to conceive in the past. But by making their son’s conception depend on these two unorthodox religious figures, the author can suggest that Hsiao-ko is doomed from the start.

Nun Wang first offers Nun Hsüeh’s fertility potion to Wu Yüeh-niang in Chapter 40.³⁴ It is in this fashion that Wu Yüeh-niang learns of Nun Hsüeh and her powers, and Nun Hsüeh is thus associated with fertility from the moment she is introduced. The pao-chüan she recites make clear her commitment to renunciation, however, and her very surname ought to alert us to her ultimate association with infertility. Just as the surname Ts’ai earlier underscored the parallel between Hsi-men Ch’ing’s illegitimately conceived first son and his ill-gotten first official post, so the surname Hsüeh here links the corrupt nun to the corrupt eunuch Hsüeh, whose role in the novel has been discussed above.

In Chapter 50, Nun Hsüeh gives the desired potion to Wu Yüeh-niang and instructs her as to its use.³⁵ By this point in the novel, Wu Yüeh-niang can also expect to rely on her husband’s increased virility, since in the previous chapter he has received the aphrodisiac that he will use repeatedly until his death. The author links this aphrodisiac with concepts of sexual hygiene that came to be associated with Taoism, because just as popular Buddhism was associated during the Ming with fertility rituals, so it was Taoists who had incorporated sexual technique into their regimen of self-cultivation. The main aim of these Taoist techniques was not, however, to produce posterity, but to nourish the growth of a purified inner self who would be free of such entanglements.

In Chapter 49, at the Yung-fu Temple, Hsi-men Ch’ing meets the monk who will give him the aphrodisiac.³⁶ (This mention of the Yung-fu Temple is highly significant, since it is here that the Hsi-men family will lose the son conceived through the use of the aphrodisiac.) The entire description of the temple is an extended doubleentendre: the temple’s meditation hall has five chambers, corresponding to the five viscera, and the abbot’s name Tao-chien has phallic connotations, since it translates as “by nature hard.” (The abbot says he has only “two small disciples.") The temple is in disrepair because its wealth has been dissipated or tiu; the same word tiu is used elsewhere in Chinp’ingmei to refer to ejaculation.³⁷ The wandering monk who actually gives Hsi-men Ch’ing the aphrodisiac is described precisely as a penis: his head is initially shrunken between his shoulders, but he straightens himself vigorously upon command. He has only a single sunken eye. His skin is a liverish purple color. (Hsi-men Ch’ing’s own penis is described in exactly this language in the following chapter.)³⁸ When Hsi-men Ch’ing invites the monk home, the account of their feast is couched in similarly suggestive terms. The “realism” of these scenes is the merest veneer for the actual subject of the chapter. The chapter concludes with the monk’s warning to Hsi-men Ch’ing to be sparing in his use of the drug; the monk thus reminds us that the aim of sexual hygiene is saving, not spending.

The monk’s warning goes disregarded, however, and with it any aims that an actual Taoist might have sought. Hsi-men Ch’ing wants the aphrodisiac not for the pursuit of longevity nor even as an aid to conception, but as a means to sexual conquest. He uses it at every opportunity until his death, despite the pain it causes his partners. But his death is the direct result of an “overspending” of semen, and the structure of Chapter 49 makes clear that the question of spending is central to the entire account of the aphrodisiac.

Chapter 49 opens with a memorial by Censor Tseng, one of the few virtuous officials in the novel, warning that the capital coffers cannot be replenished with the blood and marrow of the people. Here at the conclusion of the chapter, however, we see Hsi-men Ch’ing offer to replenish the temple coffers with his ill-gotten wealth (taken, as are the imperial taxes, from the “blood of the people"). The puns that pepper this chapter make it clear that the parallel is intentional: ching-shih, the capital, is homophonous with another ching-shih, meaning the semen chamber of Taoist sexual hygiene, and the temple coffers that Hsi-men Ch’ing offers to replenish are precisely this latter ching-shih, since the temple has already been described as a body. When we remember the importance of Taoism at the Chia-ching court, it seems doubly appropriate that the author should use this symbolism to link the personal, domestic, and imperial spheres. These conjunctions suggest that the result we can expect from the novel’s fertility magic and sexual hygiene will be infertility, not only for the family but for the state. This is borne out when Hsiao-ko’s departure from his family is paralleled by the empire’s loss of its northern lands.

Taoism, Buddhism, and fertility magic in Chinp’ingmei all suggest this infertility, since they all point to loss. Still, the religious life of Chinp’ingmei is rich and colorful enough that we may not at first be drawn to this conclusion. Since the sectarian religious movements of the Ming were markedly egalitarian (and especially since they made a place for women), there is a temptation to take the prominence of sectarian religious material in Chinp’ingmei as evidence that the novel is “popular” - or even subversive - in its intent. (This reading seems superficially harmonious with the novel’s criticism of corrupt officials.) But whatever their function in other works of Ming literature, the associations of popular Buddhism and mechanistic Taoism in this novel are always with loss, and the way the author associates popular Buddhism and Taoism with corrupt figures keeps us from judging this loss as enlightenment or redemption.³⁹ Here again the appropriate parallel is with the depiction of sex in Chinp’ingmei, which draws us in only to wake us up, to warn us away from disorder and excess. Actually, the very form of the late Ming novel produces a tension between such warnings and the means used to produce them. The authors clearly delighted in the verbal extravagance that the long narrative form made possible, and they even described decadence with loving care. But in Chinp’ingmei these brilliant descriptions finally undermine themselves. In the following chapter we will see that this is typical of the narrative method of Chinp’ingmei. The author’s puns and puzzles teach us to look beneath the surface of the narrative, to the ethical premises that the book illustrates through descriptions of sex and ceremony.