The Social and Political Milieu

The vast majority of the Chinese population in the sixteenth century was rural and agricultural, scattered through small farming villages and county seats. This was a time of growing urbanization and commercialization, however, and the Chinese village was linked to the expanding cities through a network of market towns, waterways, and traveling merchants. These cities bulk large in the cultural life of the late Ming, especially the cities of Chiang-nan (“South of the River”) in the fertile Yangtze delta: Hangchow, Yangchow, Soochow, and Nanking, separated from the administrative center of the country (the Northern Capital, Peking) by hundreds of miles, but surpassing it in wealth, commercial enterprise, and cultural activity. The Chiang-nan region was recognized as the center of characteristically Ming culture: new painting, new fiction, new forms of music and drama. The cultural life of the North was not ignored, even by southerners, who were careful to list the major northern dramatists and essayists in their memoirs. But the North was regarded as a place where older traditions were conserved, whereas the growing cities of the South produced what was considered characteristic of the age. We must not overemphasize the position of cities in late Ming China. The largest had populations of only half a million or so (out of a total population estimated at 150 million in 1600),¹² and they were not the sole centers of culture. Great libraries, for example, might be found in rural estates or academies, and these privately founded academies were often as important as centers of learning as were the cities themselves. But urban commercial life set the tone for one characteristic type of Ming fiction, which, as we will see, suggested the setting of Chinp’ingmei.

Only a small fraction of the Ming population can have experienced anything like the sort of life depicted in the Hsi-men household. What Chinp’ingmei reflects accurately, however, is the increased social mobility of the period.¹³ Relative to the entire population the number of those who experienced this mobility is once again small, but it was a phenomenon that attracted attention, and it was repeatedly celebrated in literature. The means of advancement were trade (as in the case of Hsi-men Ch’ing, whose pawnshop typifies the small-scale commercial establishments that flourished with the influx of silver and the monetization of the economy), and success in the world of the civil-service examinations that led to official careers, which could prove lucrative far beyond their nominally stipulated rates of compensation. The examinations were open to all who could prepare for them, thus making possible the cases of spectacular advancement that did on occasion occur. Primary education was frequently available through clan schools but it was not universal or compulsory. Increases in printing and publishing seem to have been matched by increases in literacy.¹⁴ Popular educational works were widely available, containing general information a candidate should know, as well as sample questions and answers.¹⁵ Since the examination curriculum was limited in ways that will be discussed below, these works increased the likelihood that even a candidate of limited learning could, on occasion, pass the examinations. And since an official career was by far the greatest badge of status in Ming China, the number of candidates was large, including the sons of the merchant class as well as those of the gentry. For the fortunate, an official career conferred intellectual as well as material advantages. Official tours of duty were an invaluable way of becoming acquainted with the various provinces of the empire, and of making or renewing intellectual contacts. But official careers could be entered by only a few. Strict quotas had been established by the court, and the number of disappointed candidates was enormous. A large fraction of the literate population was thus comprised of those who identified with the scholar-official class but had no place in it, (or had some very humble place, such as tutor or clerk). And toward the end of the dynasty, the obvious advantages of an official career were offset, in the eyes of certain intellectuals, by serious drawbacks. These drawbacks lay both in the stultifying nature of the examination curriculum (which had been criticized since the beginning of the dynasty), and in the diminished opportunity for effective service once in office. The great majority of qualified scholars still served whenever summoned, but disdain was increasingly voiced for those who allowed the scramble for office to sway them from self-cultivation and the unfettered pursuit of learning. Self-cultivation and official success were increasingly seen as separate matters.¹⁶

The diminished opportunity for service in the late Ming can be traced in part to structural features of Ming governent. Late Ming China was heir to a centralized and even autocratic administrative structure that the Ming founders had adapted from the government of their predecessors, the Mongol Yuan rulers.¹⁷ The small counties through which the population was governed were organized into thirteen provinces, whose court-appointed civil and military governors had relatively little independence from imperial supervison and control. National policy was made in the capital and administered through the traditional Six Ministries, and under the energetic early Ming rulers the Ministries were coordinated largely by the emperor himself. Later emperors shuffled these administrative duties off onto their supervising secretaries to a greater or lesser degree, but there was no official avenue for the delegation of the emperor’s responsibilities. He could be kept from excesses and urged to his duties, and that peculiarly Chinese institution, the Censorate, insured that official remonstrators could criticize any deviation from his traditional role.¹⁸ (Though remonstrators put themselves in personal danger when they criticized the emperor, frequently suffering severe corporal punishment, or worse, the traditional prestige of the Censorate meant that new ones regularly appeared.) Nonetheless, when the emperor abdicated his duties altogether, as the Wan-li emperor (r.1572-1620) did in the latter years of his reign, there was no designated figure to step in and take control of government.¹⁹ The government therefore stood in danger of internal collapse, leaving the official class demoralized. Whole areas of administration went unattended as the emperor refused to meet his court or to fill vacancies by appointment. Powerful eunuchs were able to seize control at court, and to wield their authority in an arbitrary fashion. As military preparedness declined, the population was increasingly exposed to pirate raids in the coastal provinces, and to nomadic incursions from the North and West. These dangers elicited calls for reform, but the calls were cast as much in ideological as in practical, administrative terms. While this phenomenon is familiar to us in our own culture, it was even more marked in China because of the uniform and intensely ideological nature of the education required for officialdom. The tensions produced by this education can best be understood in the context of philosophical developments that took place during the Ming.

Developments in Ming Thought

Education, philosophy, ideology, and government have been intimately linked through most of recorded Chinese history. Confucianism originated in the advice of itinerant teachers to the rulers of the small principalities that made up pre-Han China, centuries before a Confucian canon was finally defined and institutionalized at the court of the Han Emperor Wu-ti (r.B.C.141-87). This advice was originally of many sorts. As well as the teachings identified with Confucius (B.C.551-479), Mencius (B.C.371-289), and Hsün-tzu (fl.B.C.298-238) there were various kinds of logical analysis, and “Legalist” teachings, whose sole concern was with the efficient administration of a centralized state. But in a development that would permanently link sage rulership to individual moral cultivation, it was not the Legalist doctrines that were institutionalized in the Han. These doctrines had been discredited at the fall of the preceding dynasty, the short-lived Ch’in, which had used the Legalist teachings to unify the first Chinese empire. The Han adopted the ideas of Confucius and Mencius, as well as particular texts that they had esteemed, as the foundation of what has been characterized as a state religion. Confucius and Mencius based their prescription for government on the cultivation of personal moral attributes, on the maintainance of properly hierarchical relations between persons in society (along with the reciprocal responsibilities entailed by those relationships), and on the necessary restraining influence of ritual on the individual temperament. From the ruler’s self-cultivation would flow wise and effective government, resulting in universal peace and prosperity. To these teachings the Han Confucianists added a cosmological dimension: with the incorporation of Five-Element theory, the complementarities of Yin and Yang, and various numerological correspondences, the ideal human relationships and primary virtues of the earlier Confucian texts were now seen as expressions of cosmic forces and principles. The notion that wise government flows from the ruler’s self-cultivation was thereby strengthened. In the words of Tung Chung-shu (B.C.1797-104?), the most influential of the Han Confucian teachers, the ruler “models himself on [Heaven’s] course and thereby brings his administration into operation.”²⁰ Jen (benevolence, or “human-heartedness”), defined as the primary human virtue by Confucius and Mencius, is the natural “expression of Heaven.²¹

By the Ming, the dominant strain in Neo-Confucianism was Mencian.²² The Neo-Confucians of the Sung had elaborated a vast cosmology to buttress the Mencian assertion that human nature is inherently good. In the Sung system, the impersonal cosmic “principle” (li), which shapes all things, is itself ethically positive. By giving form to individuals, it confers this inherent goodness on them also. (This represents an implicit repudiation of Mencius’s contemporary Hsün-tzu, who had emphasized the ritual restraints required to direct an inherently evil human nature into the paths of righteousness.) The program of education drawn up by Chu Hsi (1130-1200), the major architect of the Sung system, begins with four texts that represent Confucianism in its most strictly ethical aspect: the Lun-yü (Confucian Analects), Meng-tzu (Mencius), Ta-hsüeh (Great Learning), and Chung-yung (Doctrine of the Mean). But the attainment of sagehood in Chu Hsi’s program demanded an exhaustive “investigation of things” (in practice an investigation of texts, of the entire Confucian canon), that would in a gradual fashion lead to an experience of enlightenment, an apprehension of li the that informed one’s own being and the being of all created things.²³ The learning required for effective government was similarly broad.

It is paradoxical, then, that the Sung Confucian synthesis became the basis of an extremely narrow and rigid examination curriculum in the succeeding dynasties. The Ming founder came to the throne energetic but unlettered, and took over the examination curriculum that his Yüan predecessors had adapted from the Sung synthesis to meet the needs of a mixed Mongol and Chinese governing class. This curriculum consisted of little more than the Four Books with the commentaries of Chu Hsi. The third Ming emperor systematized the curriculum further, ordering the compilation of an anthology of extracts from Sung Neo-Confucian writings, and the preparation of uniform editions of the Four Books and Five Classics, with commentary by Chu Hsi and other eminent Sung Neo-Confucians.²⁴ Hereafter all examination answers were to be based on these texts (though the knowledge of the candidates was in practice supplemented by the popular educational works referred to above).

This restricted orthodoxy could not accommodate innovation, and the speculative tendency of the next two centuries proved exasperating to many a Ming administrator. The Confucian ideal of the sage-in-the-world, acting in personal harmony with the Way of the cosmos, was expressed in terms that seemed increasingly dangerous to the established system of government, though Confucian writers of the Ming did not explicitly challenge governmental norms.²⁵ New currents of Ming thought located the source of principle or li in the human mind and heart, so that the Way could be grasped by anyone willing to look inward.²⁶ Chu Hsi’s “investigation of things” was no longer required. The Way to be found in the human heart differed little from what Confucians had always taught (in the seminal teachings of Wang Yang-ming, 1479-1529, there was no attack on filial piety, or on any of the canonical relations of Confucian tradition), but enlightenment no longer depended on the long discipline of the Sung. The question as to whether enlightenment was rapid or gradual, and the attendant question as to what constituted appropriate self-cultivation, thus became principal foci of Ming philosophical debate.²⁷ As this debate could not be carried out in the government schools with their fixed curriculum, private academies were founded and public meetings were convened.²⁸ Ming literati studied all manner of texts: Confucians wrote on Buddhist sutras, and scholars in this officially Mencian age demonstrated an easy familiarity with Hsün-tzu.²⁹ The new teachings led certain thinkers in directions that generated conservative mistrust.

This mistrust showed itself, in part, in accusations that Wang Yang-ming and his followers had capitulated to Buddhism, or were practicing heterodox Taoist rites. These labels meant different things at different social and educational levels during the Ming. Popular religious practices drew selectively on both Buddhism and Taoism, and popular teachings that were associated with Buddhism inspired millenarian rebellions, to which some of the frustrated examination candidates attached themselves. But for conventional literati, who despite the Three Teachings movement of the age remained at all times clear as to what distinguished Confucianism from Buddhism and Taoism, the meanings of the terms “Buddhist” and “Taoist” have to be carefully qualified.³⁰

The philosophic texts to which all later “Taoist” traditions paid homage date from almost as early as Confucius. Expressing a philosophy which advocated withdrawal from petty care, and a surrender of the illusory “self” to the unending flux of the universe, they periodically offered an emotional haven to literati at odds with an intractable world. “Taoism” in the Ming was a loose confederation of traditions: the classic texts by Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, with their many literati commentaries; the alchemy and meditative practices supposed to insure longevity; and the clergy and rituals of the Taoist Church, with its secrets known only to the initiated. “Taoism” is a label that Chinese and Westerners have applied to all of these traditions. What linked them was their adherence to texts or teachings that had been gathered into the Taoist Canon.³¹ Buddhism had entered China from India at the close of the Han, and had prospered intellectually and materially until the midpoint of the T’ang. Changing conditions led to its suppression at various times, most notably at the midpoint of the ninth century, and by the Ming it was no longer the rich intellectual edifice of earlier centuries. The metaphysical concerns of Buddhism had played a major role in shaping the Sung Neo-Confucian synthesis, but by late Ming times even the dominant Ch’an (Zen) sect was in decline, replaced for much of the population by the sects that are discussed below in Chapter 3. Ch’an was renewed temporarily by the spread of Wang Yang-ming’s teachings, and lay Buddhism enjoyed a period of revival under the guidance of eminent clerics. But the monasteries did not flourish again as they had in the early T’ang. The “Three Teachings” movement of the Ming was for most literati primarily a discussion of the ways in which Buddhism and Taoism could supplement Confucianism.³² Accommodations between these traditions had always existed: in the period of disunity following the Han, there were Taoist readings of the Lun-yü that attempted to reconcile Lao-tzu with Confucius, and the Sung Neo-Confucian cosmology was elaborated, in part, on the basis of images drawn from the Taoist tradition.³³ In the Ming, the early rulers made strategic use of Buddhist and Taoist notions of retribution as they exhorted their subjects to virtue. Similar strategies were employed in the “morality books” popular later in the dynasty.³⁴ But in no cases did these tendencies alter literati notions of how government was to be carried out. Officials and emperors remained clearly aware of the features that distinguished the Three Teachings from one another.³⁵ As in the Han, the canonical notions on which government was based remained Confucian, reciprocal but hierarchical. Filial piety remained the basis for loyalty to the emperor. The moral influence of the ruler’s example was still said to be the final determinant of the virtue or vice of the masses. Naturally, a great quantity of day-to-day practical counsel was offered to the emperor at any given time; the empire could not have been governed without it. But this counsel invariably appealed to Confucian texts and categories for its authority.³⁶

The reconciliation of the Three Teachings proceeded, for speculative thinkers, from a desire to discern a fundamental unity behind all knowledge.³⁷ Finding such a unity depended on the sort of revalorization seen in the Han Taoist readings of Confucius, or in the Taoist-inspired cosmological diagrams of the Sung Neo-Confucians. What many Ming philosophical thinkers prized in Buddhism and Taoism was the way these teachings could harmonize with Confucianism to deepen the inner life and to strip away illusion. But such thinkers had no use for abbots who promised easy enlightenment through mechanical means. They distinguished sharply between the classic texts of philosophic Taoism, on the one hand, and what they saw as charlatanism on the other, a charlatanism that promised longevity or immortality independent of sincere self-cultivation. They criticized the escapism of Buddhism and Taoism, even as they valued the spiritual depth and subtlety of the two teachings.³⁸ When the label “Ch’an-ist” was used to criticize the followers of Wang Yang-ming, it was because of a residual mistrust of the “sudden enlightenment” of Ch’an, which seemed to undercut the need for moral effort. This suspiciously easy enlightenment seemed at the same time to do away with the need for moral restraint, in the view of conservative critics. Chan Jo-shui (1466 - 1560), whose views approached those of Wang Yang-ming, was said to keep scores of girls. Similar charges were leveled at Li Chih (1527 - 1602), who had carried the advocacy of spontaneity to its farthest Ming extreme. If the sage need only look to his own heart for guidance, said these critics, then what restrained him from turning to sensual pleasure as a path to enlightenment?

As with the government’s suspicion of private academies, these apprehensions were partly groundless. Most academy students still prepared themselves for the examinations, and it was possible to espouse Wang Yang-ming’s ideals and live a thoroughly conventional life.³⁹ But new attitudes toward the physical desires were undoubtedly fostered by locating li-the shaping principle of the cosmos-primarily in the individual heart and mind. The individual was given a prominence and a justification new to Confucian tradition, and the physical desires, as an essential part of the individual self, were given a new kind of sanction.⁴⁰ In the teachings of Wang Yang-ming’s followers, this new discussion of the physical desires was still cast in conventional, abstract terms: we do not find the easy acceptance of sexuality that characterizes Yüan drama or Ming folksong. Nevertheless, any explicit acceptance of the physical desires - which had heretofore been held to distract seekers from the Way - involved a new acceptance of human complexity. (We see this reflected in Ming fiction.) The new currents in Ming thought led to intellectual and physical emancipation, whether in the conduct of one’s own life or in the vicarious experience afforded by the popularity of figures like Chan Jo-shui and Li Chih.

With the disastrous events of the Wan-li era, however, came fresh criticism of these eccentrics, and a growing sense that their emancipation from traditional restraints (an emancipation that had begun in the expanding economy of the early Ming), was responsible for the catastrophes of the early seventeenth century. Previously, the government had shown periodic mistrust of private academies; now, the conservative critics of government (who were themselves organized in academies) condemned both the “bad elements” at court and the speculative currents of thought that had stimulated the founding of academies in the mid-1500’s.⁴¹ With the criticism of “bad elements” at court went an increasing condemnation of the escapism and easy enlightenment promised by Buddhism, and a call for a return to the strict standards (and slow, disciplined approach to enlightenment) of the Sung Confucians. The question of appropriate personal moral cultivation was thus central to the political discourse of the late Ming. We must bear this in mind as we turn to the area of Ming culture with which this study i’s primarily concerned, the world of literature.

The Literary World of Chin p’ing mei

Any speculation about the authors and audiences of Ming fiction must begin by listing the forms of the Chinese language that authors were likely to use. Patrick Hanan has pointed out that above a certain level of education, an author would be likely to command at least two spoken languages: the dialect of his native region, and the dialect called kuan-hua or “officials’ speech” (based on the dialect of Peking but accommodating regional differences), which served as a lingua franca for the officials and merchants who traveled the empire. Such an author would also command several written versions of the Chinese language: first, classical Chinese, the language of the Four Books and the standard histories; second, a semi-standardized written kuan-hua, which had its own conventions as a literary language; and third, the notation of his own spoken dialect or others with which he was familiar.⁴²

The norms of classical Chinese had been set in the Chou and Han dynasties, and this highly compressed, elliptical literary language no longer corresponded to any spoken dialect. It could be learned only by the study of texts that employed it. Rich in homophones that could only be distinguished graphically, Classical Chinese was not a medium for oral communication. It was, however, the medium of most Chinese writing: all official correspondence, all of the essay forms traditionally practiced by the literati, all treatises in specialized areas of knowledge, and most poetry. As for written kuan-hua, its pronunciation had been standardized in Yüan and early Ming treatises on the drama,⁴³ and this written language corresponded fairly closely to the Northern Chinese speech of the Ming. The kuan-hua of written fiction had been subtly modified by the cultural predominance of the Chiang-nan region, but as Hanan emphasizes, the normative power of genre was such that the written vernacular of fiction is first and foremost a literary language, with conventions of its own that any author had to learn in order to write in the standard genres of vernacular literature. This semi-standardized written vernacular, while comprehensible to any literate Chinese, therefore did not reflect any of the spoken dialects with perfect fidelity.

The written vernacular had a limited number of uses in the late Ming. It was used for some kinds of prose fiction, for the spoken parts in drama, and in some kinds of song-poetry and chantefable literature. It was also used for certain government proclamations, and in religious didactic literature.⁴⁴ Chinese of this period did not distinguish, as they later came to do, between “classical” and “vernacular” written Chinese; they saw the distinction, rather, as between more and less difficult forms of the language. Since the classical language could only be learned by the study of texts, it was the more difficult; written kuan-hua was considered more accessible. Classical Chinese at its purest presumed an educated audience, especially in light of the frequency of literary allusion conventional in this form of the written language. The written language became easier (less allusive, more like ordinary speech) as wider audiences were intended, and as we will see, this characterization of the vernacular as comprehensible was central to the conventional justification of vernacular fiction.⁴⁵

If there was far less written during the Ming in semi-standardized kuan-hua than in Classical Chinese, there was an even smaller amount written in recognizable dialect. Regional expressions crept into drama (as we know from suggestions that they be banished),⁴⁶ and they turn up for special effect in essays and poetry. The purest dialect-writing in the Ming was the most strictly notational: the transcription of regional songs, which will be discussed below.

It should be evident from the discussion above that most writing in the vernacular was not notational, and this brings us to a central question in the history of Chinese fiction, the relation between written vernacular literature and the oral performing tradition. A striking feature of almost all traditional Chinese vernacular fiction, whether in verse or prose, is its use of an oral model, the narrator engaging in dialogue with the audience, commenting on the plot, and introducing his tale with an invitation to “listen.” This has led in the past to the simple assumption that the written vernacular tales extant from Yüan and Ming were storytellers’ promptbooks, or notation, at one or another remove, of actual performance. It has been demonstrated, however, that vernacular prose fiction relied increasingly on written models over the course of the Ming (including tales in Classical Chinese, which can never have been intended for oral performance). During the same period, storyteller’s comments and exhortations are found to play an increasingly important role in vernacular fiction, so they are clearly just a literary device.⁴⁷ Ming vernacular stories also make increasingly sophisticated use of the contrasts between classical and vernacular Chinese, employing a language mix that varies from author to author. While the conventions of the written vernacular seem obviously derived from oral performance, by Ming times (and doubtless even earlier) they no longer depended on the oral tradition in any notational way. The model for vernacular fiction was vernacular fiction; writers learned their craft from earlier writers. These authors ranged from the professionals of the fiction industry, with a limited stock of allusions and heavy reliance on linguistic convention, to highly educated literati able to play different styles off against each other. Whether an author wrote in Classical or vernacular Chinese depended on the genre in which he wrote; we cannot use this distinction to judge the level of an author’s literary cultivation. The higher an author’s level of literary cultivation, however, the greater the range of style, diction, and genre available to him.

It is possible to use vernacular literature itself to get at the question of audience, since different works seem to assume different levels of education in their readers. Literacy was pursued for a variety of ends during the Ming, and while the functional literacy of the merchant may have left much sophisticated literature beyond his comprehension, it enabled him to read the highly formulaic vernacular chantefable tales that were produced in luxury editions.⁴⁸ There was also a sizable public for works in a simplified, highly conventional form of classical Chinese: the stereotyped genre fiction of the following century was written in this literary language.⁴⁹ What unites vernacular chantefables and simplified classical genre fiction is their redundancy and reliance on linguistic convention (as well as their limited use of allusion, and extensive explication of the allusions they do use).

The masterpieces of sixteenth-century fiction - Shui-huchuan, Hsi-yuchi, Chinp’ingmei - are set off from these highly conventional works not only by their structural complexity, but also by the ease and fluency of their vernacular narrative. The characters in these “novels” spring to life through their well-individualized speech, whereas the heroes and heroines of chantefable literature speak in a language so patterned and repetitive as to turn them into types. The language mix of Chinp’ingmei ranges from conventional doggerel couplets to the difficult classical language of court memorials, which only a study of such documents could prepare one to read. Chinp’ingmei must have been, and still is, significantly more difficult to understand (much less to savor) than the simplified vernacular or the formulaic classical language genre fiction described above.

These considerations suggest that Chinp’ingmei was written by a highly literate author, secure enough in his command of both the vernacular and classical traditions to mix them as he chose, and as careful an architect in the vernacular language as a more conventional author might have been in the classical. But would such a highly educated author have been interested enough in oral performing literature to produce a work like Chinp’ingmei, with hardly a chapter that does not quote drama and song? These extensive quotations are just what suggest to certain readers that the book is a pastiche, a product of the oral tradition at some very slight remove. But it is precisely this fascination with drama and song that marks Chinp’ingmei as the work of an educated author, given what is known of the late Ming literary world. Such authors were often deeply committed to drama and song in the late Ming, for a variety of artistic and ideological reasons.

Chinese drama is a mixture of speech and song. The language of the lyrics is a fusion of classical and vernacular, while that of the spoken parts is a language mix similar to what we find in vernacular fiction. There are literati treatises on drama and song extant from the T’ang dynasty onward, and the sixteenth century witnessed a burst of literati activity in the collection and editing of these genres. Drama enjoyed relatively high prestige during the Ming, even if it still ranked well below classical literature. Playwrights were of higher social and educational status than had been the case in the Yüan, and there was apparently no disgrace attached to signing one’s work.⁵⁰ Much early Ming drama was highly didactic, which must have helped to secure its prestige.⁵¹ These highly regarded early Ming plays were in the southern-style ch’uan-ch’i form, a development of the indigenous southern dramatic tradition.⁵²

The ch’uan-ch’i tradition had developed independently from the shorter, more tightly organized tsa-chü plays of the North under the Yüan. Tsa-chü had become the dominant dramatic form in both North and South over the course of the Yüan dynasty, but by the late sixteenth century the tide had turned. Southern drama and Southern music once again dominated the South, and had made definite inroads in the North.⁵³ One consequence was a sense that the Southern drama and song represented the characteristic poetry of the age, just as tsa-chü and its associated music had been characteristic of the Yüan.⁵⁴ This perception fit neatly into a theory of generic succession that was well-established by Ming times, according to which the genius of an era was expressed in its own characteristic forms of art and literature. The collection of drama during the Ming, which even in the case of Southerners always emphasized the collection of tsa-chü texts, must be understood in light of this theory of generic succession. The Ming collectors felt that they were preserving the characteristic literature of the Yüan and Ming, and their activity gave them a gratifying sense of connoisseurship, of membership in a group whose taste was not constrained by the fashion of the age. They read each other’s treatises and commented on each other’s collections, and were often loving amateurs of the tsa-chü form, even as they predicted its demise.⁵⁵ These particular intellectuals were all educated beyond the needs of the examination curriculum, and despite their official careers they identified with the many Ming literati who held themselves aloof from the scramble for position.

The collection of popular song conferred the same sense of connoisseurship as did the collection of drama, but drew an additional impetus fom the way the “songs of the people” had traditionally been regarded. These regional songs were thought to show the temper of the masses, the general inclination to virtue or vice, and they could thus be used to gauge the stability of the empire. The wise emperor sent his servants to record them through the lanes and byways of the empire. Of course no recent emperor, by Ming times, had done anything of the sort. Nevertheless the myth remained a potent one, and it was conventionally used to explain the inclusion of regional songs (the Kuo-feng) in the Shih-ching (Book of Odes), China’s oldest and most venerated classic of poetry. Like the theory of generic succession that supported the collection of drama, this myth served as a justification for the collection of songs, a sort of cultural permission for an activity that was becoming highly fashionable (and must have been highly pleasurable) in certain intellectual circles.⁵⁶ The songs then influenced the poetry of their literati collectors, stimulating a vogue for composition to popular melodies. This influence was salutory, in the eyes of many Ming intellectuals, as it infused poetry with new vigor and heightened its expressive power. Expressive power, such writers contended, could not result from mere polish or empty elegance, key terms in a controversy over diction that was as central to late Ming literary debate as the issue of self-cultivation was to discussions of philosophy. For collectors of drama and popular song, a central value was pen-se, fidelity to natural speech, and a central issue in the diction controversy was the expression of genuine emotion, or ch’ing.⁵⁷ Rustic ballads, however crude, were of value because their emotion had not been distorted to fit the dead models of the past, the empty elegance of the present. “True poetry,” said more than one amateur, “exists only among the people,”⁵⁸ and the songs and drama that made use of this rustic poetry could touch its hearers because “man is born into a world of ch’ing.”⁵⁹ Ming Nee-Confucianism, with its emphasis on spontaneity, encouraged this attraction to the “spontaneous” productions of the people. Though the partisans of pen-se did not always agree on what in practice constituted good style, the very concept of pen-se gave theoretical support to their advocacy of spontaneous expression, and their mistrust of showy ornament or sterile pedantry.

The inclusion of drama and song, then, does not mark Chinp’ingmei as the work of a collective or the notation of a storytelling performance. There are subtle links, however, between the oral tradition and the terms in which works like Chinp’ingmei were discussed by the literati. Much of the Ming discussion of drama, poetry, and even classical fiction was still couched in terms of a listening audience (which could be easily moved to emotion), even where the works in question were purely literary. For the literati who devoted themselves to vernacular literature, this image of the listener was a central legacy of the oral tradition. We, who have only the texts of the period to work with, cannot feel its force, but these Ming connoisseurs were surrounded by oral and written versions of much of the same material.⁶⁰ This was true for fiction as well as for drama: the tales of the Shui-hu cycle were still performed in the homes of the wealthy and lettered well after the appearance of a written version of the saga, in 100 chapters, during the Chia-ching reign period.⁶¹ Ming readers were of course able to distinguish text from performance: for the drama-collector Ho Liang-chün (1506-1573), the text represents the accurate version of any play, and he turns to Yüan treatises to purge “mistakes” introduced by performers into later versions of the plays he collected.⁶² What oral performance gave these critics was the ideal of immediate comprehension, and the image of the listener as an emblem of such comprehension. This ideal conditioned the way they wrote about literature even when they were clearly talking about literary works that depended on written sources.

The ideal of immediacy had contributed to the emphasis on ch’ing and pen-se in the discussion of drama and song, and by the mid-sixteenth century both terms were well established in the critical vocabulary for these genres. By the end of the century, the same emphasis (and in some cases the same terminology) dominated the prefaces to fiction, which was also justified on the grounds of its immediate impact, its ability to move its audience. In the typical preface to fiction, however, a didactic emphasis is joined to the image of the listener. We can see this from the frequent appearance of the term feng-hua (which connoted the transformation, hua, by the force of example, imagined as a wind, feng). A desire to transform the morals of the age is expressed in prologues to certain plays early in the dynasty, but these are precisely the plays that later critics attacked for their contravention of pen-se.⁶³ By the end of the sixteenth century, the term feng-hua was regularly joined to the ideal of comprehensibility, in what had become the conventional justification for vernacular fiction.⁶⁴

The appreciation of fiction, like the appreciation of drama and song, also seems to have conferred a sense of connoisseurship on a limited group. The increasingly common comparison of Shui-huchuan to the historical classic Shih-chi must have functioned as a sort of code, a way for like minds to recognize each other.⁶⁵ (The theory of generic succession was invoked here as well.) The notion that fiction could “transform the morals of the age” permitted these men of like mind to take their shared pursuit seriously, to assimilate it to the responsibilities that their education had taught them to shoulder - even as they were clearly delighted with the new artistic opportunities offered by the genre.⁶⁶ (Vernacular stories extant from Yüan and early Ming, which seem to be by authors of limited literacy, are relatively free of explicit didacticism; a didactic tone crept into fiction and prefaces over the course of the Chia-ching and Wan-li reign periods, precisely as literati involvement with the genre increased.)⁶⁷ The treatment of sex in Chinp’ingmei must be understood in the context of this didactic tendency. The first preface to the earliest edition of Chinp’ingmei conforms to the general trend, the opening sentences declaring that the author “had his mind on the morals of the age.”⁶⁸ Transforming the morals of the age meant different things to different Ming critics: some, like Feng Meng-lung (1574-1646), were at pains to explain allusions and principles to their audiences; this is in accord with Feng’s stated desire to reach the widest possible audience, the “common ear.” But Chinp’ingmei, as we have seen, could not have been comprehended in its entirety by the common ear. The writer of the preface, as though aware of this, bases his claim for the transforming power of Chinp’ingmei not only on its linguistic comprehensibility (as was conventional), but also on the universality of the experience presented in the novel. An ambivalence toward sex, and a love of wealth and fame, are universal attributes, states the preface, and so they may be used to move men’s hearts. Who can resist an appeal to the senses? How readers will sigh over the magnificence of the palaces, the beauty of the ornaments, the charm of hair in disarray and bosom uncovered, and so on. At the height of this pleasure, however, the reader will be reminded that the zenith of pleasure is the beginning of pain, and that merit gives rise to good fortune while evil breeds disaster. Accommodation to the will of Heaven gives long life and posterity, while rebellion against it destroys the family line. The preface justifies the author’s use of common and even licentious language, not merely on the obvious grounds that it will be understood, but on the grounds that it will draw the reader in, and make him susceptible to the ultimate lessons of the book.

The assumption here is that sex stands for more than sex in Chinp’ingmei, and directs the reader’s attention to the moral issues raised by physical acts. Chinp’ingmei was not alone in making this sort of equation. One of the prefaces to a contemporary work, San-chiaok’ai-mikuei-chengyen-i (Romance of the Three Teachings, Enlightening the Deluded and Returning them to the True Way), says explicitly that San-chiaok’ai-mi draws its metaphors from the body and the physical desires, but that its ultimate concern is with the reader’s heart and mind.⁶⁹ A few decades later, the preface to Feng Meng-lung’s second collection of vernacular stories, Ching-shiht’ung-yen (Common Words to Warn the World) defends fiction in a way quite consonant with this use of metaphor. “There is no need,” says the preface, “to excise all that is spurious from fiction; these spurious events can still be used to illustrate true principles.”⁷⁰ (Indeed, they may be necessary to move their readers to virtue.) Feng goes on to imply that references to Buddhism and Taoism need not be taken literally either: they are useful because of their admonitory effect upon the masses. In all of these prefatory statements, a consistent thread is that the immediate or familiar could be revalorized to remind the reader of more general, immutable laws. That sexuality should now function in this metaphoric fashion must have been due in part to the individuality fostered by the main currents of late Ming thought, which included a growing acceptance of the physical desires. But the sexual metaphor of Chinp’ingmei has its roots in a literary tradition as well, the “Hangchow realism” of Ming “folly and consequences” hua-pen that antedate the novel.⁷¹

Patrick Hanan has identified and characterized eight extant “folly and consequences” stories of the Ming. Set in Hangchow, the center of the silk trade, these hua-pen treat the lives of merchants, shopkeepers, servants, and prostitutes. Economic realities dominate the characters and their desires, but a stern moral vision dominates their fate: the single act of folly which motivates each tale draws an entire family to its doom. The minutiae of daily life, however sordid, texture the narrative, and by their nature the stories end in tragedy. Sexuality is a dangerous force in these stories, draining men and turning women from virtue, and threatening the continuation of the family. These elements of the folly and consequences story are all strikingly in evidence in Chinp’ingmei, so that while the long fictional narratives of the period served as models for the scope and complex integration of Chinp’ingmei, these hua-pen must have suggested its setting. (The very opening of Chinp’ingmei is drawn from one of these stories.)⁷² The sexual description in the hua-pen is fairly explicit (if highly conventional), using the same vocabulary as is found in Chinp’ingmei. This explicit sexual description is never separated in the hua-pen from the notion of retribution: the “folly” in presented as an act of blindness to moral law, and the “consequence” is the impersonal action of moral law. These stories, within their restricted compass, treat sexual deviation as a disturbance of the universal order, and in a wider arena Chin p’ing mei does the same. Literati authors were writing folly and consequences stories, with the conventions of “Hangchow realism,” shortly after the publication of Chin p’ing mei.⁷³ Like drama and song, this sort of tale drew the attention of the educated elite, whatever the original, broader audience for the genre may have been.

The importance to Chinp’ingmei of these folly and consequences stories is not limited to sex. The strong note of retribution sounded in them, the inevitable retribution for which karma might be more a conventional cloak than an indication of Buddhist belief, dominates Chinp’ingmei as well. This emphasis on retribution lends gravity to the social and political criticism implied in the novel. There was no shortage of such criticism in Ming literature: drama was an accepted vehicle for it, and Ming discussions of literature make it clear that readers turned to drama in the expectation of finding such criticism. (Chinp’ingmei quotes extensively from one of the best-known plays of this type.)⁷⁴ During the disastrous Wan-li reign, anonymous satires portrayed the emperor as a prisoner of lust, and a full-length novel, SuiYang-tiyen-shih (The Merry Adventures of Emperor Yang), appeared in 1631 to satirize him once again in this fashion.⁷⁵ The criticism in Chinp’ingmei is directed at an entire system in disarray, an empire governed by false literati, tyrannical officials, and ignorant eunuchs. They are entertained by the profligate Hsi-men Ch’ing, whose own household, seething with jealousy, mirrors the faction-ridden court. These are follies on a monumental scale, and the consequence is danger to both the Hsi-men family and the imperial line. Who is to blame for this massive violation of traditional moral norms, which threatens the state at its very root? Does the text itself raise the question of responsibility, and if so, in what terms? These are the questions of the following chapter, where we will study the teachings that may have guided the author to his subject and setting.