Abstract
This study reconsiders The Story of the Stone as a literary exemplum of the “Buddhist conquest of China.” The kind of Buddhism that Stone embodies in its fictional form and makes indelible on the Chinese cultural imagination simultaneously indulges in and wavers from the Mahāyāna teachings of the nonduality of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. The dialectics of truth and falsehood, love and emptiness, passion and compassion, which Stone dramatizes and problematizes, continues to stir the creative impulses of artists in revolutionary and post-revolutionary China. This study features three of Stone’s modern reincarnations. Tale of the Crimson Silk, a story by the amorous poet-monk Su Manshu (1884–1918), recasts at once the idea of Buddhist monkhood and that of “free love” in early Republican China. In Lust, Caution, a spy story by the celebrated writer Eileen Chang (1920–1995), a revolutionary heroine is compelled to weigh the emptiness/truth of carnal desire against the truth/emptiness of patriotic commitment. Decades later, love and illusion dwell again at the epicenter of a fallen empire in the director Chen Kaige’s (b. 1952) 2017 film, The Legend of the Demon Cat, in which an illustrious poet sings testimony to the (un)witting (com)passion of a femme fatale.
Highlights
Rethinking “Buddhist Literature”Let me present the gist of what I have to say in the form of three paradoxes
That our view of Chinese Buddhism as a historical phenomenon is greatly obscured by the abundance of our source materials
That if we want to define what was the normal state of medieval Chinese Buddhism, we should concentrate on what seems to be abnormal
Summary
Let me present the gist of what I have to say in the form of three paradoxes. First, that our view of Chinese Buddhism as a historical phenomenon is greatly obscured by the abundance of our source materials. The teachings of Buddhism and Daoism enjoy unrivaled eminence in the novel that would support the reading of Stone as a fiction of enlightenment This is illustrated by a few exceptional clerics, and above all, by the scabby-headed Buddhist monk and the lame Daoist priest who appear intermittently throughout the novel (Zhou 2011). In the Red Inkstone reannotated manuscript edition dated to the Year of Jiaxu during the Qianlong reign, or 1754, which has only 16 chapters and stands as the earliest surviving version of Stone, we see a different rendition of the opening scene It all begins with a seemingly accidental chat between the duo, whose topic presently changes from “cloud-wrapt mountains and mist-covered seas and the mysteries of immortal life” to “the wealth and luxury and the good things of life in the Red Dust” as they advance toward the stone We turn to three modern reincarnations of Stone, which continue to wrestle with the dialectics of truth and falsehood, love and emptiness, passion and compassion and bear testimony to Stone’s reverberations that penetrate changing sociopolitical circumstances
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