Eifring, Halvor, ed., Love and Emotions in Traditional Chinese Literature

Abstract

As Halvor Eifring explains in his introduction (1–36), this book represents the fruits of a conference on qing 情 held in Finse, Norway, in 1997. The purpose of the collaboration was evidently to answer the question with which the editor opens the book: “To what extent are emotions universal?” (1). The difficulty, as Eifring aptly notes, is that qing and “emotion” are by no means coterminous; as we shall see, qing includes some senses comparable to our word “emotion,” but it comes with divergent philosophical underpinnings and also bears senses unlike anything that ordinary speakers of English associate with emotion. Thus Love and Emotions in Traditional Chinese Literature is a book that fails to solve the original problem to which it was devoted but proves extremely useful for different reasons. Although comparatists with a global perspective may not find in these pages all the answers to the problem of universal human psychology, students of Chinese philosophy and cultural history will treasure this book as the most detailed investigation in English into the various senses of qing and their usage through many centuries of Chinese writing. Were it not for the otherworldly list price ($193 as of this writing), I would recommend that any reader of Dao purchase this book. The following discussion considers all of the contributions but two: Robert E. Buswell, Jr., “The Transformation of Doubt (yiqing 疑情) into a Positive Emotion in Chinese Buddhist Meditation” (225–36), and Waiyee Li, “Languages of Love and Parameters of Culture in Peony Pavilion and The Story of the Stone” (237–70). Qing has been the source of considerable consternation in the study of Chinese philosophy, inasmuch as the earliest Sinologists, who were eager to attach every Chinese concept to some convenient entity from the Western tradition, recognized that it often means something like “emotion,” but just as often it also means something perplexingly different. To readers of late imperial literature, meanwhile, qing has a related yet distinct sense: “passionate feelings for another human being,” sometimes as a general sort of affection, but more typically as a profound and life-altering passion like romantic love. In other words, while it is possible to feel qing for one’s father or mother, a protagonist is Dao (2010) 9:237–240 DOI 10.1007/s11712-010-9165-2