Nonhuman Self-cultivators in Early Medieval China: Re-reading a Story Type

Abstract

Historians of literature are well acquainted with early medieval stories of shapeshifting animals and other beings seducing unsuspecting men and women. This paper re-reads such narratives from the shapeshifters’ point of view. This requires escaping the customary disciplinary boundaries and viewing these creatures’ depictions against the backdrop of concurrently circulating “arts of the bedchamber” (fangzhong zhi shu 房中之術), one of several classes of techniques for “nurturing life” (yangsheng 養生). I argue that the shapeshifters’ actions make sense when understood within the framework of this mode of self-cultivation. This in turn implies a view of nonhumans as selves striving to realize aims—among them health, longevity, the acquisition of enhanced capabilities, and, ultimately, metamorphosis into higher species on the ladder of beings. The tales emerged, then, in a culture to some extent shaped by a worldview of the sort often termed “animistic,” one that saw nonhuman beings as co-participants with humans in self-transformational projects grounded in a common cosmology.