Signs in a Reinterpretation of His Autobiography

Abstract

In a groundbreaking, much-cited book, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China by Pei-yi Wu 吳百益 (1927–2009), the annalistic autobiography (nianpu 年譜) of the eminent late-Ming 明 monk Hanshan Deqing 憨山德清 (1546–1623) earns an entire chapter, culminating Part II on self-accounts of life-defining spiritual struggles and awakenings. In that chapter, which is the only study in any language that squarely addresses Deqing’s autobiography as a work of self-representation and self-revelation (rather than using it as a source, either of religious inspiration or information on Deqing’s life), Wu highlights aspects of the work that distinguish it from earlier and contemporaneous writings of similar ilk by Buddhist and Neo-Confucian authors: principally the length and detail in which Deqing recounts his childhood and early education, and the degree to which he seems to undergo “essential change.” Wu sees in the nianpu “the initial crises, the early conditioning, the subsequent reinforcement, the hesitations and temptations, the backslidings, the strenuous efforts, and the ultimate enlightenment”—at least through Deqing’s thirtieth year, at which point “as a record of education and spiritual progress the autobiography might well have ended.” Thereafter, in Wu’s eyes, the nianpu becomes ordinary: “a diary of activities rather than a process with shape and meaning.” The contention of the present essay is that, in part because of implicit suggestions from a parallel efflorescence in European autobiography during the period that Wu aptly dubs “the