Organizer and Chair: Russell Kirkland, University of Georgia
Discussant: Suzanne E. Cahill, University of California, San Diego
Heretofore, scholars of Chinese philosophy and religion have been more concerned with what our primary sources say than with how they say it. However, as literary critics and biblical scholars have repeatedly observed, the literary aspects of texts are equally as important as the ideas presented in them. Indeed, the literary, historical, and philosophical aspects of a text are often intricately intertwined, and can only be separated through scholarly analysis. The influence of form and style, and such detailed aspects as narrative, plot, and characters, on the content of Chinese non-fiction philosophical and religious works remains virtually ignored.
This panel proposes to analyze the roles that narrative plays in a broad spectrum of Taoist texts. Taoism is a particularly apt subject because of the important role that narrative has played in the tradition.
Harold Roth's paper, "Two Important Narratives in the Chuang Tzu," will
analyze the interplay of composition and historical context in two stories from the Chuang
Tzu. Livia Kohn's paper, "The Quest of the Hero and the Conversion of the
Barbarians," will present three related versions of the story of Laozi's meeting with
the barbarian king as an example of a classical mythic structure. Peter Nickerson's paper,
"Saved by the Tao: Early Medieval Taoist Narratives of Disaster and Renewal,"
will examine the influence of Six Dynasties chih-kuai (records of anomalies) on the
narrative structure of the genre of revealed Taoist literature. Suzanne Cahill will serve
as discussant.
The Quest of the Hero and the Conversion of the Barbarians
Livia Kohn, Boston University
In medieval China, the Taoist story of the "conversion of the barbarians" (hua-hu) is told in three versions (3rd, 6th, 8th centuries), during the course which it becomes increasingly more mythical, integrating Buddhist tales and adapting the narrative pattern of the quest of the hero.
According to the story, Laozi and Yin Xi meet the barbarian king and exchange banquet invitations, which lead to the depletion of the king's treasury and hatred of the Taoists. Laozi undergoes the tortures of hell but emerges unscathed and appears in a brilliant vision, thus winning his kingdom. He prescribes a set of precepts, then hands the state over to Yin Xi, now called "Buddha." Eventually he departs, with destination unknown, either to ascend back to heaven or to continue his conversions.
The narrative integrates the Buddhist Asokavadana, which tells of the conversion of King Asoka by the monk Samudra. In addition, it follows the classical "quest of the hero," according to which the hero, after a supernatural birth and the overcoming of a major obstacle, conquers his true kingdom. He creates suspicion and doubt, then has to confront evil and death, is even violently killed, dismembered, or castrated. But, remaining true to himself and his destiny, he defeats death and shows his true power to the world. Laozi's conversion of the barbarians matches this pattern closely, documenting the ultimate fulfillment of the divine life of the Tao on earth.
Two Important Narratives in the Chuang Tzu
Harold D. Roth, Brown University
The Chuang Tzu has been beloved for two millennia for its unique mode of explaining even the most profound insights with delightful and often humorous stories. Its authors were the pioneers in China of the use of narrative as a device for expressing philosophy. It is thus a fertile source for studying the interplay between the various aspects of narrative and their relationship to the authors' ideas and to their historical context.
This paper is an exercise in aspects of literary criticism as they have been applied to religious texts by recent New Testament scholars. These include redaction criticism (which studies the ideological position of the author in reworking sources), composition criticism (which studies how individual units of text fit into the ideological context of the entire work), and narrative criticism (which studies the various aspects of plot and character for their own value).
In this paper, I analyze two of the most significant stories in the Chuang Tzu-the interactions between Hu-tzu and the Shaman in chapter 7 and between the Yellow Emperor and Kuang Ch'eng-tzu in chapter 11. I will seek to identify the basic elements of plot and character-development in those narratives, and to analyze how these elements serve as vehicles for the communication of philosophical insights. I will place these stories in the context of the philosophy and composition of the entire book, analyze evidence of their reworking of earlier sources, and speculate on the historical circumstances that might have led to their creation.
Saved by the Tao: Early Medieval Taoist Narratives of Disaster and Renewal
Peter Nickerson, Duke University
In the 4th-5th centuries C.E., Taoists wove their conceptions of the deleterious social effects of popular practices like spirit-mediumism, sacrifice, and divination into mytho-historical narratives. Those narratives are found in a wide variety of texts, from the Abridged Codes of the elite cleric Lu Hsiu-ching to the popular Spirit-spells of the Abyss. According to such narratives, the excesses of popular religion had caused a full-scale crisis of rampant violence and death, social disintegration, and cultural collapse, which had moved the deified Lao-tzu to reveal the Taoist religion. This paper analyzes these narratives by placing them in comparative context and locating their indigenous antecedents.
What Rene Girard calls the "sacrificial crisis" is strikingly similar to the scenario depicted in the Taoist narratives. Girard's analysis of myth and sacrifice, and his assertion that these were transcended by Christianity, are in fact a remythification entirely parallel to our Taoist narratives. Both assert that "pagan" sacrificial religion is intrinsically linked to violence, and maintain that their own faiths unmask that violence and transcend it.
The Taoists' insistence on bureaucratized religious practices (such as the rite of "petitioning celestial officials") as antidotes to that crisis perpetuated a much older tradition. Bureaucracy, which has been called "the Chinese charter myth," was closely tied to exorcism: the creation of order through the forceful expulsion of undesirable elements, as in the myth of Yu and the flood. The myth of bureaucratic renewal thus involved its own form of violence.