Organizer: Sarah E. Fraser, Northwestern University
Chair: Albert E. Dien, Stanford University
Discussants: Andrew H. Plaks, Princeton University; Kenneth J. DeWoskin,
University of Michigan
The papers on this panel explore binary opposites in narratives. In many different areas and genres of Chinese culture bipolarity informs narratives concerning the establishment and protection of the state and religion. In the Zhou, Han, and Tang ritual environments explored in these papers, the opposition between parts functions to safeguard the center, that is, the Chinese state, Buddhism, or the local community, from encroachment. The panel originated in a series of musings on the pervasiveness of a paradigm in which unresolvable but complementary opposites imply each other's existence. The tension between these elements is necessary for conceptual resolution. Inspired by Andrew Plak's work on Chinese narrative, the papers explore the application of and shifts in opposing structures as they are expressed in ritual records, histories, literature and art.
Sarah E. Fraser's work focuses on Dunhuang murals depicting religious competition between Buddhists and non-Buddhists. This opposition is embodied in two large protagonists that frame the action in the painting. In the space between these two figures political, racial, and cultural concerns central to the oasis site are resolved. Karin Myhre's paper focuses on records of the Han Great Exorcism. She investigates interactions between the human and spirit worlds as these are joined and then separated in this annual ritual. In a study of the construction of a "Zhou" identity by Confucian scholars, Constance Cook discusses the use of the boundary between nei (inner) and wai (outer) and its manipulation by ritualists.
Narrative Strategies in Murals of the Magic Competition Between Raudraksha and
Sariputra
Sarah E. Fraser, Northwestern University
This paper is concerned with late Tang and Five Dynasties ritual court narratives in Dunhuang murals. Imbedded in the structure of the popular Magic Competition is the notion of dueling but complementary opposites. Both the Buddhist monk Sariputra and the heretical master Raudraksha anchor the painting's edges with their colossal forms assuming social, political, and spiritual identities that are inherently contradictory. The Han Chinese Sariputra is calm, elegantly attired, and seated on a high dais. Raudraksha is wildly emotional, bare-chested, and sits in a tent, a home of nomadic peoples. This Hua-Hu reflects the continued political and ethnic struggle in Dunhuang after 848 when the Tibetans lost local power and the Han-identified Zhang and Cao clans assumed control of the commandery.
Based on these divisions, the visual narrative is in constant flux. A call and response synergy resonates between the static Sariputra and the visibly wind-blown Raudraksa, who is defeated by a gale in a test of magical powers. The space between functions as a ritual battleground where resolution is negotiated. A king sits in judgment in the painting's upper center framed by bell and drum towers, the instruments of victory for each side. This structure suggests the layout of a Chinese city in which the imperial center is situated above a symmetrical field of wards, markets, towers, and pagodas.
The Eater and the Eaten: Theatrical and Ritual Perspectives on Exorcism and
Entertainment
Karin Myhre, Swarthmore College
Focusing on the symbolic routing of ghosts and demons in the annual Han danuo, this paper explores the relationship between the human and spirit worlds in exorcistic ritual and dramatic performance. Methods of separating and combining spirit and human realms are examined in Zhang Heng's Rhapsody of the Eastern Capital and the "Treatise on Ritual" in the History of the Latter Han. In this ritual it is the exorcist, combining qualities of the human and the demonic, who acts as go-between.
The complex nature of the practice, which both relates and distinguishes opposite but associated worlds is recapitulated in surviving literary descriptions. The account in the History of the Latter Han describes the proceedings from the point of view of a ritual participant focused on function; the human actors are understood to be clearly distinct from their ghostly combatants. The account in Zhang Heng's rhapsody, by contrast, gives a vision of what the ceremony might have looked like to someone involved, not with the details of performance, but with the merging of spirit and human worlds through the course of the ritual.
Patterns in exorcistic practice are also apparent in literary narratives with ghosts and demons. Dramas involving ghosts illustrate how members of the spirit world, opposite from humans at the same time as they embody quintessential human qualities, function as catalysts for narrative action.
The Inner and the Outer: Negotiating Space in the Zhou
Constance A. Cook, Lehigh University
Scholars often begin their discussion of the early Chinese state (guojia) in terms of opposites: the construction of the guo versus the ye, the walled city or residence of the king versus the wilds, the area outside the guo. The Zhou state, set up as a paradigm of perfect rule in the Zhouli-an idealized ritual code quite likely designed by Confucian scholars in response to Qin sponsored legalism-was explained by Han scholars in terms of multiple outer layers of relative domestication radiating from an inner core or royal guo. The wilds, by Han times, was a space composed of concentric rings of ranked allegiances with the outermost rings allocated to the subjugated barbarian groups (man and yi) and the frontier regions of mountain and bush (zhen and fan).
Between the Inside (nei) or the walled-city and the Outside (wai), the layered wilds, was a liminal region, the suburbs (jiao), a site of sacrifice and trade governed by officials. This structure was reduplicated on a smaller scale at the temple sites where funerals and other memorial rituals were performed in stages-inside or outside the gates. This paper compares the Han ideal as expressed in ritual texts like the Zhouli with evidence from ritual Zhou bronze inscriptions. Particular attention is paid to the role of ritualists in the delineation, negotiation, and control of space.