A History of China (55 page)

The novel, which developed during this time, decried social conditions and challenged the status quo. Because it defied convention and originated in ­storytelling, the elite originally relegated it to a relatively low status. It did not have the same prestige as poetry or philosophical works. The mostly anonymous authors combined stories and organized them into novels, which as a result were lengthy and appeared to be patched together. The popularity of the ­novels attested to the increasing rate of literacy and indicated that the new audience relished accounts of elite corruption and injustice. The most popular among them often dealt with historical events and eventually would be mounted as plays or operas and even later reproduced on television or in video games.

The major ones can largely be characterized as social-protest novels.
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
(
Sanguozhi yanyi
), which is attributed to a certain Luo Guanzhong of the fourteenth century (although the earliest surviving ­edition derives from around 1522), dealt with the era after the collapse of the Han dynasty and cataloged the court’s failings –dissipation, intrigues, ­official malfeasance, and exploitation by the eunuchs. Neither the scholar-­official bureaucrats nor the military commanders appeared in a favorable light. The thrust of the narrative cast several of the military contenders for power as tyrannical and evil, while others such as Guan Yu and Zhuge Liang were ­portrayed as brilliant strategists and moral rulers or commanders and as ­possessors of ­magical or supernatural powers. The novel judged these stereotyped figures on the basis of their humaneness and incorruptibility. Perhaps because they were stereotypes, the leading characters became popular and romantic heroes.

Water Margin
(
Shuihuzhuan
, also translated as
All Men Are Brothers
or
Outlaws of the Marsh
), which Luo Guanzhong allegedly edited, offers an even clearer example of a novel that exposed social injustices. It described the adventures of a group of 108 bandit-heroes toward the end of the Northern Song dynasty who rebelled against an exploitative and oppressive government. These heroic figures defended the poor and powerless against cruel, ­avaricious, and tyrannical officials. Their leader, Song Jiang, a Robin Hood-like character, still believed in loyalty to the emperor, despite his hatred of many at the court. In one version of the novel, he ultimately joined the imperial forces to stave off a rebel whom he considered to be an even greater threat to China. The exploits of these heroes, which included feats of almost superhuman strength, appealed to a wide audience. Mao Zedong was entranced by the work and proclaimed it his favorite novel. The adventure stories aside, the novel’s portrayal of a group advocating social justice reputedly appealed to him. Its use of the ­colloquial also attracted and increased the number of its readers.

Although
Journey to the West
(
Xiyouji
, also translated as
Monkey
), a sixteenth-century work, was not a novel that exposed social or political injustice, it gently satirized the Buddhist establishment and Chinese officialdom. Based on the travels of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang in the seventh century, the novel invented three characters who accompanied the renowned traveler. Monkey, the most significant of these escorts, protected Xuanzang from an array of ogres and ghosts. His magical powers, together with the assistance of Buddhists and deities, permitted the Buddhist monk to reach his destination safely. After harrowing adventures, including debates and struggles with Daoist monks and battles with monsters, both Xuanzang and Monkey achieved salvation. In the course of this fantastic and often comic journey, the travelers encountered avaricious and ignorant Buddhist monks, as well as official bureaucrats. Although Buddhist and Daoist themes, adventurous tales, larger-than-life characters, and humorous and sometimes earthy incidents constituted the main thrust of the novel, the revelations about the religious establishment and the bureaucracy could not be discounted as themes. Wu Cheng’en (ca. 1500–1582), an official, is credited with paramount but not exclusive authorship.

The Golden Lotus
(
Jinpingme
i
), also a sixteenth-century work, was renowned not only for its candid and unflinching depiction of erotica but also for its exposure of a decadent and corrupt society. Its vivid pornographic description of sex acts shocked and captivated its audience, but its account of the lecherous nouveau-riche Ximen Qing also revealed a decaying and amoral culture. The rich and corrupt owner of a pharmacy, Ximen Qing was an inveterate womanizer who sought sexual gratification not only with his wives and concubines but also in numerous adulterous relationships. Abetted in his sexual adventures by the so-called Golden Lotus, another reprehensible character who poisoned her husband, Ximen Qing reflected some of the worst excesses of late Ming ­profligacy. Along with hedonism, bribery and corruption were rampant, and the newly wealthy, according to the novel, would resort to any action, including murder, to satisfy their desires. The author showed that behind the elaborate entertainments, banquets, and parties lay a decadent and corrupt society. He concluded the novel with the two most pernicious characters receiving their just desserts. The Golden Lotus’s brother-in-law exacted his revenge for his brother’s murder by killing his sister-in-law whereas Ximen Qing died while imbibing an aphrodisiac that was, in fact, poisonous. After his death, nearly all his family members had disastrous lives. Only his principal wife, a faithful and virtuous woman, and one son, who joined a Buddhist monastic order, survived the fall of his family.

Short stories also witnessed the same development of realistic descriptions of the new commercial and urban elites and a sympathetic portrayal of those who were oppressed and discriminated against. Feng Menglong (1574–1646), who gathered and issued a valuable collection, and Ling Mengchu (1580–1644), who compiled a similar collection mostly of his own works, selected stories representing various genres, from tales of the supernatural and Buddhist and Daoist immortals to accounts of historical figures to realistic portraits based on ­contemporary events. Hypocritical and avaricious monks and nuns, ­rapacious merchants and pawnbrokers, and harsh and cruel judges populated the stories and revealed Feng’s and Ling’s views of the decline of the Confucian virtues of love, filial piety, and righteousness in their new money-oriented ­society. Feng and Ling countered this decline with the Buddhist teaching of retribution. The unjust, the evildoers, and the criminals, often associated with the merchants and monks, would eventually be punished in this world or in the afterlife, while the virtuous would reap their just rewards.

Ming dramatists were not as concerned about social problems or about appealing to a wider audience. A new form of dramatic opera deriving from south China, dubbed the
chuanqi
, was extraordinarily long, and its arias were sung in the Wu dialect. Although the playwrights did not deliberately inject social themes in their dramas, the plays often reflected the tensions arising between the values of the newly ascendant middle class and those of the scholar-official elite. Gao Ming’s (ca. 1305–ca. 1370)
Lute Song
(
Papa Ji
) offered one example of this tension. The leading character was tempted from the proper Confucian path by his yearning for wealth and renown, but he eventually returned to the “right” road of abiding by filial piety and by respecting his admirable first wife, who lived by the traditional Confucian virtues. His first wife brought him to his senses by pursuing him and playing plaintive songs on her lute. Because members of the elite wrote many of these plays, they tended to reflect the conventional orthodoxy. However, in reaffirming Confucian principles, they disclosed that traditional values were being challenged.

Tang Xianzu (1550–1616), the most famous of the Ming playwrights, was associated with dissidents, including Li Zhi, but his plays did not generally represent his social or political views. Instead they concerned themes of ­seemingly eternal verities. The transience of life and the fear of death loomed large in his works; in his early plays, he offered love as a means of coping with the impermanence of human existence. In
The Peony Pavilion
(
Mudanting
), one of his most revered plays, the young heroine had a dream in which she and a handsome youth met and fell in love. Unable to find love in this life, she died but left her portrait behind. The young man fortuitously visited her home and found her portrait. That very night he had a dream during which the heroine appeared and instructed him to dig up her body. When he did so, she returned to the world of the living, and the couple was reunited. Love appeared to ­overcome the transience of human life. In another of his plays, dreams again propelled the action and addressed his major themes. The protagonist ­repeatedly had dreams at critical points in his career. One dream led to a ­propitious marriage, which in turn led to a distinguished career and a reward for his meritorious service (the imperial gift of a sizable estate and twenty-four female quasi-entertainers and quasi-bed partners). The playwright implied that fame and sex compensated for the brevity of life. Yet Tang’s later plays were less optimistic. Did this more sober view reflect his growing ­disenchantment with the corrupt and incompetent leadership at court? The available sources do not yield an answer. However, he now seemed to regard fame, wealth, and love as ephemeral. His heroes abandoned the weak and sought refuge in Daoist detachment or Buddhist enlightenment. The inexorable march of time, the approach of death, or disillusionment with his society probably contributed to his growing emphasis on religious salvation.

The plays and life of Li Yu (1610–1680?), the most eccentric of the Ming playwrights, revealed the individualism of the dynasty’s later years. Failure in the civil-service exams deflected Li from a bureaucratic career, a depressing outcome for most Chinese, but Li took it in stride. Faced with the prospect of supporting a slew of concubines, he worked, at various times, as a publisher, bookseller, commercial gardener, essayist, critic, and playwright. His plays ­differed from those of other dramatists in that he did not have a message to convey. He simply sought to create entertaining plays that expanded a range of plots and used well-crafted dialogue suited to each character. Yet he was serious in his efforts to portray ordinary people, not the elite, in his dramas. In addition, the intelligence and individuality of his female characters conformed with his support for education for women, which included exposure to the classics, literature, and painting and the other arts.

Theater, particularly the southern drama known as
kunqu
, persisted for ­several more centuries, owing its success in part to the continued growth of southern Chinese urban centers that nurtured it. A larger potential audience was available for the theatrical productions. Yet the
kunqu
was less appealing because of its almost exclusive association with south China, and its plays were increasingly divorced from the lives of the populace. Beijing opera arose later in the eighteenth century and introduced more popular and entertaining elements in drama. It innovated in music, dance, and costume, and makeup was more colorful than in the
kunqu
theater. Brilliant acting, singing, and dancing, which mesmerized the audience, took precedence over themes, dialogue, and poetry. Because the spectacle often superseded the ideas, Beijing opera did not have the same literary quality as earlier traditional theater. Yet the remarkable acting attracted attention while it overshadowed the playwriting.

Chen Zilong (1608–1647), a poet most often renowned for his loyalty to the Ming court, also reflected the growing individualism of the era. A loyalist who resisted the Manchu conquest of 1644 and ultimately committed suicide after the enemy captured him, Chen was highly praised for his devotion to the Ming. It may seem strange to extol a man who remained steadfast in his support of a corrupt, increasingly mismanaged, bankrupt, and demoralized dynasty, but many Chinese clearly valued such figures. Even more significant, Chen’s songs and poems to his beloved Liu Shi, a poet in her own right, were remarkably candid. His open acknowledgment of romantic love reflected individualism and a great concern for individual feelings. The relatively independent life and career of Liu Shi, who also openly expressed her love for Chen, indicated the greater opportunities for women.

Neo-Confucianism overwhelmed Buddhism, as few original thinkers arose to infuse new ideas into the religion. Yet the Neo-Confucian School of the Mind owed much to Buddhist conceptions. In addition, the number of ordinations of monks increased at a rapid pace. Buddhism had profited because the first Ming emperor had spent part of his youth in a monastery. Yet, despite these successes, Buddhism tended to be eclipsed by the other Chinese religions and cults and needed to adapt in order to retain its influence. One such adaptation entailed borrowing from Daoism the concept of merits and demerits as a means of determining the individual’s status or the path to Nirvana. Buddhist monks explained that noble deeds earned a specific number of points (e.g. helping a person to recover from a serious illness resulted in the award of ten merits), while transgressions led to demerits (e.g. one hundred demerits for killing another person). A grand total of ten thousand merit points would almost surely lead to Nirvana. This formulaic concept contributed to ­public-spiritedness and philanthropy, but hardly to Buddhist ideology.

Monks worked out the schedule of merits and demerits in part to stem the decline of Buddhism. Believing that only the Chan and the Pure Land sects were still vibrant, they sought to reconcile these sects to strengthen the cause. Many Buddhists were scornful of Pure Land because of its seemingly easy path to Buddhahood, but these monks countered that chanting and calling on the name of Amida in an effort to enter the Western Paradise were not facile exercises with scant intellect and appeal. The believer had to focus his mind on Amida, an intense experience that resembled the Chan meditative process. An emphasis on the mind characterized both of these sects and indeed the other remaining sects. The monks’ eclecticism extended to Confucianism as well. In their effort to bridge the gap between their religion and Confucianism, they noted that the two complemented each other. As one monk stated, Confucius was a this-worldly sage and Buddha an another-worldly sage. Other monks also maintained that Buddhist monks needed to purify themselves if the
sangha
(or community of monks) were to be sustained. Thus they imposed strict ­discipline in the Yunqi temple, which they constructed in Hangzhou, in order to reverse the negative image that lazy, incompetent, or avaricious monks had conveyed. They hoped in this way to bolster the image of Buddhism.