Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies (Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library) (2 page)

The Confucian philosophers who dominated the Chinese state conceived these relationships as a harmonious balance of obligations, and a number of pieces in this collection illustrate their view of order and authority. By and large, the Confucians were the voice of the superior orders—emperor, father, husband. The majority of our tales, however, speak for the other side, for they come from the Taoists, philosophers and social critics who represented the subordinate orders and historically opposed the Confucians. The Taoist view found vivid expression in popular literature—novels, plays, and the tales and legends we read here. Indeed, one of the purposes of this genre, typically scorned and even banned by Confucian authorities, was to publicize the crimes of the mighty and the injustices suffered by the subordinate order, including children, women, and animals. As the conflict between those above and those below gave shape to Chinese history, the rivalry of these two great philosophies gave shape to Chinese culture.

In Confucian doctrine, the emperor sat at the center of the
political, social, and natural realms. He ruled with a mandate from heaven, and his spiritual authority radiated outward in concentric circles; he received in return the allegiance of humans and the submission of creatures and things. The Chinese saw him as both Son of Heaven and father of the people, thus fusing the Western roles of king and pope into a single, semi-divine figure. As the descendant of the founder of his own dynasty, the emperor had charge of the filial worship of his ancestors and the wise governance of his own family—in particular the careful arrangement of marriages and the proper education of the son who would succeed him. In Confucianism, the hereditary principle was foremost, because the imperial family was the heart of the state.

The emperor transmitted his influence across the land directly through the imperial bureaucracy and indirectly through the great landowning clans, sometimes called the local gentry or nobility. Official positions (the goal for every clan’s sons) were obtained through a series of qualifying examinations based on the sacred books of Confucian doctrine, ritual, ethics, metaphysics, and history. An ambitious young man could rise by passing three successive levels of examinations, the county, the provincial, and the metropolitan. Each of the degrees brought its holder various immunities, exemptions, and privileges, though not always an actual office. The system was designed to delegate the responsibilities of government to upright and learned men, to scholar-officials who would rule with judgment.

However, these tales deal with practice, not theory, and in reality the bureaucracy was a cumbersome, often corrupt structure in which official appointment was determined by a mixture of factors that included patronage and bribery as well as scholarship. A tale like “The Scholar’s Concubine” is meant as a scathing satire on the sale of office to the unqualified.

The official that appears most frequently in this collection is the county magistrate, the lowest official of the imperial bureaucracy and the direct governor of the people in his jurisdiction. He usually held a “metropolitan” or “provincial” degree, and was addressed as “parent of the county.” Even so, he was usually a sorry caretaker of the peasants’ fortunes, and rarely loved. “A Wise Judge” and “A Clever Judge” pay tribute to good magistrates; but “Social Connections” tells how a vicious official ruins a
prosperous farmer, and “Underworld Justice” goes further to show how little justice there is in this world or the next.

The closing selection of this book, chapter one of the eighteenth-century novel
An Unofficial History of the Confucian Academy
, satirizes the entire official realm. In it, the hero, Wang Mien, refuses to take office despite his enormous talents and the wishes of the emperor, taking to heart his mother’s dying wish: “Take a wife and raise a family; care for my grave—and don’t become an official.” Such criticism rarely touched the emperor himself. An exception is the opening tale, “The Cricket,” in which the whole bureaucracy mobilizes to cater to the court’s newest fad.

The great clans ruled locally, little models of the imperial family. Here too, hereditary right was enforced to assure the smooth transmission of property and status; and to that end the arrangement of marriages was essential. If a young noble and his first wife had little choice in the matter, secondary wives or concubines had none at all. Generally speaking, in a society that makes the family a political as well as a social unit, freedom of love and marriage cannot be tolerated; personal preference and appetite must be overruled by the social virtues. The response to this demand—the struggle for freedom to love and marry—became the spark in much of Chinese literature, as we see in “The Divided Daughter,” which describes with compassion the sorrow of couples who want to marry for love, not duty, and in “The Waiting Maid’s Parrot,” where a young concubine who loves a scholar finds that help can come from an unusual source.

The control of emotion lies at the heart of the Confucian’s perception of human nature. The Confucians defined human beings solely in terms of a set of obligatory relationships, in which the essence, the fundamental act, was obedience: children obeyed parents, peasants obeyed lords and officials, wives obeyed husbands. This was the primary force in behavior—leaving passion and instinct as attributes not of humans but of animals; we encounter an official who has fallen into this savage state in “The Censor and the Tiger.”

Master storyteller P’u Sung-ling, who sets the dominant tone in this volume, attacks this entire tradition in a set of tales in which animals and other “subordinate” creatures set the standards for virtuous conduct that their superiors would do well to follow; in “The Loyal Dog,” “The Snakeman,” and “A Faithful Mouse,” he shows eloquently where love and compassion are
truly demonstrated. Twenty-one of the tales here come from P’u’s
Record of Things Strange in a Makeshift Studio
, a collection of over four hundred tales which is the culmination of the Chinese short-story tradition. The manuscript of this work was probably completed toward the end of the seventeenth century and circulated widely, though it was not formally published until the 1760s, some fifty years after P’u’s death.

The literary countertradition of which P’u may be the principal figure has its roots in Taoism, a philosophy as old as Confucianism and the one most consistently critical of it. Tao (literally “the way” or “the main current”) is the universal ancestor and the universal annihilator. As the ultimate leveler of all living creatures, it creates all things equal, giving no one of them dominion over another by virtue of birth or any other inheritable power. Tao’s authority is absolute; it transfers no authority to what it creates—quite unlike the Confucian heaven, which gives its “son” the emperor a mandate to rule. As destroyer, Tao gathers up again all it has produced; none of its myriad creatures can transfer influence, property, or status beyond its ordained time. Animals and all other creatures exist on the same level as humans, and each exists for one lifetime alone, free of obligations to either ancestors or descendants. According to the Taoists, the artifices of civilization only lead people away from the original and benign state of nature. Thus at one blow the Taoists shattered the fundamental premise of the Confucian order: the social hierarchy founded on hereditary right.

More than twenty pieces in this collection come from the great Taoist philosophers Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu. Two brief selections, “The Fish Rejoice” and “Butterfly Dreams,” imagine how the human and animal realms are part of the same whole. Chuang Tzu, in particular, sought a state of personal transcendence in which the spirit would be free to rove among the entirety of creation, becoming one first with this, then with that. This interplay between the human and animal worlds connects Taoism to the Buddhists, who believed that the spirits of the dead may reappear in animal form to atone for the sins of previous lifetimes. The transmigration of souls figures dramatically in “Suited to Be a Fish” and “Three Former Lives.” Both tales also teach the importance of compassion toward all living things, the essence of Buddhist ethics.

The humanization of animals in these tales reflects yet another
cultural association: the relations between the Chinese and the non-Chinese. Confucian historians were often outraged by the marriage and burial customs of the innumerable Asian peoples, some non-Chinese, some partly Chinese, who lived around China’s borders. Concerned with preserving the purity of Chinese ethnic and cultural identity, the Confucians often referred to these peoples with unflattering animal names like “hound” and “reptile.” The Taoists and Buddhists, on the other hand, had a far more tolerant view. Lieh Tzu’s “Man or Beast” voices this challenge in a powerful way, recognizing in mythic terms the contributions non-Chinese peoples had made to Chinese civilization.

But the Taoists did not deal only in imaginative metaphors. The Taoist priests whose magical powers are displayed throughout the tales spurned the teachings of the Confucian classics and the careers of bureaucrats in order to study alchemy, astrology, botany, pharmacology, meteorology, zoology, and so forth. Rebels as often as recluses, they lived in the mountains where tigers reigned and outlaws hid. As critics of the social order, they often joined the peasants in resisting and at times overthrowing the dynasty in power, thus translating their egalitarian view of creation into social and economic reality. Antidynastic movements such as the White Lotus (a society of peasant rebels active from the twelfth century to the nineteenth) often made use of the “heresies” and “black arts” the Taoists taught them. “White Lotus Magic” and “The Peach Thief” afford us a glimpse of their activities.

The Confucian social order was threatened from yet another source, the supernatural world. In the Confucian view, the dead commanded an authority that could be invoked only in the ancestral temple, and only by their living—and noble—descendants. These rituals had enormous social and psychological influence over the common people, whose untitled and often homeless dead were silent and impotent. A rival and contemporary of Confucius, the philosopher Mo Tzu, devised an ingenious way to reverse this concept. Ghosts, Mo argued, are not the agents of the privileged living; rather, they are agents of heaven. As the collective common dead, they are the enforcers of a universal, objective justice and can compensate for the defects in human justice. The City God who plays an important role in “Underworld Justice” is criticized for neglecting this duty. The City God had a public temple in the city which gave anyone who
entered and sought it access to the world of the dead. The local deity in “Drinking Companions” is a variant of the same idea. Many of the other tales in the section
Ghosts and Souls
poke fun at those who believe in ghosts that are creations of mere superstition, not agents of justice.

These, then, are a few of the social themes that come into play as the tales unfold. Together the collection spans over twenty centuries of Chinese literature, from the fifth century
B.C
. to the eighteenth
A.D
. Yet each tale has its own voice, speaking to us with vivid honesty of common feelings about human life.

During the Ming reign known as Pervasive Virtue cricket fighting was very popular at court, and each year the populace had to supply crickets for the noblemen to test in battle. In Floral Shade, our county in western Shensi, the cricket is not common. But our magistrate wanted to curry favor with his superiors, and he managed to find them one that proved to be a mighty warrior. As a result Floral Shade was appointed a royal supplier of crickets to the court.

Naturally the magistrate then shifted the responsibility down to the neighborhood heads, and crickets became rare and valuable in the county. In hopes of pushing the price up, the young bloods in our towns often hoarded the outstanding specimens they caught. Cunning local officials were quick to use cricket hoarding as an excuse for searching people’s houses. And whenever they looked for cricket collections, they confiscated so many other goods that they ruined several families at a time.