THE STRANGE DAOISM OF PU SONGLING

A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

In

Humanities

by

Christopher David Rubin

San Francisco, California

Fall 2017 Copyright by Christopher David Rubin 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read The Strange Daoism of Pu Songling by Christopher David Rubin, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Humanities at San

Francisco State University.

Cristina Ruotolo, Ph.D. Professor of Humanities THE STRANGE DAOISM OF PU SONGLING

Christopher David Rubin San Francisco, California 2017

This thesis explores the ways in which stories from Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio draw from the earlier Daoist work the Book o f Zhuangzi. While Pu Songling’s work contains Daoist moral themes similar to those of Zhuangzi’s earlier collection, this analysis will show that, in both collections, the way in which the stories are conveyed is just as important as their particular moral maxims. In the Book o f Zhuangzi, this emphasis on style is embodied by the characters within the stories themselves, who communicate Daoist principles through their strange appearance. Finding the link between Daoism and the strange, this thesis explores the ways in which Daoism might penetrate Pu Songling’s entire collection, as only a small amount of the stories have clear moral maxims.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Mary Scott for all of her much needed advice, and, further, for pointing me toward the works that follow. Additionally, I’d like to thank my family for all of their support. 1

Tan Jinxuan, a first degree graduate of my home district of Zichuan,

was a great believer in Daoist Yoga. He practiced it assiduously for

several months, regardless of the weather, and seemed to be

making some progress (Pu Songling, “Homunculus, Strange Tales

from a Chinese Studio).

With this line, John Minford opens his translation of Pu Songling’s eighteenth century story collection Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. The story continues: Tan, the graduate, marks his spiritual progress by the growth of a buzzing sound, a sound which seems almost like a voice: “I think I’m taking shape” it whispers. After a few days of Daoist practice, the voice changes: “Most definitely taking shape”—a change which the excited Tan takes to be the sound of approaching enlightenment, of the “Inner Elixir of Immortality.” However, one day, during a particularly overzealous session of meditation, something climbs out of Tan’s ear: far from being the voice of the famed Elixir, the voice instead belongs to a small “yaksha-demon.” To his downfall, the creature is scared away by the unexpected knocking of a neighbor, leaving Tan in “utter desolation, as if his very soul had gone missing...taken with a violent fit...howling hysterically.” He only recovers after six months of steady treatment (Minford 5).

A strange story, but strange as it may be, it would seem as though Pu

Songling wants us to believe it, believe that it actually occurred. After all, he tells us in the very first line that the events of the story took place in his home district.

Pu Songling might be a waishi shi, an “unofficial historian,” but he is a historian 2

nonetheless, or, as he calls himself, a Historian o f the Strange (Zeitlin 1). And he certainly makes it appear as though he’s trying to write history: almost every story in Strange Tales has some detail, some statement which suggests to us that yes, this event, though strange, happened in our world.

For example, the author, or, should I say, the Historian, is always quick to show us his sources. He even witnessed the events of “Stealing a Peach” himself:

“When I was a boy, I went up to the prefectural city of Ji’nan to take

an examination. It was the time of the Spring Festival and,

according to custom, on the day before the festival all the

merchants of the place processed with decorated banners and

drums to the provincial yamen. This procession was called Bringing

in the Spring. I went with a friend to watch the fun.” (Minford 43)

The story does go on to depict a boy climbing into the heavens to steal a peach from the “Queen Mother of the West.” The boy gets dismembered, decapitated and revived in a basket before the author’s eyes. But it’s all true: Pu Songling saw it—he tells us so.

Other stories, he relates, come from friends or acquaintances:

With time

And my love of hoarding,

The matter sent me by friends

From the four corners of the world

Has grown into a pile (Minford 455) 3

One tale, as John Minford writes, even has “our author collecting tales at the roadside, offering casual passersby cups of tea and pipes of tobacco for strange or unusual anecdotes” (Minford xv). Wherever the author heard it, he is quick to tell us the source—often in the very first line: “The Troll” comes from Sun Taibo (28).

“Biting a Ghost” comes from Shin Linsheng (31). “The Devoted Mouse” comes from Yang Tianyi (180).

One might cast doubt on the reliability of these accounts heard at second or third or fourth hand. The Historian, however, is always sure to ease our doubts, telling us exactly when and where the story happened: again, where and when it happened in our world, the world of historical truth. In fact, we might even remember it: “Wailing Ghosts” begins “[a]t the time of the Xie Qian troubles in Shandong— “Thumb and Thimble” comes from “the region of Zhending

County” (Minford 104-107). Occasionally, the Historian is ever more specific: the events in “An Earthquake” occurred “[b]etween the hours of seven and nine in the evening of the seventeenth day of the sixth month of the seventh year of the

Kangxi reign” (182).

However, despite the great lengths to which Pu Songling goes to convince readers of his stories’ truth, commentators, writing even before the book was published in full, knew something else was going on beyond waishi, beyond unofficial history, beyond mere chronicle. As Judith Zeitlin notes in her work

Historian of the Strange, Ji Yun, an eighteenth century commentator, was in fact disturbed by the Historian’s extreme attempts to authenticate his stories. Pu 4

Songling’s ability to source each story and describe events and characters in incredible detail, rather than convince readers of the stories’ truth, actually, according to Ji Yun, alert us to their inauthenticity. For example, many of the stories happen in spaces where neither Pu Songling nor one of his sources could have observed the events, for example, in a bedchamber. How could anyone know, especially with so much detail, exactly what went on? Ji Yun writes,

“Now... [Pu Songling] gives a vivid picture of the smallest details

down to amorous gestures and secrets whispered before lovers. It

would be unreasonable to assume the writer experienced these

things himself; but if he was describing things that happened to

others, how could he have known so much?” (Zeitlin 40)

For Ji Yun, this reveals Pu Songling to be nothing more than, as Zeitlin puts it, a

“bad historian” whose “narrative techniques too obviously betray authorial fabrication” (40).

However, for other early scholars, even attempting to judge the work as history appeared to be a mistake. As the eighteenth century painter-poet Yu Ji wrote, “Comparing it to Qixie’s book of marvels or saying that it differs little from collections of rare phenomena or strange tales is a very shallow view and one that greatly contradicts the author’s intent” (Zeitlin 26). Under this reading, Pu

Songling’s attempts at verification are obviously only half-attempts: the Historian is playing with us. As Zeitlin notes, the tales, to these commentators, 5

“deliberately straddle the border between fictional and historical discourse and are indeed predicated in part on the ensuing ambiguity” (5 [italics my own]).

Further, as Zeitlin also notes, once one puts aside the possibility that Pu

Songling was simply collecting and reporting strange tales, admitting authorial intention, the question then becomes what is the intention? What is Pu Songling saying? What do the tales mean? As she writes, “as the emphasis shifted from the content of Liaozhai [Strange Tales] to its author’s intention, a general allegorical reading of the tales perhaps became inevitable” (Zeitlin 30).

However, this way of reading the work,—as a set of stories which have underlying meanings and morals—far from being a later innovation, appeared even at the time of its earliest commentaries. As Zeitlin notes, Gao Heng, writing the first preface for the book, used the word yuyan to describe the tales, a word which Zeitlin renders as “allegory, metaphor and parable” (Zeitlin 30-31). Even the author himself seems to suggest that the tales should be read for their underlying meaning in his preface to the work—albeit obliquely:

Fastidious readers of my book

May mock me,

Just as the Tale of the Five-Fathers Crossroad

May be baseless—

But who can tell?

The Tale of Three-Lives Rock

May contain 6

Food for enlightenment (Minford 455).

As John Minford notes in his commentary, “The Tale of Three-Lives Rock” comes from an earlier collection of Buddhist and Daoist tales, which frequently served a didactic function. Pu Songling, in his preface, seems to liken his stories to this earlier collection: they may be false, or they may have something to teach us.

For the early commentators, the parable-like nature of Pu Songling’s stories had roots in the past: for both Gao Heng and Tang Menglai, the second commentator, Strange Tales belonged to a rich Daoist storytelling tradition exemplified by the early work the Book of Zhuangzi, which, as A.C. Graham notes, took its final form almost fourteen hundred years before Strange Tales was published in full (Graham 27). Even later commentators make this connection. Feng Zhenluan, in his early-nineteenth century preface to the work, gave readers a piece of advice: “This book should be read as one reads The Book of Zhuangzi” (Minford xxv). As Judith Zeitlin points out, Pu Songling himself noted his affinity for the early writer in his preface to a now lost anthology of

Zhuangzi’s sayings: “The extraordinary writing of the past stops with Zhuangzi and Liezi... I have always loved those books” ( Zeitlin 230).

Even a cursory reading of Strange Tales confirms this admiration: often

Pu Songling’s stories, like Zhuangzi’s before him, seem deliberately constructed to illustrate the truth of Daoist principles. This can be seen in “Homunculus,” told above: to an unknowing reader, the story appears to critique Daoism, Daoists, and their practices; however, a reader with some knowledge of the Daodejing, the 7

foundational Daoist work attributed to Laozi, the moral of the story itself Daoist at heart. As He Shouqi and Dan Minglun explain in their nineteenth century commentary, “Homunculus” is a story about a man who abuses spirituality for his own ends. Minford summarizes their commentary, writing “pretentious vanity exposes [practitioners] to strange apparitions, and ultimately they make fools of themselves.” He goes on to link this with the phenomenon of “spiritual materialism” coined by the twentieth century Tibetan Buddhist Master Chogyam

Trungpa, a phenomenon where “the ego [attempts] to acquire and apply the teachings of spirituality for its own benefit (Minford 500).

This is a teaching that has deep roots in the Daoist tradition. Turning to the Daodejing, consider this oft-quoted passage from Chapter 38:

A truly good man is not aware of his goodness

And is therefore good.

A foolish man tries to be good,

And is therefore not good.

A truly good man does nothing,

Yet nothing is left undone.

A foolish man is always doing,

Yet much remains to be done.

As Max Kaltenmark notes in Lao Tzu and Daoism, his Daodejing commentary,

Daoism has nothing to do with the personal gain of any state of virtue, any special feeling; rather, it is only by emptying oneself of all personal pursuits, 8

aims, and states that one can be in accord with the Dao. This accord, rather than being a personal achievement resulting from an endeavor initiated by the self- translated above as “doing and trying”— is the result of the motion of the

(Kaltenmark 49-50). This is why the “truly good” man is “not aware of his goodness” and “does nothing.” He knows that the only Good belongs to the Dao, and as such, doing nothing, he allows the Dao to move instead: a movement called De—virtue, power.

In “Homunculus” Tan Jinxuan, in his search for the Elixir of Mortality, is excited by the prospect of becoming virtuous, of becoming personally enlightened. Thus, after becoming aware of the possibility of gaining a special or virtuous state signified by the whispers, he practices harder and harder, selfishly pursuing his own ends. However, as Pu Songling shows, this, far from being something virtuous, is in fact a merely human obsession: a manifestation of a demonic, self-seeking behavior, symbolized by the appearance of the being that emerges from his ear.

This moral is even repeated in the very next story in Minford’s selection,

“An Otherwordly Examination: “a man named Song Tao, after lying ill in bed, finds himself being interviewed for a position by supernatural deities, one of which is “The God of War.” Though he wins the position after writing a short essay, Song Tao, being more concerned with others—in this case, his own “aged mother”—than with the growth of his career, turns down the position, allowing it to be rewarded to a Mr. Zhang. When he awakes “as if from a dream” Song 9

receives word that a Mr. Zhang died the very same day that he fell into delirium, revealing the nature of the position to which he, Song, was almost appointed: he was to fulfill the position of “City God”—a divine position requiring that one die as a human being to take it up. Unlike Tan from “Homunculus,” Song’s actions proceeded from “benevolence” rather than a desire for his own gain, allowing him to avoid an early death. As John Minford recognizes in his own commentary, the emphasis on xin,“motive” or “intention,” a theme in the first two stories of the collection, borrows from the Daoist wisdom described above. In fact, the essay with which Song initially wins his position reads almost like lines from the Dao

De Jing: “virtue pursued with intent warrants no merit” (Minford 7-8).

This theme reaches its apogee in the story “The Daoist Priest of Mount

Lao.” The story begins by introducing a young “gentlemen by the name of Wang.”

Like Tan Jinxuan from “Homunculus,” Wang has taken up an interest in Daoist practices. As the story progresses, his interest reveals itself to be motivated largely by curiosity and the promise of gain. Hearing that Mount Lao is occupied by a group of Daoist adepts, Wang sets off to make an inquiry. After seeing one monk who seems possessed with “vitality” Wang, without a second thought, asks to be this man’s disciple. The monk, however, rebuffs his request: “You are too accustomed to a soft life... I fear the hardship will be more than you can bear.”

Wang insists and, upon waking the next day, is given an axe to cut wood with the other monks. As the months go by, Wang is promised of even greater powers, as the head priest performs a number of miracles: he makes a piece of paper 10

illuminate a dark room “in dazzling light.” Next, he pours out wine for the assembled monks, filling all their glasses out of a single, small jug. Finally, the priest makes a young woman appear in the center of the illuminating paper. She recites a poem for all the monks. Then three of the monks get up and enter the small circle of paper, enquiring, “Will you gentlemen accompany us for a last cup of farewell in the Palace of the Moon?” (Minford 51). As the author notes, at this sight, all of Wang’s doubts evaporate, and he throws himself fully into his labor.

However, after another month passes, Wang has still not accomplished anything.

Uttering a statement that both states his frustration and reveals the self-seeking nature of his quest, Wang appeals to the priest:

I came here from a great distance to sit at your feet, Master. Even if

I could not learn the Art of Immortality [the same art Tan Jinxuan

hoped to learn], I thought at least to acquire some minor

accomplishment with which to nourish my spiritual aspirations. But

alas, for these three months I have done nothing but chip wood all

day and return exhausted in the evening to sleep (Minford 52).

He begs the priest further: “For all these days I have labored, give me some trifling skill to take away with me, so that I will not go home empty handed.” He asks the priest to teach him the art of walking through walls, which he does by giving Wang a mantra to accomplish the task. Wang performs the task in front of the priest and sets out for home. Once home, hoping to demonstrate the skill to his wife, he charges at a wall full speed, meeting it with a thud. The story 11

concludes: “His wife helped him up, looking at the egg sized bump that was starting to emerge on his forehead and burst out laughing. Wang was bitterly angry, and cursed the monk for a scoundrel” (53). Pu Songling, giving his own commentary, curses both the “vanity” of young men in pseudo-spiritual pursuits and the spiritual phonies who feed off of their ambition.

These stories, and the other stories like them which unfold over the pages of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio seem, in their morals, to express classical

Daoist truths. Here, however, I’d like to ask a question: is it only the moral of these stories that is Daoist? Put another way: is the only Daoist element of these stories an underlying “meaning-content” which is reached by means of a parable?

To both answer and clarify this question, one should turn to the Book of

Zhuangzi, the book of Daoist parables to which Strange Tales from a Chinese

Studio is most often compared. In examining this earlier work, one sees that it does indeed convey principles from its predecessor the Daodejing in parable form. However, a close examination of the Book of Zhuangzi reveals that the tales, not only convey Daoist principles, they embody them as well.

As Martin Palmer details in his introduction to his translation of the Book of Zhuangzi, the earliest anecdotes about Zhuangzi and his life come from the

Chinese historian Sima Qian, writing in the first century BC. The historian describes what he sees as Zhuangzi’s motive in writing the tales, “to refute the arguments of the Confucians” and to “glorify the mysteries of Laozi” (Palmer xv). 12

As Max Kaltenmark notes, to the early Confucianists, the Dao or “Way” represented something like a “code of behavior” or rules of “moral guidance”

(Kaltenmark 48). To be a good Confucian meant studying these codes of conduct and learning to apply them in one’s life. As Kaltenmark notes, however, “Laozi condemns all learning” (48). Laozi, the author to whom the Daodejing is ascribed, writes

When the great Dao falls into disuse, the virtues of human­

heartedness and righteousness arise.

When intellect emerges, the great artifices begin.

When discord is rife in families, dutiful sons appear.

When the State falls into anarchy, loyal subjects appear

Banish wisdom, discard knowledge, and the people will benefit a

hundredfold

Banish human-heartedness, discard righteousness, and the people

will return to true familial virtues.

Banish ingenuity, discard profit, and there will be no more thieves

and brigands (Chapters 18 and 19, Kaltenmark 50)

Reading these passages, it seems as though Laozi is recommending lawlessness and anarchy to his readers, encouraging them to act in whatever way they decide.

As Kaltenmark notes, this reading completely misses Laozi’s point. He notes that the words “human-heartedness” and “righteousness”— and y in Chinese— 13

represent “the supreme virtues of Confucianism” which he describes as “respect for convention, law” (50). The chapters’ mention of “intellect” or “knowledge,”

“dutiful sons” and “loyal subjects” represent the other Confucian virtues: intelligence, filial piety, and loyalty. The passage, far from recommending lawlessness, actually recommends complete submission to the Dao. When one submits to the Dao, one, quite unconsciously, lives a virtuous life, the life of De.

As described above, this life is lived not through one’s consciously initiated efforts but through the Dao working through oneself. When the Dao is present in one’s life, harmony is naturally established; however, when “the great Dao falls into disuse” one consciously strives to maintain order through small-minded efforts, learning morals by rote, forcing them into one’s life: forcing oneself to mimic these acts, forcing one’s family to oneself, forcing one’s people to maintain order.

In the end, the Confucian, force-based morals were only introduced to contain a society that had departed from the Dao.

This sentiment is echoed throughout the pages of the Book ofZhuangzi. In what is generally held to be the fifth chapter, translated by A.C. Graham as “The signs of fullness of power,” the writer, who may or may not have been a man named Zhuangzi, tells four stories in a row that illustrate the principles described above in the Daodejing.

In the first of these stories, Confucius is consulted by a man named Chang

Qi about “a man with a chopped foot” named “Wang Tai” (Graham 76). Chang Qi then informs Confucius that this man, who has as many disciples as Confucius 14

himself, has a completely different teaching method: “When he stands up he doesn’t teach, when he sits down, he doesn’t talk things over, yet [his disciples] go to him empty and come away full.” Chang Qi asks Confucius, “Is there indeed a wordless teaching, or a heart which is whole though the body is deformed? What man is this?” Confucius, who is more humble here than he is at other places in the Book of Zhuangzi, has a surprising response: that the man is a great sage and a much better teacher than Confucius himself. And, following Chang Qi’s “what kind of a man is this?” the writer ventriloquizes Confucius and pronounces him a man “aware of the Flawless and [is] not aware of other things” who “uses his wits to discover his heart, his heart to discover the unchanging heart beyond it.” His stillness teaches because “[o]nly the still can still whatever is stilled” (Graham 76-

77).

This story gives physical form to the claims of the Daodejing mentioned above: only a stilling of one’s own actions and a hearkening to the Dao can still others. This is a stillness in action which is itself virtue. The second and third stories go on to illustrate the same principle in their own ways each using the foils of Confucius and a man with “a chopped foot.” Here, it is important to note why exactly the men in these stories have chopped feet to begin with. As Eske

Mollgaard explains in An Introduction to Daoist Thought, this was a common punishment for criminals in the Confucian Chinese state. The mutilated men in these stories come from Lu, “where Confucius himself had been the police 15

commissioner” (Mollgaard 110). The character’s physical form, then, bears witness to their lack of adherence to Confucian moral codes.

In the third of these tales, the mutilated man is chastised by Confucius for being so silly as to lose his foot; however, Confucius is reprimanded for not realizing a certain fact: that it much better to lose a foot and, with it, society's approval, than to lose something more precious, the Dao (Graham 77-78)! The man had come to ask Confucius in what way he could preserve the latter but, upon hearing Confucius’ response, realizes that he cannot offer assistance. After this encounter, the man with the chopped foot relates the whole account to Laozi, commenting, as Palmer has it, “he seems caught up with the search for honor and reputation, without appearing to understand that the perfect man sees these as chains and irons” (Palmer 41).

The fourth story, though substituting the character who foils Confucius with “a hideous man called Uglyface Tuo,” continues along the same lines. Here, the Duke of Ai challenges Confucius’ set of morals by referring to this man: Tuo, though so ugly, is followed by all: young men wish to be his dutiful sons, women wish to be his wife, large crowds gather around him yet he doesn’t enforce the

Confucian values of filial piety or loyalty to bring people to himself. Further, he doesn’t act in a conspicuously virtuous way: as Martin Palmer translates, “he was always in accord with others” (Palmer 41). Additionally, he was completely unlearned when it came to higher morals, “in knowledge content to stay with the ordinary.” However, as the Duke states, “this was obviously a man with 16

something different about him” (Graham 79). What so attracted people to this man? What was so different about him? An inner vitality, authenticity—what

Graham often calls “spontaneity”— set him apart from other men, though this man did nothing consciously to set himself apart. The moral of the stories is explained in the lines which immediately follow, but, again, through two more stories:

Cripple Lipless with crooked legs advised the Duke Ling of Wey; the

Duke was so pleased with him that when he looked at normal men

their legs were too lanky. Pitcherneck with the big goitre advised

Duke Huan of Qi; the Duke was so pleased with him that when he

looked at normal men their necks were too scrawny. To the extent

then that [De] stands out we lose sight of bodily shape (Graham

80).

Each of these stories in turn serves to illustrate exactly what is meant by

Chapters 18 and 19 of the Daodejing: where Confucius is focused on making things appear right, forcing things to fit this pattern, the Daoist focuses wholly upon the Dao. And though things may not appear right, they are actually righted.

But are these stories merely proving Daoist points?

I’d like to compare these writings from the Inner Chapters to their counterparts in the Outer Chapters. The Book ofZhuangzi, as A.C. Graham explains, the Book ofZhuangzi, though traditionally attributed to a single author named Zhuangzi is actually a diverse set of documents which began forming 17

around the time Zhuangzi is supposed to have lived, somewhere between 300 to

370 BC, before being finally collected in 312 AD (Graham 3, 27). Traditionally these documents were arranged into three groups: the Inner Chapters, The Outer

Chapters, and The Mixed Chapters. The Inner Chapters, from which I’ve quoted above, are “homogeneous in thought and style and generally recognized as substantially the work of [Zhuangzi] himself’ (Graham 27). Of the Outer and

Mixed chapters, “none can be plausibly ascribed to Zhuangzi” (Graham 28).

These sets reflect the efforts of a group of authors who, though concerned with similar points, beliefs, and themes as the Inner Chapters, reflected many diverse schools of thought— “Syncretist,” “Yangist,” and “Primitivist” to name a few. To put it simply, the Inner Chapters are the most ian stories in the book of

Zhuangzi.

The Outer Chapters, like the Inner Chapters, include a set of stories about

Confucius, but they lack a certain something possessed by their earlier

counterparts. Though there are roughly seven whole episodes, I’d like to point out

moments from two of them. Each of the seven episodes contains an exchange between Confucius and “Old Dan,” another name for Laozi, traditionally held to be the founder of Daoism. In one of these encounters, Confucius asks Old Dan if the Way can be studied as one studies “correlatives.” As A.C. Graham describes in

his work Yin-Yang and the Nature of Correlative Thinking, the study of

correlatives was a kind of “proto-science” that pervaded classical Chinese thought

(7). It was thought that the universe could be arranged around the numbers two, 18

four, and five—two for the cosmic principles of light and dark, and yang, and four and five for the “Four Seasons, Four Directions, Five Colors, Five Sounds,

Five Tastes, [and] Five Smells” (Yin-Yang l). Confucius, in asking if the Way can be studied as one studies correlatives, asks if the Way can be discovered through a kind of scientific study, finding patterns in nature and acting accordingly. Old

Dan responds that “[t]his is a slave’s drudgery, an artisan’s bondage, wearing out the body, fretting the heart,” before finally pointing out,

To study anything belongs to the way of man. To forget all about

things, forget all about Heaven, the name for that is “forgetfulness

of self,” and it is the man who is forgetful of self who may be said to

enter the realm of Heaven. (Graham 132)

In another episode, Confucius states that he has studied “the six Classics,” historical, ritual, and divination documents described in the Analects, Confucius’ own sayings, as tomes of great wisdom. He affirms to Old Dan that he “knows their contents thoroughly” and yet he cannot use his knowledge to give advice to other princes. Old Tan tells him that the Six Classics fail to show the source from which they flowed. He says,

The six Classics are the worn footprints of the former kings, not

what they used to imprint! What you speak of now is still the

footprints, and the footprints are where the shoes passed, they are

not the shoes! (Graham 133) 19

These stories, like the stories above from the Inner Chapters, advance the critique of Confucianism rooted in the earlier Daodejing: the philosopher is too focused upon external conditions—external conditions abstracted from texts and subsequently used to manipulate and shape the surrounding world. As it is written in Chapter 18 of the Daodejing, “When intellect emerges, the great artifices begin” (Kaltenmark 50). Confucius ultimately pays too much attention to the trace that the Tao once left, its appearance, rather than hearkening to the inner reality of the Dao. However, these later stories from the Outer , though they critique certain kinds of philosophizing and intellectualizing, are actually quite serious and intellectual themselves. They read almost like straightforward philosophical treatises. Like the Inner Chapters, they do use characters to convey their message, but the characters merely act as mouthpieces for various philosophical arguments. Confucius states a point and Old Dan rebuts it.

While both sets of stories advance similar arguments, what these later stories miss is the style of the Inner Chapters. They seem to almost do away with style altogether—the arguments receive the most emphasis. In the Inner

Chapters one finds something different: there, the way the stories advance their argument is just as noteworthy as the argument itself. There, the author actually tells stories: characters do something more than merely contribute pieces of an argument. Further, the images and characters in these stories actually embody the Dao. The very images of the story say just as much as the lines of commentary 20

which come afterward to explain. These earlier chapters seem to argue in both their content and their form — their style—that the Dao most genuinely reveals itself as a style.

Consider the story of Wang Tai told above: the teacher says

“When he stands up he doesn’t teach, when he sits down he doesn’t talk things over, yet [his students] go to him empty and come away full.” (Graham 76) As

Confucius goes on to describe, it is his very lack of teaching and proselytizing— which one could liken to a style—that ultimately teaches: “Only the still can still whatever is stilled” (77). He bears “a wordless teaching” (76). Uglyface Tuo is just the same. Although he says nothing, his formhis style speaks. Through the very use of these characters and images, through the emphasis on style over philosophical argument, the stories from the Inner Chapters embody the very lesson that they teach: that true De—virtue—is a style.

And here one could ask a further question: what style does the Dao take?

In what way is it embodied? Zhuangzi seems to give a straightforward answer to this question: The Dao is embodied by the strange. In these early chapters, our teachers are three men with “chopped feet,” a man “certainly... ugly enough to frighten the whole world,” “Cripple Lipless,” “Pitcherneck with the big goitre”

(Palmer 42, Graham 80). In the chapter, “Worldly Business Among Men” we hear of Cripple Shu: “his chin is buried down in his navel, his shoulders are higher than his crown, the knobbly bone at the base of his neck points at the sky, the five 21

pipes to the spine are right up on top, his two thighbones make another pair of ribs”—and the author goes on to tell us the advantages of the useless.

This justification of the strange, far from being contained in isolated bits of the Inner Chapters, is present throughout the whole of the collection. In fact, it begins in the very first sentence of the work:

In the North Ocean there is a fish, its name is the Kun; the Kun’s

girth measures who knows how many thousand miles. It changes

into a bird, its name is the Peng; the Peng’s back measures who

knows how many thousand miles. When it puffs out its chest and

flies off, its wings are like clouds hanging from the sky...In the

words of the Tall Stories, ‘When Peng travels to the South Ocean,

the wake it thrashes on the water is three thousand miles long, it

mounts spiraling on the whirlwind ninety thousand miles high, and

is gone six months before it is out of breath.

A strange tale. In fact, as A.C. Graham notes, this story is lifted from a work that, like Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, supposedly collects accounts of the strange. And strangeness, the strangeness of the fish-bird, far from merely providing an entertaining way to tell the story that follows, is in fact the very subject of the story. To the flying creatures below—the earthly, common creatures—which Graham has as “a cicada,” a “turtle-dove,” and a “quail,” the journey to the South Ocean seems impossible, especially by the method of the fish-bird. As they go on to detail, “We keep flying till we’re bursting, stop when 22

we get to an elm or sandalwood, and sometimes are dragged back to the ground before we’re there” and later, “That [to the to the top of an elm of sandalwood] is the highest one can fly, where does he think he’s going?” (Graham 44-45).

Further, while they expend so much effort in their short-lived journeys, the fish- bird expends no energy at all. It merely “rests it weight on the wind” (43),

What exactly is this story, traditionally held to be the first of the collection, attempting to convey? It is that to small minds, the wise, the virtuous—the man of the Dao— will always appear as the unusual, the strange, the impossible:

Little wits cannot keep up with the great, or few years with the

many. How would we know that this is so? The mushroom of the

morning does not know old and new moon, the cricket does not

know spring and autumn; their time is too short. South of Chu there

is the tree Ming-ling, which grows through a spring of five-hundred

years, declines through an autumn of five hundred years...it is only

nowadays that Pengzi in uniquely famous for living long, and is it

not sad that common men should think him insurpassable?

(Graham 44)

Ultimately, to Zhuangzi, then, when the Dao appears in the world, it most often appears as the strange. This is, I think, for several reasons. Turning back to the Confucius tales from the Inner Chapters, what exactly makes the characters there strange? It is the difference between the shape of their body and the shape of the usual body. In the third tale, upon seeing the man with the chopped foot, 23

here named “Shu-shan Choptoes,” Confucius treats him as if he’s made some mistake which led him to lose his foot. Confucius can’t give him advice—the advice would come too late. However, Shu-shan points out Confucius’ error: what in fact caused his body to be shaped as such was, apart from being some mistake, his complete and total adherence to something beyond the body. He states, “I simply did not have the sense to care [for the laws], and took my safety for granted, that is how I lost my foot. Coming to you now, what gave the foot its worth still survives in me, which is why I am concerned to keep it intact”

(Graham 78). Like the Daoist sage advertised by Old Dan, the man has himself. And the body of a man who forgets himself in a world where people remember themselves all too well, harkening, as Confucius does in this tale, to the maintenance of physical health and external appearances, will necessarily assume a strange shape.

In fact, even the behavior of such a man—a man who forgets himself and his body— will, to usual minds, seem strange. While this pseudo-biographical story comes from the Mixed Chapters, the latest chapters included in The Book of

Zhuangzi, it illustrates the point beautifully: “When [Zhuangzi’s] wife died, Hui

Shi came to condole. As for [Zhuangzi], he was squatting with his knees out, drumming on a pot and singing” (Graham 123). Hui Shi, a man associated with the logical throughout the story collection, is struck by Zhuangzi’s behavior,

“When you have lived with someone... and brought up children, and grown old together, to refuse to bewail her would be bad enough, but to drum on a pot and 24

sing—could there be anything more shameful?” (123) To Hui Shi, a man conditioned by the usual attitudes toward death and dying, all of this is highly unusual. Making a point that comes across more clearly in Martin Palmer’s translation, Zhuangzi explains:

When she first died, I certainly mourned just like everyone else!

However, I then thought back to her birth and to the very roots of

her being, before she was born. Indeed, not just before she was born

but before the time when her body was created. Not just before her

body was created but before the very origin of her life’s breath. Out

of all this, through the wonderful mystery of change she was given

her life’s breath. Her life’s breath wrought a transformation and she

had a body. Her body wrought a transformation and she was born.

Now there is yet another transformation and she is dead... She is

now at peace lying in her chamber, but if I were to sob and cry it

would certainly appear that I could not comprehend the ways of

destiny (Palmer 151).

While this passage, as Graham notes, is the production of a group of authors writing much later, the message of this story, which, like the story of the fish- bird, attempts to justify the strange, is rooted in the wisdom of the Daodejing. As

Max Kaltenmark notes, this idea of “returning” to the source is one of the foundational statements of early Daoism (Kaltenmark 44). He quotes Chapter 16 of the Daodejing: 25

These teeming creatures all return to their separate roots. Having

returned to its root, each is still; in stillness, each has returned to its

original state. Returning to one’s original state is the universal law.

To know the universal law is to be illumined; not to know it is to fret

in vain and bring down misfortune upon oneself.

But Zhuangzi adds something to this, illustrating the practical outcome of this wisdom: to harken to the “universal law” is to appear strange to those who attach significance to their bodies and their personal existence.

The story about Zhuangzi and his wife highlights an additional point: in many cases, one’s ideas of the usual and the unusual, of the normal and the strange, are the products of societal conditioning. While the value of the body is reinforced by the biological conditioning of pleasure and pain, which enslaves us to its preservation, our feelings toward death and dying are equally conditioned by cultural custom which the Confucians believed should be followed as a law.

Hui Shi doesn’t seem to be surprised by Zhuangzi because of his own bodily aversion to death. Rather, he seems surprised that Zhuangzi isn’t following custom.

As the Daodejing says, in hearkening to the unchanging Dao, the sage often disregards the changing definitions of the inappropriate and the appropriate. As Arthur Waley has it in his translation The Way and its Power, the sage resembles the “Uncarved Block.” Waley likens this to infancy: our original state before we were conditioned, “carved” by the do’s and dont’s of our 26

society. The Book of Zhuangzi illustrates exactly what becoming an uncarved block would look like: strange, completely out of accord with the behavior of conditioned citizens. As it was suggested in the story of Shu-shan Choptoes, the character’s complete adherence to the Dao caused him to act in such a way that was seen as being so strange that it was labeled criminal. The Confucian society, in mutilating him, merely gave explicit, physical form to a strangeness which his actions already exemplified.

While the idea that the sage sometimes runs counter to the conditioning of societal values is illustrated in the Book of Zhuangzi through the characters described above, their very ability to be used to convey these truths is itself an enactment of this fact on behalf of its authors. As A.C. Graham notes in his introduction, philosophical writers both before and after The Book arguably even the author of the Daodejing— expound their ideas in the form of serious, efficient, logical treatises (26). The group of authors who composed The

Book of Zhuangzi, however, broke from this tradition, proceeding, at their best, in a way epitomized by the title of the first chapter, “Going Rambling Without a

Destination,” using stories with a wide variety of tones to convey their message

(Graham 43). Ultimately, the work’s disregard for literary tradition, a disregard which allows it to employ the characters described above, is an embodiment of the Daoist “uncarved block.”

I’d like to conclude my examination of The Book o f Zhuangzi with a final point. The strange may mean “the shocking,” “the disturbing,” or “the weird”— 27

meanings I’ve considered above—when strangeness causes some emotional reaction in those who encounter it because of their social and biological conditioning. The strange, I think, has another aspect: the simply left out. It would seem that throughout TheBook of Zhuangzi, the authors have a special reverence for this last meaning, as the Dao itself is the most left out. It’s right before our eyes, they seem to be telling us—and yet both society at large and we as readers, pass it right by. Why?

A story about a gnarled and twisted tree appears throughout the Zhuangzi.

Hui Shih describes it in “Going Rambling Without a Destination”:

I have a great tree, people call it the tree of heaven. Its trunk is too

knobby and bumpy to measure with the inked line, its branches are

too curly and crooked to fit compasses or L-square. Stand it up in

the road and a carpenter wouldn’t even give it a glance (Graham 47)

This tree is likened to both Zhuangzi and the Way—the Dao he follows. Why do we miss the Dao? Because it is itself strange, where strange, in this sense, means

“the useless.” In a life of self-seeking, we constantly apprehend the useful: that from which we can benefit. As it is described in a later chapter:

Cinnamon has a taste,

So they hack it down

Laquer has a use,

So they strip it off. 28

It continues, “[a]ll men know the uses of the useful, but no one knows the uses of the useless” (75). In constantly seeking after the useful, we leave out the strange, the useless. In so doing, we leave out 10,000 little details—but, what’s worse, we leave out the Dao.

Zhuangzi concludes this story with a recommendation for readers: “Why not plant [the tree] in the realm of Nothingwhatever...and go roaming away to do nothing at is side, ramble around and fall asleep in its shade” (Graham 47).

Perhaps, in hearing of the strange—in having the strange called to our attention— we can ourselves become strange, become useless. However, as Zhuangzi tells us,

“...it is plain that the useless does serve a use.” As Chapter 11 of the Daodejing puts it, “Shape clay into a vessel;/ It is the space within that makes it useful”

(Feng). Space, the useless element of a vessel, allows it to capable of being filled.

The true Daoist, though useless, though strange, ultimately embodies the most vital, the most living part of life. Free from the body, free from mind, free from society, free from the desire for reputation one loses one’s self—but as Wallace

Stevens once described, one finds oneself again:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or hear or felt came not but from myself

And there I found myself more truly and more strange (“Tea at the

Palaz of Hoon [italics my own])

One can, then, look at The Book ofZhuangzi as a long attempt to valorize the strange. In its content and, most purely, in its form, it tells us that in order to 29

truly live, one must by necessity become acquainted the strange in all its various senses.

Becoming aware through the Book of Zhuangzi that the strange is the emissary of the Dao changes one’s approach to Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. Looking back to the three stories discussed above,

“Homunculus,” “An Otherworldly Examination,” and “The Daoist of Mount Lao,” one can say, as we have said already, that the stories channel early Daoist works like The Book of Zhuangzi in what they say, in the lesson which lurks below their surface. Now we may also say that the surface too, the particular way in which these lessons unfold, namely, in their strangeness, is also a direct expression of

Daoist wisdom, perhaps even in its purest form. “Homunculus” is not a Daoist story purely because, as Song Tao tells us, “virtue pursued with intent merits no reward (Minford 7). Rather, “Homunculus” is Daoist because a tiny demon emerges from a man’s ear. After reading the Book of Zhuangzi, one finds Daoism everywhere in these stories: in Song Tao’s dream, in the God of War, in Mr.

Zhang’s death, in a paper moon, in a fairy, in an all-too-real wall.

And here, I’d like to argue a further point: the very way in which the stories bend the border between truth and fiction which was once, as Zeitlin described, held to be a fault by some, is in fact a further embodiment of the

Daoist glorification of the strange. When this border is challenged—when we hear that the events of “Homunculus” happened not too far away from the author’s home, or that “An Otherwordly Examination” is based on a book Song Tao 30

himself wrote, the stories themselves become strange objects in the reader’s hands. Their very existence becomes just as deformed as Uglyface Tuo’s face. And at this observation, one hears the voice of Zhuangzi intrude:

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and

fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He

didn’t know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he

was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn’t know if he was

Zhuangzi who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming

he was Zhuangzi (Watson 35).

Ultimately, then, these three stories are Daoist in their meaning-content, but they are just as Daoist in their style. Feng Zhenluan, an early nineteenth century commentator, also seems to have noticed this. For him, the stories’ style, far more than their meaning, recalls the early Daoist works. As he advises readers,

This book should be read as one reads the Book of Zhuangzi. The

Zhuangzi is wild and abstract, the strange tales are dense and

detailed. Although they treat of ghosts and foxes, the details make it

very concrete and real. It is a series of wild details and concrete

abstractions (Minford xxvii)

For Feng, the very ambiguity of the stories places them within the Daoist tradition—he makes no mention of their “meaning.” As Zeitlin points out in her own appraisal of Feng, “[he] concentrates on the stylistic techniques through which the moral nuances are uncovered rather than on the moral nuances 31

themselves” (Zeitlin 38). It seems relevant that the same commentator who noticed the influence of Daoism upon the stories’ style also, only a few lines before the above-quoted passage, said this: “If one reads Strange just for the plot, and not for the style, one is a fool” (xxvii).

When one takes this view of the similarity between the Book ofZhuangzi and Strange Tales one sees that Daoism is not merely contained in isolated stories that argue for a Daoist moral. Rather, Daoism can be seen as a kind of tone or style which pervades the work as whole. This perspective allows a reader to see a more complete picture of what Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio actually is, as straightforwardly moralistic tales comprise a relatively small part of the work. A large portion of the work contains tales that, while perhaps having a more subtle message, seem to place more emphasis on the mere reporting of strange tales. For example, consider the story “An Alligator’s Revenge” from

Minford’s translation. The story, one of the shortest in Minford’s selection, is comprised of two paragraphs, the first of which merely describes alligators— their appearance, their habitat, their feeding habits—as if the mere existence of such a creature deserved to be to be included in a collection of strange tales. He writes: “It is dragon-like in appearance, but shorter than a true dragon, and only able to fly sideways. From time to time, it emerges from the river and scours the banks for food—usually geese and ducks” (Minford 205). An even shorter paragraph follows this first one, and, if there were some moral to be found in the 32

story, one could expect it to be here—but one finds nothing, at least not obviously so:

A traveler coming from the west of the river captured one and kept

it tied up with a rope in his boat. One day, he moored in the

Qiantang River when the rope worked its way loose and the

creature suddenly leaped into the water. The next instant, great

waves rose up and overturned the boat, which capsized and sank

into the river (205)

One might argue that the author is showing, perhaps even like the Daoists, that our efforts to restrain and control our environment ultimately prove fruitless; however, this kind of interpretation requires more from the reader than other tales like “Homunculus” and “An Otherworldly Examination,” where the moral seems obvious.

“A Passion for Snakes” also seems to fit in this category. The author describes a man from his hometown who “had a passion for eating snakes”

(Minford 141). He goes on to describe his habits in detail:

If he came upon a very small one, he munched it up whole and

swallowed it like a spring onion. Larger ones he cut up into small

pieces and ate it with his hands, crunching them up loudly and

vigorously, and letting the blood dribble all over his chin” (Minford

141) 33

The author goes on to report that the man could also smell snakes: he once smelled one through a wall, and, finding it, bit it in the head and ate it while the tail was still “wriggling from his mouth.” This story is incredibly shocking—it seems as if Pu Songling ups the ante as every sentence passes, pushing readers closer and closer to disgust; however, what is the moral of this story? Whatever it may be, the story is clearly in a different camp than the moralistic stories described above.

“The Devoted Mouse” provides a final example of stories from this category. Here, two mice crawl into the room of Yang Tianyi, an acquaintance of

Pu Songling. One is swallowed by a snake. When the snake returns to his hole fattened from his catch, the second mouse bites the snake, and the snake chases it in pursuit. After failing to catch the mouse, it returns to its hole, and the same events unfold again: the mouse bites and eludes capture. This continues, as Yang reported “for quite some time” before the snake vomits up his prey (Minford

180). Upon seeing the body of his dead “friend,” the mouse cries, before pulling the corpse away. While one could say that the story shows that animals have strikingly human emotions in some cases, this, far from being a moral—a moral like “virtue pursued with intent merits no reward”—is more of an observation, as if Pu Songling were providing readers with additional data through which they might make a more accurate appraisal.

After reading tales like “An Alligator’s Revenge” or “The Devoted Mouse” one might question their designation as “strange”—how could stories like these 34

be arranged in a collection with tales of fox-spirits, demons, dream worlds, magical acts, transformations and the like? “A Passion for Snakes” might fit into the collection, being so extreme in the disgust it provokes. However, “An

Alligator’s Revenge” and “The Devoted Mouse” are more subtle. If these stories do indeed embody the strange, they do so in a sense quite different from a majority of the stories in the collection.

Why, for example, does a story like “An Earthquake” mentioned above, in which the author merely describes an earthquake that he experienced in his youth, belong in the same collection as a story like “Grace and Pine?”—a long story which, as Minford notes, contained an obvious message to almost every commentator: “Spiritual communion between a man and a close woman friend of this kind is something superior to the carnal love of man and wife” (Minford 511).

The answer lies in the very Daoist conception of the strange which runs throughout the work.

My reading of the Book ofZhuangzi reveals its several justifications of the strange. In employing the shocking, the things that provoke a reaction, Zhuangzi called to our attention our discriminating, conditioned mind, which only sees through the eyes of its body and its current historical moment. However, in our final examination, Zhuangzi seems to point out something more subtle: the useless: things so strange that they don’t even provoke a reaction. We simply miss them. We leave them out. In bringing these things to our attention, Zhuangzi reveals something further about our minds: in our self-seeking efforts, we leave 35

out countless details that aren’t pertinent to our search. We miss the Dao, which can’t be used for our selfish ends.

Ultimately, while Pu Songling follows Zhuangzi in justifying and bringing to our attention the strange in its many different forms, I’d like to argue that

Strange Tales follows Zhuangzi into this more subtle territory, and it is for this reason that tales like “An Earthquake” or “An Alligator’s Revenge” are collected together with tales like “Grace and Pine” or “An Otherworldly Examination.”

Here, some lines from the author’s own preface to Strange Tales seem pertinent:

Here in the civilized world,

Stranger events by far occur

Than in the Country of Cropped Hair

Before our very eyes

Weirder tales unfold

Than in the Nation of Flying Heads (Minford 455)

As John Minford notes in his commentary to the lines, the “Country of the

Cropped Hair” referred to a real place: the south of China where the “men had tattooed bodies and short-cropped hair.” This name is taken from another, earlier work, the Book of Hills and Seas. “[T]he Nation of Flying Heads,” however, refers to a place decidedly fictional. The Minford description deserves being quoted in full:

A fabulous community, so called because heads were in the habit of

leaving their bodies and flying down to marshy places to feed on 36

worms and crabs. A red ring was seen the night before the flight,

encircling the neck of the man whose head was about to fly; with

the appearance of daylight, his head returned. Some say that the

ears were used as wings; others that the hands also left the body

and flew away (Minford 463)

With these facts in mind, the lines reveal hidden depths. In the first three lines, the author’s intent seems clear: after receiving the accounts from friends— mentioned in lines quoted above— Pu Songling has discovered that strange events have been unfolding in his vicinity, unbeknownst to him. “Strange,” here, seems to imply the supernatural, as if Pu Songling were saying ghosts spirits exist in our own towns. The next three lines, though, appear to be doing something different. Where the first three juxtaposed one real place with another real place, these lines compare that which lies “before our eyes” with a supernatural space. What do these lines seem to be saying? That the seemingly unremarkable things we miss, are perhaps more remarkable than the fantastic, the supernatural. Look! He seems to be saying—the strange, the weird, the wonderful, are not far off.

Sidney Sondergard, in her full translation of Pu Songling’s collection, includes this tale, “The Clam”:

In the East China Sea there lives a particular type of clam and when it

becomes hungry it swims close to the shore, where its two shells open up;

from inside, a small crab emerges, connected to the clam via a thin red 37

tube, and it hunts for food until it's sated, then returns to the clam shell,

which precedes to shut. If someone secretly severs the tube, both creatures

die.”

The Historian of the Strange, then, has a further mission in Strange Tales from a Chinese studio. Like Zhuangzi before him, Pu Songling, far from alerting us to the existence of supernatural beings within our very midst, attempts to show us that, in some way, this very moment, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, contains something hidden, something unexpected. As Judith Zeitlin puts it, “The point is that the strange is not other; the strange resides in our midst”

(Zeitlin 47) Wonder at our strange, unusual, varied life, then is Pu Songling’s goal, wonder which takes us away from our small, conditioned self, sifting the world for its own uses, wonder which the Daoists once called De, virtue. While in wonder we lose a part of ourselves, if Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is to be believed, we’ll find it once again, as Wallace Stevens once had it, “more truly and more strange.” 38

Works Cited

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Kaltenmark, Max. Lao Tzu and Taoism. Stanford University Press, 1969.

Laozi. Tao Te Ching. Translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, Vintage Books, 2012.

Mollgaard, Eske. An Introduction to Daoist Thought: Action, Language, and Ethics in

Zhuangzi. Routledge, 2007.

Pu, Songling, and John Minford. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. Penguin, 2006.

Pu, Songling, and Sidney L. Sondergard. Strange Tales from Liaozhai. Vol. 5, Jain Publ.,

2012.

Zeitlin, Judith T. Historian o f the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale.

Stanford Univ. Press, 1997.

Zhuangzi, and A. C. Graham. Chuang TzuU: The Inner Chapters. Hackett Pub. Co.,

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Zhuangzi. The Book of Chuang Tzu. Translated by Martin Palmer, Penguin Books, 1996.

Zhuangzi. The Complete Works o f Chuang Tzu. Translated by Burton Watson, Columbia

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