The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World
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The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World • Lynn A. Struve University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu © 2019 University of Hawai‘i Press This content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that it may be freely downloaded and shared in digital format for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Commercial uses and the publication of any derivative works require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The Creative Commons license described above does not apply to any material that is separately copyrighted. The open-access version of this book was made possible in part by an award from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation. Cover art: Woodblock illustration by Chen Hongshou from the 1639 edition of Story of the Western Wing. Student Zhang lies asleep in an inn, reclining against a bed frame. His anxious dream of Oriole in the wilds, being confronted by a military commander, completely fills the balloon to the right. In memory of Professor Liu Wenying (1939–2005), an open-minded, visionary scholar and open-hearted, generous man Contents Acknowledgments • ix Introduction • 1 Chapter 1 Continuities in the Dream Lives of Ming Intellectuals • 15 Chapter 2 Sources of Special Dream Salience in Late Ming • 81 Chapter 3 Crisis Dreaming • 165 Chapter 4 Dream-Coping in the Aftermath • 199 Epilogue: Beyond the Arc • 243 Works Cited • 259 Glossary-Index • 305 vii Acknowledgments I AM MOST GRATEFUL, as ever, to Diana Wenling Liu, head of the East Asian Col- lection at Indiana University, who, over many years, has never failed to cheerfully, courteously, and diligently respond to my innumerable requests for problematic materials, puzzlements over illegible or unfindable characters, frustrations with dig- ital databases, communications with publishers and repositories in China, etcetera ad infinitum. Among my other colleagues at the university, Luo Manling of East Asian Languages and Cultures patiently vetted many of my draft translations, espe- cially of Chinese poetry, and thus greatly reduced the number of errors and infe- licities. Also, staff members in the Circulation and Interlibrary Loan Departments at the Herman B Wells Library of Indiana University have conscientiously served my book needs almost daily. Many other colleagues, scholars, students, and librarians at my home institution and elsewhere have generously provided me with valuable materials and imparted to me their expert knowledge on various subjects in this book. First, I am most grateful to the two scholars engaged by the University of Hawai‘i Press to review my manuscript, Wai-yee Li and Shuen-fu Lin, who meticulously checked every line, even through the notes and bibliography, making many keen-eyed corrections and valuable suggestions. Others who have helped in various ways, and whose names have not been lost to my aging memory, include Richard Barnhart, Phillip Bloom, Pei-si (Peggy) Chao, Jonathan Chaves, Dimitri Drettas, Robert Eno, Fan Xin, Grace Fong, Rivi Handler-Spitz, He Shuyi, Robert Hegel, Martin Heijdra, Clarke Hudson, Macabe Keliher, Russell Kirkland, Holger Kühnle, Lee Yuk Mui, Qiancheng Li, Li Xinfeng, Liao Zhaoheng, Ōki Yasushi, Kaya Sahin, Shen Naiwen, Michael Stanley-Baker, Richard Strassberg, Judy Stubbs, Brigid Vance, Ellen Widmer, Yan Ming, Ye Gaoshu and his student Cai Songying, Lawrence Yim (Yan Zhixiong), and Zhu Hong and his student He Xingzhen. Thanks also to certain institutions— Nankai University, in the People’s Republic of China, and National ix x Acknowledgments Central University and the Academia Sinica, in Taiwan—which hosted me as I col- lected materials in the early stages of this project. A preliminary version of chapter 4 was presented at the International Conference on Intellectuals and Culture in Pe- riods of Crisis in China, at National Central University in 2012. Staff at the Indiana University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, especially Madeleine Gonin and Cordah Robinson Pearce, digitally enhanced some of the pictographic materials herein. James Campbell of Campbell Arts in Bloom- ington digitally remastered my hand-drawn graphs and diagrams. And cartographic specialist John Hollingsworth executed the one map in this book. A Grant-in-Aid from the Indiana University Office of the Vice Provost for Research has defrayed costs associated with producing graphics and obtaining permissions to reproduce the paintings. The Department of Germanic Studies has been helpful over the years in recommending advanced graduate students and alumni to assist me in com- prehending the substantial German-language secondary scholarship in the area of Chinese dream culture. Also, a heartfelt note of thanks is hereby sent out to those many scholars and technicians who have created and who expertly maintain the several digital databases and research tools that I have used in this undertaking, especially the Chinese Text Project, the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, and the Kanseki Repository. Sincere gratitude is due, also, to the makers of my older and newer MacBooks, which have performed stalwartly despite frequent challenges from my four-legged, feline “laptop,” Pao Pao 泡泡. When not wreaking havoc on the keyboard or swat- ting at the cursor, he has contrarily entertained many dreams without, alas, making them accessible to me. The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World Introduction AS A SPECIES, we humans are not alone in dreaming, as many other animals also have phases of mentation during sleep. Yet as individuals we are utterly alone in the dream state (belief in shared dreams notwithstanding), more so than in any other normal state of consciousness. Dreaming is as subjective as our awareness gets: almost totally oblivious to objective sense data and completely absorbed internally, our dreaming minds generate agglomerations of percepts that, even when remem- bered and thereby identified as “dreams,” are difficult to describe to others or even explain to ourselves after waking. Whether cherished as a medium of privileged insight on the divine, valued for reflective feedback on one’s character, indulged for the amusements it offers, or dreaded because of the challenges it brings to our complacency, dreaming is our most intimate, most self-baring, yet least intelligible kind of experience. This radical interiority and consequent ineffability are among the most universal associations of dreaming. To this subjective quality may be added several other associations of dreaming which have endured through time and across civilizations. Certainly dreams, in running a gamut from the mystical to the bizarre, epitomize irrationality—or less pejoratively, the non-rational—a characteristic which overlaps with lack of control of one’s thoughts, movements, and environment, and with strong emotions which often catalyze waking up from dream-sleep. This deficit of logic and rationality in dreams is regarded warily by some but celebrated by others for opening us to great- er spontaneity and creativity. And, like these qualities, dream content is unbidden, giving rise to belief in supernatural, supra-human sources, on one hand, and to convictions about subconscious selfhood, on the other. (Even when dreams are im- portuned from deities, the results, if any, cannot be determined by the supplicants.) For better or worse, dreaming is recognized as highly imaginal, filled with apparent- ly meaningless illusions but also with personally compelling, self-arising symbols, metaphors, and avatars. Moreover, dreaming highlights the vagaries of memory. 1 2 Introduction Normally hard to recall but sometimes unforgettable, dreams frequently feature persons and things from our pasts but often in strange ways, offering shards of the familiar in unfamiliar situations and assemblages. As in the waking state, memories in dreams may be either recurrent or one-off, but uniquely in dreams our willpow- er flaccidly fails to banish them or hold them in mind. In the past half century, tremendous strides in brain science have revealed much about the neurophysiological and neurochemical bases of how dreams seem, as a universal mode of human consciousness.1 But we still are far from understanding how or what dreams mean—if, indeed, they mean anything at all. Whether dreams themselves project meanings, or meanings are imputed to them by waking thought, or both of these processes occur, the cognitive, semantic aspects of dreaming and dream-memory remain stubbornly resistant to systematic study, being inextricable from individual psychological differences, the variables of societies, and the vicissi- tudes of cultures.2 Not only are the sources of our dreams multifarious at any given moment; they also change over time, and, over time, what and how we think about our dreams, individually and collectively, changes too. There is a historicity to dreaming in two senses. Of course, some dreams lit- erally have made history. But more germane here is that the degree of attentiveness to dreams and the profile of how they are regarded in certain periods, especially in the more authoritative or highly educated strata of societies, are indicators not to be overlooked in cultural or intellectual history. Literary critic George Steiner, for one, has pointed out “that the ways in which we speak to ourselves, that the style, frequency, content and outward effects of unvoiced soliloquies, of the interior monologue which comprises the major part of our linguistic output, are subject to historical change and sociological constraints.” He continues, “The same, I be- lieve is true of the activities—they are manifold—which we associate with the generation, formulation and recollection, whether wholly private or published, of dreams.” He gives as an example of “fundamental transformation in the received 1. For an up-to-date, efficient overview of findings, with references to the most pertinent of the copious literature, see Moorcroft, Understanding Sleep and Dreaming.