Escape from Blood Pond Hell: The Tales of Mulian and Woman Huang

Introduction

3 E ach of the two texts translated in this volume, ἀ e Precious Scroll of the ἀ ree Lives of Mulian (Mulian sanshi baojuan) and Woman Huang Recites the Diamond Sutra (Huangshi nü dui Jingang),1 represents only one of numerous versions of a religious story that once enjoyed tremendous popularity all over China and is occasionally read and performed even today. The primary worldview reflected in these tales is what we might call popular Buddhism, which was quite different from the Buddhist philosophy discussed inside monastery walls or among elite clerics and literati. As early as the sixth century, Huijiao, the author of Biographies of Eminent Monks (Gaoseng zhuan), urged his fellow monks to adapt their message to their audience, which, should it be made up of uneducated peasants, might mean having to frighten them with vivid descriptions of the consequences of their sins before presenting them with ways of avoiding this dreadful fate. According to Huijiao, when a good preacher speaks about death, he makes heart and body shiver for fear; if he speaks about hell, tears of anxiety gush forth in streams. If he points out earlier karma, it is as if one clearly sees one’s deed from the past; if he predicts the future consequences, he manifests the coming retribution. If he talks Introduction 4 | Introduction about the joys [of the Pure Land], his audience feels happy and elated; if he discourses on the sufferings [of hell], eyes are filled with tears. At that moment the whole congregation is converted and the whole room overcome with emotion: people throw themselves down on the floor, bang their heads against the ground, and beg for grace; each and every one snaps his fingers; everybody recites the name of the Buddha.2 At first, it was primarily Buddhist monks who took this message of hell and damnation, sin and salvation, not only to unlettered peasants, but to society at large, high and low, men and women.3 Beginning in the Song dynasty (960–1279), lay authors also began to create texts that conveyed similar messages of sin and salvation. Such texts only rarely ended up in the libraries of literati and even more rarely made their way into the modern academic libraries upon which scholars of things Chinese have long relied for their research. But that does not mean that these texts were not widely distributed and read in their own time. Not only did men and women with at least a basic education read these texts; many elite literati-scholars probably perused them as well, whether out of curiosity, fascination, or disgust. On the other side of the social spectrum, there were many unlettered Chinese who knew of these stories through performances of many different drama and ballad versions. Grisly and gory as these stories could sometimes be, they both reflected and informed the ethical and belief systems of countless men and women in late imperial and early modern times. They could do so only by presenting riveting narratives, stories such as those of Mulian and Woman Huang, which spoke in a particularly powerful way to universal human fears and concerns. The histories of the Mulian and Woman Huang tales, as described in greater detail later, are quite different. The origins of the story of Mulian can be traced back to canonical Buddhist sutras dating to the sixth century at the latest, while the earliest-known textual reference to the story of Woman Huang does not appear until the late sixteenth century. There are also considerable differences in the status and gender of the main protagonists of these two tales. On the one hand, Mulian (the Chinese rendition of Maudgalyayana) is a celibate monk; he is said to have been one of the two most senior disciples of Sakyamuni Buddha and was traditionally renowned for his supernatural powers, which, among other things, allowed him to 5 | Introduction travel to other levels of existence. Woman Huang, on the other hand, is a simple laywoman, married to a butcher and the mother of his children, whose power rests solely in her pious determination to save both herself and her family by single-mindedly reciting the Diamond Sutra (Sanskrit, Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra; Chinese, Jingang jing). Nevertheless, by the final decades of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), when the ballad versions translated here were published and circulated, these two stories not only enjoyed great popularity but had...