Daoist Philosophy and Literati Writings in Late Imperial China: A Case Study of The Story of the Stone

4. Bird and Fish

Chapter Four Bird and Fish In the Northern Darkness there is a fish and his name is Kun. The Kun is so huge I don’t know how many thousand li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is Peng. The back of the Peng measures I don’t know how many thousand li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky. (ZZ, 1:29) The Zhuangzi opens with the above fabulous tale. The fish and bird, Kun and Peng, in fact, ushers in a whole team of animals that the philosopher creates to project his profound outlook of the world; they make the book a series of intriguing fables. Interestingly, as my discussion will demonstrate, animal imagery, particularly that of bird and fish, also appears frequently in the first 80 chapters of the Stone, making Cao Xueqin one of the most conscious and creative users of animal symbolism among Ming-Qing fiction writers. Although the Stone can hardly be read as a fable, its frequent use of animal symbolism may have contributed to Zhiyanzhai’s and Yu Pingbo’s assertions of its rhetorical indebtedness to the Zhuangzi. My task in this chapter is to go beyond their recognized rhetorical affinity in search of the philosophical kinship in their use of animal images, particularly those of bird and fish. To better locate the philosophical import of the bird-fish imagery in the novel, I explore a cultural context wherein such imagery emerged and evolved, particularly in the writings of those scholars inclined to the Daoist philosophy. An exhaustive exploration of this type, undoubtedly, would go beyond the scope of this chapter. My investigation, therefore, inevitably focuses on the most well-known scholars and their most typical uses of bird-fish imagery. In the 174 Daoist Philosophy and Literati Writings in Late Imperial China following pages, I will first examine the early Chinese classics, particularly the Analects and the Zhuangzi, then briefly look at works from the Wei-Jin and Tang-Song periods, before I finally scrutinize the late imperial period when animals feature prominently in the writings of Daoist-inclined scholars. Against such a background, we may better determine the philosophical implications of the bird-fish imagery in the Stone. 4.1 Bird-Fish Imagery in Ancient Chinese Writings The transformation from a huge fish into a gigantic bird in the tale cited above is generally taken as a setting that Zhuangzi creates to project his famous concept of xiaoyao you 逍遙遊 (unbounded wandering), his ideal of spiritual freedom. A quick look at early Chinese writings reveals that such allegorical association of bird-fish imagery with spiritual freedom is absent in Confucian classics. While Confucius and his disciples occasionally use bird and fish images, such animal symbolism is often adopted to promote Confucian values and outlooks. In the Analects birds, like human beings, are presented on a clearly hierarchical scale. The phoenix, a divine bird in Chinese legend, is presented as an auspicious sign or simply a personification of Confucius himself,1 while ordinary birds identified with beasts are presented as a symbol of the anti-Confucian multitude who tried to dissuade the master from political involvement, hence the master shunned them 鳥獸不可與同群.2 Similar hierarchical use of bird symbols is also common in Qu Yuan’s (ca. 340–ca. 278 b.c.) poetry, where phoenixes often symbolize judicious officials or the poet himself, whereas low species, such as sparrows and swallows, are associated with villains or petty men.3 Such hierarchy in bird symbolism is significantly weakened in the Zhuangzi, probably because of the Daoist inclination to equate the high and low. The image of the phoenix appears only once in satirical reference to Confucius (ZS, 4:183), although a bird close to the phoenix species is used to project 1 Lau, trans., The Analects, IX:9, p. 79; XVIII:5, p. 182. 2 Ibid., XVIII:6, p. 184. 3 Lei Qingyi, annot., Chuci zhengjie, pp. 39, 55, 193, 197. 4. Bird and Fish 175 Zhuangzi’s self-image (ZS, 17:605). Meanwhile, the Daoist classic, which abounds in images of low avian species, takes the swallow as the wisest bird because its ability to resist material temptation for self-preservation embodies a basic Daoist value (ZS, 20:692). The only exception to Confucius’ disdain of ordinary birds is seen in the use of the phrase...