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Chapter 1 Transformation as Imagination in Medieval Popular Buddhist Literature Victor H. Mair From its very beginnings, Chinese civilization has been preoccupied with record-keeping and history-making.1 No other civilization on earth can match the sustained dedication to the enterprise of writing down for posterity the main events of each dynasty and reign that has transfixed China for two millennia and more. The monumental twenty-five official histories, impressive though they may be, constitute but a small part of the remarkable Chinese commitment to historiography. By the same token, however, the perennial obsession with history has put fiction on the defensive in China. Naturally, as with all other civilizations, the Chinese have felt the impulse to create fiction. However, due to the extreme admiration for chronicles, annals, documents, and other written accounts of what transpired in the enactment of government institutions, as well as the policies and the actions of rulers and officials on a day-by-day basis, fictionalizing was considered intellectually suspect. Consequently, would-be authors of fiction had to resort to various stratagems and justifications when writing their stories (and later, novels). Let us take, for example, the zhiguai (“tales of anomalies”) of the Six Dynasties (220–589), the first major Chinese genre of what might be thought of by modern literary historians as fictional narrative. In a profoundly important but little known paper on “The Poetics of Uncertainty in Early Chinese Literature,” Andrew Jones investigates the mechanisms whereby the narratives of the tales of anomalies in Sou shen ji (Records of Investigations on Spirits) were constructed. Compiled by Gan Bao (fl. 320) during the first half of the fourth century, Sou shen 14 Victor H. Mair ji is the foundational collection of this genre. What Jones discovers is that certain techniques were deliberately and consistently employed, first, to maintain the pretense that the entire contents of the narrative were true, and, second, to advance the narrative from incident to incident. Because of the “paratactic structure” of many classical Chinese narratives , the problems of transitions between scenes and plot development in general were usually manipulated by categories . . .2 and, where absolutely necessary, by conjunctions such as nai (“so”), zhi (“arriving [at some time or place]”), hou (“later”), or yushi (“thereupon”).3 These mechanisms for advancing the narrative, which continued into the Tang period (618–907) in the classical tales known as chuanqi (“transmission of the strange”) include conspicuous use of terms that mean “suddenly, instantly, quickly” and so forth, or references to dreams, drinking of alcoholic beverages, and the appearance of ghosts and spirits. Because these devices can be used to justify (if only superficially) almost any transition from one situation or state to another, they permit even the most extravagant scenarios. In other words, they enable the author to construct what is essentially a fictional narrative in all but name and ontological assumptions. As a matter of fact, zhiguai and related genres in the Six Dynasties were regarded (even by their own authors) almost as journalistic newsgathering.4 With zhiguai, there was no conscious fictionalization, but rather an attempt to record strange or supernatural events that the official historians had overlooked, yet that were considered important for the complete historical record. It is no wonder that Sou shen ji was often referred to by later scholars as yushi (“leftover history”). As Karl Kao has put it so well: In Western literature, the supernatural and the fantastic, as their association with the term fantasy suggests, are conceived mainly from the angle of creative perception (the author’s projection of his vision) rather than from that of the reality represented. Within the Chinese context, the opposite orientation is assumed: Six Dynasties chih-kuai [zhiguai] particularly are considered as the “records” of facts and observable natural phenomena (or hearsay).5 Speaking of “hearsay,” an even earlier forerunner of fiction in China is what was called xiaoshuo (“small talk”). A peculiar phenomenon that goes back to the 8.223.171.12] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 23:17 GMT) Transformation as Imagination 15 late Warring States and Han period (roughly fourth century BCE to second century CE), xiaoshuo was supposedly gathered from what the populace was saying in the villages and lanes, hence it served as a sort of premodern opinion-gathering mechanism. The great twentieth-century short-story writer and essayist Lu Xun (1881–1936) begins his Brief History of Chinese Fiction thus: “Hsiao-shuo [xiaoshuo], the name for fiction, was first used by Chuang Tzu [Zhuang...

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