Reading for the Moral

Exemplarity and the Confucian Moral Imagination in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Short Fiction

Maria Franca Sibau

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781438469904, 9781438469898
• eBook ISBN: 9781438469911
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reading for the Moral offers an innovative reassessment of the nature of moral representation and exemplarity in Chinese vernacular fiction. Maria Franca Sibau focuses on two little-studied story collections published at the end of the Ming dynasty, Exemplary Words for the World ( Xingshi yan, 1632) and Bell in the Still Night ( Qingye zhong, c. 1645). Far from being tediously moralistic tales, these stories of loyal ministers, filial children, chaste widows, and selfless friends provide a deeper understanding of the five cardinal relationships central to Confucian ethics. They explore the inherent tension between what we might call textbook morality, on the one hand, and untidy everyday life, on the other. The stories often take a critical view of mechanical notions of retribution, countering it with the logic of virtue as its own reward. Conflict between passion and duty is typically resolved in favor of duty, a duty redefined with a palpable sense of urgency. In constructing vernacular representations of moral exemplars from the recent historical past rather than from remote or fictitious antiquity, the story compilers show how these virtues are not abstract or monolithic norms, but play out within the contingencies of time and space.

Chapter 1

Filial Quests

In the early sixteenth century, a young man named Wang Yuan 王原 left his mother and newly wedded wife to undertake a long and risky journey in search of his father—a father who had abandoned the family to escape corvée duties while Yuan was still in his swaddling clothes. After several years of wanderings through modern day Hebei, Shandong, and Henan provinces, Yuan eventually discovered his father in a temple, where he had been living as an unordained monk. Having overcome his father’s initial reluctance, Yuan returned with him to his hometown and at long last achieved his dream of family reunion. Yuan was later celebrated as a resplendent filial exemplar in the local gazetteer, official and unofficial historical compilations. His story was also adapted multiple times into fiction and drama.

Wang Yuan’s tale was one of the most popular “filial quest” narratives—my rendering of the Chinese phrase wanli xunqin 萬里尋親 (searching for parents across 10,000 miles)—but his was by no means an isolated case.1 In the latter part of the seventeenth century, the great Confucian scholar Huang Zongxi 黄宗羲 (1610–1695) wrote, “When one looks at historical biographies, there is no end of tales about sons who face calamity and endure arduous travels and physical hardship, all in search of their parents” 嘗觀史傳, 人子所遭不幸, 間關踣頓, 求父母者不絕書.2 Huang was commenting—not without a tinge of impatience—on the deluge of filial quest accounts in order to highlight the extraordinary feat of his own ancestor, who went in search of his brother instead. What is not immediately apparent in Huang’s statement, however, is that the filial quest was not a motif of great antiquity, but rather a relatively recent phenomenon. In her extensive survey of accounts of filial quest included in Ming and Qing local gazetteers, Taiwanese scholar Lu Miaw-fen has found an overwhelming majority of entries (200 out of 282) dating from the Ming-Qing transition and early Qing dynasty (mid to late seventeenth century).3 Narrative predilections reflected changes in the historical reality. The “filial journey” was first instituted as a category eligible for imperial reward in the early Ming, as established by an edict of the founding Ming emperor.4 The glorification of filial journeys continued to the end of the dynasty (and beyond), as documented, for example, in the late Ming compilation Filial Records (Xiaoji 孝紀, 1639) by Cai Baozhen 蔡保禎, where the filial journey is one of the sixteen categories into which the book organizes its material.5 By contrast, earlier records of filial exemplars, such as the medieval accounts discussed by Keith Knapp, do not feature filial journey as a discrete category.6

Why did filial quest narratives have such wide appeal at this point in time? What kind of anxieties and tensions are explored, or belied, in these stories? By focusing on the development of the narrative motif of filial quest as seen in two vernacular adaptations of the story of Wang Yuan, this chapter shows how this particular embodiment of the supposedly perennial virtue of “filial piety” reveals broader shifts in moral and intellectual concerns during the seventeenth century. Before doing so, however, we will review the broader coordinates of the discourse on filial piety during the Ming, a discourse in which didactic literature, intellectual debates, imperial policies, and actual practice play significant and often conflicting roles. This will provide the necessary backdrop against which the stories discussed in this and the next chapter can be fully appreciated.

Traditional Discourse of Filial Piety in the Ming

Filial piety (xiao 孝) is arguably the quintessential virtue in traditional Confucian ethics.7 Ubiquitously invoked throughout Chinese premodern history, filial piety not surprisingly became the target of vitriolic condemnation by the May Fourth intellectuals’ wholesale assault on Confucianism in the early twentieth century. Yet the traditional discourse of filial piety is riddled with contradictions, and the very notion of filial piety and the way it was enacted through specific practice were far from uniform throughout the centuries.

The notion of filial piety as a “natural” virtue was continuously reiterated. Yet the very existence of texts such as the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing 孝經) and the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars (Ershisi xiao 二十四孝)—which were among the first texts that children of both sexes encountered in their literary education—lays bare the necessity to inculcate this supposedly natural virtue in the minds of young readers. Filial piety is said to be what sets humans apart from plants and beasts—yet murder committed to avenge one’s parent is not only contemplated, but at times even prescribed and officially pardoned. As the Classic of Filial Piety famously dictates, sons and daughters should preserve intact the body given to them by their parents—yet many stories of filial exemplars entail bodily sacrifice, which can, for example, take the form of slicing off a piece of flesh (gegu 割股) to prepare a life-restoring broth for the dying parent. Moreover, according to the famous Mencian prescription, the greatest violation against filial piety is the failure to produce an heir who can ensure the continuation of the family line—and yet filial exemplars gladly sacrifice their progeny for their parents’ survival, or act in such a way as to impair or obliterate their chances of producing heirs.

At the level of official discourse, the Ming inaugurated a renewed emphasis on filial piety. Both the Ming founder and the Yongle emperor purportedly authored didactic texts promoting filial piety, which were explicitly intended for the wider audience. The Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang promulgated the Sacred Edict in Six Maxims (Shengyu liuyu 聖諭六語), which opens with an exhortation to “be filial to the parents.”8 He also compiled the Record of Filial Piety and Parental Benevolence (Xiaoci lu 孝慈錄, 1375), a work in 20 juan that Norman Kutcher describes as aimed at restoring “the people and members of the officialdom to the path of filial piety so neglected by his Yuan predecessors.”9

Lamenting that records of filial exemplars, however numerous, were scattered across countless different sources, the Yongle emperor oversaw the compilation of True Cases of Filial Piety (Xiaoshun shishi 孝順事實, 1420), which gathered over 200 anecdotes of outstanding filial piety. This work included a preface, as well as final commentaries and poems appended to each entry, all of which were attributed to the emperor himself.10 The notion of “transference” of filial piety from the father-son relationship to the emperor-minister relationship was given particular emphasis, while the last juan was devoted to female filial exemplars. Yongle’s True Cases was the basis for later expanded and revised compilations, among which is Cai’s Filial Records mentioned earlier. Yongle’s compilation of True Cases is not itself without irony. Yongle usurped the throne that was rightfully occupied by Jianwen, the son of his father’s legitimate heir, thus disturbing the succession chain supposedly cemented by filial piety. As shown in chapter 3, Yongle also plays a highly ambivalent role in stories of loyalty.

Notions of filiality, paternity, and ancestral rites also lie at the heart of the so-called Great Rite Controversy (da liyi 大禮議) that stormed the court in the third decade of the sixteenth century.11 The controversy saw the opposition between the Jiajing emperor and the great majority of the state bureaucracy over the correct ancestral rites and posthumous designations to be observed by Jiajing himself, who was a cousin of the preceding emperor. The ministers pleaded with the emperor to honor his uncle, the Hongzhi emperor, as his father by way of posthumous adoption, to preserve the integrity of the succession line. The emperor adamantly refused, considering this course of action as most unfilial, and continued to venerate his biological father instead.

The Jiajing emperor’s position was aligned (though not by conscious design) with the most innovative developments in mid and late Ming intellectual debates, which sought to redefine filial piety, along with the other cardinal virtues, as based on qing 情 (emotion, feelings). The great Neo-Confucian thinker Wang Yangming held that sincerity and earnestness (chengxin 誠心), rather than ritual prescription or historical precedents, should dictate the expression of one’s filiality. Significantly, he considered the two most widely debated manifestations of filial piety (flesh slicing and filial huts) as neither right nor wrong in and of themselves.12

There is also much discussion of the religious connotations of filial piety. Some scholars argue that the sentiment of filiality comes closest to a kind of religious feeling. Central to this religious dimension is the notion of ganying 感應 (variously rendered as “sympathetic resonance,” or “sympathetic response”), according to which sincere filiality can reach and move the spirits above.13 This notion is already present in the Classic of Filial Piety, and it is abundantly manifested in miracle tales and hagiographical accounts of filial exemplars, from medieval times onward. The religious dimension of filiality, however, is not confined to popular literature and local beliefs and practices. Lu Miaw-fen has studied a current of late Ming exegesis on the Classic of Filial Piety that was essentially religious in nature. Filiality was reconceptualized as a kind of “cosmic Spirit” by Yu Chunxi 虞淳熙 (1553–1621) and others.14

The late imperial discourse of filial piety was also profoundly influenced by Buddhism. Alan Cole has identified the shift toward the mother-son dyad, as opposed to the traditional emphasis on the father-son relationship, as a major influence of Buddhism. Moreover, the Buddhist discourse on filial piety stresses the importance of joining or donating to the monastic community (sangha) as much more effective means than the traditional sacrificial offerings to the spirits of the deceased parents.15 While Cole’s study does not focus on the specific historical development of the Buddhist discourse on filial piety and family in the Ming, some of the vernacular stories discussed below portray Buddhist belief as playing a significant role in the performance of filial acts.

When it comes to popular filial practices, flesh slicing or gegu is arguably the most notorious—and often misunderstood.16 It was usually performed by the son, daughter, or daughter-in-law, as a form of extreme remedy, when all other medicines and prayers had proven ineffective. The practice, though attested with increasing frequency from the Song onward, was subject to vivid debate among the literati, and a matter of controversy for the imperial court as well. The Hongwu emperor prohibited gegu, and Xuande refused to grant awards to those who performed it; yet biographies of filial sons and daughters (usually of commoner status) in Ming and Qing local gazetteers and other sources continued to include gegu as a staple feature of filial behavior. As shown in the story “A Slice of Liver for Grandma” (XSY 4) discussed in chapter 2, the practice of gegu is enmeshed in an intrica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Reading for the Moral
• Chapter 1 Filial Quests
• Chapter 2 Filial Dilemmas
• Chapter 3 The Spectrum of Loyalty
• Chapter 4 Female Exemplarity and the Violence of Virtue
• Chapter 5 Interchangeable Brothers
• Chapter 6 Friends in Need and Friends in Deed
• Concluding Note
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover