by Kim Man-jung
5. In Chinese folklore, Fu Fei is said to have drowned in the Luo River and then become a goddess, paralleling Shao-yu’s idea that Ch’iung-pei has died and become a fairy in the Heavenly Kingdom.
CHAPTER 13.
Two Princesses, Two Wives
1. See note 5, chapter 6.
2. This is a loaded allusion, since in the traditional story the girl was his own wife, whom he hadn’t seen in twenty years. She refuses him and preserves her honor, which he was testing, but she commits suicide because she believes her husband has lost his own honor in trying to seduce a stranger. Shi Jinbao (1279–1368) adapted this story into a play, Qui Hu Tries to Seduce His Own Wife, but in that drama the wife does not kill herself (and Qui Hu recognizes her to some degree in the mulberry field).
3. Rutt continues with an allusion here: “This is like Szu-ma Hsiang-ju playing the lute in the outer court to seduce Cho Wen chün, or the daughter of Chia stealing incense for her paramour in the days of Chin.”
4. An ancient independent state (蜀) that was conquered by Qin in 316 BCE. It is now Sichuan Province. Since the story is set during the Tang period, it is as if the priestess has gone back in time.
CHAPTER 14.
The Contest of Beauties
1. In traditional Chinese culture, each cardinal direction is also associated with a color, a mythical beast, and a season: east/Blue Dragon/spring, south/Red Bird/summer, west/White Tiger/autumn, and north/Black Turtle/winter.
2. Named for her village, the Woman of Wu Yen was said to be extremely ugly. According to Chinese folklore, even her picture was so ugly it was unbearable to look at. And yet, despite this, she was able to marry a prince because her mental qualities outshone her homeliness.
3. See note 7, chapter 14.
4. Yang Youji (養由基, 597–558 BCE) was a fabled archer of the Spring and Autumn Period who never missed his target. He once even shot down a deity no one else could slay, and so this is a grand compliment on the prince’s part.
5. See note 12, chapter 15, on the Shanglin Preserve. The Chinese emperors had many preserves or parks set aside for their use as hunting preserves or recreational parks.
6. Rutt adds a small transition here to fill in the continuity: “Soon there were piles of game—furred and feathered—in front of the tent. The girls killed many rabbits and pheasants, which they presented to the Prince and Shao-yu for generous rewards in pieces of gold. Everyone lounged now, enjoying the music and the singing.”
7. Dufu (杜甫, 712–770). Along with his dear friend Li Po, he is considered one of the greatest Tang poets. See also note 8, chapter 2.
8. Wives of semimythic Emperor Shun who were famous for their lute playing.
CHAPTER 15.
The Wine Punishment
1. Rutt continues with another allusion regarding diplomacy: “Prince P’ing-yŭan went to the kingdom of Ch’u as a peace envoy, and although he had nineteen people in his suite the one who brought peace for the kingdom of Chao was Mao Sui alone.”
2. The Chunqiu (春秋), attributed to Confucius, is one of the Five Classics of Chinese literature. The Spring and Autumn Period was from 770 to 476 BCE, which covers approximately the first half of the Eastern Zhou dynasty.
3. Cui Hao (崔顥, 704?–754) was a contemporary of Li Po. Although he was an accomplished poet, his work is almost always overshadowed by that of Li Po and Wang Wei. See also note 8, chapter 2.
4. Although this plays out like a joke, Prince Yüeh is also serious here, and his suggestion refers to a form of execution or torture similar to the wine torture used at the time of Tiberius in Rome. In contemporary China, there is still the common practice (a kind of drinking etiquette game) in which someone who is late to a drinking engagement has to “catch up” by drinking the equivalent number of drinks the others have had, but all at once. In context, this is also a rather poignant scene, since (although Kim could not have known it) King Sukjong would eventually execute his favorite concubine, Jang, by having her drink poisoned wine. Sukjong was avenging his wife’s death, which he believed was caused by Jang’s use of evil shamanic magic.
5. The romantic story dramatizing the forbidden love of the Herder Boy (or the Cowherd) and the Weaver Girl is one of the most popular folktales in East Asia. It is documented in The Classic of Poetry, which is over 2,500 years old. The tale is a cosmological allegory, the boy representing the star Altair and the girl representing Vega. The two are banished to opposite banks of the Silver River (the Milky Way), because they are of different social classes, but once a year on the seventh day of the seventh month, a huge flock of magpies creates a bridge that allows them to meet each other for a single day. In East Asia, this story has the resonance of Romeo and Juliet, though it is not as tragic.
6. Note the parallel to what Hsing-chen says to Master Liu-kuan early in the novel about being whipped on the calves as punishment. See this page.
7. Meaning that one has a pure heart.
8. Like many of the allusions in the text, this is sexually charged. The sparrow is phallic and the clam is a euphemism for vagina. The clam can “fly” in sexual union with the sparrow, since it does have figurative wings in the form of its upper and lower shells, and it propels itself by flapping them and squirting water.
9. The daughter of the elephant hunter King Matang, as mentioned in the Divyavadana, a third-century collection of stories about the Buddha’s previous lives. In Hinduism, Matangi is a tantric goddess equated with the Buddha. She also happens to be a goddess who governs speech, music, and art. The Shakyamuni Buddha is the Buddha of this age (the historical Buddha), called “Shakyamuni” to mean “the sage of the Shakyas.” The Buddha’s surname is Gautama, his given name Siddhartha, and his clan name Shakya.
10. See note 4, chapter 16.
11. See note 9, chapter 1.
12. The Shanglin Preserve or Shanglin Park was a famous preserve from the time of Han Wudi (who ruled from 141 to 87 BCE) and maintained afterward by other emperors. Wudi himself was even criticized for spending too much of his time in the preserve and indulging in its pleasures to the degree that it caused moral corruption (suggesting that there was a great deal of debauchery going on there).
13. Suggesting that his daughters are like the “goddess” of the moon. People believed that clouds moving across the moon were the fairy goddess Chang’e (or Chang-o) (嫦娥), who is often said to have fled from an abusive husband who ruled harshly over his kingdom. Note the indirect allusion to the clouds here, which is amplified when one considers that in some versions of the story Chang’e’s husband was the archer Hou Yi, who was ordered by the Jade Emperor to shoot down nine of his ten sons who had transformed into suns in the sky.
14. He would have been an administrator who oversaw the logistical operations of the capital under the emperor.
15. The sons’ names, in sequence, have the following meanings: “Great Honor,” “High Honor,” “Younger Honor,” “Late Honor,” “Fifth Honor,” and “Final Honor.” The daughters’ names mean “Tinted Rose” and “Eternal Joy.”
16. See note 8, chapter 4.
17. This is a very complicated allusion, since it appears to be protesting the Emperor’s surfeit of favor on the one hand, but also alludes to both Taoist and Buddhist ideas on the other.
In Taoism, a vessel is useful for its emptiness, as described in chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching:
Thirty spokes share a central hub;
It is the hole that makes the wheel useful.
Mix water and clay into a vessel;
Its emptiness is what makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
Their emptiness is what makes them useful.
Therefore consider: advantage comes from having things
And usefulness from having nothing.
In Buddhism, “the empty cup”and “empty your cup” ar
e old Chinese Zen phrases that refer to a famous conversation between the young scholar-monk Deshan Xuanjian (782–865) and Master Longtan Chongxin (760–840). The master filled Deshan’s cup until it overflowed, and when the young monk protested, the master told him that he could not teach him until he had emptied his cup.
At this point, Shao-yu is in a transition point interwoven of Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist allusions, primed for his old master to appear from the “reality” of the novel.
The second allusion is much more self-explanatory.
18. Once again, as on this page (see note 3, chapter 10), the Emperor is erroneous in his allusion. The one the legendary emperor Yao asked to be his successor was actually the hermit Xu You (許由). After refusing, Xu You was so upset he washed out his ears in the river to clean his head of the request. Qao Fu was another hermit, a friend of Xu You, who is said to have avoided that river because Xu You had polluted it with what he had washed out of his ears! In the allegorical reading of Kuunmong, this slip-up on the Emperor’s part is another indication that King Sukjong, paralleled with the Emperor, was fickle and needed good advising.
19. See note 13, chapter 7.
20. A preceptor is a teacher who also gives practical instruction, especially in medicine.
21. A fief was a parcel of land given by a ruler to his subject in lieu of a salary. The land included the peasants who worked and lived on it, and it was expected that the ruler would then receive taxes based on the productivity of that land. An additional five thousand households makes Shao-yu fabulously wealthy since he would be receiving a significant percentage of the productivity of those households.
CHAPTER 16.
Returning to the Source
1. Like the Luo, this is another tributary of the Yellow River known for its scenic beauty.
2. Yang Guifei (楊貴妃), one of the “four great beauties” of Chinese history. She was the favorite consort of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang toward the end of his reign. Xuanzong had stolen her away from his own son by having her become a Taoist nun for an interim before making her his concubine. Because Yang was implicated in the An Lushan (An-shi) rebellion of 755, as a consequence Xuanzong ordered her execution. She was strangled to death by his attendant Gao Lishi. This is an especially poignant allusion—almost prophetic—in relation to King Sukjong and the fate of his own favorite consort, Jang, whom he put to death by making her drink poison wine. Kim Man-jung did not live to see it happen because he had died in exile a few years prior.
3. Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty (502–587) in China, who was a devoted Buddhist and actually became a monk several times, only to be “brought back” into his royal life by donations to the temple. Wu’s reign was a golden age of Buddhism in China, and he is often regarded as “the Bodhisattva Emperor,” although the great monk Bodhidharma put him in his place for being prideful in his promotion of Buddhism. Wu popularized repentance and the ritual of bowing as a way toward liberation. Red Pine (赤松) is the name of a legendary Taoist immortal. Bill Porter, one of the most highly regarded contemporary translators of Taoist and Buddhist texts, writes under the name Red Pine.
4. This is a reference to the bodhisattva Guanyin (觀音, also written Kwan Yin), who is derived from Avalokitesvara, whose name means “the Lord Who Looks Down Upon Sound.” The Chinese characters literally mean “perceives sound,” with the implication that Guanyin abides on high, listening for the sounds of suffering in order to provide compassionate assistance. Avalokitesvara is a male figure (and the Dalai Lama, for example, is said to be his earthly incarnation), but in East Asia (China, Korea, Japan) the figure is female. Some scholars theorize that the Western figure of the Madonna converged with the figure of Avalokitesvara to produce Guanyin, who, like Mary, is often associated with the sea. Guanyin is often erroneously called the “goddess” of mercy.
5. In Korean, Manjushri is called Munsubosal (文殊菩薩). His name is usually interpreted to mean “the Bodhisattva of Gentle Glory,” but the first two characters in his name can also be read to mean “literary distinction,” which makes it a metafictional allusion. Manjushri is the bodhisattva typically associated with wisdom and is the oldest and most important one in the literature of the Mahayana tradition.
6. Sanskrit term for an aeon in Buddhist cosmology. This is generally the amount of time that passes between the creation of a world and its destruction and re-creation.
7. “The Butterfly Dream” of the Taoist master Zhuang Zhou (“Master Zhuang,” 莊子) is the best known of the stories in the Zhuangzi, the book named after him. It is the subject of many paintings and commentaries.
8. See note 6, chapter 1.
9. The term can be used to refer to teachings of the Buddha, cosmic law, or phenomena. Here it is used in combination, particularly since we are at the end of a story that thematically addresses the interaction of the three definitions.
10. These would be the typical possessions of a wandering monk. See note 14, chapter 1.
APPENDIX B:
Reading Kuunmong in Chinese and Korean
1. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is probably one of the best examples of this technique in nineteenth-century British fiction. Jane’s last name, Eyre, and its approximate homophones are a practical road map of the novel’s plot. Eyre: err (Jane makes a grave error when she initially agrees to marry Rochester); ire (she is of Irish background and quick to anger); air (she is associated with that element, fairies, and imagination); eerie (she has a strange imagination and spooks Rochester’s horse when they first meet); eyrie (she is associated with a bird and ultimately provides a “nest” for Rochester, whose name begins with roc, the name of a giant bird). Meanwhile, in real life, we have amusing examples like Usain Bolt, the fastest sprinter alive.
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