Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Read online

  circus seal would be equally inconceivable.

  The moral hierarchy, however holistic, admits of a staggering amount of

  violence: in harvesting and slaughtering, living things are killed and blood is shed, and the pain and agony of death are difficult to behold. Writing in early China’s Warring States period (475–222 BCE), Mencius thus counsels distance.

  In an oft-quoted passage, he queries King Xuan of Qi whether it is true that during a religious ceremony he spared an ox from being sacrificed at the altar because he couldn’t bear to see it tremble in fear. Mencius praises the king for his humaneness ( ren), but also endorses his decision to substitute a lamb for the ox while absenting himself from the slaughter. Mencius offers the following punch line: “The gentleman keeps his distance from the kitchen.”8 By averting his eyes from the scene of brutal instrumentality, the gentleman effectively prevents raw emotions and instinctual reactions from overwhelming rational

  calculus. Mencius’s psychological insight here is remarkable in light of modern neuroscience and the countless testimonials of vegetarians that point to some primal moment of witnessing animal suffering.9 However, Mencius’s explicit

  goal in this episode is not to stem the tide of vegetarianism, but to help the king reconnect with the “moral sprouts” that he didn’t know were ingrown

  within him—given his reputation as a ruthless tyrant. He just needs to redirect his innate goodness toward the proper object: his subject people.10

  It is all very well for philosophers and kings to cultivate their moral sprouts by shuttering their mental blinds. The plebeians, however, have far fewer ways This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:17 UTC

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  x i i

  For e wor d

  of skirting the dirty work of ministering to the omnivorous appetites of our species. And the literary imagination, unlike philosophy, is perversely drawn to the emotional and moral complications that arise in the arenas where

  cruelty, gore, and necessity commingle. Out of this penchant grows a steady trickle of colorful, feisty, and often poignant tales about humble rodents dar-ing to question the natural order of things. They point to a level of engagement with the nonhuman world beyond the simple allegorical mode whereby animals are mere props with which to dramatize human desires, fantasies, and

  conflicts. Significantly, many of these tales adopt the perspective of the

  mouse, thereby shaking loose at the outset its automatic equation with ver-

  min, pest, and plague—things to be eradicated rather than creatures whose

  fear and pain one can identify with and whose cosmic fate one is invited to contemplate.

  To be sure, there is no radical revisionist or social justice agenda here, but there is a subterranean current of empathy that creases the otherwise smooth canvas of a holistic cosmology into a wrinkle of doubt: Just because a creature is minuscule or its mode of survival is a nuisance to others, does it mean that it deserves to be quashed no questions asked? Rodents become pests in

  relation to humans in the context of sedentary agrarian civilization. Behind all the vilification and extermination effort, there seems to lurk a recognition that these creatures, too, are only trying to survive and, when possible, to thrive. And if they betake themselves to carry off grain from the granary or to chew through fineries and treasured books, well, they can’t help it, can they? By the same logic, when cats hunt mice, that, too, is part of the ongoing affairs of the universe, and the felines, too, are at no fault. That their pre-daceous instinct benefits humans is convenient and well exploited by the

  latter, but humans are not the author of the trophic order. Having taken themselves out of the food chain, Homo sapiens are able to live by the values and ideals of their own making. But what of the other animals? A cautious mode

  of anthropomorphism, the kind that keeps the three-dimensional animals

  in the picture instead of allowing us to see right past them, prods us to ask: Is what is natural necessarily just? What separates predation from murder? If a mouse could think and feel, where could it turn to seek redress? Such are the profound ethical and philosophical questions animating these lively tales.

  These tales about the war between the cat and the mouse and their under-

  world lawsuit clearly invite allegorical reading and would fit comfortably into folkloric traditions from around the world that analogize the fate of the

  wretched of the earth to that of feeble, defenseless prey. The social commentary also extends to the institutions of law and order that invariably side with This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:17 UTC

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  For e wor d

  x i i i

  the strong and turn a blind eye to the plight of the weak. Social and political hierarchies are thus justified in the name of the natural order of things. But the subaltern can still complain, and in complaining they make waves, or at least a few ripples. As one of the few nonhuman species in Chinese folk literature that have major speaking parts as animals, neither in human guise

  nor in human company, mice are accorded with remarkable dignity and moral

  gravitas. They sport a variety of personalities and occupy distinct social roles; they maintain deep kinship and communal ties and observe ritual proprieties (especially when it comes to the greatest event in life: marriage); they are responsible parents and dutiful sons and daughters; and they lead modest,

  cautious, and diffident lives forever wary of their nemeses. They may be vain and foolish at times (such as in the story of the rodent parents’ wish to marry off their daughter to the most powerful entity in the universe, only to send her into the maw of a cat), but they are also brave Davids not afraid of striking back at Goliaths. Their burning sense of injustice is the impetus behind the fascinating underworld court case stories. Although King Yama invariably

  affirms the righteousness of the predator-prey arrangement, the reader can-

  not fail to notice the unease with the way the whole system is stacked against the mice in favor of the humans and their feline retainers. Sleeping in the mouse’s despair is the Laozian aperçu that heaven and earth are hard-hearted and treat the myriad things as straw dogs. Never mind the Confucian faith

  in the inherent goodness and fairness of the universe.

  In other words, justice is a human achievement. Take humans out of the

  picture, the moral ballast vanishes, and the mice’s grievances become impon-derable. Justice for all is a noble aspiration, but in the final analysis, man is not the measure of all things and the human ledger of right and wrong does

  not exhaust the workings of the universe. We are a long way from the moral

  Manichaeanism of commonplace bestiaries and animal fables. Interestingly,

  the impulse to assign good and evil persists and blossoms into full-blown

  protest in the modern retellings whereby predators and prey are to make

  peace with one another and “if a cat kills a mouse, he’ll be hung from a tree,”

  feline instinct be damned. This is no mere pipe dream of some naive utopian; nowadays there are philosophers seriously pondering the advisability of

  eradicating animal-to-animal predation once technology makes it possible

  and not overly costly, effortful, or disruptive.11

  Such visions of universal peace and justice largely derive from the Chris-

  tian prophecy of the wolf dwelling with the lamb and the leopard lying down with the kid in the heavenly kingdom—as a way of finally resolving the problem of theodicy: If God is all powerful, why should there be predation and

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  x iv

  For e wor d

  suffering? Lu Xun probably would have scoffed at such a vision. In the same essay mentioned at the beginning, he recounts his brief bout of skirmishes

  with cats after learning from a servant (who turns out to have been lying)

  that a cat had gobbled up his pet mouse. In the end, however, he resigns to the fact that cats will be cats, neither good nor bad, just annoying. At least, he concedes, when they make mincemeat of their prey, they do not hoist

  the banners of “right” or “justice” to make the victim praise its executioner till the doomed hour.12 Thereafter he merely shoos them away when they get

  on his nerves. If “nature red in tooth and claw” provides no justification for injustices among humans—despite the social Darwinist doctrines that precisely aim to do that—then the human quest for universal justice and per-

  petual peace may have hidden boundaries as well. The hard question is where the frontier should be, or what is the furthest our moral circle can expand.

  As we try to figure out what we owe our fellow beings (human and nonhu-

  man), how to restore fragile ecosystems, how to reintroduce wildlife to former or new habitat, how to slow down species extinction, and in general how to

  share the planet with the myriad things in the Anthropocene, there are

  instructive lessons we can draw from the lives and troubles of others, even those of puny mice.

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  Ack now ledgm ents

  From early on I have been fascinated by animal tales. Because of that interest, for many years I have been collecting materials about the relationship

  between cats and mice in Chinese literature. It took a while, however, before I realized how rich the materials were on the underworld court case of the

  mouse against the cat that informs some of the selections translated in this volume. That tale, and others about acrimony between mice and cats, illustrates aspects of the role of animals in the Chinese imagination that are worth contemplation.

  In preparing this monograph I have benefited from the assistance of

  many individuals who provided me with materials or took the time to answer

  my questions. I want to mention here Tim Barrett, Rostislav Berezkin, Petra de Bruijn, Chen Yiyuan, Melissa McCormick, Karl Friday, Lloyd Haft, Nancy

  Hearst, Jan Huber, Keller Kimbrough, Laura Nüffer, Oki Yasushi, Pan

  Peizhong, Christopher Rea, Robin Ruizendaal, Laura Saums Mei, Asghar

  Seyed-Gohrab, Shang Lixin, Ivo Smits, Paul J. Smith, Marten Stol, Sun

  Xiaosu, Tian Yuan Tan, Tunc Sen, Mark Strange, Chris Uhlenbeck, Hugo van

  der Velden, Pierre-Étienne Will, Kirstin H. Williams, Jan Just Witkam, Catherine Vance Yeh, Louis Zonhoven, and Erik-Jan Zürcher. My apologies to all

  persons whose names I have inadvertently omitted to list. Haiyan Lee kindly agreed to provide a foreword for this book.

  In the person of Mr. Ma Xiaohe I would like to thank the staff of the

  Harvard-Yenching Library. They have, as always, been extremely helpful in

  obtaining many rare materials. I also want to express my thanks to the staff at the Asian Library of Leiden University.

  The publication of this volume was supported by a generous grant from

  the Harvard-Yenching Institute to cover the costs of indexing.

  As in the case of other books that I have published with University of

  Washington Press, it has been a great pleasure to work with Lorri Hagman

  and her efficient colleagues in Seattle.

  June 2018

  Wilt L. Idema

  x v

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  Chronology of Dy na sti es

  a nd Histor ica l Per iods

  Xia

  20th–15th century BCE

  Shang

  15th century–1045 BCE

  Zhou

  1045–256 BCE

  Qin

  221–207 BCE

  Han

  202 BCE–220 CE

  Western Han

  202 BCE–9 CE

  Eastern Han

  25–220

  Three Kingdoms

  Wei

  220–265

  Wu

  222–280

  Shu-Han

  221–265

  Jin

  266–420

  Northern and Southern dynasties

  386–589

  Sui

  581–618

  Tang

  618–906

  Five Dynasties

  907–960

  Song

  960–1279

  Northern Song

  960–1126

  Southern Song

  1127–1279

  Yuan

  1260–1368

  Ming

  1368–1644

  Qing

  1644–1911

  Republic of China

  1912–

  People’s Republic of China

  1949–

  x v i i

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  Mouse vs. Cat

  in Chinese Liter atu r e

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  Introduction

  H u m a ns h av e a lway s be e n fa sc i nat e d b y a n i m a l s. I n

  their infinite variety of shape and size, color and sound, expression and behavior they have filled men and women, in their real and imagined confrontations with them, with a bewildering variety of intense emotions, ranging from fear and loathing to admiration and wonder, including enmity and love, taboo

  and desire. Every culture, it would appear, has a rich store of oral stories that record rare and mythical animals, detail encounters with dangerous and helpful creatures, and explain the features of birds and beasts, whether wild or domestic. When telling stories of how animals acquired the characteristics

  that set them apart from each other and humans, and how the animals learned their hunting skills and hiding tricks, men and women in past and present

  cannot but imbue animals with human emotions and human motivations, a

  phenomenon known as “anthropomorphism.” In oral literature all over the

  world animals are allowed to express their feelings and schemes in words to each other and humans, and while it is obvious that most of us cannot understand the cries and other sounds of animals, many cultures know stories of

/>   privileged men and women who in one way or another have acquired the rare

  ability of understanding the language of birds and quadrupeds.1

  Once human beings had credited animals with emotions and thoughts

  like their own, the behavior of animals also was used to comment on human

  behavior. Animals turned out to be good to think with not only for classifica-tory schemes but also for evaluative purposes, and not only were the virtues and vices of individuals explained by comparison to specific animal traits, but also the interactions of human beings were illustrated by tales of animals interacting with other animals. In the words of the manifesto of Humanimalia (an online journal of human/animal interface studies), “Animals have been

  the slightly skewed mirror that has allowed aspects of human consciousness

  and life to appear as if they were somehow outside us, and hence observable 3

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  4

  I n t roduct ion

  and manageable—from animal fables to metaphysical phantasies like The

  Journey to the West and The Golden Ass. Animals are our ‘near abroad,’ aspects of the world that are the closest to us as a species (itself a vexed and contest-able term), yet different enough to embody significant (and hence illuminating) difference.”2 While anthropomorphism has been criticized from a

  science perspective, it tends to be highly effective in literature. Animal images quickly create a mood. In fables and other tales, animals may be humanized

  to the extent of caricature, but their presence still animates stories that if they were told about humans would appear flat. “Animals,” Lorraine Daston and

  Gregg Mitman write in their often-quoted introduction to Thinking with