Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Page 30
Shiwen yuxie 時文玉屑
Wen Yiduo 聞一多
Shiwentang 世文堂
“Wenfu” 聞訃
Shiwu guan 十五貫
Wenquxing 文曲星
Shizi gaozhuang 虱子告狀
Wenzheng 文正
shu 鼠 (mouse/rat)
Wolf of Zhongshan 中山狼
shu 數 (number, numerous)
Wu Cheng’en 吳承恩
“Shu shi xiancao” 鼠食仙草
Wu Huanchu 吳還初
Shu Yuanyu 舒源輿
Wu Sansi 武三思
Shuangxiong meng 雙熊夢
Wu Zetian 武則天
Shujing zuofan 鼠精作反
Wu Zimu 吳自牧
Shun 舜
Wudeng huiyuan 五燈會元
shuochang cihua 說唱詞話
Wudidong 無底洞
Shuoyuan 說苑
Wudidong laoshu jianü 無底洞老鼠
“Shuxi” 鼠戲
嫁女
Shuyu shuo 鼠獄說
Wusheng Laomu 無生老母
shuzi 鼠子
Wushu nao Dongjing Baogong shouyao
Siba mao you yin 四八貓遊陰
zhuan 五鼠鬧東京包公收妖傳
Siku quanshu 四庫全書
Wutong 五通
Sima Qian 司馬遷
wuxing wuying 無形無影
Student Zhang 張生
Wuying zhuan 無影傳
Su Shi 蘇軾
su’er 粟耳 (millet ear)
xian 仙
su’er 速兒 (quickly get a son)
Xianchan xiaolu 銜蟬小錄
sufu 俗賦
xiangmao jing 相貓經
Sun Sunyi 孫蓀意
Xiangnang ji 香囊記
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Gl os s a ry of Ch i n e se Ch a r act e r s
187
xianshu 仙鼠
Yao Shouzhong 姚守中
Xianyi bian 賢奕編
Yaoque fu 鷂雀賦
Xiaodehao 笑得好
Yapian Xian 鴉片先
xiaojuan 小卷
Ye Yusun 葉瑜蓀
Xiaolin 笑林
yejing 業鏡
Xiaopin ji 效顰集
Yelang 夜郎
Xiaoshuo yuebao 小說月報
Yijianzhi 夷堅志
xie 鞋 (shoe)
Yijing 義凈
xie 諧 (together)
Yinglou 穎樓
Xie Cheng 謝承
yingwu 鸚鵡
Ximen Qing 西門慶
Yingwu fu 鸚鵡賦
Xingshi yinyuan zhuan 醒世姻緣傳
Yingying 鶯鶯
Xinkan jingben tongsu yanyi Bao Longtu
“Yishu” 義鼠
pan Baijia gong’an 新刊京本通俗演
Yongne Jushi 慵訥居士
義包龍圖判百家公案
you 酉
Xinkan Songchao gushi Wushu danao
You Tong 尤侗
Dongjing ji 新刊宋朝故事五鼠大鬧
Yu Mong-in 柳夢寅
東京記
Yu Ping 于平
Xinke quanxiang Wushu nao
Yu Yue 俞樾
Dongjing 新刻全相 五鼠鬧東京
Yu Zhaofu 于兆福
Xinshu shi 新鼠史
Yu Zongben 俞宗本
Xixiang ji 西廂記
Yuanyang chubin 鴛鴦出殯
Xiyang laoshu jianü 西洋老鼠嫁女
Yue Fei 岳飛
Xiyou ji 西遊記
“Yumian mao” 玉面貓
xiyu 西域
Yuxie 玉屑
Xu Qing 徐慶
Xu xuanguai lu 續玄怪錄
Zeng Rui 曾瑞
Xu Zhimo 徐志摩
Zeng Xianquan 曾憲詮
Xuanzang 玄奘
Zengmao shi 憎貓詩
Xue Pinggui 薛平貴
Zhan Xiongfei 展雄飛
Xue Rengui pingdong 薛仁貴平東
Zhang Bo 張搏
Xue Wei 薛偉
Zhang Guangwen 張廣文
“Xumao shuo” 蓄貓說
Zhang Liang 張良
Xusi bian 續巳編
Zhang Liyou 張歷友
Zhang Qian 張騫
Yan Chasan 閻察散
Zhang Suoxing 張所行
Yang Chuanzhen 楊傳珍
Zhang Tang 張湯
Yang family, generals of the 楊家將
Zhao Bi 趙弼
Yang Kui 楊夔
Zhao Dun 趙遁
Yang su yuan 羊訴冤
Zhao Kuo 趙括
Yang Tianyi 楊天一
Zhaohua xishi 朝花夕拾
Yang Xiuqing 楊秀卿
Zhaoshi gu’er 趙氏孤兒
“Yangli shu” 養貍述
Zhaozhou 趙州
Yanzi fu 燕子賦
Zhenge 珍哥
Yao 堯
zhengqi wenxue 爭奇文學
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188
Gl os s a ry of Ch i n e se Ch a r act e r s
Zhengyi 正一
Zhou Wenzhi 周文之
Zhi Dun (Daolin) 支遁道林
Zhou Yafu 周亞夫
Zhiwen lu 咫聞錄
Zhu Bajie 朱八戒
Zhong Shengyang 鍾聲揚
Zhu Ci 朱泚
Zhongguo geyao jicheng: Jiangsu juan
Zhu Fuzhen 朱福珍
中國歌謠集成江蘇卷
Zhu Heling 朱鶴齡
Zhongguo minjian wenxue jicheng
Zhu Suchen 朱素臣
Dongming minjian gushi juan 中國民
Zhu Xi 朱憙
間文學集成東明民間故事卷
Zhu Xiang 朱湘
Zhongguo minjian wenxue jicheng:
Zhu Yizun 朱彝尊
Henan Yushi juan 中國民間文學集成
Zhu Zhang 朱彰
河南尉氏卷
Zhu Zhanji 朱瞻基
Zhongguo minjian wenxue jicheng
Zhuang Yuanxie 莊元燮
Zhejiang sheng Tongxiang xian
Zhuangzi 莊子
juan 中國民間文學集成浙江省桐鄉
Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮
縣卷
Zhuxianzhen 朱仙镇
Zhongyong 中庸
zi 子
Zhou 紂
Zi Zhang 子章
Zhou Gong 周公
zitan 自嘆
Zhou Hougong (Shouzhai) 周厚躬綬齋
Zong Bo 宗伯
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Notes
For e wor d: T h e L i v e s a n d T rou bl e s of Ot h e r s
1 Lu Xun (1973, 8–9).
2 Lu Xun (1973, 9).
3 Daston and Mitman (2005).
4 I discuss at some length the literary trope of anthropomorphism in a cross-cultural context in Lee (forthcoming).
5 McMahan (2016, 268).
6 See Lee (2018) for a survey of the clashes between animal rights advocates who may well be called modern Mohists and conservation biologists who subscribe to the more pragmatic “land ethic” first articulated by Aldo Leopold.
7 Blakeley (2003, 152).
8 Quoted in Slingerland (2014, 124).
9 A passage in
Marcel Proust’s masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu gets at the same psychological truth. In it, the narrator recalls venturing into the back kitchen one evening, when he was a small boy vacationing in the country, only to witness the maid wrestling ferociously with a spasmodic chicken fighting for its dear life. “Trembling all over,” he resolves to ask for the maid’s immediate dismissal. Upon reflection, however, he realizes that it would mean giving up his favorite roast chicken dish, which is the maid’s specialty. It then dawns on him that the adults around him have long ago made
“the same cowardly reckoning” (Proust 1922, 165). It is as if they had all heeded Mencius’s advice that willful ignorance is the precondition for learning to tolerate what one cannot bear to see or hear.
10 Slingerland (2014, 122–25).
11 McMahan (2016).
12 Lu Xun (1973, 5).
I n t roduct ion
1 For a thematic survey of animal folktales all over the world, see Uther (2004).
2 Humanimalia (n.d.).
3 Daston and Mitman (2005, 12–13).
4 Dithmar (1988); Lefkowitz (2014). Hawhee (2017, 70–88) stresses the importance of the fable in Greek rhetoric as the clinching argument; she also stresses the importance of the fable in early education, as students were required to compose fitting speeches for animals in fables (87).
5 Zakani (2012).
6 Ziolkowski (1993). For a study and translation of Ysengrimus, see Mann (1987; 2013).
Mann (2009, 2–27) surveys European medieval beast literature in all its genres and provides an elucidating discussion (28–52) of the different literary strategies of the 189
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Not e s to to i n t roduct ion
beast fable and the beast epic: if the fable shows the ineffectiveness of argument in a world of brute power, the epic shows the power of language to dupe one’s opponents.
From the late twelfth century we also have the Speculum stultorum, an epic poem in four thousand lines by Nigel of Longchamp, which describes the adventures of an ass that wants to have a longer tail to match its long ears. While in the Ysengrimus the animals only rarely interact with humans, the ass’s interlocutors are mostly human characters.
7 Jauss (1959, 56–314). For a recent survey of the fox in fable and beast epic, see Janssens and Van Daele (2001). For an English translation of the Dutch beast epic Van den vos Reynaerde, see Bouwman and Besamusca (2009).
8 For an English translation, see Attar (1984). In Iranian mythology the Simurgh is a majestic bird, in many ways similar to the Phoenix. The name of the Simurgh can be understood as meaning “thirty birds,” so when the thirty birds on their pilgrimage eventually arrive at the dwelling place of the Simurgh, they see only their own reflection in a lake, showing that the highest wisdom is not found outside ourselves, but in our own soul.
9 For a survey of medieval French debates between animals, see Smets (2004). Disputation poems featuring nonhuman protagonists including animals were already known from the ancient Babylonian world, both in Sumerian and Akkadian. See Jiménez (2017). The several Akkadian texts in which the fox confronts other animals also display strong narrative elements. See also Vanstiphout (1988).
10 Bødker (1957).
11 For a recent translation, see Visnu Sarma (1993). The Indian fable collections also contained some materials of Middle Eastern origin.
12 Ruymbeke (2017).
13 Ohnuma (2017, 41–93). Around two hundred of the jataka are animal tales. These often comment bluntly on the cruelty animals suffer at the hands of humans; in many cases animals show a superior virtue and wisdom.
14 For inventories of Chinese animal tales, see Ding Naitong (2008), Jin Ronghua (2007), and Ting (1978).
15 For the engagement of early Chinese philosophers with animals (and the absence of a systematic zoology), see Sterckx (2002). For an account of the Confucian ethical attitude toward animals from earliest times till the Ming, see Blakeley (2002) and R. Taylor (1986).
16 On the incident involving the cat, see Spring (1993, 63–64).
17 This tale is found in Li Fuyan’s Xu xuanguai lu as “Xue Wei.” For an English translation, see Kao (1985, 266–70). Aristotle, too, defined animals as unable to speak, but linked this characteristic with an inability to engage in true (“human”) social interaction. He also did not share the Chinese belief in changeability; a belief in fixed essences underlines his project of descriptive zoology.
18 See Zeitlin (1993, 39–40) for a discussion of the criticism by Ji Yun (1724–1805), one of the most prestigious intellectuals of his time, of China’s most famous collection of anomaly stories and miracle tales, Pu Songling’s (1640–1715) Liaozhai zhiyi.
19 Traditional Arab Muslim poetics also were averse to fiction. Ghersetti (2013) discusses how Arab Muslim thinkers accommodated the animal fable as providing wisdom, but This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:51 UTC
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191
also shows how authors using animal fables felt increasingly pressured to defend their use of talking animals.
20 On foxes and vixens in Chinese animal stories, see Huntington (2003) and X. Kang (2005). For a representative selection of stories from Liaozhai zhiyi in English translation, see Pu Songling (2006). Full translations of the collection are available in French and German.
21 Cats only very rarely feature in stories of animals seducing men or women in human guise. One reason may be that they are one of the few animals that as animals are allowed to sleep close to humans.
22 The Journey to the West is available in two full English-language translations: Wu Cheng’en (1982–86) and Yu (1977–83).
23 Lee (2014, 72–81), in her discussion of animals in traditional Chinese literature that serves as an introduction to her analysis of animals in contemporary Chinese literature, stresses the Chinese traditional tendency toward anthropomorphism (which here means portraying animals in human guise), taking her examples from Xiyou ji and Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi.
24 Most Panchatantra stories that are encountered within the borders of the People’s Republic of China circulate among minorities, not among the Han (Liu Shouhua 1983).
25 In the fifth-century Baiyu jing, translated in 492, only five of the ninety-eight fables are animal fables, and in only two of these the animals speak (Chen Hong and Zhao Jibin 2012, 6; Rong Sheng 1987; Wu Ping 2014, 112).
26 L. Chan (1998, 67).
27 For exhaustive surveys, see Liang Liling (2010) and Liu Shouhua (2012).
28 See Idema (1999; 2002); Zheng Acai (2008). The earliest adaptation of this tale to survive is a “ballad-story” ( cihua) that was printed in the fifteenth century, shortly afterward buried in a grave with other ballad stories, and rediscovered in 1967. A Dutch translation is included in Idema (2000, 235–68). In the Qing dynasty, the story circulated widely in various adaptations as a “precious scroll” ( baojuan). A translation of the “Precious Scroll of the Parrot” from western Gansu is found in Idema (2015b, 309–44). For other versions, also see Idema (2008, 184–86; 2010a, 168–72).
Wang Yaping (1905–1983) provided a revolutionary rewrite of the story of the filial parrot in his Bainiao chaofeng (Wang Yaping [1953] 1987, 60–69): after the little parrot has been killed by the owl and the snake, its mother unites all birds, led by the phoenix, in a battle against these miscreants.
29 For a full translation of the Zhuangzi, see B. Watson (1970). Talking animals are actually not that common in the Zhuangzi, but they are featured in two of the most popular chapters (1 and 17).
30 Spring (1993). It should be noted that
Spring does not discuss the two versions of the Yanzi fu that were discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts, which will be discussed in the introduction’s next section.
31 Mowry (1980–81); T. Tan (2007). For an English translation of the tale by James High-tower, see Birch (1972, 46–52). For a translation of the one-act play Zhongshan lang, usually ascribed to Wang Jiusi (1468–1551), see Dolby (1978, 93–102).
32 For full translations of these and other early animal rhapsodies, see Xiao Tong (1996, 40–81). Also see Lavoix (2015, 159–65).
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33 For a study and translation, see Ess (2003). For a French version, see Lavoix (2015, 165–72).
34 For a French rendition of this text, see Lavoix (2015, 172–74). For an extensively annotated edition of the Chinese text, see Zhao Youwen (1985, 302–5).
35 For modern annotated editions of this text, see Huang Zheng and Zhang Yongquan (1997, 376–412) and Xiang Chu (1989, 374–410). For an English translation, see Waley (1960). Chu Yongqiao (2002) has shown that the judicial procedures followed in this text correspond closely to the official rules for handling cases of the Tang dynasty. For a brief discussion, see Idema (2015a, 251–58).
36 For annotated editions of this text, see Huang Zheng and Zhang Yongquan (1997, 413–22) and Xiang Chu (1989, 411–31). For a versified English translation, see Yang and Yang (1986).
37 For annotated editions of this text, see Huang Zheng and Zhang Yongquan (1997, 1207–
12) and Xiang Chu (1989, 776–87). Mayo (2000) provides a detailed discussion of the bird names mentioned in Bainiao ming. Mair (2008) compares this text to Attar’s The Conference of Birds, Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foules, and the Tibetan The Precious Garland. Zhang Hongxun (1992) in a short section discusses the continuing popularity of the court of the phoenix as a theme in the popular literature of the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Qinjing, a short text detailing the moral qualities of sixty kinds of birds (a bestiary limited to birds), probably also dates from the Tang, even though it claims a much older date (I. Taylor 1986, 8–10).
38 For a detailed discussion of Dunhuang bird culture of the ninth and tenth centuries, see Mayo (2002).
39 Zhu Fengyu (2014) draws our attention to a number of texts in classical Chinese from Korea on law cases between animals.
To the extent that the Yanzi fu is a dispute, it may also be grouped with a number of other texts found at Dunhuang that are based on a dispute, such as the Cha jiu lun, in which an altercation between tea and wine is eventually terminated by water. Zhu Fengyu (2012) has linked this Dunhuang “disputation literature” ( zhengqi wenxue) to the popularity at the Tang imperial court of formal disputations by representatives of the Three Teachings ( sanjiao: Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism). This disputation literature had another high tide during the last decades of the Ming when Deng Zhimo and others in the 1620s published seven works featuring debates between flowers and birds, mountains and streams, breeze and moonlight, plum blossom and snow, vegetables and fruits, catamites and female prostitutes, and (again) tea and wine (Pan Jianguo 2002; 2007; Qi Shijun 2008; Zhang Hongxun 2014). Kim Moonkyong (2014) discusses the links between this type of Chinese works and comparable texts from Japan.