Zhiguai xiaoshuo 志怪小说 : Chinese tales of the strange
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One of the most important Chinese sources of Buddhist miracle tales was a genre called zhiguai xiaoshuo, or tales of the strange. Zhiguai were written in a plain, straightforward style, which was in keeping with their intention of being accurate records of unusual occurrences, and they usually cite specific times and places and other details in order to make them credible. These were not considered to be fictional stories. The Chinese had no trouble accepting the unusual happenings in these stories as fact because of the underlying belief in magic, and in fact one of the reasons these stories were written down in the first place was that they testified to the reality of such things. In the West we might call them fantastic or supernatural, but the Chinese didn’t think this way. Strange phenomena were taken to be real because they originated in the natural world – in other words, there was nothing outside of nature, or supernatural. Calling the stories fantastic doesn’t fit either, because they are not considered to be the creation of an author’s imagination. Because strange events were not separate from nature, the Chinese didn’t see these as scary, or as horror stories, even though they might include ghosts and corpses.
Zhiguai in general have five main characteristics:
Some zhiguai do deal with specifically Buddhist subjects, but not all of them have any religious element. There are stories about various kinds of kuai, or phenomena, including omens, ghosts, fairies, magical animals and people, and divine retribution. A main theme of zhiguai is karmic retribution. The point is not how society came to be the way it is, but how to accept things and act according to conditions. They’re not about how robbers came to be robbers, who was at fault or how they could be rehabilitated, but about how not to let robbers get you. Apparent contradictions were considered OK, and there was no need to reconcile them. There were two kinds of Buddhist zhiguai. One was stories about eminent monks, short biographies of monks who were supposed to have special powers or be particularly skilled in their practice. These stories were often used to legitimize a particular lineage or temple. If your temple was founded by someone particularly powerful, it was easier to get supporters and donations. Temple founding stories are related to stories of eminent monks and they sometimes overlap. The other kind of Buddhist zhiguai was stories about the intervention of Buddhist deities in the world of ordinary mortals, bodhisattvas like Guan-yin and Dizang. There are many Chinese tales of Guan-yin, and one of their most important functions was to explain the Lotus Sutra, particularly the Universal Gateway chapter, and convince the reader and listeners of the power of the bodhisattva and the sutra. Folk tales were sometimes co-opted and recast as Buddhist stories. Lots of the tales show up in more than one collection and in various versions, so the borders between the types of stories can become somewhat blurred Stories help establish Buddhism in China Many zhiguai collections were put together by elite laymen, but not all – some were done by monks. The Chinese began collecting Buddhist miracle tales in the Six Dynasties period (220-589 CE), and the collections became even more popular during the Tang dynasty [618-907 CE]. To understand the role of the stories, we need to back up and consider how Buddhism came to China in the first century CE. When it arrived, it immediately confronted a society that was based on very different ideas than the Indian society in which it developed. Where Buddhism taught that this world was characterized by suffering, the Chinese believed that we only had this one life and we ought to enjoy everything we could. Buddhism said that the ordained sangha should give up family life and withdraw from society in some ways, but for the Chinese, the family was the backbone of society and the perpetuation of the family line was the highest duty. Buddha said monks should live on donations from others, but the Chinese thought that every man should be self-sufficient by growing crops and every woman should weave. Buddhist monks held themselves outside of secular law; Chinese said there was no separation between church and state and monks were subject to imperial law. Thus Buddhism had an uphill climb before it began to take root in China, and in fact when it did, it was because people considered it simply another branch of Taoism. As Buddhism spread across China, it needed to position itself as powerful and efficacious in a culture of religious pluralism, where there was already Daoism, Confucianism and folk beliefs. The average person wouldn’t have made much distinction between Buddhism and any other spiritual practice, or between religion and the rest of daily life, but if he or she could be said to have had a religious goal, it was the generation of merit, in hopes of lessening of current difficulties and a gaining a fortunate rebirth. These were times of war, famine, natural disaster and general instability, and people were looking for manageable ways to protect themselves; increasingly they turned to Buddhism. Buddhist miracle tales were an important means of conveying the teachings, but they were also used by the clergy as evidence of the superiority (or, at least, the legitimacy) of Buddhism as a religion. In these stories, bodhisattvas convert the local spirits, propagating sutras is portrayed as the most effective means of rescuing dead loved ones from an eternity in a hell-realm, and Buddhist clerics defeat other spiritual leaders in contests and debates. The Six Dynasties era, which is the time of the earliest zhiguai, was the start of a time of division between the north and the south that lasted more than three centuries, until the T’ang Dynasty. It was also a time when Buddhism really started to catch on at all levels of society. By the start of the T’ang, Pure Land was widely popular, as was T’ien-t’ai, and temples played a large part in people’s daily lives. All kinds of people came to make offerings to buddhas and bodhisattvas, and to ask them for help or blessings. Temples also promoted the spiritual welfare of the Chinese empire and the well-being of the emperor, and they made sure that the imperial family and the country as a whole were protected by the bodhisattvas. Since the Chinese believed in all parts of the natural world, seen and unseen, they had to make sure they were protected from any evil forces. Temples and their tales The larger temples were favorite getaways for the T’ang literati looking for serenity and tranquility. The literati came up through the rigorous Confucian education system, passed the civil service exams and were appointed to offices in the imperial bureaucracy. But once they were there, their positions were only as secure as those of the men to whom they reported. Power struggles were common, so their livelihoods were always in danger. Who wouldn’t want to get away from the competition and rivalry, and spend time wandering around in scenic areas, listening to the birds and writing poetry? Temples also carried out programs of religious education aimed at the masses. Educated laity could read the sutras for themselves, or they could go to temples to hear elite monks giving talks or debating each other about fine points of the dharma. However, most of the average people were uneducated and illiterate, and they didn’t have the time or patience to sit through formal lectures. Even if they did, they wouldn’t have had the background to understand what was being presented, so the temples had to come up with some entertaining ways to explain the basics of Buddhism. One strategy was the popular lecturer, who might live in one temple or might travel around from place to place. He had to have a good voice, he had to be eloquent, he had to have some talent for making entertaining presentations, and he had to have a deep understanding of the teachings. He used stories, anecdotes and parables to keep the audience amused while imparting the Buddhist message, and these may have come from collections of Buddhist zhiguai. There is scholarship that says that these stories were compiled and circulated mainly to give preachers material for their sermons. Not only did they serve to illustrate the teachings, they helped the preacher make the case for the power of Buddhism. Another strategy for reaching the masses was to have a lot of festivals throughout the year. These festivals were good for community building and creating a common faith in line with the Mahayana messages of compassion and universal liberation. There was entertainment, like plays or skits based on episodes from sutras or the life of Buddha, as well as religious instruction. There were other events on the calendar too, like vegetarian feasts sponsored by the temple itself or by rich patrons or the imperial family. Sometimes the clergy would organize societies or clubs for the laymen for the purpose of constructing Buddhist images, copying or reciting sutras, making pilgrimages, or getting ready for the big public events. There were a number of opportunities for laity to participate at the temple and gain merit for themselves and learn about the dharma. Because the Chinese were a concrete, rather than an abstract, people, doing charitable work was important to them as a means of making teachings about compassion and interdependence tangible. In some stories, particularly those about Guan-yin, bodhisattvas become tangible and take concrete action in response to a sincere practitioner. It’s also important that because real people are testifying about their experiences, particularly with Guan-yin, the bodhisattva becomes Chinese. Guan-yin had migrated from India, so the stories showed that he or she would indeed respond in China to Chinese people who made a sincere request. Related to the growing popularity of Guan-yin, temples created hospitals and orphanages, fed the hungry, provided burial services for the poor, and set up inns to care for pilgrims. They also carried out public works projects like building roads, planting trees, and deepening rivers so that boats could get through. All of this was thought of as creating fields of compassion. |
More to explore
Campany, Robert Ford. Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China. Germany, University of Hawaii Press, 2012. Campany, Robert Ford. Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China. United States, State University of New York Press, 1996. Kao, Karl S. Y. (Gao, Xinyong). Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic: Selections from the Third to the Tenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Liu, M. (2015). Theory of the Strange: Towards the Establishment of Zhiguai as a Genre. UC Riverside. ProQuest ID: Liu_ucr_0032D_12265. Merritt ID: ark:/13030/m5q5597c. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3579w43t Pu Songling. Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. Hong Kong, Thos. De la Rue & Company, 1880. Zeitlin, Judith T. Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale. Stanford University Press, 1997. Zhang, Zhenjun. Buddhism and Tales of the Supernatural in Early Medieval China: A Study of Liu Yiqing's (403-444) Youming Lu. Brill, 2014. |
