SOURCE: "Obsession," in Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale, Stanford University Press, 1993, pp. 61-97.

[In the following excerpt from her book-length study of P 'u's life and works, Zeitlin examines some of Pu's stories within the context of the Chinese cultural condstruct of obsession. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the development of an obscure or unusual addiction, compulsion, mania, or craving became a fashionable pursuit of the intelligentsia and occasioned many works of literature and art.]

Without an obsession, no one is exceptional.
—Yuan Hongdao, A History of Flower Arranging

According to one of the apocryphal anecdotes that later sprang up around Liaozhai and its author, Pu Songling never passed the higher examinations because "his love of the strange had developed into an obsession."¹ As a result, when he entered the examination hall, foxspirits and ghosts jealously crowded around to prevent him from writing about anything but them. This colorful legend continues the transformation of the author into a character in his tales that we glimpsed in the previous chapter. But it also contains an important insight: the nearly five hundred tales in the Liaozhai collection grew out of the author's lifelong obsession with the strange. We have seen that in his preface Pu Songling represented his fascination with the strange as an uncontrollable passion and linked his recording of strange stories with the paradigm of obsessive collecting, in which "things accrue to those who love them." Within the stories themselves, the notion of obsession and collecting is likewise a prominent theme, one translated with great art into fiction.

The Chinese Concept of Obsession

The concept of obsession, or pi, is an important Chinese cultural construct that after a long development reached its height during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. A seventeenth-century dictionary, A Complete Mastery of Correct Characters (Zhengzi tong), offers the essential Ming definition of the term: "Pi is a pathological fondness for something" (pi, shihao zhi bing).² This pathological component of pi is significant: indeed a synonym for pi is sometimes "illness" or "mania" (bing). The medical usage of pi can be traced back to The Classic Materia Medica (Bencao jing) of the second century, where according to Paul Unschuld, the term pi shi or "indigestion" already figures as "one of the most important kinds of serious illnesses."³ An influential early seventh-century medical book, The Etiology and Symptomatology of All Diseases (Zhubing yuanhou lun) offers the most detailed description of this syndrome: "If digestion stops, then the stomach will not work. When one then drinks fluid, it will be stopped from trickling and will not disperse. If this fluid then comes into contact with cold qì [energy], it will accumulate and form a pi. A pi is what inclines to one side between the two ribs and sometimes hurts."⁴ According to a mid-eighth-century medical book, the Secret Prescriptions of the Outer Tower (Waitai biyao), a pi could even become as hard as stone and eventually develop into an abscess.⁵

From this sense of pathological blockage most likely evolved the extended meaning of obsession or addiction—something that sticks in the gut and cannot be evacuated, hence becoming habitual. When written in its alternative form with the "person" radical, rather than the "illness" radical, however, the primary meaning of pi becomes "leaning to one side," or "off-center."⁶ An attempt to relate the meanings of both graphs (which share a phonetic element) becomes apparent in the etymology in The Etiology and Symptomatology of All Diseases: "A pi is what inclines [pianpi] between the two ribs and sometimes hurts." From this sense of one-sidedness or partiality, pi also comes to denote the individual proclivities inherent in all human nature, as in the compound pixing (personal taste), written with either radical. This paradoxical view of obsession as at once pathological and normative helps account for the peculiar range of behavior associated with it and for the contradictory interpretations assigned to it.

The concept of pi is not merely a matter of terminology, however: once the symptoms have been codified, this particular term need not be used for the condition to be instantly recognizable.

The concept of pi is associated with a cluster of words, notably shi (a taste for) and hao (a fondness for). These characters are further combined to form almost synonymous compounds, such as pihao, pishi, and shihao. One caveat: I am not employing "obsession" in the technical psychiatric sense, which stresses negative and involuntary aspects. Compare the definition of obsession in Campbell, Psychiatric Dictionary, p. 492: "An idea, emotion, or impulse that repetitively and insistently forces itself into consciousness, even though it may be unwelcome."

Nonetheless, the term is charged with a strong emotional quality and has a wide range of implicit meanings; this was particularly true during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the concept of obsession had deeply penetrated all aspects of literati life. As an indication of its range of meaning, "pi" has been translated into English as addiction, compulsion, passion, mania, fondness for, weakness for, love of, fanatical devotion, craving, idiosyncracy, fetishism, and even hobby. On this level, the idea of obsession is most apparent in the pronouncements of Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610), one of the great literary and intellectual figures of his time. As he wrote in his History of Flower Arranging in 1599:

If someone has something he is really obsessed about, he will be deeply immersed, intoxicated with it. He will consecrate his life and even his death to it. What time would he have for the affairs of moneygrubbers and traders in official titles?

When someone in antiquity who was gripped by an obsession for flowers heard tell of a rare blossom, even if it were in a deep valley or in steep mountains, he would not be afraid of stumbling and would go to it. Even in the freezing cold and the blazing heat, even if his skin were cracked and peeling or caked with mud and sweat, he would be oblivious.

When a flower was about to bloom, he would move his pillow and mat and sleep alongside it to observe how the flower would go from budding to blooming to fading. Only after it lay withered on the ground would he take his leave.… This is what is called a genuine love of flowers; this is what is called genuine connoisseurship.

But as for my growing flowers, merely to break up the pain of idleness and solitude—I am incapable of genuinely loving them. Only someone already dwelling at the mouth of Peach Blossom Spring could genuinely love them—how could he still be an official in this dust-stained world!⁷

Rather than condemning the flower-lover as frivolous or ridiculous, or lamenting the misdirection of his energies and passion, Yuan raises an obsession with flowers to unprecedented heights, praising it as an ideal of unswerving commitment and genuine integrity incompatible with worldly success and conspicuous consumption. This idealization arises in part from his disgust at the shallow vogue for obsession in his day. For Yuan, true obsession is always a marginal activity, an act of alienation and withdrawal from conventional society. His polemic aimed at wresting obsession from the inauthentic vulgar mainstream; ironically it may have merely reinforced obsession's fashionability.

Yuan's description also implies some of the general principles of obsession. First, obsession describes a habitual fixation on a certain object or activity, rather than on a particular person, and it is particularly associated with collecting and connoisseurship. Second, it must be excessive and single-minded. Third, it is a deliberately unconventional and eccentric pose.

A Brief History of Obsession

The identification of behavior as obsessive and the attitudes toward that behavior evolved over time. Obsession first began to crystallize as a distinct concept in anecdotes about the free and unrestrained eccentrics included in the fifth-century anthology New Tales of the World (Shishuo xinyu) with corresponding overtones of eremitism and nonconformity. The spectrum of obsessions in New Tales of the World ranges wildly, from a fondness for funeral dirges and donkey brays to a passion for ox fights and the Zuo Commentary. One anecdote in the anthology even recounts an informal competition between a lover of money and a lover of wooden clogs. The lover of clogs proves himself the superior, not because of the object of his obsession, but because of his utter self-absorption in his clogs even when observers pay him a visit.⁸

It was not until the late Tang, however, that obsession was mated with connoisseurship and collecting and people began to leave written records of their obsessions. Of particular interest is a moving passage by the great ninth-century art historian Zhang Yanyuan, which lays out the basic paradigms of the fanatical connoisseur's spirit: these paradigms will be re-enacted over and over in subsequent ages.

Ever since my youth I've been a collector of rare things.… When there was a chance of getting something, I'd even sell my old clothes and ration simple foods. My wife, children, and servants nag and tease me, sometimes saying, "What's the point of doing such a useless thing all day long?" At which I sigh and say "If one doesn't do such useless things, then how can one take pleasure in this mortal life?" Thus my passion grows ever deeper, approaching an obsession.…

Only in calligraphy and painting have I not yet forgotten emotion. Intoxicated by them I forget all speech; enraptured I gaze at and examine them.… Does this not seem wiser, after all, than all that burning ambition and ceaseless toil when fame and profit war within one's breast?⁹

This autobiographical sketch begins by enumerating the symptoms of obsession—the utter absorption and diligence, the willingness to endure physical privation, the transcendent joy. Zhang hints at the notion of obsession as a form of individual self-expression, but his statement also becomes a defense, an apology for a private obsession, that justifies the rejection of public life. Zhang introduces the notion of obsession as compensation for worldly failure at the same time as he criticizes the fame, profit, and vain ambition underlying success. He formulates the idea that an obsession should be useless—something that does not contribute to official success or material wealth. In this way, obsession is linked with the tradition of the recluse in Chinese culture and the worthy gentleman who does not achieve success but instead disdains competition for power and prestige as an inferior mode of life.

Zhang's statement foreshadows the flourishing of art connoisseurship during the Song dynasty. Not only ancient masterpieces of painting and calligraphy but all sorts of antiques—bronzes, carved jades, stone engravings, and ceramics—as well as things from nature, such as rocks, flowers, and plants, became objects of collecting. With the onset of printing, the compiling of handbooks and catalogues devoted to a particular type of object came into fashion. New paradigms of eccentric collectors emerged, firmly tying the pursuit of obsession to Song literati culture. This mania for collecting culminated in one of the most notorious episodes in Chinese history, "the levy on flowers and rocks" (huashi gang), the mass appropriations for the collection of Huizong (r. 1100-1125), the last Northern Song emperor and an aesthete whose decadence would be blamed for the loss of the north to the Jin barbarians.

As the craze for art collecting and connoisseurship became closely associated with the notion of obsession in Song culture, an uneasiness arose that an overattachment to objects courts disaster. Zhang Yanyuan's discovery of the joys of collecting could not be replicated unequivocally by the more self-conscious Song connoisseurs. Framed by the destruction of the Five Dynasties in the mid-tenth century and the devastation of the Northern Song in the early twelfth century, three famous essays debate the dangers of obsession. These essays should be read sequentially because the later ones seem in part a response to the previous ones.

The need to justify obsessive collecting despite its potential for harm is first raised in the eleventh century in Ouyang Xiu's preface to his catalogue of epigraphy. His solution is to posit a hierarchy of value based on the kind of objects collected. He distinguishes ordinary treasures—pearls, gold, and furs—which incite conventional greed, from relics of the past, whose collection does not entail great physical risk and which supplement our understanding of history. With ordinary treasures, what counts is the power to get them; with relics of the past, what counts is the collector's taste and his whole-hearted love of them. But even compiling a catalogue does not quite set to rest Ouyang Xiu's anxieties about the future of his collection. He consoles himself in a fabricated dialogue:

Someone mocked me saying: "If a collection is large, then it will be hard to keep intact. After being assembled for a long time, it is bound to be scattered. Why are you bothering to be so painstaking?"

I replied: "It's enough that I am collecting what I love and that I will enjoy growing old among them."¹⁰

Ouyang Xiu's fears about the dispersal of his collection must have been prompted in part by the destruction of the great Tang estates a century or two earlier, a subject he addressed in an essay called "The Ling Stream Rocks" ("Lingxi shi ji").¹¹ Another connoisseur, Ye Mengde (1077-1148), reported that "Ouyang Xiu used to laugh at Li Deyu's [787-848] remark that neither his sons nor grandsons would ever give away one tree or one plant of his Pingyuan estate,"¹² for as everyone knew, the estate had been utterly destroyed.

In the next generation, Su Shi adopts another strategy to mitigate the dangers of collecting, one implicit in Ouyang Xiu's defense that what is important is the act of loving what one collects rather than the collection itself. Su Shi, too, posits a hierarchy of value, but not of the sorts of collections but of the sorts of collectors:

A gentleman may temporarily "lodge" his intetest in things, but he must not "detain" his interest in things. For if he lodges his interest in things, then even trivial objects will suffice to give him joy and even "things of unearthly beauty" will not suffice to induce mania in him. If he detains his interest in things, then even trivial objects will suffice to induce mania in him, and even things of unearthly beauty will not suffice to give him joy.¹³

Su Shi draws a subtle distinction between "lodging" (yu) one's interest temporarily in things and "detaining" (liu) one's interest permanently in them. In his scheme, lodging implies viewing objects as vessels through which one fulfills oneself rather than as things that one values for their own sake. This maximizes the benign pleasures of loving things and prevents even "things of unearthly beauty" (youwu) from causing injury.¹⁴ Detaining, on the other hand, implies a pathological attachment to actual things as things. Su Shi employs the clearly pejorative term "mania" (bing) rather than the more ambiguous "pi" to emphasize the harmful nature of the passions detaining engenders. He concludes that only the detaining kind of collecting brings personal and national catastrophe.

Ouyang Xiu's and Su Shi's clever arguments, however, are challenged by the poet Li Qingzhao (1081?-1149) in her autobiographical postface to the epigraphy catalogue of her husband, the antiquarian Zhao Mingcheng (1081-1129). Having survived the death of her husband, the destruction of their book collection, and the violent fall of the Northern Song dynasty, she speaks of experiencing the very disasters that Ouyang Xiu and Su Shi had most feared and warned against. She begins by echoing Ouyang Xiu's claims that epigraphy collections serve the lofty aims of redressing historiographic errors. But suddenly her tone shifts, and she attacks his privileging of scholarly collections over all others: "Alas! in the disasters that befell Wang Bo and Yuan Zai, what distinction was there between [collecting] books and paintings and [collecting] pepper?¹⁵ Both He Qiao and Du Yu had a mania—what difference was there between an obsession with money and an obsession with the Zuo Commentary?¹⁶ The reputations of such men may differ, but their delusion was one and the same."¹⁷

Li Qingzhao also rejects Su Shi's argument that the collector's self-control can prevent his passion from becoming pathological and thereby ward off disaster. In recounting the saga of the progressive worsening of her husband's obsession, she shows that Su Shi's distinction between "lodging" and "detaining" hangs by a thread. As Stephen Owen has pointed out, the book collecting that begins as a casual and joint pleasure for the young couple disintegrates into a nightmare of anxiety.¹⁸ Ouyang Xiu had argued in an autobiographical essay that being encumbered by the things of office made him distressed and worried, but that being encumbered by his scholarly possessions made him detached and freed him from vexation.¹⁹ The image of the lone woman Li Qingzhao stranded during the Jin invasion with fifteen boatloads of books that her dying husband had ordered her to protect renders the detachment posited by Ouyang Xiu and Su Shi utterly absurd.

The Late Ming Craze for Obsession

By the sixteenth century, however, most scruples or fears about the perils of obsession seem to have vanished. What is truly new in the explosion of writings in this period is the glorification of obsession, particularly in its most exaggerated form. Obsession becomes an important component of late Ming culture, in which it is linked with the new virtues of Sentiment (qing), Madness (kuang), Folly (chi), and Lunacy (dian). No longer do obsessives feel obliged to defend or apologize for their position. Although someone like the scholar-official Xie Zhaozhe (1567-1624) might caution his contemporaries that any preference, if sufficiently one-sided and extreme, should be considered "a form of illness,"²⁰ most of them were only too willing to contract such a pleasurable virus. Obsession had become a sine qua non, something the gentleman could not afford to do without.

As the preface to the sixteenth-century Brief History of Obsession and Lunacy (Pidian xiaoshi) puts it: "Everyone has a predilection; this gets called obsession. The signs of obsession resemble folly and madness.… The gentleman worries only about having no obsessions."²¹ Declares Yuan Hongdao: "I have observed that in this world, all those whose words are insipid and whose appearance is detestable are men without obsessions."²² Zhang Dai (1599-1684?), a Ming loyalist, concurs: "One cannot befriend a man without obsessions, for he lacks deep emotion; nor can one befriend a man without faults, for he lacks integrity."²³ A seventeenth-century aphorism by Zhang Chao (fl. 1676-1700) clinches the indispensability of obsession on aesthetic grounds: "Flowers must have butterflies, mountains must have streams, rocks must have moss, water must have seaweed, old trees must have creepers, and people must have obsessions."²⁴

The eleventh-century intellectuals had already argued that obsessions were valuable as an outlet for personal fulfillment; in the sixteenth century, obsession as a vehicle for self-expression becomes the dominant mode. The traditional Chinese understanding of the function of poetry, that it "speaks of what is intently on the mind," had long spread to the other arts, such as painting, music, and calligraphy; now this notion was extended to cover virtually any activity, no matter how preposterous. Moreover, this self-expression was no longer involuntary: it had become obligatory. Most important, the virtue of an obsession lay not in the object of devotion, not even in the act of devotion, but in self-realization. As Yuan Hongdao observes:

The chrysanthemums of Tao Yuanming, the plum blossoms of Lin Bu, the rocks of Mi Fu—people all swap stories about these men's obsessions as delightful topics of conversation and then blithely take up something as an obsession in order to amuse themselves. Alas! they are mistaken. It wasn't that Tao loved chrysanthemums, Lin loved plum blossoms, or Mi loved rocks; rather, in each case, it was the self loving the self.²⁵

In this most radical equation, the boundary between subject and object has utterly dissolved. Obsession is no longer understood as a form of alterity, but as a self-reflexive act: it is not the self loving the other, but the self loving the self

But the idealization of obsession in the sixteenth century also arose from a new evaluation of love: the fanatical attachment of a person to a particular object was interpreted as a manifestation of "that idealistic, single-minded love,"²⁶ "that headlong, romantic passion,"²⁷ known as qing. Once the relationship between someone and the object of his obsession was conceptualized as qing, it was not a difficult leap to declare that the object itself could be moved by its lover's devotion and reciprocate his feelings. Since, for the most part, the objects of obsessions were not human, this meant anthropomorphizing the object, adopting the view that animate and inanimate things alike, are capable of sentiment. As we will see, this is one of the most important developments in the theory of obsession for Liaozhai.

Such a position was facilitated both by the traditional Chinese animistic view of the universe and by the broader implications of qing during this period as a universal force and even as life itself.²⁸ For example, the main project of the seventeenth-century compendium of fact and fiction called A Classified History of Love is to document the power of qing over every part of the universe—from wind and lightning to rocks and trees, from animals and birds to ghosts and spirits: "The myriad things are born of qing and die of qing," comments the Historian of Qing.²⁹ In this scheme, the human race becomes merely one more category subject to the forces of qing.

In earlier times, an important, though not mandatory, criterion for recording an obsession was that it be strange, peculiar, incomprehensible. As a preface to A Brief History of Obsession and Lunacy explains: "Nowadays, no one is able to fathom the appeal that watching ox fights or hearing donkey brays held for [those in the past] who were fond of such things. That is why they are all pi."³⁰ A particularly idiosyncratic obsession could win someone fame in the annals of unofficial history, such as Liu Yong of the Southern Dynasties who enjoyed eating human fingemail parings or Quan Changru of the Tang who liked to eat human scabs because he said they tasted like dried fish flakes.³¹ But as the fad for obsession grew during the Ming, another change began to take place: the objects of obsessions became increasingly standardized as indexes of certain virtues and personalities. By the sixteenth century, obsessions have grown noticeably less variant. Although some unusual obsessions are mentioned, such as a penchant for football or for operas about ghosts, and particularly disgusting eating habits are still listed with relish,³² most writings now concern highly conventionalized obsessions. The most frequent are books, painting, epigraphy, calligraphy, or rocks; a particular musical instrument, plant, animal, or game; tea or wine; cleanliness; and homosexuality.³³ But even within these, the actual choices—which flower, which game—have become circumscribed and stereotyped.

By the seventeenth century, a rich tradition of lore and a corpus of specialized manuals or catalogues for the connoisseur had accumulated around virtually every standard obsession. Pu Songling appears to have incorporated research from such manuals on a number of the objects that form the focus of his obsessional tales. Liaozhai commentators frequently cite specialized handbooks both to explain and to praise the accuracy of Pu Songling's connoisseurship. Allan Barr has demonstrated that Pu partially derived the cricket lore introduced into the famous tale "The Cricket" ("Cuzhi"; 4.484-90) from a late Ming guide to Beijing, A Brief Guide to Sights in the Capital (Dijing jingwu lüe), which Pu abridged and wrote a new preface for.³⁴ According to Barr, he made use of "a number of technical details from the guidebook—the different varieties of cricket, the insect's diet" and even "borrowed some phrases wholesale" from it.³⁵

The stylistic influence of catalogues and manuals is particularly evident in the unusual opening of the tale "A Strangeness of Pigeons" ("Ge yi"; 6.939-43), which abandons the biographical or autobiographical formats typical of Liaozhai and most classical fiction. The opening of the story is virtually indistinguishable from a catalogue: it lists the different varieties of pigeons and their locales and provides advice on their care: "The classification of pigeons is extremely complicated. Among the rarest varieties are the Earth Star of Shanxi, the Delicate Stork of Shandong, the Butterfly Wings of Guizhou, the Acrobat of Henan, and the Pointed Tips of Zhejiang. In addition, there are types like Boot Head, Polka-Dot, Big White, Married Sparrow, Spotted-Dog Eyes, and innumerable other sorts that only connoisseurs can distinguish."³⁶ Pu Songling explicitly acknowledges his debt to such a catalogue when he informs us that the wealthy pigeon fancier of his story strove to amass an exhaustive collection "according to the handbook" (6.839).³⁷ In fact, Pu Songling himself compiled two catalogues on other subjects: a rock catalogue and a flower handbook in his own hand are still extant.³⁸

Narratives recounting personal experiences with the subject of a manual or a catalogue were sometimes included in such books. Such accounts may be among the most important inspirations for Pu Songling's connoisseurship tales. For instance, Ye Mengde, a Song dynasty lover of rocks, in a colophon to a famous record of a Tang estate, relates how acquiring a wonderful rock miraculously cured him of sickness.³⁹ The therapeutic properties of obsession are carried even further in "White Autumn Silk" ("Bai Qiulian"; 11.1482-88), a Liaozhai tale about a poetry-obsessed carp-maiden, whose lover's recitation of her favorite Tang poems not only cures her of illness but even revives her from the dead. Yuan Hongdao's portrait of the ideal flower-lover in his handbook on flower arranging anticipates to a remarkable degree, the peony fanatic in the tale "Ge Jin" (10.1436-44), who anxiously begins watching for peony shoots in the dead of winter and writes a hundred-line poem called "Longing for Peonies" ("Huai mudan") as he goes into debt waiting for the peonies to bloom.

As objects became associated with certain qualities and historical figures, the choice of obsession became dictated by those qualities and figures. By loving a particular object, the devotee was striving to claim allegiance to that quality or to emulate that figure. This idea can be glimpsed already in the twelfth-century preface to Du Wan's famous Rock Catalogue of Cloudy Forest (Yunlin shipu): "The Sage Confucius always said, 'The benevolent man finds joy in mountains.' The love of rocks implies 'finding joy in mountains,' for the stillness and longevity that Confucius mentioned can also be found in rocks."⁴⁰

Thus an individual might favor rocks if he prized the moral virtues associated with rocks—benevolence, stillness, longevity, loyalty—or if he wanted to imitate the famous Song rock-lover known as Mi Fu or Mi the Lunatic (Mi Dian). Someone else, on the other hand, might feel drawn to chrysanthemums because of their association with purity and aloofness and with the recluse-poet Tao Yuanming. Although in theory the spontaneous impulse of a particular nature, in practice an obsession had become a studied act of self-cultivation. Once an object had become a fixed emblem of certain virtues, it was again an easy leap to attribute these virtues to the object itself. This again led to the anthropomorphizing of the obsessional object: the object not only symbolizes a particular virtue but also possesses that virtue and behaves accordingly.

The personification of objects is an ancient poetic trope. In the sixth-century anthology New Songs from a Jade Terrace (Yutai xinyong), for example, the attribution of sentiment and sentience to objects is a common device. Both natural objects, such as vegetation, and manufactured objects, such as mirrors, are portrayed as sharing or echoing the emotions of human beings. A typical couplet describes the grass growing over palace steps: "Fading to emerald as though it knew the season, / Holding in fragrance as though it had emotion."⁴¹ This technique is later formulated in Chinese poetics as the overlapping of scene (fing) and emotion (qing): emotion is both aroused by the scene and located within it.⁴² But this sort of personification differs from the personification of objects through obsession. In New Songs from the Jade Terrace, objects are like mirrors—they reflect the narcissistic emotions of the human world. Such objects have no separate identity or independent emotions; rather, they allegorically represent the speaker—for example, the discarded fan that symbolizes Lady Ban Jieyu's neglect by the emperor.⁴³

In Yuan Hongdao's History of Flower Arranging, however, flowers, like human beings, experience different moods; for example, he advises fellow connoisseurs how to tell when flowers are happy or sad, drowsy or angry, so as to water them accordingly.⁴⁴ Here flowers are presented as feeling emotions of their own accord; they do not merely mirror or reinforce the emotions of a human being. Once things are seen as possessing independent emotions, they can be thought capable of responding to a specific person. Thus developed the idea that objects could find true friends or soul mates in those who love them. Zhang Chao distilled this idea into another aphorism: "If one has a single true friend in this world, one can be free of regrets. This is true not only for people, but also for things. For instance, the chrysanthemum found a true friend in Tao Yuanming … the flowering plum found a true friend in Lin Bu … and the rock found a true friend in Mi the Lunatic."⁴⁵

The Ethereal Rock

It is this last offshoot of obsession that becomes the central theme of Pu Songling's brilliant tale "The Ethereal Rock" ("Shi Qingxu"; II.1575-79), which narrates the friendship between a fanatical rock collector called Xing Yunfei and the rock named in the story's title.⁴⁶ One day, Xing finds a rock entangled in his fishing net. It is a fantastic rock, shaped like a miniature mountain with peaks and crannies, and it has unusual powers—whenever it is going to rain, the rock puffs tiny clouds, just like a real mountain. When word of the rock gets around, a rich local bully brazenly orders his servant to walk off with it, but it slips through the servant's fingers and falls into a river. The bully offers a substantial reward but to no avail. The rock is not recovered until the desolate Xing happens to walk by the spot and sees it lying in a suddenly transparent spot in the river. Xing keeps his recovery of the rock a secret, but one day he is visited by a mysterious old man who demands the return of "his" rock. As proof for his claim, the old man names the number of the rock's crannies (92) and reveals that in the largest crevice is carved the miniature inscription OFFERED IN WORSHIP, ETHEREAL, THE CELESTIAL ROCK. Xing is finally granted ownership of the rock on the condition that he forfeit three years of his life. The old man then pinches together three of the crannies on the rock and tells Xing that the number of crannies (89) is now equal to the number of years he is fated to live. After more trials and tribulations—the rock is stolen by burglars, a corrupt official who wants the rock throws Xing into jail—Xing, as foretold, dies at the age of eighty-nine and is buried, according to his last wishes, with his rock. But half a year later, grave robbers steal the rock. Xing's ghost hounds the men into giving up the rock, but once again an unscrupulous official confiscates the rock and orders a clerk to place it in his treasury. The rock twists out of his hands and smashes itself into a hundred pieces. Xing's son buries the pieces in his father's grave once and for all.

Pu Songling's comment, as Historian of the Strange, begins by raising the old fears of dangerous obsessions with beautiful things (youwu), but soon yields to the admiration of sentiment popularized during the late Ming:

Unearthly beauty in a thing makes it the site of calamity. In this man's desire to sacrifice his life for the rock, wasn't his folly extreme! But in the end, man and rock were together in death, so who can say the rock was "unfeeling"? There's an old saying, "A knight will die for a true friend."⁴⁷ This is no lie. If it is true even for a rock, can it be any less true for men?

The Historian of the Strange's rhetoric underscores the irony that a technically "unfeeling" rock (the phrase wu qing is a play on "inanimate") displays more true feeling than most human beings, who are by definition animate and hence should "have feeling" (you qing).

Sentiment is not a static force in the narrative: the friendship between the hero and his rock grows and deepens, culminating in mutual self-sacrifice. The rock is an active participant in the tale. "Treasures should belong to those who love them," the proverbial saying about obsessive collectors reiterated by the divine old man in the tale, is interpreted in a new light: the object itself chooses and responds to the one who loves him. The rock flung himself into the rock-lover's fishing net and entangled himself in the world of passions; the rock's desire precipitated his premature entry into the world, like the rock that becomes the human Bao Yu in The Story of the Stone. As the old man informs Xing, the rock surfaced three years ahead of schedule, for "he was in a hurry to display himself." And once in Xing's possession, the rock beautifies himself for his lover: the clouds that he miraculously puffs up cease when he is in anyone else's custody. Even after the rock has once more been cruelly extorted from Xing, he comes in a dream to console Xing and arranges their final reunion. Thus this tale subtly inverts the roles of object and collector: Xing becomes the object of the rock's obsession.

The philosopher Li Zhi, one of the most powerful influences behind the iconoclastic trend in late Ming thought, had explored a similar idea in a brilliant polemic called "Essay on a Scroll Painting of Square Bamboo" ("Fangzhu tujuan wen").⁴⁸ It is a radical reinterpretation of a well-known anecdote from the fifth-century New Tales of the World. This classified anthology detailing the wit and exploits of the Wei-Jin eccentrics enjoyed particular popularity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, judging from the numerous editions and sequels to it published during this time, and it became a veritable bible for Ming and Qing fanciers of obsession.⁴⁹ The anecdote that Li Zhi drew upon concerns the love of bamboos: "Wang Huichih [Wang Huizhi; d. 388] was once temporarily lodging in another man's vacant house, and ordered bamboos planted. Someone asked, 'Since you're only living here temporarily, why bother?' Wang whistled and chanted poems a good while; then abruptly pointing to the bamboos, replied, 'How could I live a single day without "these gentlemen" [ci jun]?"' ⁵⁰

In Li Zhi's misanthropic view, Wang Huizhi preferred the companionship of "these gentlemen" to the society of humans, and the bamboos themselves recognized a kindred spirit in a man of Wang's uncommon temperament:

The one who in the past loved bamboos [Wang Huizhi] called them "gentlemen" out of love. He didn't call them gentlemen because he meant they resembled refined gentlemen; rather he was depressed and had no one to converse with—he felt that "The only ones I can associate with are the bamboos."⁵¹ For this reason he befriended them and gave them that designation … Someone said, "Wang considered bamboos as 'these gentlemen,' so the bamboos must have considered Wang as 'that gentleman.'" … But it wasn't the case that Wang loved bamboos—rather the bamboos loved Wang of their own accord. For when a man of Wang's mettle gazed at mountains, rivers, stones, and earth, all would have naturally grown beautiful, these gentlemen not least of all.

All things between heaven and earth have a spirit; especially these hollow gentlemen that rise straight up—could they alone be unspirited?⁵² As the saying goes, "For a true friend, a knight exerts himself; for an admirer, a lady makes herself beautiful." So too these gentlemen. As soon as they encountered Wang, their distinct virtue and extraordinary energy [qi] would have naturally grown exhilarated; their lifelong principle of standing fast amid ice and frost would have blown away into the fluty love songs of phoenixes;⁵³ all must have been out of a desire to make themselves beautiful for the one who admired them. For how could they stand there so solitary, moaning in the wind for years on end, forever harboring the regret that they had no true friend?

In Li Zhi's polemic against the shallowness of the late Ming fashion for obsession, he reverses the hierarchy of object and obsessive and anthropomorphizes the bamboos by imputing to them human will and desire. He argues that every object has a shen, a spirit—an animate force within it—and extrapolates from this animistic view, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that for a meaningful existence, an object, like a person, needs a true friend to love and understand him. Li cleverly imagines the scene of the bamboos' attempted seduction of Wang Huizhi through an elaborate series of puns that play on bamboo's conventional associations with integrity and steadfastness, but his anthropomorphizing of bamboo was clearly a rhetorical pose, a conceit.⁵⁴

In "The Ethereal Rock," Pu Songling takes the ideas of Li Zhi's essay further. Carefully, with all the techniques of a novelist, he gives the intense love between an inanimate object and a man a coherent narrative shape and in so doing realizes this rhetorical stance literally. But for an inanimate rock to be fully human, it must die. The most shocking moment in the tale is when the rock smashes himself into smithereens: the valuable has been made worthless; the permanent has been destroyed. The rock is able to know love, but at the price of suffering and mortality. His obsession with Xing culminates in self-sacrifice: to demonstrate his loyalty and remain with his true friend, the rock must in the end, like a knight-errant or a virtuous widow, sabotage his own beauty and commit suicide. Only in destruction is the rock safe and buried permanently with his beloved. As in Daoist parables of crooked trees that survive because they are useless, the rock, that "thing of unearthly beauty," can only be left in peace once his material value is gone.

It is no accident that Pu Songling chose an obsession with a rock to illustrate the theme of perfect friendship: the rock was conventionally valued as a symbol of loyalty and constancy. The phrase "a rock friend" (shi you), for instance, signified a faithful friend and was a common poetic designation for a rock.⁵⁵ The expression "a friendship of stone" (shi jiao) likewise describes a friendship as strong and permanent as stone; Pu Songling himself employed this phrase in a little homily on friendship.⁵⁶ Again, as I noted earlier, it was not uncommon to locate the qualities symbolized by an object in the object's innate nature. For instance, A Classified History of Love argues that since love is "as strong as stone or metal," it can actually transform itself into stone or metal.⁵⁷ In "The Ethereal Rock," Pu Songling brilliantly gives these figurative expressions a concrete and literal form.⁵⁸

By Ming times the rock had become a cult object. John Hay's study of the rock in Chinese art, Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth, has revealed the extent to which the rock had assumed the stature of a cultural icon in late Imperial China. Rocks, like stories, were prized for being singular, bizarre, odd. A rock was no ordinary object; it was an objet d'art, valued not for the ingenuity and artifice of human skill but for its exquisite naturalness. An obsession with unpolished and uncarved rocks was considered refined; compared to it, a passion for jade and precious stones was merely vulgar. (During the late Ming jades were even carved to look like rough stones.⁵⁹) Rocks were supposed to be prized only by real connoisseurs, but as Pu Songling makes clear, in a market where rocks commanded a high price, the powerful and wealthy extorted rocks for status and the ignorant chased after rocks for profit. Like Li Zhi's bamboos, who are said to detest their phony modern admirers, Pu Songling's rock could not possibly reciprocate the false love of the other collectors in the tale. It is the hero's pure and unwavering obsession amid this atmosphere of corruption that earns the rock's devotion.

The most obvious inspiration behind Pu Songling's rock-loving hero is the Song painter and calligrapher Mi Fu, whose obsession with rocks had become proverbial. Mi Fu's flamboyant brand of connoisseurship had enshrined him as the paragon of obsession and eccentricity. The numerous collections of anecdotes about Mi Fu published during the Ming attest to his great appeal.⁶⁰ The heady mixture of lunacy and sincere passion attributed to Mi Fu accorded well with the sensibility of the late Ming and can be detected in a number of Pu Songling's heroes. Xing's fanatical devotion in "The Ethereal Rock" had a precedent in the most celebrated anecdote about Mi Fu, which even figured in his official biography in the Song History: Mi Fu was said to have donned official garb to make obeisance to a favored rock in his collection and to have respectfully addressed it as "Older Brother Rock" (shi xiong) or, in a variant, as "Elder Rock" (shi zhang). ⁶¹

We can be certain of Pu Songling's familiarity with at least this anecdote. Not only did stories about Mi Fu enjoy wide circulation during the seventeenth century, but a reworking of this anecdote appears in a poem by Pu Songling entitled "Elder Rock." The rock described in this poem is thought to be still standing today on the former site of the Stone Recluse Garden (Shiyin yuan), which belonged to Pu Songling's friend and employer, Bi Jiyou.⁶²

Elder Rock's inlaid sword juts up high, so high;
He wears a turban, tablier, and sandals of straw.⁶³
Where dragon veins coil on bone, stands a mountain spirit,
Still in a cloak of wood-lotus, in a belt of bryony.⁶⁴
Gong Gong hit the pillar of Heaven, and it came crashing down;
Where one shard struck, a fold in the eastern mountains rose.⁶⁵
Uneven peaks like hair knots, dozens of feet tall,
Brushed by white clouds moving through the sky.
I ready my cap and robe and bow reverently: Brisk air fills my bosom, healing my grave malady.⁶⁶

Pu Songling's poem may be read as the literary equivalent of the illustrations of Mi Fu bowing to his rock so popular in seventeenth-century art,⁶⁷ but with one important difference—it is the poet ("I") who bows to the rock in imitation of Mi Fu and finds therapeutic relief; Mi Fu himself is not depicted, as he often is in comparable poems by other writers.⁶⁸ In Pu Songling's version, the mythological description of the rock as a miniature mountain dominates the poem; the Mi Fu poet-figure has receded into the background and makes only an almost routine appearance in the closing couplet.

Compared with the description of the rock in this poem, the description of the rock in the tale is startlingly restrained and sparse. Gone are the ornate language and standard allusions of the poem: in their place is simply a brief but vivid description given when the rock first comes into view: it "was a rock barely a foot high. All four sides were intricately hollowed, with layered peaks jutting up." Further details of the rock's unearthly physical beauty—the number of crannies, the minuscule inscription bearing its name, the clouds it emits—are filled in only gradually as needed within the framework of the plot, but there are never enough details to dispel the rock's aura of mystery. The real image of the rock is left to the reader's imagination, to be inferred from the endless struggles to possess it.

Moreover, "The Ethereal Rock" does not retell any of the well-known Mi Fu anecdotes; instead it creates a new cluster of anecdotes within the heightened atmosphere of seventeenth-century obsessional culture. Pu Songling's hero does not simply imitate Mi Fu—he surpasses him, surrendering three years of his life and then risking what remains all for the rock, who in turn eclipses any previously recorded rock in history. As Feng Zhenluan exclaims: "Mi Fu bowed to a rock, but I imagine he didn't have a rock of this caliber. Niu Sengru was called a rock connoisseur, but I'll bet he both demonic powers (mojie) and a deep humanity, he never set eyes on such a rock" (Liaozhai 11.1575).⁶⁹ And Xing's rock is not only worshipped; invested with both demonic powers (mojie) and a deep humanity, he is able to respond to a true connoisseur's love as Elder Rock never could.

In addition to "Elder Rock," Pu Songling wrote two other poems expressly on rocks and, as already mentioned, compiled a brief catalogue on rocks.⁷⁰ He brilliantly incorporated the knowledge of rock lore so evident in his poems and catalogue into his tale. The rock's miraculous feat of emitting clouds, for instance, may be imaginative invention, but it plays on the traditional associations of rocks, mountains, and clouds.⁷¹ The rock's ability to predict the weather also has a quasi-historical basis in a description of a famed mountain-shaped inkstone said to have belonged to Mi Fu: "When it is going to rain, the 'dragon pool' [in a cranny of the rock] becomes wet."⁷² Giving rocks personal names likewise had a foundation in historical and contemporary practice. As a poem written on a beautiful early seventeenth-century painting of a rock proclaims: "Rocks, too, have names and sobriquets, / This rock is called Mysterious Cloud."⁷³ (Surely it is no coincidence that the name Pu Songling gave his rock-lover, Xing Yunfei or Moving Clouds in Flight, sounds like the name of a rock.⁷⁴) Lastly, the history of rock collecting is notorious for epic battles between connoisseurs. These battles are scaled down in "The Ethereal Rock"; to underscore the purity of the hero's obsession, his human competitors for the rock are not true connoisseurs, and the rock is resold cheaply in the common market.

Liaozhai contains a number of wonderful tales about obsessions with flowers and musical instruments. What distinguishes "The Ethereal Rock" from these other obsessional tales is not the anthropomorphism of the object, for the heroes in Liaozhai frequently fall in love with the human incarnations of their obsessions. The sustained imputation of human-like behavior to the non-human (objects, plants, animals, ghosts) is a staple of the strange tale, but the ground covered by such anthropomorphism is quite broad. At one extreme, things retain their own form but are motivated by human ethics and desires; at the other extreme, things take on human form, often so convincingly that they are mistaken for people until the denouement of the tale. In the first case, there is no physical metamorphosis, and only the spirit of a thing is anthropomorphized; in the second case, metamorphosis is essential, and both spirit and form are anthropomorphized. Within any given instance of anthropomorphism, however, the ratio of thing to human is variable. Thus, although the objects of many different obsessions are anthropomorphized in Liaozhai, whether they seem more human or more thing-like varies enormously.

In the Liaozhai tales of flower obsession, the flowers primarily assume human female form in the story, although telltale clues to their floral nature are liberally provided. Part of the charm of a story about a peonyspirit like "Ge Jin" or a chrysanthemum-spirit like "Yellow Pride" ("Huang Ying"; 11.1446-52) is that the revelation the heroines are flowers rather than human beings is deferred; the tale becomes a riddle of identity, one that contemporary readers would have found enjoyable and not too difficult to unravel.⁷⁵ Pu Songling adopted a second approach in two tales of obsession with musical instruments, "Huan Niang" (7.985-90) and "The Sting" ("Zu zha"; 8.1029-34). Although the zither is the pivot of both plots, it is not anthropomorphized at all; it undergoes no metamorphosis and is given no distinct personality. It remains throughout a precious but passive object of desire.

"The Ethereal Rock" is unique in Liaozhai because the rock acquires a personality, an identity, a human presence, even though it remains an inanimate object. Only veiled in dream does the rock appear as a man

As Mi Fu's addressing his rock as "Older Brother" affirms, rocks were gendered as male in the Chinese imagination, just as flowers were gendered as female.

and speak directly, introducing himself as Shi Qingxu. Ordinarily when a rock is given a name in a catalogue or in an inscription, the character shi or rock follows rather than precedes the name. This is why the miniature inscription carved on the rock in the story reads: "Ethereal, the Celestial Rock" ("Qingxu, tianshi"). This order, however, is reversed in the rock's self-introduction and in the story's title. Placed first rather than last, the character shi assumes the Chinese position of a surname. The deliberate inversion of the rock's name, then, suggests a subtle anthropomorphization. The delicate balance between the outward form of a rock and the inner soul of a man is thus encoded in this new name: "Shi" is in fact a common surname; "Qingxu" (pure and ethereal), the rock's given name, evokes his extraordinary quality of qi, for which rocks, as "kernels of energy," were prized.⁷⁶ Such a balance seems to have also been achieved in certain late Ming paintings of rocks, which, as John Hay suggests, may have been "portraying personalities as embodied in structural forms and textures."⁷⁷

Pu Songling's rock may be fictional, but beginning in Song times numerous artists had portrayed their favorite rocks and imbued them with their own fantasies. An extraordinary handscroll painting from the early seventeenth century gives us additional insight into "The Ethereal Rock" and the cultural milieu out of which it emerged.⁷⁸ The rock in question belonged to Mi Wanzhong (1570-1628), a well-known official who adopted the sobriquet "Friend to Rocks" (You shi) and claimed descent from none other than Mi Fu himself. Contemporaries said of Mi Wanzhong that he possessed Mi Fu's obsession but not his lunacy.⁷⁹ Although Mi Wanzhong was a famous calligrapher and painter specializing in rock paintings, the handscroll was the work of his friend Wu Bin (fl. 1591-1626), a professional landscape painter and fellow rocklover.⁸⁰ At first glance, the painting seems to belong to the "still life" genre: the rock is methodically painted, and Mi Wanzhong's descriptions are factual and meticulous, documenting the size, shape, gesture, and texture of each of its peaks. But when we gaze at the painting longer, it becomes anything but still or photographic in feel; the rock is fantastic, bizarre, unearthly, with long stalagmite-like peaks, separated by mysterious spaces. It almost seems to be moving, writhing as though on fire or blown by wind; yet it still somehow retains the solidity of stone.⁸¹

Most unusually, the handscroll consists of ten life-size portraits of the rock, each painted from a different angle. Such attention lavished on a single rock reminds one of an infatuated lover reveling in his mistress's every pose, every shift of expression. Many wonderful albums devoted to rock paintings and illustrated rock catalogues were produced during the seventeenth century; unillustrated catalogues, like Pu Songling's, were even more common.⁸² The aim of a rock catalogue or album is ordinarily to record a number of exceptional examples. What we find in Wu Bin's handscroll is in essence still a rock catalogue of sorts, but one uniquely devoted to a single example, one that catalogues a single rock as though it were multiple rocks.

This compulsive repetition of the same object characterizes both Wu Bin's painting and Pu Songling's tale. One of the most striking features of "The Ethereal Rock" is that the same plot with minor variations is repeated over and over: Xing, the rock-lover, finds the rock, and someone wrests it away from him, but each time the stone contrives to return to him. This pattern of loss and recovery occurs five times, but the repetition does not become monotonous, for with each cycle, the man's display of grief at losing the rock becomes more violent; each time, his joy at regaining it becomes more profound. After each loss, the man goes to greater lengths to redeem the rock—he gives up three years of his life, mortgages his house and land, and tries repeatedly to hang himself. Even death does not break the cycle; Xing comes back as a vengeful ghost to demand the rock's return. The repetitive, cyclical nature of the story inscribes the compulsive structure of obsession: desire, possession, loss; desire, possession, loss. This repetitiveness is truly excessive, for it continues far beyond our expectations, just as Wu Bin's picture surprises the spectator with its excessive variations on the same object.

In a final, very personal inscription on the handscroll, Mi Wanzhong identifies himself as a rock-lover from birth, tracing his passion for rocks and his coming to consciousness to the same primal moment. He spent thirty years collecting rocks and won fame as a connoisseur, but this one rock, the subject of the handscroll, was the rock he had been preparing himself for and seeking all his life. So amazing was this new rock, he tell us, that upon its arrival all the rocks in his sizable collection withdrew in deference as if acknowledging their inferiority and defeat. Thus this rock is not merely the crowning jewel of his collection: it utterly effaces his collection. It alone is his collection.

This is perhaps the greatest parallel between Wu Bin's painting and Pu Songling's tale. In the opening to "The Ethereal Rock," the rock connoisseur Xing is introduced as someone who would spare no expense to add to his collection. And yet from the moment that he fishes up the ethereal rock (who comes of his own accord, just as we are told Mi Wanzhong's rock "crossed the river" to him),⁸³ no other rock is ever mentioned again. Xing's rock collection no longer exists for him once he gives himself up to this rock. His collection simply disappears from the text, just as Mi Wanzhong's painstaking assemblage of rocks is displaced from the scene. Xing, like Mi Wanzhong, becomes uniquely obsessed with a single rock. Both Pu Songling and the painter Wu Bin seem to have captured the identical truth about obsession when idealized to its furthest extent.⁸⁴

The late Ming sensibility that shaped both Pu Songling's and Wu Bin's representations of obsession was powerful enough to transform medical discourse. By the late sixteenth century, "pi" no longer retains much force as a medical term; this sense has been almost completely eclipsed by the extended meaning of "obsession" or "addiction."⁸⁵ In his encyclopedic Classified Materia Medica, Li Shizhen addresses obsession in a single entry on a drug called a pishi, or pi stone: "There are people who concentrate on something until it becomes an obsession [pi]. When this develops into an illness, knots in their bowels will solidify and form a stone."⁸⁶ Li's medical understanding of pi springs from the extended notion of obsession and presumes a psychological rather than somatic etiology: single-minded concentration on something obstructs the digestion, and this obstruction may harden into stone. In this very interesting move, Li reconciles the old medical definition of pi with the now-predominant cultural understanding of it.

Li Shizhen's main interest lies in the problem of how obstructions within the body can turn to stone. He cites other known examples of petrifaction, including meteors, kidney stones, fossils, and Buddhist relics. This is so in each case, he explains, because "vital energy" (jingqi) has solidified.⁸⁷ But this traditional theory is too vague to satisfy him. To account for the petrifaction of human flesh, he draws on the Ming theory of the overwhelming power of single-minded passion.⁸⁸ As evidence, he cites an amazing story about a Persian who broke into an ancient tomb. "The Persian saw that all the skin and muscles [of the corpse] had disintegrated; all that remained was a heart hard as stone. He sawed it down the middle and found a landscape inside resembling a painting. On one side was a girl leaning out over a railing and gazing fixedly in the distance. In fact, this girl must have had an obsessive love of landscape for her to be recomposed in this fashion."⁸⁹ The picture formed inside the petrified heart records her fatal history. The girl's obsession with the landscape has literally etched itself into her heart, the seat of consciousness, figuring herself into this stone landscape. In fact, certain rocks, like marble, were indeed prized for the painting-like landscapes that could be glimpsed in them, natural pictures that John Hay has called "mountainscapes in marble."⁹⁰ In transmuting to stone, this heart has outlasted the organic process of decay, recording for posterity the obsession responsible for the metamorphosis.

Li Shizhen's entry concludes with a final prescription that follows the principle of curing like with like: a dissolved pi stone taken orally will cure a "blocked gullet" (yege), a condition whose symptoms include the inability to ingest food, vomiting, and constipation. Such a stone would be obtained, his final case suggests, among the cremated ashes of someone who had died from knots in the bowels.⁹¹ A stone thus becomes at once the perfect symbol of obsession, the somatic result of obsession, and the cure for obsession. We have come full circle to Pu Songling's "Ethereal Rock" in which only the destruction of the rock can dissolve the rock-lover's obsession and bring peace.

Addiction and Satire

Although the rock-lover in "The Ethereal Rock" is disparaged by the Historian of the Strange for being "foolish" in his devotion, this is clearly not intended as a real rebuke. The admiring tone adopted in the final comment accords with the late Ming glorification of folly and sentiment that trumpeted the excesses of obsession as the highest form of self-expression.

In a number of other tales, however, Pu Songling parts company with the late Ming cult of feeling to expose the dark underside of obsession. In these tales of addiction, obsession is stripped of its glamor to reveal its potential to inflict human misery. Liaozhai paints devastating portraits of addictions to gambling, sex, alcohol, geomancy, and chess that are emphatically not idealized or applauded. These more conventional moral tales, on the whole, emphasize the consequences of immoderate indulgence and the loss of self-control. For instance, in "The Gambling Charm" ("Du fu"; 3.419-21), a chronic gambler loses his house and land in a game and, even after winning them back with the aid of a Daoist amulet, cannot bring himself to quit. Only after the amulet suddenly vanishes into thin air does he come to his senses and withdraw from the game. In case the point has not been driven home clearly enough, the Historian of the Strange appends a lengthy sermon to the story lamenting the evils of gambling, which begins: "Of all things on earth that destroy households, nothing is swifter than gambling; of all things on earth that wreck virtue, nothing is worse than gambling" (3.420). But even in the case of gambling, a subject that he evidently felt very strongly about, Pu Songling cannot resist including another tale, "Ren Xiu" (11.1473-75), in which a gambling addict's fatal weakness for dice ironically provides the very means through which ghosts restore his stolen family fortune.

In Five-fold Miscellany (Wu za zu), Xie Zhaozhe lists famous figures of the past whose deaths were caused by uncontrollable addictions, and dryly observes that "although life and death are both important, that which someone loves can be more important to him than life itself."⁹² Pu Songling vividly translates this notion into fiction when his addicts not only forfeit their lives in this world for what they crave but also do the same again in the next. Even death cannot break the title character in "The Chess Ghost" ("Qi gui"; 4.532-34) or "The Alcoholic" ("Jiu kuang"; 4.583-88) of their addictions. Forgetting that he is dead, the alcoholic gets drunk as usual and kicks up a ruckus in hell until he is finally fished out of a foul, knife-infested stream. This explains the ferocious hangover that he faces upon waking the next morning back among the living, but it still does not cure him of his alcoholism, and he is soon marched back to hell for good.

In the more moving story, "The Chess Ghost," a young scholar's uncontrollable passion for chess leads to his father's death; he himself is taken off to the purgatory of hungry ghosts as punishment. On his way to redeem himself by drafting an official inscription for the underworld authorities, he happens to pass by living men playing a chess game in the open air. He joins the game and, glued to the spot, loses every match until the deadline has passed and he has forfeited any further chance for rebirth. Comments the Historian of the Strange: "When he glimpsed a chessboard, he cared no more about death; once he was dead, he glimpsed a chessboard and cared no more about life. Isn't it the case that his desire to play was greater than his desire to live? But to be as obsessed as this and still be unable to score even one great move!" (4.533)

It is difficult to determine what saddens the Historian of the Strange more—the chess ghost's dooming himself to damnation for eternity or his inferior skills at the game. It goes against the grain of the late Ming idealization of obsession for a man to fail so miserably at what he sincerely loves; in fact, foolishness and talent should go hand in hand. In "A Bao" (2.233-39), the Historian of the Strange defends foolishness on precisely those grounds: "If one's nature is 'foolish,' then one's resolve will be firm: thus those who are foolish in their love of books are sure to excel in composition, and those who are foolishly devoted to the arts are bound to have excellent technique, whereas those people who make no progress and achieve nothing are always those who claim that they are not foolish" (2.239).⁹³

Although the privileging of foolishness and single-mindedness enabled obsession to be idealized as a vehicle for self-expression in the first place, such excessive behavior also becomes an irresistible target for social satire. The comic possibilities of the subject are already discernible in Mi Fu's official biography in the Song History, where the anecdote about him bowing to the rock is reported as a current joke.⁹⁴ In fact, this anecdote also circulated with an additional punchline that completely undercut its seriousness. Someone is said to have asked Mi Fu whether he had really bowed to a rock, to which he slowly replied: "How could I have bowed to a rock?—I merely saluted it."

Both modes of treating obsession—glorification and satire—coexist in the writings of certain authors and even in certain books during the late Ming. Feng Menglong preaches the gospel of obsession and folly in his commentary to A Classified History of Love, but makes these same traits the butt of jokes in his Survey of Talk New and Old (Gujin tan 'gai). The prefaces to A Brief History of Obsession and Lunacy advance solemn claims for the moral virtues of obsession, but most of the anecdotes in the book are quite funny and are clearly constructed as jokes; the comments also tend to maximize the humor by coining ludicrous epithets or pairing incompatible cravings. In Liaozhai, too, although certain stories treat obsession extremely seriously, it is also lampooned, even sometimes within the same story. The hero of the tale "Huang Jiulang" (3.316-23), for example, has a fixed penchant for homosexuality ("the obsession with rent sleeves").⁹⁵ His love affiar with a fox-boy is narrated fairly sympathetically since he manifests all the symptoms of the sincere love-fanatic and refuses to give up the boy even at the cost of his own life. But the story starts to slip into comedy when as a reward for his devotion he is "converted" to heterosexuality in his next incarnation. At the end of the story, in another, more abrupt change of tone, the Historian of the Strange indulges himself in an amazingly arcane and rather hostile parody in parallel prose on homosexual practices. The piece's scholastic, punning wit hinges on the contrast between its erudite style and obscene content.

In "A Strangeness of Pigeons," the wealthy pigeon fancier Zhang Youliang, who boasts of the finest pigeon collection in Shandong, pampers his birds with all the attentiveness of a mother caring for her baby. Because of his exquisite devotion, he is honored with a visit from the pigeon god, who presents him with a pair of snow-white pigeons. These and their offspring become the gems of his collection. Sometime later, a friend of his father's, a high official, inquires about his pigeons. Assuming that the official is a fellow connoisseur and hoping to get into his good graces, Zhang sends him, after much agonizing, a pair of the snow-white pigeons. Later he meets the official, but to his chagrin the official says not a word about the pigeons.

Unable to contain himself, Zhang blurted out: "And how were the pigeons?"

"Nice and plump," replied the official.

"You don't mean you cooked them?" asked Zhang, alarmed.

"Why, yes."

"But those were no ordinary pigeons … !" cried Zhang in shock. The official reflected for a moment. "Well, they didn't taste especially out of the ordinary."(6.841)

The joke is beautifully constructed with comic pauses and a slow buildup to the punchline as the pigeon fancier realizes that his worst fears have come true. The story ends sadly when the remaining snow-white pigeons desert Zhang for betraying them; in remorse, he gives away the rest of his collection. Once again, an obsession ends with dispersal and loss. The Historian of the Strange reprimands Zhang for trying to curry favor with an official but defends his passion: "We can see that gods and spirits are angered by greed but not by foolishness" (6.842).

Two short anecdotes appended to the comment are closer to jokes than to stories; they are essentially variations on the joke told in "A Strangeness of Pigeons." In the second anecdote, a monk, a fanatical tea connoisseur, entertains a high official with his second-best grade of tea. Since the official does not react, the monk, conscience-stricken, assumes he must be a true connoisseur and immediately offers him his best grade of tea. When a response is still not forthcoming, the monk breathlessly asks him what he thought of the tea. "It was hot,". is the answer. These secondary items reinforce a comic rather than tragic reading of the main tale. As a final authorial comment explicitly points out: "These two anecdotes are funny in the same way as Master Zhang presenting his pigeons" (6.843).

A version of the pigeon joke in A Brief History of Obsession and Lunacy concerns the famous calligrapher Wang Xizhi, who was said to love geese because their sinuous necks inspired the curves of his brush strokes.⁹⁶ Knowing of his passion, a friend invites Wang to view a remarkable goose raised by his old nurse in the countryside. Upon hearing that the famous calligrapher is coming to visit, however, the old lady slaughters the goose and cooks it in order to have some delicacy to serve him. A joke about a beloved animal being eaten appears as early as New Tales of the World of the fifth century in which the grand marshal Wang Yan maliciously slaughters and consumes the Prince of Pengcheng's favorite ox.⁹⁷ It is not hard to understand why this kind of joke was common: it makes fun of both parties at once.

The satire in "A Strangeness of Pigeons" is double-edged but unmistakable: the aficionado is lampooned for his overfastidiousness and consequent misreading of other people, and the unappreciative philistine is ridiculed for his boorishness. When the targets of satire are less obvious, however, the tales become correspondingly more ambiguous. In the tales "Yellow Pride" ("Huang Ying") and "The Bookworm" ("Shu chi"; 11.1453-58), the spirits of the objects themselves seem to take pleasure in debunking their stereotyped associations, to the shock and alarm of their devotees.

In "Yellow Pride," Ma, a poor and austere chrysanthemum connoisseur, unknowingly befriends brother and sister chrysanthemum-spirits, who are the descendents of that most famous lover of chrysanthemums, the recluse-poet Tao Yuanming. (Chrysanthemums had become so identified with this poet by the Ming that in one anecdote a scholar hosting a chrysanthemum-viewing party in his garden cautioned his tipsy guests to take care lest they step on "Tao Yuanming."⁹⁸) To Ma's horror, the brother and sister do not share his eremitic tastes and set up a profitable chrysanthemum business, trading on their phenomenal horticultural skills. After Ma marries the sister, Yellow Pride, he valiantly tries to hold onto his poverty and spiritual purity in the face of his bride's commercial wealth, but after some ludicrous maneuvering, is forced to live in the comfortable style she prefers.

Most important, Ma's obsession with chrysanthemums is not the fashionable pseudo-connoisseurship that Yuan Hongdao and Li Zhi attacked. Ma faithfully adheres to all the rules of idealized obsession, and the chrysanthemums duly love him back. But these rules are themselves called into question and mocked in this story. As befits the true connoisseur, Ma is steadfast in refusing to profit from the buying and selling of the things that he loves. He clearly prides himself on being a pure-minded recluse, a latter-day Tao Yuanming. But Ma's obdurate poverty and eremitism in the face of his improved financial circumstances are ridiculed as priggishness and affectation, most notably by his wife, the chrysanthemum-spirit, the very one who ought to understand these virtues best.

The paradoxically materialist behavior of the chrysanthemum-spirits becomes even more striking when we consider that in his poetry Pu Songling professed to be a chrysanthemum-lover in much the same conventional terms as his protagonist Ma. The first couplet of his poem "Admiring Chrysanthemums in Sun Shengzuo's Studio, the Tenth Month" ("Shiyue Sun Shengzuo zhaizhong shang ju") reads: "My old love of chrysanthemums has become an obsession, /To seek a lovely I'd travel a thousand miles."⁹⁹ The couplet closely echoes the opening description of Ma in "Yellow Pride": "Whenever he heard of a lovely variety, he would travel a thousand miles to buy it" (11.1446). Although the language is extremely conventional in both cases, Pu Songling does not employ this exact wording in any other poem on flowers or in any of his other obsessional tales in Liaozhai. In a consecutive poem entitled "Drinking at Night and Composing Another Verse" ("Ye yin zaifu"), Pu Songling likewise praises chrysanthemums in a model couplet that he could easily have attributed to Ma: "Literary groups delight in pouring the Sage's wine; / Worldly faces are shamed before the recluse flowers."¹⁰⁰ In light of these poems, Pu Songling's flouting of the chrysanthemum stereotype in "Yellow Pride" may come close to a mild form of self-satire.

In Liaozhai, although vulgarity is derided, poverty is decidedly not glamorized.¹⁰¹ Pu Songling, as the son of a scholar turned merchant, tends to be concerned with the material well-being of his heroes. More often than not, the intrusion of the strange into the world of the hero vastly improves his finances: the satisfaction of one desire (love) leads to the satisfaction of other desires (fortune and career).¹⁰² Business dealings are described in surprising detail, and the most lovely heroines often prove to be the most hardheaded businesswomen. Despite Ma's resistance, this pattern basically prevails in "Yellow Pride."

On the other hand, it is hard to avoid the impression that the commercialization of seventeenth-century society is also being mocked here or at least milked for its comic possibilities. The implication is that if Tao Yuanming himself somehow came back to earth in this late day and age, he too would turn his back on poetry and earn a fortune raising chrysanthemums instead. Underlying this fable of the industrious chrysanthemums is a subtext: the opening of that most famous of Tao Yuanming's poems, "Drinking Wine," no. 4 ("Yin jiu"):

I built my cottage in the realm of men,
And yet there is no noise [xuan] of horse and cart.
You ask me, "How can this be so?"
"When the mind is distant the place is naturally remote."
I pick chrysanthemums beneath the eastern hedge.¹⁰³

When Ma first learns of his friend Tao's proposal to sell chrysanthemums, he specifically alludes to this poem to dissuade him: "If you follow this plan, you will be converting your eastern hedge into a bazaar and profaning your chrysanthemums" (11.1447). Although Tao defends himself that it is not vulgar to make an honest living selling flowers, sure enough, before long the quiet refuge in the poem has been turned into a marketplace: "Crowds gathered outside T'ao's [Tao's] house, and the place was as noisy [xuan] and busy as the market.… [Ma] saw that the street was filled with people and carts loaded with chrysanthemums" (11.1447).¹⁰⁴ With the profits from the chrysanthemum business, Tao Yuanming's thatched cottage is torn down, and a palatial residence is built in its place. The Historian of the Strange carefully refrains from commenting on any of the controversial points in the story and merely praises the one obvious similarity between Tao the chrysanthemum and Tao Yuanming—insouciant drunkenness: "To die of drunkenness after spending a carefree life, though deplored by the world, need not be an unhappy ending" (11.1452).¹⁰⁵ He deliberately seems to leave open to the reader's interpretation the extent and scope of the tale's satire.

An underlying strain of self-satire is also discernible in the portrait of the impecunious scholar in "The Bookworm." Pu Songling seems to harbor a secret sympathy and affection for his bookish hero, Lang. In his naïveté and stubbornness, Lang carries to absurdity the philosopher Li Zhi's call to preserve one's "childlike heart" (tongzi xin), the supposed wellspring of spontaneity, authenticity, and literary creation.¹⁰⁶ Lang loves the books in his ancestral library with an almost-blind devotion, refusing to part with even a single volume despite his poverty. He is no true connoisseur or scholar, however, for no one book appears more or less valuable to him than any other. Although he spends every waking moment studying, he does not know how to read between the lines or interpret what he reads; he takes everything literally and consequently never passes the exams.

Just as Tao Yuanming's poetry underlies the chrysanthemum story, so too in this tale there is a subtext: the "Exhortation to Study" ("Quanxue pian"), a pedantic poem "extolling the glory of scholarship" composed by the Northern Song emperor Zhenzong (r. 997-1022), which enjoyed particularly wide currency in the cheap popular primers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁰⁷ This poem, which Lang's father had hung in an honored position by his desk, is a blueprint for the plot: the bookworm believes it will come true exactly as written, and as so often in Liaozhai, it miraculously does. The poem's most important line for the story is: "Regret not that you have no fine maid; / In books are girls with cheeks smooth as jade [yan ruyu]."¹⁰⁸ Sure enough, one day he happens to open volume eight of the Han History; there between the pages is a paper-cut of a beautiful woman. Beneath his ardent gaze, she comes to life and introduces herself as Miss Jadesmooth Cheek (Yan Ruyu), explaining dryly that she has been moved by his devotion: "I'm afraid there will never again be anyone like you who so profoundly believes the ancients" (11.1454). The bookworm is a fool because he cannot distinguish figurative and literal levels of meaning. Because he so profoundly believes obvious lies to be the truth, they come true after all. But in their coming true, he paradoxically learns that they were lies.

Although the bookworm is admired in the story for his sentimentality, naïveté, and childlike heart, all cardinal virtues in the late Ming cult of feeling, he is also ridiculed mercilessly for taking them to excess. Lang's total immersion in books has kept him so ignorant that even at the age of thirty-three he is completely unaware of the facts of life. Ironically, it is the spirit of the book, Jadesmooth Cheek herself, who forces him to stop reading and introduces him to the pleasures of gaming, music, and the bedroom arts, because as she tells him, "the reason you're not successful is simply because you're always studying" (II.1454). She even urges him to get rid of his library before it is too late; he refuses in horror: "But this is your native land, and my entire life! How can you suggest such a thing!" (II.1456) In fact, the book-spirit turns out to be the catalyst for the library's destruction, which paradoxically instigates Lang's worldly success. Under the pretext of searching for the beautiful demon, the district magistrate torches Lang's library, repeating, as the Historian of the Strange suggests, the trauma of the First Qin Emperor's burning of the books. Once again, obsession results in the destruction of the loved object and the dispersal of a collection. We are back to the poet Li Qingzhao contemplating the destruction of her husband's library.

But Lang's very different response to this catastrophe forces us to recognize that the world and official success are also being mocked. When Lang's library goes up in smoke, so does his foolishness. His passion for books is transformed into a passion for revenge. His career takes off only after he turns his back on reading and scholarship and forsakes the cardinal rule of the "Exhortation to Study"—"My boy, to achieve life's reward / just face the window and study hard." As soon as he realizes that the words of the ancients are lies, he swiftly passes the jinshi exam, becomes governor of his enemy's native province, and wreaks his revenge.

Notes

EPIGRAPH: Yuan Hongdao ji, p. 826.

¹ Wang Qishu, Shuicao qingxia lu, quoted in Wang Xiaochuan, Yuan Ming Qing sandaijinhui xiaoshuo, p. 314. A portion of this chapter, with a somewhat different emphasis, appeared in my article "The Petrified Heart: Obsession in Chinese Literature, Medicine, and Art" in Late Imperial China.

² Zhang Zilie, Zhengzi tong, wuji 24a. This dictionary was based on Mei Yingzuo's (1570-1615) Lexicon (Zihui), printings of which were still extensive ca. 1691. DMB (pp. 1061-62) calls Zhengzi tong "the most successful of a large number of vulgate versions of the Tzu-hui [Zihui] which circulated widely in late Ming and early Qing times and which dominated both popular and professional Chinese lexicography until the K'ang-hsi tzu [Kangxi dictionary] became available." The Kangxi Dictionary cites Zhengzi tong's definition of pi. I am indebted to Mi-chu Wiens for calling my attention to the importance of Mei Yingzuo's work.

³ Unschuld, Medicine in China: Pharmaceutics, p. 20.

⁴ Chao Yuanfang, Zhubing yuanhou lun 20.113. This section introduces eleven varieties of pi diseases, including pyie (pi nodules), yinpi (fluid-induced pi), hanpi (cold-induced pi), andjiupi (chronic pi). On Chao Yuanfang, see Zhongyi dacidian, p. 233.

⁵ Wang Tao, Waitai biyao 12.329. See the entry "Pi ying ru shi fu man." This book synthesizes many pre-Tang works, including Zhubing yuanhou lun, whose discussion of pi is quoted verbatim at 12.321. For further information on this book, see Zhongyi dacidian, p. 53.

⁶Pi written with the "person" radical has a long history in its own right extending back to the Odes (Mao shi, no. 254) and the Jiu zhang in Chu ci.

⁷ "No. 10: Connoisseurship" ("Shi: haoshi"), Pingshi, p. 846. "Peach Blossom Spring" alludes to a hidden utopian community in Tao Yuanming's famous account. For a complete French translation and discussion of Pingshi, see Vandermeesch, "L'arrangement de fleurs en Chine." Vandermeesch defines pi (written with the "person" radical) as "designating at once that which is distant and vague and that which diverges from the normal path."

⁸Shishuo xinyu 4.15, p. 199; trans. Mather, New Tales of the World, p. 185. New Tales has no specially designated category for obsession. The term "pi" occurs only once in Liu Xiaobiao's early sixth-century commentary to the work and even shi (a taste for) occurs only rarely. The characters most commonly used to describe fondness or attachment are hao (to be fond of) and, less often, ai (to like, to love); bing jiu (to be addicted to liquor) is employed once.

⁹ Zhang Yanyuan, Records of Famous Paintings Through the Ages (Lidai minghua ji), in Yu Jianhua, ed., Zhongguo hualun leibian 2: 1225-26. Trans. Bush and Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting, pp. 73-74 (modified).

¹⁰"Jigu lu mu xu," in Ouyang Wenzhonggong quanji 41. 7a-b.

¹¹Ouyang Wenzhonggong quanji 40.1. For a translation of this essay, see Egan, Literary Works of Ouyang Hsiu, pp. 217-18.

¹² Ye Mengde, "Pingquan caomu ji ba"; trans. Hay, Kernels of Energy, p. 34.

¹³ Su Shi, "On the Hall of Precious Paintings" ("Baohuitang ji") in Yu Jianhua, Zhongguo hualun leibian I: 48. I have modified Bush and Shih's translation in Early Chinese Texts on Painting, p. 233. Su Shi probably borrowed his concept of "lodging" from Ouyang Xiu's autobiographical essay, "The Old Drunkard's Pavilion" ("Zuiweng ting ji,") (Ouyang Wenzhonggong quanji 39.9-10; trans. Egan, Literary Works of Ouyang Hsiu, p. 216): "The Old Drunkard's real interest is not the wine but the mountains and streams. Having captured the joys of the mountains and streams in his heart, he lodges them in wine."

¹⁴" The locus classicus of the phrase youwu is Zuo zhuan Zhao 29 in which it refers to beautiful women: "Where there are beautiful creatures [youwu], they are capable of perverting men. Unless virtue and righteousness prevail there will surely by disaster" (trans. Dudbridge, Tale of Li Wa, p. 69).

¹⁵ Both men were powerful Tang chief ministers who were disgraced and executed. According to the editor of Li Qingzhao ji, Wang Bo must be an error for Want Ya (ca. 760-835), who was renowned as a connoisseur of books and paintings. His collection was destroyed after his fall from power. Yuan Zai, who accumulated great wealth during his tenure in office, was executed in 777. An official raid on his home unearthed a cache of 800 piculs of pepper.

¹⁶ In a famous anecdote in the sixth-century commentary to Shishuo xinyu 20: 4, the scholar and general Du Yu tells the emperor that He Qiao has "an obsession with money"; he himself has "an obsession with the Zuo Commentary" (p. 381). Mather (New Tales of the World, p. 359) translates pi as "a weakness for."

¹⁷ "Postface to Records on Stone and Bronze" ("Jinshi lu houxu"), in Li Qingzhao ji, pp. 176-77.

¹⁸ For a partial translation and close reading of the postface, see Owen, Remembrances, pp. 80-98.

¹⁹ Ouyang Xiu, "Biography of the Retired Scholar of Six Ones" ("Liuyi jushi zhuan"), in Ouyang Wenzhonggong quanji 44. 7a-b. For a translation, see Egan, Literary Works of Ouyang Hsiu, pp. 217-18.

²⁰ Xie Zhaozhe, Wu za zu 7.299. In an adjacent passage (7.296), Xie observes that human tastes and preferences have always differed and then erects a hierarchy of preferences drawing on historical examples. In the highest group he includes such benign passions as a fondness for roaming in scenic spots and for books one has never heard of before. This kind of thing, says Xie, "comes from natural disposition and doesn't warrant being considered an illness." His second group includes more problematic activities: a fondness for ox fights, braying like a donkey, and a love of rocks. "These," in Xie's words, "already verge on obsession, but are not yet harmful." Moving down the ladder, Xie covers weirder passions in his third category, such as a fetish for cleanliness, for taboo characters, and for ghosts. Here Xie allows himself a practical quibble: "These present obstacles for getting along in the world." But he draws the line at his final category, eating filth and a taste for foot-bindings: "This is too much!"

²¹ Tang Binyin (1568-ca. 1628; jinshi 1595), "A Short Preamble to History of Obsession" ("Pishi xiaoyin"), in Hua Shu, Pidian xiaoshi. On Hua's publications, see Wang Zhongmin, Zhongguo shanbenshu tiyao, pp. 421, 425-26. Tang Binyin must have been a friend of Hua Shu's because we find a preface to Hua Shu's collected works ("Hua Wenxiu Qingshuige ji xu") in Tang Binyin's Shui'an gao, juan 5. Hua Shu reused part of Yuan Hongdao's famous essay on connoisseurship from Pingshi as Yuan Hongdao's preface to Pidian xiaoshi. I see no reason to doubt the attribution to Tang Binyin, although the preface to Pishi is not found in his Shui'an gao; it is possible that for this preamble, too, Hua Shu recycled some already existing essay of Tang Binyin's.

²²Yuan Hongdao ji, p. 846.

²³ Zhang Dai, "The Obsessions of Qi Zhixiang" ("Qi Zhixiang pi"), in Tao'an mengyi, p. 39. Zhang was so taken with this aphorism that he repeated it in another piece, "The Biographies of Five Extraordinary Men" ("Wu yiren"), in Langhuan wenji, juan 4.

²⁴ Zhang Chao, Invisible Dream Shadows (Youmeng ying) 164.6. After this work had been completed, Yagi Akiyoshi's article "Fools in Liaozhai zhiyi" ("Ryosai shii no 'chi' ni tsuite") was brought to my attention. Yagi draws upon a number of the same sources to explore the close relationship between folly and obsession in Ming-Qing thought and the influence of this relationship on Pu Songling and Liaozhai; see esp. pp. 91-96.

²⁵ Each of these famous connoisseurs was proverbial for his obsession. Yuan Hongdao's comment appears after the entry on obsessions with rocks ("shi pi") in Hua Shu's Pidian xiaoshi. Feng Menglong included an abridged version of Yuan's comment in his Gujin tan 'gai 9.426. To avoid redundancy in English, I have followed Feng's abridgment in the last line of my translation.

²⁶ Barr, "Pu Songling and Liaozhai," p. 217.

²⁷ Hanan, Chinese Vernacular Story, p. 79.

²⁸ The development of this new conception of qing is still inadequately understood, but is generally ascribed to the influence of Wang Yangming's (1472-1529) thought. The best discussion of the Ming philosophical influence underlying qing in literature is W. Y. Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment.

²⁹Qingshi leilüe 23. 17a. The comment is probably by Feng Menglong, who is thought to have published Qingshi leilüe under the pseudonym Zhanzhan waishi. For a discussion of the authorship and contents of this book, see Hanan, Chinese Vernacular Story, pp. 95-97; and Mowry, Chinese Love Stories. Barr ("Pu Songling and Liaozhai," pp. 216-17) points out that the pseudonym Historian of Love parallels Pu Songling's Historian of the Strange and demonstrates that Pu was familiar with Qingshi. The resemblance between Pu's commentary and Feng's commentary goes even further; they sometimes express similar opinions, sometimes in similar language.

³⁰ Tang Binyin, "Pishi xiaoyin," in Hua Shu, Pidian xiaoshi.

³¹ Gu Wenjian, Fuxuan zalu, under the entry "personal taste" ("xingshi") in Shuofu 2.1319-20. The close connection between shi (a taste for), one of the main graphs associated with obsession, and food is indicated by the presence of the "mouth" radical. The Tang-Song encyclopedia Bai-Kong liutie places its entry on obsession in the food section under the heading "predilections" ("shihao") and primarily lists bizarre eating habits. The Song encyclopedia Taiping yulan also uses the heading "shihao," but it subsumes non-food-related obsessions in this category as well.

³² For two such lists, see Xie Zhaozhe, Wu za zu 7.296; and Feng Menglong, Gujin tan'gai 9.8b-1Oa. The interest in eating habits of a bizarre nature is manifested in two short Liaozhai anecdotes, "A Passion for Snakes" ("She pi"; 1.130) and "Nibbling Rocks" ("He shi"; 2.137). The frequency of obsessions in Chinese writing with eating filth on the one hand and cleanliness on the other seems to indicate some affinity with the obsessive-compulsive syndromes familiar from psychoanalytic literature, and it would be interesting to ponder the connection with obsessive collecting.

³³ Homosexuality presents a special case in that it involves human beings rather than things, but even here I believe the emphasis is on a category of people or a mode of behavior rather than on a particular person. Although obsession with sex in general or with one's own wife does occasionally crop up in the literature, an obsession with a particular person, regardless of gender, is generally not interpreted as obsession but as qing. See, e.g., Hairpins Beneath a Man's Cap (Bian er chai), a 1517 collection of sentimental stories of male love, and the "Qingwai" (gay love) section of Qingshi leilüe. At the same time, only exclusive homosexuality qualifies as an idiosyncrasy or obsession; casual or occasional homosexual liaisons do not. See Zhang Dai's account (Tao'an mengyi, p. 39) of a friend said to have an obsession with homosexuality because he abandoned his wife to run off with a male lover during the fall of the Ming.

³⁴ Pu Songling's preface to this work appears in PSLJ 1:53.

³⁵ Barr, "Pu Songling and Liaozhai," pp. 278-79. Yuan Hongdao's essay "Raising Crickets" ("Xu cuzhi," in Yuan Hongdao ji, pp. 728-29) cites Jia Qiuhuo's Cricket Manual (Cuzhi jing) as an authority on different species of crickets and methods for raising them. For a translation of Yuan's essay, see Chaves, Pilgrims of the Clouds, pp. 83-88.

³⁶ For a few of the pigeon varieties, I have followed G. Yang and Yang Xianyi's translations in Selected Tales of Liaozhai, p. 96.

³⁷ It is possible that Pu Songling had consulted some version of Zhang Wanzhong's Pigeon Handbook (Gejing). Pu's story displays some similarities in wording and content with this manual. The story's list of pigeon varieties by region closely parallels a section of the handbook that classifies pigeons by region of origin. The order of places in the story follows that in the handbook, and under each region it names at least one of the varieties named in the handbook. Another obvious similarity concerns the treatment of sick pigeons. In the story, we are told, "If a pigeon took cold," the pigeon fancier would "treat it with the finest variety of sweet grass [Glycyrrhiza glabra]"; "if a pigeon became overheated, he would offer it grains of salt" [leng ze liao yifencao, re ze tou yi yan ke] (6.839). Under the heading "Cures" ("Liaozhi"), the handbook reads: "If a pigeon becomes overheated, treat it with salt; if it takes cold, treat it with sweet grass" [re, liao yi yan; leng, liao yi gancao] (50.5a). On the other hand, there are a number of places in which the story and the manual do not overlap, such as the etymologies given for the Nightwanderer ("yeyou") pigeon and the treatment of other diseases.

Pu Songling's familiarity with this manual also seems likely because the author of the manual, Zhang Wanzhong, styled Kouzhi, came from Zouping, one of the counties in Pu Songling's native Ji'nan prefecture. Zhang Wanzhong, son of the well-known official Zhang Yandeng, was a late Ming senior licentiate who distinguished himself for his heroism during the fall of the Ming. See the Zouping xianzhi (1696 ed.) 5.8b and (1837 ed.) 15.47b-49a.

The wealthy pigeon fancier of Pu's story, Zhang Youliang, is also surnamed Zhang and comes from Zouping. In fact, both the story's pigeon-fancier and the compiler of the pigeon handbook were members of the wealthiest and most prominent gentry family in Zouping, and both had renowned gardens. See Cheng Jinzheng's private gazetteer-memoir, Zouping xian jingwu zhi, section on "famous gardens" ("ming yuan"), 3.1la, 3.15a. It is possible that Pu Songling intended to call his pigeon-fancying protagonist after the author of the pigeon manual, but mistook or misremembered his name.

Curiously, Zhang Youliang, whose name appears on no gazetteer list of degree holders, was well known for his obsession not with pigeons but with rocks. Zhu Jiuding of Qiantang's preface to his rock catalogue, the Ti' an shipu (like the Gejing, printed in the Tanji congshu [uan 44]), recounts that his friend and fellow rock-lover Zhang Youliang of Zouping had once had a rock that he admired dragged from the mountains to his garden by a team of 300 oxen. The identical anecdote is recounted in both Wang Zhuo's Jin shishuo (8.107) and Cheng Jinzheng's Zouping xian jingwu zhi.

Finally, Pu Songling's friend Gao Heng may have known Zhang Youliang because he composed a poem entitled "Zhang Youliang's Ancient Sword" ("Zhang Youliang gujian pian"). See Lu Jianzeng, Guochao Shanzuo shichao 6.12b-13a.

Pu Songling's story satirizes the pigeon collector for trying to curry favor with a friend of his father, a high official. It is possible that in addition to a general satire against obsessive collecting, spoiled rich sons of officials, and brownnosing, Pu Songling is also directing some sort of topical satire against the wealthy and powerful Zhangs of Zouping.

³⁸ For the rock catalogue and the flower handbook, see Liaozhai yiwen jizhu, pp. 151-58 and 107-23, respectively.

³⁹ Ye Mengde, "Pingquan caomuji ba." We know that Pu Songling was familiar with the Pingquan caomuji, because in 1707 he wrote a poem called "Reading the Record of the Pingquan Estate" ("Du Pingquan ji"), PSLJ 1.613.

⁴⁰ Kong Chuan, "Yunlin shipu xu." The allusion is to Analects 6.23: "The wise find joy in water; the benevolent find joy in mountains. The wise are active; the benevolent are still. The wise are joyful; the benevolent are long-lived" (trans. D. C. Lau, p. 84).

⁴¹Yutai xinyong (Gyokudai shin 'ei), p. 705.

⁴² A simplified formulation of an important point in Chinese poetics. See Siu-kit Wong, "Ch'ing and Ching in the Critical Writings of Wang Fuchih."

⁴³ "Lament" ("Yuan shi"), attributed to Ban Jieyu, Yutai xinyong, p. 78. For a translation, see Watson, Chinese Lyricism, pp. 94-95.

⁴⁴ "No. 8: On Watering" ("Ba: ximu"), Pingshi, p. 824.

⁴⁵ Zhang Chao, Youmeng ying, 4b-5a. Zhang's full list is quite long and encompasses many of the best-known paragons of obsession.

⁴⁶ For the original text, see Liaozhai 11.1575-79. For my translation, see the Appendix. Giles's translation (Strange Stories, pp. 181-91) calls the hero a "mineralogist" and his rocks "specimens," but these terms are misguided; the hero's love for rocks is emotional and aesthetic and not in the spirit of Victorian science and its impartial interest in collecting "specimens." It is extremely interesting, however, that Giles, writing for a turn-of-the-century English audience, tried to make sense of the Chinese obsession with rocks in terms of a scientific passion.

⁴⁷ Originally said of Yu Rang, an assassin-retainer who commits suicide (Sima Qian, Shiji 86.2519).

⁴⁸ Li Zhi, Fen shu, pp. 130-31.

⁴⁹ Lu Xun (Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue, pp. 52-53) notes the revival of interest in New Tales of the World during the late Ming and early Qing. During this period, which was also the heyday of obsession, the predilections of the New Tales eccentrics were reinterpreted in light of the late Ming notion of obsession. Although as I have already mentioned, no category in New Tales was specifically devoted to obsession, the chapter heading "Blind Infatuations" ("Huo ni"), which recounted men's infatuations with women, was converted into a rubric for obsession in a number of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century updates. For example, the "Blind Infatuations" chapter in He Liangjun's Shishuo xinyu bu, which was published with great success in 1556, constructs a history of famous obsessions up to the Ming. The entries under the heading "Blind Infatuations" in Wang Zhuo's Jin shishuo (preface dated 1683) have nothing to do with romantic love; all are examples of obsessions. A disproportionate number of the entries in Hua Shu's Pidian xiaoshi retell or simply reprint anecdotes from New Tales. The chapter on obsession in Feng Menglong's Gujin tan gai also includes many anecdotes from New Tales.

According to his friend and biographer Yuan Zhongdao, Li Zhi himself had "an obsession with cleanliness" ("Li Wenling zhuan" in Fen shu, p. 3). Li Zhi was profoundly interested in drawing connections between the New Tales eccentrics and nonconformists of his own time (see Billeter, Li Zhi, pp. 232-33). In 1588 Li Zhi published his Chutan ji, which was based on his readings of New Tales and Jiaoshi leilin, a sequel to New Tales that his friend, the bibliophile and scholar Jiao Hong (1541-1620), had published the year before. In recognition of Li Zhi's association with the New Tales eccentrics in the eyes of the reading public, a late Wanli edition of He Liangjun's Shishuo xinyu bu was brought out with a commentary by Li Zhi. According to Wang Zhongmin (Zhongguo shanbenshu tiyao, p. 391), this commentary was based on Li Zhi's annotations to his personal copy of New Tales, the rough draft for his Chutan ji.

⁵⁰Shishuo xinyu 23: 46; trans. Mather, New Tales of the World, p. 388.

⁵¹ See Billeter, Li Zhi, on the acutely felt lack of a true friend as a major theme in Li Zhi's work.

⁵²Bu shen—a pun, for the meaning of shen as a noun and as an adjective differ. As a noun, shen means "spirit"; as an adjective, it is closer to "extraordinary," "amazing," "divine."

⁵³ A reworking of the title and a line in the Book of Documents (Shang shu) concerning the flute songs of Shao.

⁵⁴ Here, in the cleverest and most playful writing in the piece, Li Zhi creates a virtual pastiche of phrases and puns (such asjie, which means both "integrity" and "a segment of bamboo") from the considerable corpus of inscriptions written on paintings of bamboo. The most famous is probably Su Shi's colophon on Wen Tong's painting "Bent Bamboos," which included the following poem:

The ink gentlemen [bamboos] on the wall cannot speak,
But just seeing them can dissipate one's myriad griefs;
And further, as for my friend's resembling these gentlemen,
The severity of his simple virtue defies the frosty autum.n
(Trans. Bush and Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting, p. 35)

The piece that Li Zhi's description resembles most closely is Ke Qian's (1251-1319) preface to Li Kan's Manual of Bamboos (Zhu pu; 1319):

How fortunate is it that in recent times the family of bamboo met up with Master Li K'an [Li Kan].… Because Li absorbs the purest air in the world, his mind is clear and open, and his spirit is brilliant, both of which are congenial to the manner and disposition of the "Gentlemen." … What neither description nor painting can encompass are the virtues for which bamboo stands. Bamboo stems are hollow … The nature of bamboo is to be straight.… Bamboo's joints are clear-cut. (Trans. Bush and Shih, Early Chinese Texts on Painting, pp. 274-75)

⁵⁵ In a short rock catalogue entitled Encomia for Rock Friends (Shiyou zan, in Zhaodai congshu, ce 77), Wang Zhuo compares himself unfavorably to the rocks whose histories he records. The allegorical associations of this phrase are apparent in Zhu Xi's (1130-1200) colophon on a scroll of rocks and bamboos painted by Su Shi: "As for Old Tung-p'o [Su Shi], he possessed lofty and enduring qualities and a firm and immovable nature. One might say that he resembled these 'bamboo gentlemen' and 'rock friends' (trans. Bush, Chinese Literati on Painting, p. 103).

⁵⁶ "When he is alive, I uphold him in times of crisis; when he is no longer alive, I support his children and grandchildren: this is how to conduct 'a friendship of stone'" ("The Principles of Human Behavior" ["Weiren yaoze"], PSLJ 1: 291). It is significant that Pu Songling uses this phrase here in the context of personal friendship rather than in the context of Ming loyalism.

Barr ("Pu Songling and Liaozhai," pp. 121-23) has sensibly placed Pu Songling, who was only four years old at the time of the Qing conquest, in a broad "middle" category of early Qing intellectuals who recognized the legitimacy of the new dynasty but did not flinch from expressing sympathy toward Ming loyalists and toward the suffering of the people during the takeover.

Hay (Kernels of Energy, pp. 92-96) discusses an album of rocks painted by Ni Yuanlu (1594-1644) entitled "A Friendship of Stone" ("Shijiao tu"), which he translates as "Rock Bound." The painter was a Ming statesman and loyalist martyr who hung himself in 1644. Given this background, it is not difficult to interpret these paintings as allegorical allusions to the painter's loyalty to the fallen Ming dynasty; rocks in the mid-seventeenth century could certainly connote Ming loyalism. Thus an early Qing collection of vernacular short stories with a strong loyalist theme is entitled The Sobering Stone (Zuixing shi). It is likely that the presence of the rock in the title was intended to call attention to the collection's loyalist bent (see Hanan, "The Fiction of Moral Duty," p. 204).

Despite the strong association of rocks with Ming loyalist sentiments in some works of the mid-seventeenth century, however, we have no evidence to interpret "The Ethereal Rock" as topical allegory or as an expression of Ming sympathies. No hints or clues favoring such an interpretation can be found within the tale or in the Historian of the Strange's commentary. The same is true of other Liaozhai tales about flowers or dreams, which are devoid of the loyalist symbolism assigned them in the writings of Ming loyalists such as Gui Zhuang or Dong Yue. What becomes most apparent is the multivalence and flexibility of cultural symbols during this period.

⁵⁷Qingshi leilue, comment following the chapter entitled "Qinghua" ("Metamorphosis through LOVE"), juan 11.

⁵⁸ Karl Kao (IC, p. 129) points out that Liaozhai contains what he calls "narrativized instances of figures." W. Y. Li ("Rhetoric of Fantasy," pp. 50-52) discusses "the literalization of metaphor" in Liaozhai as a way of naturalizing other worlds. For a more detailed discussion of the literalization of figurative language, see Chapter 5 and the Conclusion to this book.

⁵⁹ See Wu Hung, "Tradition and Innovation," which discusses the literati vogue during the Ming for uncarved jade to capture the spiritual and visual "naturalness" of rock and to distinguish its owner from vulgar folk who could appreciate only "artificial" beauty.

⁶⁰ Although there were other famous rock connoisseurs in Chinese history such as Niu Sengru of the Tang and the ubiquitous Su Shi, Mi Fu seems to have eclipsed them all. In the writings on obsession, it is Mi Fu's name that is invariably coupled with rocks, and in that role he is heavily featured in Feng Menglong's Gujin tan 'gai and in the Ming sequels to New Tales of the World. For a discussion of different Ming editions of Mi Fu anecdotes, see van Gulik, Mi Fu on Inkstones, pp. 3-4.

⁶¹Song shi 444.13124. In his preface to a collection of stories entitled Rocks That Nod Their Heads (Shi dian tou, p. 329), Feng Menglong provides a cosmological rationale for Mi Fu's apellation of his rock: "Now when Heaven gives birth to the myriad things, though their endowments of material may differ, they are alike in receiving qì [energy]. When qì congeals, it becomes a rock; when it melts it becomes a spring; when qì is limpid, it becomes a human being; when it is turbid, it becomes an animal. It is simply that men and rocks are brothers." Feng then argues that rocks, too, have intelligence and reaches this rhetorical climax: "As for calling a rock 'my elder'—why shouldn't a rock be the equal of a human being?" Pu Songling's Historian of the Strange takes this position one step further: the rock shows himself not merely the equal but the superior of most men.

⁶² I am grateful to Professor Ma Ruifang of Shandong University for taking me to see this rock in June 1987.

⁶³ There is a lacuna in the text in this line and the fifth character is missing. Pu Songling is making a play on words between clothes and the names of plants here.

⁶⁴ A variation on a line from "The Mountain Spirit" in Songs of the South. This line must have been one of Pu Songling's favorites; he also included it in the opening of his powerful preface to Liaozhai.

⁶⁵ According to ancient legend, Gong Gong knocked down the sky by bumping into the pillar of Heaven; the Goddess Nü Wa eventually repaired the damage with rocks.

⁶⁶PSLJ 1: 620.

⁶⁷ For illustrations of Mi Fu bowing to his rock, see Hay, Kernels of Energy.

⁶⁸ Contrast with Yuan Hongdao's poem "Shizong," no. 1: "The rock is one Mi Fu pulled from his sleeve" (Yuan Hongdao ji, p. 1460).

⁶⁹ Niu Sengru, a Tang statesman and author of a book of strange tales, was one of the earliest famed rock collectors.

⁷⁰ The two poems are "Inscribed on a Stone" ("Tishi"), PSLJ 1: 620; and "Stone Recluse Garden" ("Shiyin yuan"), PSLJ 1: 619.

⁷¹ According to Stein (World in Miniature, p. 37), the Yunlin shipu describes a stone shaped like a miniature mountain that could be made to emit smoke that looked like clouds: "There are high peaks and holes that communicate through twists and turns. At the bottom is a communication hole in which one may set up a two-story incense burner. [If one lights it,] it is as though clouds were buffeting each other among the summits." Stein traces the Chinese interest in stones as miniature mountains back to the mountain-shaped incense bumers of the Han.

⁷² Trans. Hay, Kernels of Energy, p. 83. For a woodblock print of this ink stone with the inscriptions—it resembles the map of a mountain in a local gazetteer—see Tao Zongyi's (1316-1403) Chuogeng lu and Hay, Kernels of Energy, p. 81.

⁷³ From an inscription on an album leaf by Li Liufang (1575-1629); the last leaf is signed by the artist and is dated 1625. Reproduced in Sotheby's Catalogue of Fine Chinese Paintings (New York, Dec. 6, 1989), p. 43. According to Schaefer (Tu Wan's Stone Catalogue, p. 8), the last Northern Song emperor, Huizong, "that notorious petromaniac," went so far as to "formally enfeoff a prodigious stone as 'marklord of P'an-ku,'" Pangu (P'an-ku) being "a primordial cosmogonic deity, fashioner of the earth and its rocky bones."

⁷⁴ Taking the surname Xing as a pun for the verb xing "to move."

⁷⁵ On Pu Songling's flower obsession stories, see W. Y. Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment.

⁷⁶ This often-repeated definition of rocks appeared as early as a Jin dynasty work A Discussion of the Pattern of Things (Wuli lun). See Hay, Kernels of Energy, p. 128 n72.

⁷⁷ Hay, Kernels of Energy, p. 97.

⁷⁸ This handscroll is reproduced in Sotheby's Catalogue of Fine Chinese Paintings (New York, Dec. 6, 1989), pp. 38-39. I am indebted to Nancy Berliner for lending me additional photographs of the paintings and inscriptions.

⁷⁹Zhongguo meishujia renming cidian, p. 242.

⁸⁰ Based on Mi Wanzhong's final inscription, dated 1510 (photograph of the handscroll).

⁸¹ An inscription on the painting by the influential painter and art theorist Dong Qichang (1555-1636) emphasizes this point.

⁸² A particularly interesting catalogue is Lin Youlin's 1603 Suyuan shipu, which features woodblock prints of famous rocks created from the artist's imagination. Unillustrated rock catalogues are well represented in collectanea such as Shuofu, Tanji congshu, Zhaodai congshu, Meishu congshu, and Yushi guqi pulu.

⁸³ Mi Wanzhong's final inscription (photograph of the handscroll).

⁸⁴ The Ming and Qing ideology of collecting, taken to such extremes in Pu Songling's tale and Wu Bin's handscroll, forestalls or diffuses the postmodernist critiques leveled against collecting by contemporary Western critics such as Susan Stewart in On Longing. In the Chinese idealization of obsession, the relationship between collectors and the objects of their collection is not arbitrary, because objects have become imbued with cultural significance, especially moral virtues. Nor is the relationship one-sided, because objects are said to need collectors as much as collectors need objects. Thus the conceit that the object itself deliberately "finds" the proper collector. Finally it is not luck or even connoisseurship that enables the collector to locate a rare object, but a moral causality. The sufficiently devoted collector comes to possess an object because he merits it.

⁸⁵ In contrast to earlier medical books that treated pi as a category of digestive illness, pi is no longer a serious disease category in any standard nosological list that reflects contemporary sixteenth- or seventeenth-century practice, including Li Shizhen's encyclopedic Classified Materia Medica (see juan 3-4). When the term "pi" does crop up in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical literature, it is simply as a verb for tobacco or alcohol addiction. I am indebted to Charlotte Furth for alerting me to the eclipse of pi as a disease category. Of course, Ming dictionaries like Zhengzi tong still list the earlier medical meanings of pi in their definitions.

⁸⁶ Li Shizhen, Bencao gangmu 52.96.

⁸⁷ Ibid.

⁸⁸ For a fuller discussion of this point and a more detailed reading of Li Shizhen's entry, see my article "The Petrified Heart."

⁸⁹ Li Shizhen, Bencao gangmu 52.96-97.

⁹⁰ Hay, Kernels of Energy, p. 84.

⁹¹ Li Shizhen, Bencao gangmu 52.96.

⁹² Xie Zhaozhe, Wu za zu 7.300.

⁹³ Trans. Barr, "Pu Songling and Liaozhai," p. 223.

⁹⁴Song shi 444.13124.

⁹⁵ A widely used allusion that refers to an anecdote in "The Biography of Dong Xian" ("Dong Xian zhuan") in Ban Gu, Han shu 13.3733. The emperor, wishing to get out of bed, chose to tear off the sleeve of his robe rather than awaken his favorite male lover.

⁹⁶ Qian Xuan's (ca. 1235-after 1301) beautiful handscroll in the Metropolitan Museum depicts Wang Xizhi in a waterside pavilion watching geese (see Cahill, Hills Beyond a River, p. 353, color pl. 35).

⁹⁷Shishuo xinyu 30: 11; trans. Mather, New Tales of the World, p. 464. Pu Songling mentions this anecdote in an essay written in 1670 on behalf of Sun Hui, "Inscription on a Stela at the Pond for Releasing Life" ("Fangsheng chi bei ji"), PSLJ 1: 39.

⁹⁸Peiwen yunfu 3: 3456, under the entry "potted chrysanthemums" ("penju"); cited in Vandermeersch, "L'arrangement de fleurs," p. 83.

⁹⁹PSLJ 1:641.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid.

¹⁰¹ Like most lower-degree holders, Pu Songling prided himself on his sensitivity to "vulgarity." This is particularly evident in his list of "unbearable things" ("bu ke nai shi") appended to a tale about a vulgar scholar who selects money over calligraphy when put to the test by two beautiful foxmaidens. See "A Licentiate of Yishui" ("Yishui xiucai"; 7.906).

¹⁰² In this, Pu Songling may be following the conventions of the drama. As Swatek has asserted in "Feng Menglong's Romantic Dream": "One of the paradigms of chuanqi drama is that the pursuit of love and the pursuit of fame are connected" (p. 232); and "in Mudan ting, the fulfillment of sexual desire is the precondition for all other resolutions" (p. 214). Liaozhai's interest in the mechanics of the hero's financial success, however, resembles as well the concerns of many vernacular stories that unfold in a mercantile milieu.

¹⁰³ Tao Qian, Tao Yuanming ji, p. 89.

¹⁰⁴ Trans. H. C. Chang, Tales of the Supernatural, p. 142.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid., p. 147.

¹⁰⁶ Barr ("Pu Songling and Liaozhai," pp. 217-26) discusses the influence of Li Zhi's "Tongxin shuo" on Liaozhai's naive heroes and draws an explicit parallel to "The Bookworm."

¹⁰⁷ "Exhortation to Study" (the locus classicus is a chapter title in Xunzi) was a favorite theme, especially during the Song. Wai-kam Ho ("Late Ming Literati," p. 26) notes the reasons for the popularity of cheap didactic primers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century publishing: "The main purpose of course for children was to extol the glory of scholarship, to impress young minds with the power of wealth, even the 'face of jadelike beauty' that one could expect to find in books, or to rhapsodize about the joy of studying in poems such as 'Sishi dushu le' [The pleasures of studying in the four seasons]."

¹⁰⁸ Liu Mengmei, the romantic hero of The Peony Pavilion, complains in his self-introduction about the false promises of "Exhortation to Study": "In books lie fame and fortune, they say, / Then tell me, where are the jadesmooth cheeks / the rooms of yellow gold?" (trans. Birch, Peony Pavilion, p. 3)