Adventures of the Mad Monk Ji Gong. Guo Xiaoting

imperial watchdogs and culture police were a ready posse. Fiction could stir up rebellion. In this, as it turns out, they were right. Readers of Qing fiction were truculent. They mimicked their heroes, used gangster argot, practiced swordplay, and gathered and plotted against the state. Mimicry was not the only issue, however. Heroes of the picaresque were considered gods. Ji Gong, in particular, was an unruly saint. The same Boxer rebels who surrounded Beijing in 1900 practiced the cult of Ji Gong.²⁸ Missionary observers had seen young Boxer soldiers in cult practices: “After greeting the deities and taking their places respectfully on either side of the altar, the little boys suddenly began to look sickly, with red faces and staring eyes; they foamed at the mouth; they began to shout and laugh.”²⁹ These rituals inspired the Boxers. Northern China was a vast terrain of the displaced and desperate; flood, disease, and imperial incompetence had created an impoverished and unstable population, a mob of “hungry, discontented, hopeless idlers,” as the American ambassador noted.³⁰ This northern mob, however, coalesced through cult practices. Ji Gong and other heroes of the waterways and greenwood gave them divine legitimacy.

      Vibeke Bordahl has traced the long histories of “schools”—the specific lines—of storytellers. She has collected performance lineages going back as many as seventy-eight generations. Storytellers of Water Margin passed down their knowledge in one famous clan for two hundred years.³¹ The Ji Gong stories have had their own great lineage. From storyteller performances to storyteller scripts, to smooth narratives by Qing writers, to contemporary movies, and then to TV shows, Ji Gong has lasted a millennium. He has, in fact, fared better than Confucius. Not that this is surprising. When the court and its revered texts and malign proclamations were abandoned, the oral tradition survived. Performers retained the lore of Ji Gong in their prodigious memories. Nor was Ji Gong a mere entertainer. Though he may be charged with the crime of comedy, his signature off-kilter view is compelling. Indeed, off-kilter has its uses. His anarchical intelligence offers us a refracted view of a difficult age, an age of corrupted authority and unmoored lives—a world in which the Empress had to flee the city dressed as a peasant. The late Qing was not a time for the great lions of history, but was “a world too numbed for tragedy and too disillusioned for glory.”³² Comedy sits in that vacuum, providing an apparently blithe view from the sidelines.

      Günter Grass revealed that he preferred the style of the “Spanish and Arab picaresque”; the jester’s version reflects the world “in concave and distorting mirrors.”³³ Indeed, the picaresque attracts those who live with violence. The talent of the jester for comical escape, offers a model, if not of victory, then at least of survival, as playing the rogue offers useful cover.

      Victoria Cass

       Baltimore, Maryland

      Footnotes

       1. Meir Shahar, Crazy Ji, Chinese Religion and Popular Literature (Harvard University Asia Center, 1998), 24.

       2. Shahar, Crazy Ji, 117.

       3. Susan Naquin, Peking, Temples and City Life, 1400–1900 (University of California Press, 2000), 638.

       4. Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987), 101.

       5. David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley, University of California Press), 104.

       6. Naquin, Peking, 641–643.

       7. Alison Dray-Novey, “Spatial Order and Police in Imperial Beijing,” Journal of Asian Studies 52, no. 4 (November 1993): 896.

       8. Dray-Novey, “Spatial Order and Police in Imperial Beijing,” 896.

       9. Dray-Novey, “Spatial Order and Police in Imperial Beijing,” 889, note 2.

      10. John Bell (1691–1780), Travels from St Petersburg in Russia to Diverse Parts of Asia, volume II (Glasgow, University of Edinburgh), 54.

      11. Shahar, Crazy Ji, 116.

      12. Carol Benedict, Golden-Silk Smoke, A History of Tobacco in China, 1550–2110 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011), 18–21.

      13. Shahar, Crazy Ji, 116–118.

      14. Guo Xiaoting, Ji Gong Quan Zhuan 濟公全傳 (Nanjing: Fenghuang, 2008), chapter 5.

      15. Guo Xiaoting, Adventures of the Mad Monk Ji Gong, trans. John Shaw (Tuttle Publishing, 2014), chapter 10.

      16. Guo Xiaoting, Ji Gong Quan Zhuan, chapter 5.

      17. Guo Xiaoting, Ji Gong Quan Zhuan, chapter 5.

      18. Jean Chesneaux, Marianne Bastid, and Marie-Claire Bergere, China from the Opium Wars to the 1911 Revolution (New York, Random House, 1976), 334.

      19. Shahar, Crazy Ji, 43.

      20. Robert Torrance, The Comic Hero (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1978), 11.

      21. Torrance, 11, citing Susan K. Langer.

      22. Robert Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University press, 1998), 51–63.

      23. Anne E. McLaren, Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables (Leiden, Brill, 1998), 170–183.

      24. Lillian M. Li, Allison J. Dray-Novey, and Haili Kong, Beijing, From Imperial Capital to Olympic City (New York, Macmillan, 2007), 92.

      25. Hegel, 30–31.

      26. McLaren, 285.

      27. Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 15.

      28. Shahar, Crazy Ji, p. 172. Also see Shahar for discussion of reading fiction as religious practice, 6–7. Also see Joseph Esherick (1988), The Origins of the Boxer Rebellion (University of California Press), 1988.

      29. Chesneaux, Bastid, and Bergere, 342.

      30. Larry Clinton Thompson, William Scott Ament and the Boxer Rebellion: Heroism, Hubris, and the Ideal Missionary (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 30.

      31. Vibeke Bordahl and Jette Ross, Chinese Storytellers’ Life and Art in the Yangzhou Tradition (Boston, Cheng and Tsui, 2002), 68.

      32. Torrance, 10.

      33. Maya Jaggi, “Slaughterhouse Lives,” review of Pow by Mo Yan, trans. Howard Goldblatt, Literary Review 406 (February, 2013): 47.

      CHAPTER 1

      Military Finance Officer Li visits Buddha and begs for a son; an immortal lohan descends to earth and begins anew the cycle of reincarnation

      THE patchwork robe made for Guang Liang, the newly elected superintendent of the monks at the Monastery of the Soul’s Retreat at Linan, was placed on display before daybreak. It was arranged on a high-backed armchair placed on a low platform to the west of the altar before the huge statue of the boddhisatva Guan Yin. In the morning when the sun shone through the door, it illuminated each scrap of precious brocade and every bit of exquisite embroidery with the unusually fine stitching that made the robe a dazzling ceremonial vestment.

      The monks had begged for these scraps at the gate of every great family in Linan, the twelfth-century capital of the Southern Song Dynasty of China.The monastery was the most important temple in the empire and, as the monks explained, Guang Liang would some day almost certainly become its abbot when the old abbot was no more. People had gladly contributed not only material, but also money for the sewing, which was done at the finest shop in Linan.

      In the first two hours of its showing, most of the monks, with the exception of the abbot, had seen the robe. Soon wealthy matrons would be pointing out their bits of brocade to their friends, but before that could happen, the robe suddenly disappeared. No one knew where it had gone, but all the monks guessed that