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well worth reading. Dr. Chou clearly knows Tu Fu and is very well
read in traditional as well as the latest Tu Fu scholarship. It is the
most advanced work on Tu Fu to date and will be of interest and
use to scholars of Tu Fu and Tang poetry. A large number of
poems are translated and the discussions can be helpful, informa-
tive, and insightful. Especially valuable are the numerous refer-
ences to traditional critics. One may or may not agree with Dr.
Chous readings or the comments of the traditional critics, but
the reader finds himself enjoying Tu Fu with worthy colleagues.
Given Dr. Chous obvious knowledge, however, Reconsidering Tu
Fu should have been much better than it is. Topics such as the
nature and evolution of Tu Fus reputation or his use of juxta-
position are important, and are examples of the sort of questions
scholars should be engaged in. If only the approaches and
methods had been kept simpler and more straightforward and
the arbitrary invention of terms and concepts avoided, the results
would have been far more rewarding.

Purdue University Daniel HSIEH

Glen DUDBRIDGE, Religious Experience and Lay Society in Tang China.


A Reading of Tai Fus Kuang-i chi. Cambridge Studies in Chinese
History, Literature and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1995. IX + 256 pp., Maps, Notes, Appendix, Biblio-
graphic References, Index. ISBN 0-521-48223-2.

In the nearly two decades since Kenneth DeWoskin apparently


came up with the translation of describing anomalies for chih-
kuai I have never been comfortable with English renditions
of the term.1 Recently, however, several studies have appeared
which have caused me to rethink DeWoskins translation and,
indeed, the genre of chih-kuai in general.
One of those studies is Glen Dudbridges Religious Experience

1 DeWoskin first used the translation recording anomalies on p. 1 of his

dissertation, The Sou-shen-chi and the Chih-kuai Tradition: A Bibliography and


Generic Study (Columbia University, 1974); he popularized the translation de-
scribing anomalies in his entry on the chih-kuai for the Indiana Companion to
Traditional Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp.
2804; describing anomalies has evolved to anomaly accounts in the work of
Robert Ford Campany (see below).

Brill, Leiden, 1999 Toung Pao LXXXV

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182 bibliographie/book reviews

and Lay Society in Tang China. A Reading of Tai Fus Kuang-i chi.
Dudbridge makes two new claims in his book. First, that the
genre we have come to know as chih-kuai is, in some cases at least,
more religious than literary. Second, that in traditional China,
especially prior to Chu Hsis influence, there was a pervasive set
of religious beliefs more basic than the Three Teachings of
Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, and that this set was shar-
ed by all levels of society.
Since I have followed with almost missionary devotion the
direction of Glen Dudbridges interests from pre-modern popu-
lar literature in his first two books to the classical-language
narratives that inform his most recent volume, I know that Dud-
bridges elegance in style and care in scholarship make reading
his books a pleasure. This one is no exception. Yet although Reli-
gious Experience promises the sacred in its title and focuses on
translations from what has been considered a literary work, it is
in large measure iconoclastic and non-literary. The only con-
tinuity with Dudbridges earlier works is the continued retrogres-
sion in timehere from the study of early ninth-century litera-
ture in The Tale of Li Wa (London: Ithaca Press, 1983), his most
recent monograph, to this probe of a fascinating collection of
about 300 stories entitled Kuang-i chi (The Great Book of
Marvels) compiled by Tai Fu (chin-shih 757, fl. 760780).
The book opens (Chapter 1: A Sequence of Voices) with the
translation and discussion of several narratives followed by Dud-
bridges attempt to bifurcate the structure of these narratives into
inner stories and outer stories (p. 14):
Those two self-defining elements within the whole narratives we can call ...
inner story and outer story. Each speaks for a distinct set of perceptions. ...
The inner storya highly coloured adventure with beings from the other
world, the centre of attention for the anecdotes earliest readerswill in-
terest the historian precisely as mythological property shared between sub-
ject, author and society at large. Its character is defined by that common
ownership. Its interest is both general, for belonging to a whole society, and
specific, for belonging to a given situation as a given time.
The outer story creates a distance from all this. At first sight its work of
observation seems to give us what we ourselves might have seen if we had
been there to see it. But of course the detachment is more apparent than
real, for those observations are filtered through the minds of informants
and shaped by the hand of the compiler Tai Fu. They perceive (as we should
perceive) selectively and express their perceptions in forms their culture
has laid down for them. The results need interpreting with care. And here

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too, as we have found with each of the stories above, the historians own
mind will interpose itself as he tried to make the dead speak.

These concepts are part of the literary approach which Dud-


bridge first brought to the Kuang-i chi2 and we shall examine
them in more detail below.
Chapter 2, A Contemporary View, provides a thorough discus-
sion of the authorship and preface.3 In Chapter 3, Dudbridge
first summarizes the contents of the Kuang-i chi and their ar-
rangement in the Tai-ping kuang-chi. (When this research was
begun, Dudbridge himself had begun to reconstruct this lost
book based on the TPKC and other sources, but for this study he
has utilized the recently published critical edition by Fang Shih-
ming .4) The chapter also gives us Dudbridges assessment
of Tai Fus purpose in compiling this book:
At first sight, as we look over Tai Fus eventful religious landscape, any op-
position between orthodoxy and heterodoxy seems to fade away. He is no
adept, no disciple under the sway of an established priesthood, no spokes-
man for a given spiritual authority. Rather he is an all-purpose layman, wit-
nessing the visible, exoteric manifestations of spiritual powers in the social
world ... the Kuang-i chi presents a set of perceptions as close to the man in
the street as we are ever likely to find in our sources from Tang China. For
me the books quintessential interest lies here ... deeper in the texture of
the Kuang-i chi there lies a quality ... which is best described as vernacular.
The distinction implied here is not between elite and popular levels in a
stratified society, but rather between the values prescribed and fostered by
a centralized state power and those prevailing in local communities at large
through the land ... So its stories speak for a far more massive population
than do the formal writings of Chinas articulate elite [pp. 624].

2 See Dudbridges Tang Tales and Tang Cults: Some Cases from the Eighth
Century, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Sinology, Section on
Literature (Nankang: Academia Sinica, 1990), 33552, and his The Tale of Liu
Yi and Its Analogues, in Eva Hung, ed., Paradoxes of Traditional Chinese Literature
(Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1994), pp. 6188.
3 Although Dudbridge uses Fang Shih-mings edition (see text just below and

n. 4) elsewhere, he does not mention Fangs text of the preface in his meticu-
lously annotated translation of that piece. Other sources on the preface or the
Kuang-i chi which are not cited in the bibliography are Huang Ching-chan
, ed., Chung-kuo li-tai hsiao-shuo hs-pa chi-lu: wen-yen pi-chi hsiao-shuo pu-fen
(Wuhan: Hua-chung Shih-fan Ta-hseh,
1989), pp. 945 (punctuated version of the Preface), and Li Chien-kuo ,
Tang Wu-tai chih-kuai chuan-chi hs-lu (Tientsin: Nan-kai Ta-
hseh, 1993), v. 1 (of 2), pp. 46389 (on the preface, author and relations of the
Kuang-i chi with other texts).
4 Published with Ming-pao chi (Peking: Chung-hua, 1992).

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184 bibliographie/book reviews

The conclusions here fit closely Jordan Papers recent definition


of Chinese religion in his The Spirits Are Drunk, Comparative Ap-
proaches to Chinese Religion (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1995, pp. 23 and 14):
The fundamental difficulty in studying Chinese religion is that ... there is
no traditional Chinese linguistic equivalent of the word religion. ... Following
Clifford Geertzs well-known definition of religion, the Chinese term wen
(modern term: wen-hua = culture) ... could have been used. ... Although
Geertzs definition has been criticized by some as being so broad that it
does not clearly distinguish religion from culture, this feature could also be
understood as its strength. Chinese religion is not a universal religion as
Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam but is an ethnic religion. In ethnic reli-
gions, such as Judaism for a Western example, religion can only be meaning-
fully separated from culture for the purpose of comparison with universal
religions. ... Alternatively, from a Chinese perspective, the term li
(modern term liyi ), which includes all formal religious behavior, would
have also served well [to designate religion].
***
The basic religious practices of all Chinese are essentially the same, only
the details vary according to region and status.

Papers arguments fitsubsume in factthe ideas Dudbridge


cites on the timeliness of China (discussing De Groot on p. 16),
on the openness of the vernacular culture to the whole com-
munity (p. 64 and n. 36 on that page), and his speculations
about the intermingling of Taoist and Tantric ritual practices
during the mid-Tang (p. 73).5
Returning to Religious Experience, about twenty narratives from
Kuang-i chi (numbered according to Fang Shih-mings edition)
are then grouped by subject, translated, and analyzed in the fol-
lowing sections: Chapter 4, The Worshippers of Mount Hua,
Chapter 5, Y-chih Chiung at An-yang, Chapter 6, Victims of the
Yan Chao Rebellion, and Chapter 7, Mating with Spirits. The
fifth chapter is a scholarly tour-de-force, providing the complex
contexts, textual and cultural, for narrative #73 in the Kuang-i chi,
the story of Y-chih Chiung haunting the residence of
Chang Chia-yu . Chapter 6 deals with women victims and is
a chance to test the statement in Chapter 1 that this book `pre-
serves the oral history of a remote age.
5 Paper believes that after Chu Hsi rational interpretation became norma-

tive for the educated elite ... [but] prior to this shift in interpretation,
mediumistic practices were not limited to the lower classes (p. 111).

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bibliographie/book reviews 185

With the concepts of Chinese religion reviewed above and the


outline of the book in mind, let us begin again as Dudbridge
began the Religious Experience, with a story, this about a man
named Wang Chi , a man who belongs to the same company
of petty provincial officials in the Chekiang region with whom Tai
Fu mixed in the 760s and 770s, but who has been possessed by
demons. In following the reading Dudbridge gives this piece we
shall have an example of his use of the Kuang-i chi as a source of
vernacular religion. We pick up the narrative some years after
Wang first encountered his tormenters:
In the Chien-yan period [758759], when he [Wang Chi] was in Chiang-
ling, he once again suffered a serious illness, and returned with devout heart
to invoking the name of Kuan-yin. In the distance he could see hundreds of
demons coming towards him in boats. They were famished from their long
journey and begged Wang for food. So he told his servants to prepare a meal,
which was laid out in the courtyard. The crowd of demons sat down in rows,
while from Wangs own mouth two demons leaped out and took their seats.
When the meal was finished they said this was still not enough.
Wang said, You want some clothes, dont you?
And the demons replied, Exactly!
So he told his servants to make several dozens suits of paper clothing
and also tunics in the official colours, such as red and green. These were
burned in the courtyard: the demons put them on, then scattered. And
consequently he recovered from his illness. (p. 8)

For Dudbridge this is a narrative of religion, ritual and posses-


sion (p. 12). The narrative certainly appeals more to religious
than literary interpretation. And, although Dudbridge demon-
strates in the discussion which follows (pp. 912) a thorough
preparation in the scholarly literature on possession, I wonder
whether his description of an important act of ritual, Wang Chi
serving his demons by burning paper clothes for their use (p.
11), doesnt overlook the role of food offerings in this story. The
sacrificial meal here seems all important, as suggested twice
earlier in the account of Wang Chi:
Later on he fell sick again. Suddenly he felt through all his limbs the pres-
ence of eighty-two people. ... The illness was unendurably depressing.
When Wang Chi asked, Do you people want to kill me?, they replied:
Of course we are not killing you. We are curing your disease!
He said: If you do cure me Ill provide a rich feast to feed you with!
And the demons cried out within his flesh in great delight. The next day a

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186 bibliographie/book reviews

meal was served for them and when it was eaten they all departed. He also
recovered from the other symptoms. (p. 7)
***
On a later occasion when he was seriously ill he forced himself to rise
in the dark and invoke the name of the Bodhisattva Kuan-yin. ... Then he
saw a feast of delicacies being carried out through the gate on stands, about
a hundred of them. Again, he saw several hundred people dressed in radi-
ant clothing, drawn up in lines inside his residence; and he saw his late fa-
ther, sword in hand, furiously saying, I have no rooms for you to stay in!
And the people all at once broke up and fled. Not long after this he recov-
ered from the illness. (p. 8)
The importance of food offerings in controlling spirits is also
emphasized by Paper (The Spirits Are Drunk, pp. 4043ff and 48).
Although Dudbridge elsewhere stresses the importance of money
as the most active system of transaction between mortals and
spirits (p. 54), in this story, at least, food dominates.6
But elsewhere there are the usual tasty lagniappes of a Glen
Dudbridge book. A number of small, perceptive discussions such
as that on City Gods (p. 70), a plethora of detailed, useful foot-
notes such as n. 19 on p. 121 on the cult of Hsiang Y or n.
93 on p. 114 (see also p. 132 and n. 61 on that page) on the Kun-
ming Poolall easily accessible through the index. Both the
translations and the textual work behind them is generally exem-
plaryI was impressed to see Dudbridge cite the oft-neglected
notes by Yen I-ping on TPKC variants.7
6 Ritual offerings of food are also mentioned on pp. 1245 and 129 and in
the summaries for stories #104 and 139 (pp. 194 and 201). Moreover, food (or
the lack of it) seems to be the motive behind the chaos caused by the spirit of
Y-chih Chiung and his daughter, since they are hungry ghosts rather than
poltergeists (p. 131).
7 A few problems concerning the translations which might be raised are:

a. The translation of the construction place name seems inconsistent. For


example: Wang Chi comes from the Tai-yan family, and his home is in
Ying-yang. (p. 7). ; Chiu Chia-fu was from Fu-ping
in the Metropolitan prefecture; his home was in Pu-tai village. (p. 109)
; Hseh Wan-shih was from a Ho-tung family.
(p. 142) ; Yang Chn, a man of Sung-cheng, belonged to a well-
known scholarly family. ... (p. 161). .
b. For the lines Lingering on with sights of regret, he eventually moved on
to the monastery, where he told the whole story. ... (p. 157)
the parsing is different in Fang Shih-ming, suggesting an alternate
version (which I prefer): Then he looked at the paintings on the wall ...
lingering on with sight of regret. When he reached the monastery, he told the
whole story. ...

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bibliographie/book reviews 187

The book is not without problems, however. The treatment of


inner and outer stories, for example, is inconsistent. Earlier, we
were told that inner and outer stories speak form a distinct set
of perceptions. ... The inner storya highly coloured adventure
with beings from the other world, the centre of attention for the
anecdotes earliest readerswill interest the historian precisely as
mythological property shared between subject, author and society
at large. Its character is defined by that common ownership. ...
The outer story creates a distance from all this. At first sight its
work of observation seems to give us what we ourselves might
have seen if we had been there to see it (p. 14). But in the
discussion following the translation of story #111 on p. 167
Dudbridge writes:
This story has the characteristics, not of a known informants personal tes-
timony, but of a local tradition associated with the Lin-ju government hos-
tel, which is perhaps where Tai Fu came to hear of it. Formally speaking
most of the text counts as inner story, with the maids evidence and the
concluding line forming its outer shell. But it makes more sense to treat
the whole text as inner storythe perception of a local event as the staff at
Lin-ju hotel might have presented it.

There is confusion here. We have for the first time the term
outer shell to describe the final line: The two families united
them in spirit marriage. I wonder whether this new term, shell,
doesnt suggest a back-frame and a retreat from the argument
that the two kinds of stories form a distinct set of perceptions.
Granted, the two families are outside the spirit world, but so is
the protagonist, Wang I, throughout most of the narrative (he
dies in the penultimate sentence). Similarly, the treatment of
perceptions troubles in the discussion of the final story in the
book, #128, on p. 170. This narrative begins Li Ying of the Chao-
chn clan ... had an unmarried cousin, thirteenth in her
generation, who travelled south with her brothers at the be-
ginning of Chih-te [756]. She died and was buried at Hai-yen in
the land of Wu. Here there may be an implied outer story, but
it is not mentioned. Instead Dudbridge argues Li Ying is ap-
parently the authors informant for this tale. Perhaps the
application of some of the concepts argued by modern literary
scholars such as Grard Genette would have proved useful in
Dudbridges attempt to analyze the structure of these narratives.
Indeed, in general I felt that the scholarly framework Dudbridge
provides the narratives from Kuang-i chi were more admirable
than the tales themselves. Over the years Dudbridge was com-

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188 bibliographie/book reviews

mitted to reconstructing, translating and finding a means of


commonality for these stories. To some extentin his theories
about the basic nature of the book, in his translations, and in his
varied analyseshe has succeeded. But in the attempts to find
larger patterns or structure or meaning, Kuang-i chi has proved
more recalcitrant. Even in these difficulties, however, Dudbridge
has been candid:
But when the story in due course has the pregnant girl patient give birth to
three otters sired by the exorcized otter demon, who then join their wel-
coming father in the lake, modern readers are caught without preparation
from ethnographic literature. Forced to switch to another mode of reading,
we recognize once more a statement from the surrounding society of what
it perceived to be happening.
Under close study these stories emerge as complex documents. They need
analysis and interpretation before they will yield useful social insights (pp.
1034).

Similar disclaimers are found towards the end of almost every


chapter. And this failure to feel more confident about the gen-
eral aspects of this collection of narratives may have led Dud-
bridge to offer less grand conclusions. Indeed, his meticulous
textual and contextual preparation would allow him to answer
many of the questions raised by Robert Ford Campany in the
Preface (p. x) to his Strange Writing, Anomaly Accounts in Early
Medieval China (Albany: SUNY, 1996):
Why did [the authors of anomaly accounts]highly literate men, most of
whom held important positions in the hierarchy of officialdomwrite at all,
and at such length, and in these particular veins, about other peoples
unexpected encounters with denizens of the spirit-world, or startling feats
by masters of esoteric arts, or the unusual flora and fauna of distant, inac-
cessible places? Why, in their world, was this a compelling thing to do? What
were the pressing questions to which these writings were urged as answers?
What sense can we now make of the portion of them that has reached us
across the centuries? What can they be coaxed to tell us about the ideas
and values of those who wrote and read them?

Dudbridge has collected and developed ample data to support,


indeed often to refine, Campanys responses in Strange Writing,
(1) that chih-kuai are vehicles of cosmological reflection and
religious persuasion (ibid.), (2) that they are not proto-fiction
(pp. 1579), (3) that their sources local in nature ... would have
included purely oral narratives ... local, perhaps family held
records of such narratives, and other sorts of documents con-
cerning sayings and customs in particular areas (p. 179), (4) that
they allowed writers to deal with a certain rather large but ...

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bibliographie/book reviews 189

scantily treated subject matter (p. 199), (5) that contact with
spirits of particular places was a prominent motif in these nar-
ratives (p. 261), and (6) that the unseen world is such that it
constantly speaks to humanity through the codes of anomalies
(p. 354). Indeed, if one reads carefully, Dudbridge, too, has sug-
gested most of these ideas.
Religious Experience, however, moves to conclude in a more
understated fashion:
I have chosen to end this books with the story of Thirteenth Sister for rea-
sons which reach beyond the particular question of spirit marriage. More
than any other report in Kuang-i chi it brings seriously into play all the three
levels of historical time we have adopted as a measure of dynamic change.
Almost triumphantly it transcends the discourse of ghost story rhetoric to
claim the status of historical document. As history of events it lets the
accurately reported progress of the An Lu-shan rebellion play a structural
part in the family drama which occupied center stage ... this great national
crisis of 756 is communicated as the population felt it, not as career
historians presented it. ...
Tai Fus catholic openness of mind and his relish for the far extremes of
human experience filled his notebooks with material from which these
questions can be studied. Many others were like him. It can only be a gain
if we learn to use their surviving work with the critical care that is taken for
granted in more conventional historical study (pp. 1723).

In utilizing the work of Paper and Campany in this review my


intent is not to fault Dudbridge for not recognizing their work
indeed, both books appeared too late for him to have consulted
them at allbut rather to suggest the inter-disciplinary possibili-
ties which now exist for the further study of chih-kuai. These pos-
sibilities could shape not only how we understand Chinese
religion and records of it such as the Kuang-i chi, but also the
nature and development of Chinese narrative, a subject which
still awaits a definitive study.
It would be lovely to think that Campany and Dudbridge and
Paper might be reading each others work as I write this. Each
would find something to interest and challenge himself. For Glen
Dudbridge that challenge would be to produce another careful,
provocative study of this genre, such as Religious Experience, which
would allow him to state more assertively the theories he begins
to outline in this important, interesting, and involved book.

University of Wisconsin-Madison William H. NIENHAUSER, Jr.

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