Narrating Miracles, Salvation, and Community: The Worlds of Proselytizing Storytellers in Premodern China
1: A Maidservant or a Daoist Master: Difference and Divergence in Medieval Daoist Hagiographies
Friday, March 25, 2022
11:30am – 1:00pm EST
Location: Conv. Center, Room 315
Paper Presenter(s)
JP
Jonathan Pettit
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, United States
The Inner Traditions of Han Emperor Wu (Han Wudi neizhuan 漢武帝內傳, hereafter HWDNZ) tells the story of the encounter between a goddess and an emperor. The text is widely regarded as an early short story in China, and the forerunner to later religious novels. It tells the story of a meeting between Han Emperor Wu and Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu). The Queen Mother is impressed by the emperor's pure intentions to uphold Daoist teachings, and wants to give him texts to aid his quest to transcend his body and ascend on high as a god. By the Tang dynasty, the HWDNZ was one of the most widely read stories in medieval China. Many literati mention the story in poems and letters, the story is quoted in many collectanea and encyclopedias, and is mentioned in medieval bibliographies. Nevertheless, the dating and the authorship of this text is shrouded in mystery. The HWDNZ shares passages that parallel, sometimes verbatim, with two early versions of Lord Mao’s (i.e., Mao Ying 茅盈) hagiography. This paper looks closely at the written representation of Wang Zideng 王子登 in these three texts to gain a more complicated picture of the bibliographic worlds undergirding these texts and the readers/communities who used them. This comparison aims not so much to lock down a particular year when the HWDNZ emerged, but rather thinking about larger debates that prompted authors of religious texts to borrow and edit one another’s stories.
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