Taoist Mirror: Ching-hua Yuan and Lao-Chuang Thought
By Hsin-sheng C. Kao

Journal of Chinese Philosophy
V. 15 (1988)
pp. 151-172

Copyright 1988 by Dialogue Publishing Company, 
Honolulu, Hawaii , U.S.A.

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I. Introduction:

    After the downfall of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), one of the most salient characteristics of the reaction against the authoritarian control of the Manchu government (1644-1911) was a reawakening of the interest in Taoism and Buddhism. These two doctrines, with their promising aura of mystery, not only helped soothe the ideological breach between the Han and Manchu people, [1] but also offered a refuge in their highly expressive works of poetry and fiction. In these works, the authors could, without fear of censorship, safely create a private realm within which to embody their ideas.

    In assessing the importance of these trends in literary history, this study will single out Li Ju-chen [a] (ca. 1763-1830) as the representative author of the Ch'ing, and will examine his only novel, Ching-hua yuan [b] (Romance of the Mirrored Flowers, ca. 1820) [2] in the light of the two Taoist canons, Lao-tzu [c] and Chuang-tzu [d]. As a means of illuminating the philosophical similarities and aesthetic parallels between these three works, the discussion will focus on the following points:

1. Like Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, Li Ju-chen is very concerned with the human condition, and points toward a Taoist framework within which to interpret and give substance to his more specific investigations of its metaphysical dimensions.

2. Common to the three is an intense awareness of the concept of Oneness and Tao [e] (the Truth). From the Taoist cosmogonical point of view, all three writers are keenly aware of the finitude of the human world.

3. Their different approaches notwithstanding, all reject the notion of

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dualism -- they all believe that the perennial problem of human existence is the universal disjunction between the dualism of transitory illusion and the ultimate reality immanent in man's own mind.

4. All are aware of the problematic nature of language. Allegories, parables, metaphors, and paradoxical turns of phrase weave a net of meanings in which to catch literary ambiguities.

5. Concepts of time and eternity are cyclical in nature, as typified by the perpetual succession of the four seasons. Due to this objective consciousness of succession, intellectual notions about the perception of the "empirical" self have thus been attacked and ridiculed.

6. Finally, Li Ju-chen's Taoist aesthetics stem directly from and constitute a response to his view of reality. His triad of artist, artistic creation, and reader ties in closely with Taoist aesthetics.

    Before going into further detail, one thing should be emphasized. This study makes no pretense of being a distillation of a common body of ideas into a common ground, nor an isolation of a particular doctrine on which the three thinkers are in implicit if not explicit agreement. Rather, it will concentrate on the above points which are central to Taoist thought, so as to render a general comparative study.

II. The Perennial Problem of Human Existence

    The prevailing themes in Ch'ing dynasty Chinese fiction can be roughly divided between two tendencies: an analysis of the state of the world and of flight from the world. Writers were caught between the naturalism of critical observation and the impressionism of dream-like immersion in the flux of the present. Thus, Wu Ching-tzu's [f] Ju-lin wai-shih [g] (The Scholar, 1768) and Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in's [h] Hung-lou meng [i] (The Dream of the Red Chamber, ca. 1765) were the exemplars of the day. As Li Chen-tung [j] puts it in an essay called "Ching-hua yuan ti chia-chih" [k] ("The Value of Ching-hua yuan"), two basic drives overshadowed the Ch'ing literary climate: "the drive to understand and that to forget." [3]

    Li Chen-tung's analysis of this literary climate also applies to Li Ju-chen. Like Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in, Li Ju-chen's Ching-hua yuan displays

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his understanding of the importance of interior monologue and symbolic description (introspection, though not necessarily narrative impartiality) originating from a unified point of view. It is left for the reader to bridge descriptions of external reality to the inward syntax of the novel. On the other hand, like Wu Ching-tzu, Li Ju-chen breaks out in another direction, experimenting with the very setting of his characters' actions to show the sad result of an attempted break through to reality. Much of this expressionism -- especially its philosophical overtones -- depicts man as a victim or as a submissive puppet, hoping for a return to the Taoist paradise instead of moving forward in the direction of a possibly compromised Confucian path under the dominance of the Manchu government.

    The most general comprehension of Li Ju-chen's novel writing maybe defined in terms of his perception of the perennial problem of human existence. For Li Ju-chen, human suffering results from man's limited perception and his incompatibility with nature. Man's specific physical make-up and his specifically human intellect cannot remedy the ills of human life. Rather, spiritual salvation is to be achieved only through the workings of forces greater than man, as is revealed on the eve of one protagonist's renunciation of the world and inscribed on a stone tablet:

Drifting along with the waves, many years have gone by,
Fortunately this life has not been spent in vain.
Only now have I arrived at the Original Source, [l]
How can I forsake it and sail on? [4]

    Drawing upon the concept of the "Original Source" is fundamental not only to the organization of Li Ju-chen's work into a coherent whole, but also to making him the most clearly Taoist writer of his time. Clearly, he is presenting a modern variation upon the Tao of Lao Tzu:

From the time of old till now, its name ever remains.
By which we may see the beginning of all things. [5]

Li Ju-chen turns to the Tao as a key to the intellectual quandary of the

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Ch'ing because it addresses the issue of the individual pitted against forces which would destroy him. Whether it be social or economic policies, mass culture, or the pressures of public opinion, man is forced into standardized roles by the powers that be. Returning to the "Original Source," Li Ju-chen affirms, releases man from the shared commitments, goals, values, and Confucian world-views which fabricate the illusion of social coherence. Thus understood, Li Ju-chen's character cannot resist the "taste of truth" and forsakes the mundane world.

    Li Ju-chen's philosophical and thematic concerns bear a decided correlation to his personal background. As his courtesy name "Sung-shih Tao-jen" [m] ("Sung-shih, the Taoist") and fragmentary details of his biography suggest, [6] Li Ju-chen was a devoted "Taoist." [7]

    Li Ju-chen was born around 1763 at Ta-hsing [n] in the Chih-li [o] district (near Peking in present-day Hopei Province), and died in desolation around 1830. [8] A phonetician by profession and a novelist by inclination, he completed three works during his lifetime. Yin-chien [p] (The System of Phonetics, 1805), a six-volume phonological treatise; Shou-tzu p'u [q] (Handbook of Chess, 1817), a sophisticated chess manual; and Ching-hua yuan (Romance of the Mirrored Flowers, ca. 1820), a one-hundred-chapter novel written in the vernacular. He was raised as a Confucian intellectual, but unfortunately never achieved any scholarly recognition or passed any civil service examination higher than that of the hsiu-ts'ai [r] degree. [9] Still, Li Ju-chen was without a doubt a man of considerable erudition who possessed an extraordinarily inquisitive mind.

    Working briefly from 1801 to 1807 as an assistant magistrate (hsien-ch'en) [s], in the Honan Province, he witnessed floods, civil upheavals and the hopeless struggles of the common man. [10] These experiences, together with his own setbacks in the examination system had him to reject the traditional worldly optimism which led most Chinese scholars to hope that the meaning of human existence could be found in pursuing the set course of a scholar-official's career. He did not believe "that the meaning of man's existence was nearly as simple and transparent as implied by the regulated paths rigidly laid out for him by the Manchu government." [11] Instead, he eventually developed a nihilistic interpretation of human existence in which, as he expresses quite clearly in his novel Ching-hua

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yuan, "he sees man as caught in a double bind, doomed one way or another to certain defeat." [12] From then on, he underwent a striking transformation -- from revulsion and frustration to a state of resigned contemplation and growing preoccupation with his own perceptions, and, ultimately, to the cultivation of his aesthetic and philosophical interests in the process of writing Ching-hua yuan. In the commentary "Ching-hua yuan chien-lun" [t] ("Brief Notes on Ching-hua yuan"), modern critic Li Kuo [u] holds that this novel is "an direct and satirical presentation" [13] of Li Ju-chen's introspective reminiscences, his feeling of deep regret, his resigned commentary upon the decay of the Chinese tradition, and his search for spiritual redemption in Taoism.

    The publication of Ching-hua yuan revealed -- or rather should reveal -- the depth of Li Ju-chen's Taoism. Modern critic Sun Chia-hsun [v] considers the book the most important work of the nineteenth century. [14] It is certainly one of the most ambitious and most difficult. Yet if the reader can grasp its thematic import, the author's position during his later years of total silence, as well as the perspective from which this work was composed, all become clear. His concern is with the aesthetics of literature, and more specifically, with Taoist literary aesthetics. His aim is to reconcile past and present, to rise above the warring literary traditions of classicism (under the banner of the School of Han Learning, or Han-hsueh [w]) [15], and romanticism (under the banner of the School of the Mind, or hsin-hsueh [x]) [16], and make room for a truly Taoist literary criticism. In order to achieve this aim, however, Li Ju-chen had to formulate his own dialectics. He confronts his reader with a complex, subtle, and paradoxical style in which he first effectively states that wrong is wrong, then that right is wrong, and, finally, that these wrongs and rights are transcended by a superior non-dualistic truth. The method obviously owes much to Taoist dialectics, specifically to Chuang Tzu's theory of the "equalization of all things" (ch'i-wu) [y] -- a mystical doctrine positing that the ultimate, most primal reality is non-differentiated, untainted by man's illusory distinctions. He views the worldly and acquisitive actions of man as ignorance to be transcended, as his Taoist predecessor Chuang Tzu states in the following excerpt:

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Everything has its "that," everything has its "this." From the point of view of "that," you cannot see it, but through understanding you can know it. So I say, "that" comes out of "this" and "this" depends on "that" -- which is to say that "this" and "that" give birth to each other. -- So I say, the best thing to use is clarity. ... A state in which "this" and "that" no longer find their opposites is called the hinge of the Way. When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly. Its right then is a single endlessness and its wrong too is a single endlessness. So I say, the best thing to use is clarity. [17]

To use Chuang Tzu's term, the only way to "illuminate" Ching-hua yuan is to peel off layers. The novel spans two planes of reality. On the surface it is the simple story of a Taoist fairy's fall from grace and her subsequent trials in the mundane world to regain her immortality; on a deeper level, various symbolic and satirical devices, together with two leitmotifs -- "the flower in the mirror" (ching-hua) [z] and "the moon in the water" (shui-yueh) [aa] -- render it an allegory of the vicissitudes of human consciousness caught between reality and appearance, the eternal and the temporal. Li gives form to a notion that beyond the worldly, beyond the shifting veils of the seasons, beyond the earthly changes of power, there is a more stable and more enduring reality. This reality is symbolized by Little P'eng-lai Mountain [ab], the paradise of Taoist popular literature. In the novel, Li Ju-chen demonstrates a fundamental connection between his thought and Taoist doctrine:

"Please tell me," asked Kuei-ch'en (the earthly incarnation of the Fairy), "Why are you nuns also interested in sight-seeing.
"Boddhisattva, you must know that once you have seen the sights, you can complete the whole achievement...," the Taoist nun answered."
Kuei-ch'en unconsciously nodded her head and then said, "I see, then please tell me where you come from."
"I come from the Cave of Looking Back on Reunion

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Mountain."
After hearing this, Kuei-ch'en suddenly remembered a phrase in her father's poem: "In order to meet, you will have to look back and recall," and she was moved to ask, "Immortal nun, where are you going now?"
"I am going to the Cave of Supreme Happiness on the Island of Divine Ascent."
Kuei-ch'en thought, "Can it be that after one has seen the sights and looked back, one finds such a reward? I'll ask her one more question. She then asked: "Immortal nun, this Cave of Supreme Happiness may very well be on the Island of Divine Ascent, but where is all this from a geographical point of view?"
"In the heart-field," replied the Taoist nun. [18]

    The Taoist nun's reference to "heart-field" (hsin-t'ien [ac], or mind) is crucial. In China both heart and mind are considered to be the source of human mental activity. Impurities of the mind can bring about illusion and, consequently, desire. In Taoist teachings, especially those of Chuang Tzu, the highest achievement of the mind is to gain release from ideas of creation and extinction, and so from discriminations between the traditional ontology of the subject-object polarity. [19] With the same concept, Li Ju-chen believes that human existence is more than the assemblage of facts studied by our discriminating minds.

    Thus it is increasingly evident that when the Taoist nun refers to the concept of "heart-field" -- the mind -- she tries to enlighten the protagonist T'ang Kuei-ch'en, the Fairy incarnate, to tell her that the mind is a dangerous and disturbing factor which precludes our "seeing" things as they really are. Because we construct the human world only through the employment of concepts and categories which stem from our own reason, we can comprehend objects only as we have analyzed and interpreted them through our impure minds. The nun's subsequent references to "sight-seeing" (kuan-kuang) [ad], "Reunion Mountain" (Chu-shou shan) [ae] and "Cave of Supreme Happiness" (Chi-lo tung) [af] not only harbor double-entendre word-plays on the concepts of "enlighten-

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ment," "redemption," and "ultimate reality," but also satirically point out T'ang Kuei-ch'en's "blindness." The Taoist nun's replies bring into focus the problematic nature of "seeing" (kuan): not the ordinary visual seeing of worldly objects meant by T'ang Kuei-ch'en, but the transcendental seeing of the ultimate nature of things, or "enlightenment" (kuang). The nun's references are total paradoxes which attempt to set T'ang Kuei-ch'en free from the dualism of appearance and reality. Unfortunately, because T'ang Kuei-ch'en can neither revert back to surface meanings nor attempt to reach the truth that lies behind them, she has to continue her journey on earth, which moves Li Ju-chen's allegory forward.

III. Allegory and the Problematic Nature of Language

    The sense of discrepancy between T'ang Kuei-ch'en's everyday reality and the Taoist nun's higher reality, and the subsequent attempt to render this higher reality in a literary form, produce a dilemma that Li Ju-chen shares with his main character, as well as with many other Chinese writers of the nineteenth century. He is acutely aware that language, ravaged and trivialized by thoughtless use and conditioned to describe everyday phenomena, no longer suffices to express a reality of a higher order. In other words, his dilemma is two-fold: first, how to express eternal reality in terms ordinarily applied to the everyday, since the words from one domain cannot possibly express the meaning of the other; second, how to convey the ineffable except through language? Li Ju-chen, who devoted many long years to phonetics and other aspects of linguistics, quickly realizes that traditional straight-forward narrative devices are outmoded tools, destroying their object in the process of sifting out the parts. Only an oblique "Taoistic" method, such as allegory, allowing the substitution of referents and simultaneous presentation of divergent views, can impart an occult truth. In other words, if language depends on how we look at it and use it, Li Ju-chen chooses allegory. However, to analyze the nature of his allegory necessitates a return to literary definitions.

    Common to all allegory is its construction in two or more layers of meaning: the primary or literary meaning, and the secondary or abstract meaning. On the primary, literal level, narrative language denotes state-

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ments or images which bear direct inter-referential relationships among themselves. [20] On the secondary, abstract level, narrative language becomes more tacit, and thus its images or statements stand for, or refer to, ideas which transcend empirical meaning. Even so, the secondary meanings always extend from and depend upon the precision of the primary meaning. Consequently, in both theoretical and technical aspects, correspondences and interactions evoke an image-idea doubleness. As observed by Edward A. Bloom:

Allegory is a literary mode which consciously presents at one and at the same time at least two meanings: one maybe designed as primary, or as a literal and figurative surface meaning. The other may be designed as secondary, or as a meaning of abstract significance... [21]

Supporting this theory of "meaning", Edwin Honig believes that allegory always embodies a "twice-told quality" in which "some venerated or proverbial antecedent (old) story has become a pattern for another (the new) story." [22]

    Ching-hua yuan indeed conforms to these two theories. First, the novel manifests this image-idea doubleness by using Taoist images, classical metaphors, and historical allusions. Li Ju-chen's reconstruction of Taoist myth and history in the novel suggests his awareness of the functional (primary and secondary) and aesthetic (literal and abstract) theories of allegory. The central theory of allegory is that the fictional reality is composed of certain selected materials -- mythical, historical, or experimental. In this regard, the novel's Taoist images and historical allusions can be understood as the specific components of Li Ju-chen's allegorical propositions. It is from these that the reader will recognize the import of their abstract meaning on the secondary level.

    The abstract ideas underlining the secondary level deal with Li Ju-chen's analysis and involvement with man's inherent dualism. Questions of the spiritual and material, of good and evil, and of the eternal and temporal -- questions reminiscent of Chuang Tzu's "Ch'i-wu-lun" ("On the Equality of Things") or "Hsiao-yao yu" [ag] ("Happy Excursion") [23] --

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examine and make light of man's discriminating viewpoints which polarize everything into absolute and separate opposites.

IV. Li Ju-chen's Taoist Artifice and the Concept of Spontaneity

    The first duality of the human psyche to be examined allegorically is that of the divine and demonic tendencies latent in all sentient beings. Similar to the polarity between finite and infinite points of view argued in "Ch'iu-wu lun", the conflict of divine and demonic natures represents the central ontological question of man's relationship to the whole of creation, and consequently overlaps the metaphysical question of reality versus appearance. Li Ju-chen borrows heavily from the Taoist canon, terminology, and personae. As a matter of fact, the initial setting before the protagonist's fall from grace is a Taoist paradise presided over by the Queen Mother of the West [ah] in the K'un-lun Mountains. [ai] Li Ju-chen's protagonist, the Fairy of a Hundred Flowers (Pei-hua hsien-tzu) [aj] -- the personification of the Taoist concept of natural spontaneity, tzu-jan [ak] -- is fully aware of her responsibilities:

Under my charge, each flower has a definite scheduled season to bloom, and it is not like singing or dancing, that can be ordered at any time. ... Moreover, as far as flowers are concerned, the Supreme Deity's ordering and supervision of flowers are extremely strict and detailed. Flowers scheduled to bloom must submit a month in advance their proposed designs, and any change in the number of their petals and the shade of their colors must await His Majesty's decision. [24]

The foregoing statement makes it clear that Li Ju-chen uses the Fairy as a symbolic vehicle for expressing his personal vision -- a fundamental acknowledgement of the importance of natural law and the idea of self-denial. In Lao-tzu, we find a like passage, which speaks of the similarly compelling dictator of nature and its non-interference on mortals:

Heaven is eternal and earth everlasting.
They can be external and everlasting because they do not exist

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for themselves,
And for this reason can exist forever.
Therefore the sage places himself in the background but finds
himself in the foreground.
He puts himself away, and yet he always remains.
Is it not because he has no personal interests?
This is the reason why his personal interests are fulfilled. [25]

    Although the Fairy is fully aware of her responsibilities and her dependence on seasonal law, her innocence and single-mindedness constitute a tragic flaw. She meets human emotional challenges in the person of the mythological figure Ch'ang O [al], the Goddess of the Moon. Ch'ang O is designed for an allegorical purpose: she is to embody concepts of finitude and egotism -- seeing things exclusively from a self-centered and finite point of view -- so as to bring out the innate weakness and mortal yearnings of the Fairy. Thus, through Ch'ang O, we see the Fairy in various stages of drastic change. First, in the initial episode, she lives in spontaneous harmony with her surroundings -- a happy exemplar of the Taoist harmony between the most divine and chosen creatures in this Taoist paradise. Then, in the next episode, the Fairy is provoked by Ch'ang O's allegorical qualities to display her own latent human qualities. Her subsequent fate of succumbing to the mortal temptations of impulsiveness and lack of self-restraint is satirized by the Queen Mother as follows:

Truly, the girl's (the Fairy's) discipline is shallow.... How could she know that many causes and effects that will happen in the future are the result of today's quarrel? ... She seems to be still in her dream and unaware of its significance. [26]

Here the reader may grasp certain characteristics of Li Ju-chen's thinking: that the Taoist paradise can only be attained through spontaneous harmony; that attachments to illusive yearnings and personal preferences can only degrade divine creatures into undergoing mortal transmigration (in the case, the reincarnation of the Fairy into a human being, reborn T'ang Hsiao-shan [am] as her first secular name and then as T'ang Kuei-ch'en) [an];

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and consequently, that paradise can only be regained through a redemptive process involving arduous spiritual journeys and quests.

V. Spiritual Quests and the Workings of the Taoist Metaphor "Yuan" [ao]

    Like Chuang Tzu, Li Ju-chen's criticism of duality is most fully realized and best understood, not in the surface story, but in its underlying allegorical meanings. Turning to T'ang Hsiao-shan's (later as T'ang Kuei-ch'en's) spiritual quest and rebirth, there is ample evidence, not only of the author's rigorous scrutiny of the experience and perception of human existence, but also the transformation of the Taoist concept of yuan from a thematic tool into a fully realized philosophy. But before dealing at length with this perception, two of Li Ju-chen's leitmotifs must be examined: "the flower in the mirror" and "the moon in the water."

    These two are Li Ju-chen's most effective symbols, around which he develops the plot and substance of the novel. Quite clearly, these two symbols are not complicated, nor are they complemented by other symbols or motifs; they alone bear the full burden of communicating the primary and secondary levels of the novel's allegory. Since the "mirror" can only reveal the reflection, but not the substance of the "flower", and since the "moon" in the "water" is only an illusive image of the real subject, then these two metaphors derive their effect from the relationship they establish between appearance and substance. These in turn stand par excellence for the two levels of reality, namely, the earthly and the ultimate. It is the Fairy's attachment to earthly reality that causes her banishment from the Taoist garden of paradise, where all things not only coexist in harmony, but where all polarities are regarded as invalid.

    In Chapter 47, through the workings of these two leitmotifs, the Fairy comes to see the pitiful material world of appearances as it really is. H. C. Chang brings an insightful observation to bear on just these points:

The romance itself is indeed of the stuff of which allegory is made, being an account of the "Flowers in the Mirror." With the word "mirror" one steps at once into the world of enchantment. The reader is thus warned not to look too

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curiously, and so warned he sees history merging into fiction, and events, supernatural and natural, taking place side by side; for it is a tale of divine natures struggling through life in human forms to regain their lost fairyhood. It will be noticed, above all, that the tone throughout the romance is matter-of-fact. The reader, having been told to suspend disbelief, must accept all as a part of the story. [27]

Only when the Fairy Incarnate starts to question the ultimate validity of worldly conceptions and values, does she confirm Li Ju-chen's conviction, crystallized by the two leitmotifs into an impression that all is illusory and transcent in the temporal world. As he denigrates the absurdity and illusory nature of human existence, he says:

Boundless, boundless this emptiness
A thing which approaches absurdity. [28]

Clearly, for Li Ju-chen, mortal beings are trapped in their distorted visions of reality. The first line indicates the vastness of an unredeemed desert; the second line, building upon the image of the first, views all things as absurd (t'ang) [ap]. Thus once the Fairy Incarnate sees through them, she no longer sways between two extremes, but focuses on the search for her true self and her lost divinity. In fact, these two leitmotifs form part of a metastructure outlined at the beginning of the novel. As Li Ju-chen summarizes:

What is constant exists to be constant; what changes exists to change. And though what is narrated may seem to consist in trivialities, these orchestrations but serve in the end to bring us back to the truth. .... That which seems fantastical or illusory within this tale all stems from the banishment of the Flower Fairies. If the reader but set himself at reading the first chapter, he will understand the general outline. [29]

    It should be added that the parallels between these leitmotifs and

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the voyage of self-discovery extend further to include the concept of yuan, the other most frequently used motif in Ching-hua yuan. This Taoist concept, used throughout the novel, closely resembles:

The idea of karma in the Buddhist tradition in that both denote the conditioning -- or rather, preconditioning -- of phenomena by something beyond the scope and influence of the immediate phenomenal situation. However, while Buddhistic karma is usually taken part and parcel with a doctrine of reincarnation that asserts that the conditioning of phenomena in the present life can be traced to the structuring of reality, of consciousness by the volition and actions of human and other sentient beings in a previous life, yuan is not so sharply delineated in meaning and can refer to any of a number of supernatural "causes". [30]

The causes as follows: namely, yu-yuan [aq] (existent causes), chiu-yuan [ar] (former causes), ch'ien-yuan [as] (previous causes), hua-yuan [at] (a transformational cause), ch'en-yuan [au] (earthly bound causes), chi-yuan [av] (auspicious causes), and the novel's title, Ching-hua yuan (illusory causes). This sizeable list is an indication of Li Ju-chen's virtuosity in selecting this allegorical word. Let us pause here to consider it in more detail.

    First, it is essential to point out that the concept of yuan, in general, represents a reaction against pure rationalism and, as such, revels in mystery. Rational principles are dropped whenever yuan appears. Consequently, the novel takes on an aura of an unspoken etheral dimension of omnipresent powers. In Chapter 51, one lengthy passage voiced by a Taoist nun touches upon these ideas:

Our meeting with each other today must be due to some yuan. Not only does this yuan exist, but this yuan must derive from a previous life. And because of this yuan from a previous life, we have come to produce an excellent yuan. And because of this excellent yuan, we might also continue our former yuan. And because of this former yuan, we will produce

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yuan for all of us. And once we have yuan for all of us, we can conclude our earth yuan. [31]

One needs hardly mention that these various aspects of yuan represent a sequential order of metaphysical qualities which parallels the movements of T'ang Kuei-ch'en's spiritual journey and quest:

(1) Earthly-caused yuan makes the Fairy descend into the mundane world as T'ang Hsiao-shan.

(2) Previous-caused yuan sees that she is helped and guided during her spiritual quests by divine creatures, such as the Taoist nun of the above passage.

(3) Due to the on-going continuity of the formerly-caused yuan, as soon as the protagonist repays the debt for "the false move she made" [32] in the Taoist paradise, she transcends the problem of the duality of appearance and reality.

(4) Finally, on completing her quest for redemption on earth, her earthly-caused yuan -- and consequently this whole cycle of the activities of yuan -- ensures the grand completion of the divine plan which has been well established since the initial chapter.

    In a sense, Li Ju-chen exploits yuan as a fictional framework. The reason for this should be obvious: somehow it is necessary to give substance to his theme, to project it into the realm of reality, and to lend a form to his thematic vision. The concept of yuan fulfills this intention precisely by supplying the various layers of allegorical meanings that Li Ju-chen needs. In addition, the sequence of yuan -- from the existence of a divine cause, to the sufferings of any earthly cause, to enlightenment through illusory causes, and then a return to eternal paradise - indicates that every plot development fits somehow into the grand design wrought by a master's hand, one who considers that a novel should be more than a mere assemblage of facts and names. To Li Ju-chen the essence of novel writing is in the underlying ideas; the ideas encompass universal truths by

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means of his investigating his characters' empirical, potential, and redeemable qualities, as seen in the Fairy and her various transformations and as indicated by her two earthly names: T'ang Hsiao-shan and T'ang Kuei-ch'en.

VI. The Concept of Time and the Taoist Cyclical View

    The concept of time is another important means of rendering the imagination's effort to fuse and thereby recreate the thematic emphasis within the confines of the printed medium. The structure of Li Ju-chen's thought is triadic, invoking the Taoistic concept of an original state of innocence followed first by a fall into illusive temptations and then by ultimate redemption. This triadic structure plays out the three stages in the development of his concept of time, represented respectively by the Fairy's three names: Fairy of the Hundred Flowers, T'ang Hsiao-shan, and T'ang Kuei-ch'en. The first stage, an untainted realm, admits no temporality nor any finite and empirical self. Nonetheless, temporal perceptions and desires lie latent in this seemingly peaceful place. The second state, which constitutes the main thrust of the novel, is characterized by T'ang Kuei-ch'en's disillusionment with the superficiality of the prosperous T'ang dynasty (618-907). Subsequently, the goal of her impending spiritual rebirth is more clearly defined; she believes the conflict initiated through the misconceptions called "flower in the mirror" and "moon in the water" will be resolved. The third stage, symbolized by Little P'eng-lai Mountain, is the ultimate goal of her search. This ultimate realm is not only her future state which lies beyond the horizon, but also an eternal realm which exists independently of the everyday world and represents a return to grace after the fall from innocence.

    Li Ju-chen describes this eternal realm as a place where "the flowers never fade … the grasses ever remain green," [33] a place that symbolizes the concept of "permanence." [34] If these three stages refer to the protagonist's past, present, and future, then accordingly, they may be read as states of permanence, change, and permanence respectively. Here we understand Li Ju-chen's view of time: that "permanence" is ever subject to "change" and that "change" can turn to "permanence". In other words, he finds that the concept of time can be viewed circularly; the

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sequence of past, present, and future is always moving in a harmonious circle, rather than in a linear direction. Implicit in this view is the idea that creation and existence follow a course engendered by the fated interplay of the primal order and entropic reshuffling: we see spontaneity in the person of the Fairy of the Hundred Flowers, who subjects herself to the dictates of nature's immutable laws of change and permanence. It is like the succession of the four seasons or the circularity of all creatures in two passages from the Chuang-tzu:

In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there has been another change and she is dead. It's just like the progression of four seasons, spring, summer, fall, and winter... [35]

The seeds of things have mysterious workings... Men in time return again to the mysterious workings. So all creatures come out of the mysterious workings and go back into them again [36]

    Clearly, both Chuang Tzu and Li Ju-chen concern themselves with the meaning of existence and man's original being. Unlike Chuang Tzu, however, Li Ju-chen remains primarily an artist whose time concepts are ultimately conditioned by his fictional design. Internal ontological experience is admitted through his characters, but an "objective" comparison is mapped out, based on an assumed circular structure of time within which past, present, and future realities have their place, To Li Ju-chen, the sequential order can be comprehended by proper perception and intelligence, precisely because the nature of perception prescribes both the course and the extent of one's ontological existence. Furthermore, by developing the notion that his protagonist can formally enact the symbolic creation of perceptual forms to represent abstract ideas, Li Ju-chen makes it clear that the human imagination has a life which can assimilate, digest and grow beyond any confined experience of time and space, and that the human imagination, like the Little Peng-lai Mountain, is itself a bridge

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uniting past and present, and leading to a future blessed with perpetual evergreen grasses and flowers.

VII. Conclusion

    For some scholars, it might be unthinkable to situate Li Ju-chen in the mainstream of Taoism: his work is only a fiction, not a Taoist tract. He did not analyze the Taoist passages deeply enough; he was too satirical. Yet in his own way, Li Ju-chen was indeed one of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu's most fascinating descendants, [37] not because he reasoned as they did, but because he responded to many of the same questions on a plane which is unlike so many others yet which remained consonant with their thought -- that is, on the ontological and allegorical plane which delineated every stage of his novel making. The Dream of the Red Chamber, published half a century earlier and constantly cited as the greatest novel of the Ch'ing, reacts to problems of human existence and perspectives in a period of evolving and conflicting values, but seems never to have gone so far as to explain the meaning of ultimate reality. The Scholar, another powerfully realistic and satirical work, struggles with the absurdity of human existence, with non-conformity, the destruction of traditional Confucian values, and ultimately with artistic alternatives. It ridicules in order to arouse the reader's awareness. In terms of what one might call Lao-Chuang teachings, Li Ju-chen emerges as a man who can not only digest complicated theories, but who can also adopt the novel as a tool for presenting his understanding of Lao-Chuang's thought. He interprets Lao-Chuang thought much as a pianist or violinist interprets a musical score.

    Seen in this way, Li Ju-chen devotes himself, at least in part, to applying Taoism to contemporary issues. It has been this essay's intent to consider Li Ju-chen's work inductively, observing how his themes have emerged directly from his perspectives on various layers or reality, and how his plot and characters have been shaped to express his own unique vision. Avoiding any categorization that might distort the substance of Li Ju-chen's thought or put it into a ready-made framework, relevant parallels have been noted only as they have suggested themselves.

SUNY AT ALBANY

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NOTES

1. For an account of these matters, see Liang Ch'i-chao, Ch'ing-tai hsueh-shu kai-lun (Intellectual Trends in the Ch'ing Period) (Taipei: Commercial Press, 1967), pp. 3-12. This book has been translated into English by Immanuel C. Y. Hsu under the same title, Intellectual Trends in the Ch'ing Period (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959).

2. The earliest text is called The Chieh-tzu yuan edition, printed in 1828. The original text has been preserved in the Peking University Library. This edition is the most important one and has frequently been reprinted. This study is based on this edition with some modification, complete with prefaces by Hsu Ch'iao-lin, Mai Ta-p'eng, Hsieh Yeh-mei, and Wang T'ao, and complimentary poems and prologues by Sun Chi-ch'ang, and others. This was published in1968 by Taiwan Shang-wu yin-shu kuan (Commercial Press).

3. See Li Ch'en-tung, "Ching-hua yuan ti chia-chih" ("The Value of Ching-hua yuan"), Wen-hsueh hsien-hsiang ti hsin t'u-ching (Taipei: San-main shu-chu,1970), pp. 129-130.

4. Ching-hua yuan (hereafter in the Notes, it will referred to as CHY), chap. 40, p. 282. The various passages I have quoted from the text of the novel are all my own translations.

5. Wing-tsit Chan translated, The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te ching) (New York: The Bobbs Merrill Company, Inc., 1963) chap. 21, p. 137. According to Chan, this chapter is a very important chapter and in some way the concepts of reality in the Book of Changes (I-ching) are strikingly similar to The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te ching).

6. Probably due to his failure to pass any civil service examinations, his name is never mentioned in the local "Biographical Record" of the Shun-t'ien fu (Shun- t'ien Prefecture), However, we find some detailed information about him in Chung-kuo jun-ming ta tz'u-tien (Dictionary of Chinese Names). For further information, see Hsin-sheng C. Kao, Li Ju-chen (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1981), pp. 19-24.

7. See Kao, Li Ju-chen, p. 22.

8. In regard to the exact date of the completion of the novel, see Kao's Li Ju-chen, p. 26. Also see H. C. Chang, Allegory and Courtesy in Spenser: A Chinese View (Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 1955), p. 6.

9. See Hu Shih, "Ching-hua yuan ti yin-lun" ("Introductory Study to Ching-hua yuan), Hu Shih wen-ts'un (Taipei: Yuan-tung t'u-shu kung-ssu, 1965), vol. 2, chuan 2, pp. 400-433.

10. See Sun Chia-hsun, "Ching-hua yuan pu-k'ao" ("Supplementary Research on Ching-hua yuan"), Hu Shih wen-ts'un, vol. 3, chuan 3, pp. 582-88.

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11. Kao, Li Ju-chen, p. 25.

12. Ibid., p. 25.

13. Li Kuo, "Ching-hua yuan chien-lun" ("Brief Notes on Ching-hua Yuan") ( Singapore: Ch'ing-nien shu-chu, n.d.), p. 12.

14. See Sun Chia-hsun, p. 584.

15. For a full-length study of each branch of the School of Han Learning, Han-hsueh, in the Ch'ing dynasty, see Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Chung-kuo chin san-pai nien hsueh-shu shih (The Intellectual History of Ch'ing Dynasty) (Taipei: Chung-hua shu-chu, 1966), pp. 22-23.

16. See Fung Yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Derk Bodde( New York: Free Press, 1966), p. 283; Liang Ch'i-chiao, Chung-kuo chin san-pai nien hsueh-shu shih, p. 23.

17. Translated by Burton Watson, Chuang Tzu: Basic Writing (New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 34-35.

18. CHY, chap. 51, pp. 376-77.

19. According to the Buddhist interpretation, the heart is the source of man's cognitive activities. See William Soothill & Lewis Hodous, ed., A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms (Taipei: Chung-kuo fo-chiao yueh-k'an she, 1968), pp. 149-51.

20. For an informative interpretation of this kind, see Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 7 & 70.

21. Edward A. Bloom, "The Allegorical Principle," Journal of English Literary History, 18, no. 3 (September 1951), p. 163.

22. Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (Providence: Brown University Press, 1972), p. 12.

23. See Yuk Wong, Collected Essays on the Philosophy of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu (Linking Publishing Company, Ltd., 1979), pp. 455-72.

24. CHY, ch. 1, p. 5.

25. Wing-tsit Chan, p. 112. For the original text, see Li Tan, Lao-tzu (Taipei: Hua-lien ch'u-pan she, 1967), ch. 7. p. 12.

26. CHY, ch. 2, p. 9.

27. H. C. Chang, Allegory and Courtesy in Spenser: A Chinese View, p. 4.

28. CHY, ch. 48, p. 357.

29. CHY, ch. 1, p. 1.

30. Kao, Li Ju-chen, pp. 59-60.

31. CHY, ch. 51, p. 377.

32. CHY, ch. 49, p. 360.

33. CHY, ch. 1, p. 1.

34. CHY, ch. 1, p. 1.

35. Watson, p. 113.

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36. Watson, p. 117.

37. In the epilogue of Ching-hua yuan, Li Ju-chen amusedly describes himself as "a descendant of Lao Tzu of some modest literary ability," as both Lao Tzu, or Li Tan, and the author bear the same last name, "Li." See CHY, ch. 100, p. 771. Also see CHY, ch. 25, p. 165 for an examination of the author's further purposes in writing the novel Ching-hua yuan.

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CHINESE GLOSSARY