Fictions of Enlightenment

LI Qiancheng: Fictions of Enlightenment. Journey to the West, Tower of Myriad Mirrors, and Dream of the Red Chamber. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. 250 pp., US$ 48 (hard cover). ISBN 0-8248-2597-7

Li Qiancheng's monograph is the revised version of his doctoral thesis completed in 1998 at Washington University, St. Louis, under the guidance of Professor Robert E. Hegel. Its somewhat drab, uninspiring dust jacket and rather fragile binding cover an interesting study that aspires to become a milestone in the study of the late traditional Chinese novel. Its innovative approach consists in presenting a new perspective in the research of this genre – the influence of the Buddhist quest for salvation, or enlightenment, on the vision, structure, and narrative form of three works of classic Chinese fiction, namely the Ming novels Xiyou ji (The Journey to the West) and Xiyou bu (Supplement to The Journey to the West or The Tower of Myriad Mirrors), and the Qing novel Honglou meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as Shitou ji or Story of the Stone). Li argues that the plot of these novels are generally patterned after the narratives in certain well-known Mahāyāna sutras and as such can - and should – be read as their fictional equivalents.

From the methodological point of view, the corner stone of this work is that of intertextuality – the study of thematic and rhetorical relationship between different texts – in both the historical and intergenre sense. On one hand, individual texts from different periods are thus set against each other with their authors as agents, while on the other the cultural milieu of the Chinese Mahāyāna tradition is identified as a common source of the poetics and aesthetics of various authors. The focus of Li's attention is on the novel Honglou meng and the way "it refers back to its predecessors and conversely, how it illuminates them" (p.3). Equipped with an impressive command of both the scholarship on vernacular fiction and the theories of Buddhism, the author defines a new sub-genre and a narrative mode within the traditional Chinese vernacular fiction, that is the fiction of enlightenment. As Li points out, "central to this subgenre is the progress toward enlightenment, in which the end and the means, however, cannot be clearly demarcated… All these works are built on the understanding of the intricate relationship between samsāra – the provisional – and nirvāna – the ultimate… [they] imply that one cannot achieve enlightenment without going through all that is called life … and that the human existential experiences… are a prerequisite of enlightenment. " (p.165).

Let us now take a closer look at the structure of the book. The very first part, the Prologue, offers an outline of the whole work with notes on its basic premises and methodology, and a summary of the individual chapters. Chapter 1 sets the terminological