Lecture | China Seminar
Demons, Monks, and Merchants: Fate and Individual Agency in Ming Vernacular Short Stories (huaben)
- Date
- Wednesday 9 October 2024
- Time
- Serie
- LIAS China Seminar
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- Lipsius 1.48
Abstract
How much can an individual’s actions affect the course of their life or their family’s lives? How much is predetermined by fate? The question of individual agency versus fate became increasingly urgent in China in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), when social fluidity and rapid commercialization challenged received ideas about the relationship between education, morality, and social structure.
The differences between how fate and individual agency are portrayed in Hong Pian’s vernacular short story (huaben) collection Qingping shantang huaben (Sixty Stories, ca. 1550) and Feng Menglong’s Sanyan (Three Words, 1620-1627) provide a window on how huaben participated in debates on these hotly contested issues. Comparing early and middle period vernacular short stories and their later adaptations in Sanyan not only gives us a view of the huaben in the process of being formed as a genre, but also highlights how that genre served as a marketplace of ideas about individual agency. Clusters of similar stories on demons, Buddhist monks and devotees, or folly and consequences highlight the competing moral frameworks through which these stories are presented. As those moral frameworks are adapted, discarded, or reframed, we can see how the shifting expectations and imagined audiences for each version affected concepts of individual agency.