Abstract:Commencing in the mid-Qing period, the composition of literary works in authors’ local dialects emerged as a growing trend in the Jiangnan region. Studies to date have noted several examples of Wu dialect fiction and tanci, while Kunqu plays, the dominant form of southern (chuanqi) opera, continued to be written in a mixture of classical Chinese and guanhua. The mid-Qing play Sancaifu 三才福 (All Goes Well for Three Talented Friends), kept in the Skachkov Collection, Russian State Library (RSL), is a rare example of a play in part rendered in Wu dialect (Suzhou variety). Spoken parts of the play employ Suzhou dialect of the time and include numerous local expressions and slang terms that would have made little sense to audiences or readers from elsewhere. The RSL’s handwritten copy likely dates from the early nineteenth century, purchased by Skachkov in Beijing sometime before 1857, thereafter remaining cataloged but unremarked in Russia. Knowledge of the play disappeared in China except for a single mention in a Manchu prince’s reading notes. A two-volume play consisting of thirty-two scenes and over 46,000 Chinese characters, Sancaifu’s plot consists of several parallel storylines, most of which concern marriage fates. The key protagonists are predominantly men of letters; however, the play also features a large number of female urban commoner roles, such as girls from struggling families, concubines, maids, nuns, elderly beggars, midwives, and go-betweens. In contrast to other plays of the time, these subaltern characters are not mere targets of humor, but more often than not play a key role in the storyline. Consistent with the prominence of urban commoner women, the play also draws attention to social values that contradict the conservative Neo-Confucianism that dominated plays from this era. Following an analysis of the play’s unusual textual and material features, this paper seeks to assess what lies behind its deliberate deployment of dialect across distinctions of social stratification, gender, and moral standing. It is this last element that establishes the unique importance of this otherwise-obscure text for Chinese theater history.
{"title":"Suzhou Dialect, Social Status, and Gender in Sancaifu, a Rediscovered Mid-Qing Chuanqi Play","authors":"W. Cuncun","doi":"10.1353/cop.2020.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2020.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Commencing in the mid-Qing period, the composition of literary works in authors’ local dialects emerged as a growing trend in the Jiangnan region. Studies to date have noted several examples of Wu dialect fiction and tanci, while Kunqu plays, the dominant form of southern (chuanqi) opera, continued to be written in a mixture of classical Chinese and guanhua. The mid-Qing play Sancaifu 三才福 (All Goes Well for Three Talented Friends), kept in the Skachkov Collection, Russian State Library (RSL), is a rare example of a play in part rendered in Wu dialect (Suzhou variety). Spoken parts of the play employ Suzhou dialect of the time and include numerous local expressions and slang terms that would have made little sense to audiences or readers from elsewhere. The RSL’s handwritten copy likely dates from the early nineteenth century, purchased by Skachkov in Beijing sometime before 1857, thereafter remaining cataloged but unremarked in Russia. Knowledge of the play disappeared in China except for a single mention in a Manchu prince’s reading notes. A two-volume play consisting of thirty-two scenes and over 46,000 Chinese characters, Sancaifu’s plot consists of several parallel storylines, most of which concern marriage fates. The key protagonists are predominantly men of letters; however, the play also features a large number of female urban commoner roles, such as girls from struggling families, concubines, maids, nuns, elderly beggars, midwives, and go-betweens. In contrast to other plays of the time, these subaltern characters are not mere targets of humor, but more often than not play a key role in the storyline. Consistent with the prominence of urban commoner women, the play also draws attention to social values that contradict the conservative Neo-Confucianism that dominated plays from this era. Following an analysis of the play’s unusual textual and material features, this paper seeks to assess what lies behind its deliberate deployment of dialect across distinctions of social stratification, gender, and moral standing. It is this last element that establishes the unique importance of this otherwise-obscure text for Chinese theater history.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41453969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Writing in general has largely been viewed as a force for cultural or social integration in China. How might writing in the Qing period reinforce regional identities? This article explores the use of regional vernacular in drum ballads (guci 鼓词) from North China: how ballads can or do use regional language, and how the use of regional language in the ballads ties to identity. It briefly considers how the use of nonstandard orthography in the ballads relates to specific book cultures (in manuscripts, woodblocks, or lithographs) by following the stories of Judge Liu and Judge Shi across drum ballads produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Overall, genre plays a key role in the language choices in the ballads.
{"title":"Drum Ballads and Northern “Vernacular” in the Qing and Early Republic","authors":"Margaret B. Wan","doi":"10.1353/cop.2020.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2020.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Writing in general has largely been viewed as a force for cultural or social integration in China. How might writing in the Qing period reinforce regional identities? This article explores the use of regional vernacular in drum ballads (guci 鼓词) from North China: how ballads can or do use regional language, and how the use of regional language in the ballads ties to identity. It briefly considers how the use of nonstandard orthography in the ballads relates to specific book cultures (in manuscripts, woodblocks, or lithographs) by following the stories of Judge Liu and Judge Shi across drum ballads produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Overall, genre plays a key role in the language choices in the ballads.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47030220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:It is commonly assumed that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, most members of the Eight Banners were no longer fluent in their native Manchu language. The Qing court certainly feared at this time that the bannermen had lost touch with their Manchu identity and become acculturated to the ways of their Chinese neighbors. This article will show, however, that late Qing bannermen were not only still using Manchu in their literary production during this period, but were also creating hybrid texts that mixed Manchu and Chinese scripts and literary forms, leading to the emergence of a body of language that made use of their native language in innovative ways heretofore not attempted. Through analyzing various examples of such compositions, including poems and songs, this paper explores how their authors developed new genres and styles that expressed ambivalent feelings concerning their social role and cultural identities.
{"title":"Experimenting with the National Language: Use of Manchu in Bannermen Poetry and Songs in the Nineteenth Century","authors":"Bingyu Zheng","doi":"10.1353/cop.2020.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2020.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:It is commonly assumed that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, most members of the Eight Banners were no longer fluent in their native Manchu language. The Qing court certainly feared at this time that the bannermen had lost touch with their Manchu identity and become acculturated to the ways of their Chinese neighbors. This article will show, however, that late Qing bannermen were not only still using Manchu in their literary production during this period, but were also creating hybrid texts that mixed Manchu and Chinese scripts and literary forms, leading to the emergence of a body of language that made use of their native language in innovative ways heretofore not attempted. Through analyzing various examples of such compositions, including poems and songs, this paper explores how their authors developed new genres and styles that expressed ambivalent feelings concerning their social role and cultural identities.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47011750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revisiting WESTERN HAN in Written Script and in Oral Performance: Language, Style, Length, and the Question of Exegesis","authors":"Vibeke B�rdahl","doi":"10.1353/cop.2019.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cop.2019.0002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46780292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2019.1699002
Vibeke Børdahl
This article discusses narrative and linguistic features of a storyteller’s script in the Yangzhou tradition of Western Han, Xi Han 西漢, dated to the late Qing, ca. 1880–1912 and belonging to the family of Dai Buzhang 戴步章 (1925–2003). What kind of language style does this text reflect? How does the written text correspond to and differ from an extant oral performance of an episode from the repertoire?
{"title":"Revisiting WESTERN HAN in Written Script and in Oral Performance: Language, Style, Length, and the Question of Exegesis","authors":"Vibeke Børdahl","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2019.1699002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2019.1699002","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses narrative and linguistic features of a storyteller’s script in the Yangzhou tradition of Western Han, Xi Han 西漢, dated to the late Qing, ca. 1880–1912 and belonging to the family of Dai Buzhang 戴步章 (1925–2003). What kind of language style does this text reflect? How does the written text correspond to and differ from an extant oral performance of an episode from the repertoire?","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86232625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2019.1696662
Rostislav Berezkin, D. Maiatskii
This article briefly introduces the history of Russian studies of Chinese traditional drama and storytelling literature, including research works and academic translations, as well as some details of the historical and cultural background of these studies. While not especially numerous, Russian studies had special characteristics that make them different from the corresponding contemporary research in other Western languages, so that one can even speak about the formation of a native Russian school of Chinese drama and storytelling studies in the mid-twentieth century. Russian works can be distinguished by methodology (such as those focusing on the interchange between literary and oral/pictorial traditions) and have used rare and unique materials preserved in Russian collections. Unfortunately, these studies remain largely unknown to Western scholars, so this article tries to make the major achievements of Russian scholars more accessible to English readers.
{"title":"Russian Studies of Chinese Traditional Drama and Storytelling Literature: An Overview","authors":"Rostislav Berezkin, D. Maiatskii","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2019.1696662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2019.1696662","url":null,"abstract":"This article briefly introduces the history of Russian studies of Chinese traditional drama and storytelling literature, including research works and academic translations, as well as some details of the historical and cultural background of these studies. While not especially numerous, Russian studies had special characteristics that make them different from the corresponding contemporary research in other Western languages, so that one can even speak about the formation of a native Russian school of Chinese drama and storytelling studies in the mid-twentieth century. Russian works can be distinguished by methodology (such as those focusing on the interchange between literary and oral/pictorial traditions) and have used rare and unique materials preserved in Russian collections. Unfortunately, these studies remain largely unknown to Western scholars, so this article tries to make the major achievements of Russian scholars more accessible to English readers.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80482888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2019.1697604
M. Bender
This paper concerns publications of long narratives, both oral and written, associated with ethnic minority groups across China. What is the situation and value of these many published versions that have been gathered and “processed” since just after 1949 down to today? Opinions vary among both Western and Chinese scholars about the legitimacy of many of the texts, perhaps due to the various “filters” applied in the process of collecting, transcribing, editing (sometimes to the extent of “enhancing”), translation, and publication. Moreover, a number of these texts have been constructed out of several versions of the same narrative to produce what I have called enriched “master texts”—in ways comparable to the treatment of oral and oral-connected material in the creation of the Finnish Kalevala. I will discuss these publications in terms of “co-creation” and translation, “processing,” format, native-Chinese translation teams, and the concept of these epics as “monuments” to traditional cultures that have altered swiftly under the forces of modernization and globalization.
{"title":"Co-creations, Master Texts, and Monuments: Long Narrative Poems of Ethnic Minority Groups in China","authors":"M. Bender","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2019.1697604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2019.1697604","url":null,"abstract":"This paper concerns publications of long narratives, both oral and written, associated with ethnic minority groups across China. What is the situation and value of these many published versions that have been gathered and “processed” since just after 1949 down to today? Opinions vary among both Western and Chinese scholars about the legitimacy of many of the texts, perhaps due to the various “filters” applied in the process of collecting, transcribing, editing (sometimes to the extent of “enhancing”), translation, and publication. Moreover, a number of these texts have been constructed out of several versions of the same narrative to produce what I have called enriched “master texts”—in ways comparable to the treatment of oral and oral-connected material in the creation of the Finnish Kalevala. I will discuss these publications in terms of “co-creation” and translation, “processing,” format, native-Chinese translation teams, and the concept of these epics as “monuments” to traditional cultures that have altered swiftly under the forces of modernization and globalization.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89344478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2019.1698872
Katherine Alexander
A gap of nearly twenty years stands between Daniel Overmeyer’s Precious Volumes: An Introduction to Chinese Sectarian Scriptures from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Berezkin’s Many Faces of Mulian. Simply for breaking this long dry spell in English language monographs on precious scrolls (baojuan 寶卷) alone, Berezkin’s book deserves attention and praise. His book will bring this complex, broadly defined genre of popular literature to the attention of new generations of scholars and students alike. The evocative tale of Mulian rescuing his mother from the depths of Buddhist hell is a compelling narrative around which Berezkin shapes his detailed exploration of the genre’s shifting textual features and intended audiences. Berezkin charts out a map of multiple versions of this tale from the fourth century CE through to the very present, not only in baojuan but also in related religious texts and their performance contexts, contributing to the fields of Chinese performance literature and popular religious studies. Many Faces of Mulian opens with a glowing foreword in which Victor Mair, Berezkin’s doctoral advisor, summarizes the book’s main arguments using superlatives, explaining to readers how the field of popular Buddhist literature will “irrevocably transform” (p. xii) because of this work. Berezkin’s own work then begins with a prologue, a refreshingly straightforward, engaging account of his first exposure to the present-day practices associated with reciting baojuan about Mulian. By beginning with this clear and exhaustively detailed firsthand experience, Berezkin implicitly reminds us that even the earliest texts, which come down to us without reliable historical accounts of their performance, were part of repertoires of ritual practice in their own time and place. Without such a reminder, the detailed formalistic textual analyses in which Berezkin engages throughout his book may risk coming across as disconnected from the very human concerns that engendered their creation and spread in the Ming and Qing. Instead, such a vivid picture of one way that the Mulian story is enacted in our own time embeds us in the shared ritual experience of contemporary baojuan audiences, creating a bridge for readers to better access the genre’s history as well. The introduction provides succinct summaries of the generic definitions and history of baojuan, both premodern and contemporary, followed by Berezkin’s main goals for his book, namely to closely examine the history of Mulian in baojuan and trace the evolution of the genre overall. He concludes this short chapter with a list of the five baojuan about Mulian which he will explore in the following seven chapters. To give readers unfamiliar with baojuan a sense of just how even a study as detailed as this one essentially only scratches the surface of research remaining to be done in the field, note that in Appendix 2, Berezkin has expertly compiled a catalog of extant versions of baojuan about M
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Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2019.1698250
Casey Schoenberger
This paper draws on scholarship in performance history, art history, cognitive humanities, and the anthropology of urbanization and markets to argue that theatrical conventions like “fourth wall” illusion and asides first developed in China’s Song-Yuan period and matured in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries under the special influence of new demands of city life, commerce, and print culture. As anthropologists argue that participation in markets requires temporary, imaginative suspension of other roles and identities, so suspension of disbelief in mimetic portrayals (as opposed to storytelling evocations) of fictional characters with fictional minds requires “leaving one’s identity at the theater door.” Song-Yuan Chinese theater, like Japanese Noh of the Muromachi and later periods, accomplished this in a mediated fashion by including star characters to focus on and “spectators’ representative” characters to identify with. Drawing inspiration from the protean, promiscuous space and punning humor of printed miscellanies and annotated vernacular fiction, the late Ming comedy Ge dai xiao 歌代嘯 (A song for a laugh) “flattens” the “asymmetric” (mediated) structure of the traditional Yuan form it takes for its model by stringing together a series of loosely related vignettes featuring buffoonish “side” characters in a generic town setting.
{"title":"Storytellers, Sermons, Sales Pitches, and other Deceptive Features of City Life: A Cognitive Approach to Point of View in Chinese Plays","authors":"Casey Schoenberger","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2019.1698250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2019.1698250","url":null,"abstract":"This paper draws on scholarship in performance history, art history, cognitive humanities, and the anthropology of urbanization and markets to argue that theatrical conventions like “fourth wall” illusion and asides first developed in China’s Song-Yuan period and matured in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries under the special influence of new demands of city life, commerce, and print culture. As anthropologists argue that participation in markets requires temporary, imaginative suspension of other roles and identities, so suspension of disbelief in mimetic portrayals (as opposed to storytelling evocations) of fictional characters with fictional minds requires “leaving one’s identity at the theater door.” Song-Yuan Chinese theater, like Japanese Noh of the Muromachi and later periods, accomplished this in a mediated fashion by including star characters to focus on and “spectators’ representative” characters to identify with. Drawing inspiration from the protean, promiscuous space and punning humor of printed miscellanies and annotated vernacular fiction, the late Ming comedy Ge dai xiao 歌代嘯 (A song for a laugh) “flattens” the “asymmetric” (mediated) structure of the traditional Yuan form it takes for its model by stringing together a series of loosely related vignettes featuring buffoonish “side” characters in a generic town setting.","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80226819","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-07-03DOI: 10.1080/01937774.2019.1695526
W. L. Idema
The Shijia rulai shidi xiuxing ji 釋迦如來十地修行記 (A record of the ten stages of self-cultivation of the Tathagata Sakyamuni) is a text composed in simple classical Chinese that brings together the story of Sakyamuni’s awakening with the stories of nine of his prior incarnations in which he accumulated by his extraordinary virtues the good karma that will allow him to become the Buddha of the present kalpa. The text does not carry the name of a compiler, and it was never included in any edition of the Chinese Tripitaka. In recent centuries the text was quite popular on the Korean peninsula, and it has often been assumed to be a Korean compilation. The earliest preserved edition, however, was revised by an otherwise unknown Shaoshi shanren 少室山人 and printed in 1448 at the establishment of the Ming-dynasty Prince of Yi 伊 at Luoyang at the order of the eunuch Puxiu 普 秀. This information makes a Chinese origin of the text more likely. The date of the edition on which Shaoshi shanren based his edition is unknown. A date mentioned in the tenth story when discussing the year of death of the Buddha suggests that that story was originally composed in 1328, but it is unclear whether this date also refers to the compilation of all ten stories as a single text. The Shijia rulai shidi xiuxing ji was reprinted in Korea in 1660, and continued to enjoy a considerable popularity there, but would appear to have dropped out of circulation in China itself. While there exists a considerable body of scholarship on this text in Korean (unfortunately inaccessible to me), the Shijia rulai shidi xiuxing ji has only quite recently started to attract the attention of Chinese scholars. This attention so far has been focused on a single story in the compilation. This is the seventh item in
{"title":"Neglected Materials on Shihua (Tales with Poems) as a Genre of Buddhist Narrative of the Song Dynasty","authors":"W. L. Idema","doi":"10.1080/01937774.2019.1695526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01937774.2019.1695526","url":null,"abstract":"The Shijia rulai shidi xiuxing ji 釋迦如來十地修行記 (A record of the ten stages of self-cultivation of the Tathagata Sakyamuni) is a text composed in simple classical Chinese that brings together the story of Sakyamuni’s awakening with the stories of nine of his prior incarnations in which he accumulated by his extraordinary virtues the good karma that will allow him to become the Buddha of the present kalpa. The text does not carry the name of a compiler, and it was never included in any edition of the Chinese Tripitaka. In recent centuries the text was quite popular on the Korean peninsula, and it has often been assumed to be a Korean compilation. The earliest preserved edition, however, was revised by an otherwise unknown Shaoshi shanren 少室山人 and printed in 1448 at the establishment of the Ming-dynasty Prince of Yi 伊 at Luoyang at the order of the eunuch Puxiu 普 秀. This information makes a Chinese origin of the text more likely. The date of the edition on which Shaoshi shanren based his edition is unknown. A date mentioned in the tenth story when discussing the year of death of the Buddha suggests that that story was originally composed in 1328, but it is unclear whether this date also refers to the compilation of all ten stories as a single text. The Shijia rulai shidi xiuxing ji was reprinted in Korea in 1660, and continued to enjoy a considerable popularity there, but would appear to have dropped out of circulation in China itself. While there exists a considerable body of scholarship on this text in Korean (unfortunately inaccessible to me), the Shijia rulai shidi xiuxing ji has only quite recently started to attract the attention of Chinese scholars. This attention so far has been focused on a single story in the compilation. This is the seventh item in","PeriodicalId":37726,"journal":{"name":"CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79112258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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