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bibliographie/book reviews 181 well worth reading. Dr. Chou clearly knows Tu Fu

bibliographie/book reviews 181 well worth reading. Dr. Chou clearly knows Tu Fu and is very well read in traditional as well as the latest Tu Fu scholarship. It is the most advanced work on Tu Fu to date and will be of interest and use to scholars of Tu Fu and T’ang poetry. A large number of poems are translated and the discussions can be helpful, informa- tive, and insightful. Especially valuable are the numerous refer- ences to traditional critics. One may or may not agree with Dr. Chou’s readings or the comments of the traditional critics, but the reader finds himself enjoying Tu Fu with worthy colleagues. Given Dr. Chou’s obvious knowledge, however, Reconsidering Tu Fu should have been much better than it is. Topics such as the nature and evolution of Tu Fu’s reputation or his use of juxta- position are important, and are examples of the sort of questions scholars should be engaged in. If only the approaches and methods had been kept simpler and more straightforward and the arbitrary invention of terms and concepts avoided, the results would have been far more rewarding. Purdue University Daniel HSIEH Glen DUDBRIDGE, Religious Experience and Lay Society in T’ang China. A Reading of Tai Fu’s Kuang-i chi. Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1995. IX + 256 pp., Maps, Notes, Appendix, Biblio- graphic References, Index. ISBN 0-521-48223-2. In the nearly two decades since Kenneth DeWoskin apparently came up with the translation of “describing anomalies” for chih- kuai I have never been comfortable with English renditions of the term.1 Recently, however, several studies have appeared which have caused me to rethink DeWoskin’s translation and, indeed, the genre of chih-kuai in general. One of those studies is Glen Dudbridge’s Religious Experience © Brill, Leiden, 1999 T’oung Pao LXXXV 1 DeWoskin first used the translation “recording anomalies” on p. 1 of his dissertation, “The Sou-shen-chi and the Chih-kuai Tradition: A Bibliography and Generic Study” (Columbia University, 1974); he popularized the translation “de- scribing anomalies” in his entry on the chih-kuai for the Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 280–4; “describing anomalies” has evolved to “anomaly accounts” in the work of Robert Ford Campany (see below). Bookrev.p65 3/1/99, 1:13 PM 181 182 bibliographie/book reviews and Lay Society in T’ang China. A Reading of Tai Fu’s Kuang-i chi. Dudbridge makes two new claims in his book. First, that the genre we have come to know as chih-kuai is, in some cases at least, more religious than literary. Second, that in traditional China, especially prior to Chu Hsi’s influence, there was a pervasive set of religious beliefs more basic than the Three Teachings of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, and that this set was shar- ed by all levels of society. Since I have followed with almost missionary devotion the direction of Glen Dudbridge’s interests from pre-modern popu- lar literature in his first two books to the classical-language narratives that inform his most recent volume, I know that Dud- bridge’s elegance in style and care in scholarship make reading his books a pleasure. This one is no exception. Yet although Reli- gious Experience promises the sacred in its title and focuses on translations from what has been considered a literary work, it is in large measure iconoclastic and non-literary. The only con- tinuity with Dudbridge’s earlier works is the continued retrogres- sion in time—here from the study of early ninth-century litera- ture in The Tale of Li Wa (London: Ithaca Press, 1983), his most recent monograph, to this probe of a fascinating collection of about 300 “stories” entitled Kuang-i chi (The Great Book of Marvels) compiled by Tai Fu (chin-shih 757, fl. 760–780). The book opens (Chapter 1: A Sequence of Voices) with the translation and discussion of several narratives followed by Dud- bridge’s attempt to bifurcate the structure of these narratives into “inner stories” and “outer stories” (p. 14): Those two self-defining elements within the whole narratives we can call ... inner story and outer story. Each speaks for a distinct set of perceptions. ... The inner story—a highly coloured adventure with beings from the other world, the centre of attention for the anecdote’s earliest readers—will in- terest the historian precisely as mythological property shared between sub- ject, author and society at large. Its character is defined by that common ownership. Its interest is both general, for belonging to a whole society, and specific, for belonging to a given situation as a given time. The outer story creates a distance from all this. At first sight its work of observation seems to give us what we ourselves might have seen if we had been there to see it. But of course the detachment is more apparent than real, for those observations are filtered through the minds of informants and shaped by the hand of the compiler Tai Fu. They perceive (as we should perceive) selectively and express their perceptions in forms their culture has laid down for them. The results need interpreting with care. And here Bookrev.p65 3/1/99, 1:13 PM 182 bibliographie/book reviews 183 too, as we have found with each of the stories above, the historian’s own mind will interpose itself as he tried to ‘make the dead speak.’ These concepts are part of the literary approach which Dud- bridge first brought to the Kuang-i chi2 and we shall examine them in more detail below. Chapter 2, A Contemporary View, provides a thorough discus- sion of the authorship and preface.3 In Chapter 3, Dudbridge first summarizes the contents of the Kuang-i chi and their ar- rangement in the T’ai-p’ing kuang-chi. (When this research was begun, Dudbridge himself had begun to reconstruct this lost book based on the TPKC and other sources, but for this study he has utilized the recently published critical edition by Fang Shih- ming .4) The chapter also gives us Dudbridge’s assessment of Tai Fu’s purpose in compiling this book: At first sight, as we look over Tai Fu’s eventful religious landscape, any op- position between orthodoxy and heterodoxy seems to fade away. He is no adept, no disciple under the sway of an established priesthood, no spokes- man for a given spiritual authority. Rather he is an all-purpose layman, wit- nessing the visible, exoteric manifestations of spiritual powers in the social world ... the Kuang-i chi presents a set of perceptions as close to the man in the street as we are ever likely to find in our sources from T’ang China. For me the book’s quintessential interest lies here ... deeper in the texture of the Kuang-i chi there lies a quality ... which is best described as ‘vernacular.’ The distinction implied here is not between elite and popular levels in a stratified society, but rather between the values prescribed and fostered by a centralized state power and those prevailing in local communities at large through the land ... So its stories speak for a far more massive population than do the formal writings of China’s articulate elite [pp. 62–4]. 2 See Dudbridge’s “Tang Tales and Tang Cults: Some Cases from the Eighth Century,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Sinology, Section on Literature (Nankang: Academia Sinica, 1990), 335–52, and his “The Tale of Liu Yi and Its Analogues,” in Eva Hung, ed., Paradoxes of Traditional Chinese Literature (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1994), pp. 61–88. 3 Although Dudbridge uses Fang Shih-ming’s edition (see text just below and n. 4) elsewhere, he does not mention Fang’s text of the preface in his meticu- lously annotated translation of that piece. Other sources on the preface or the Kuang-i chi which are not cited in the bibliography are Huang Ch’ing-ch’üan , ed., Chung-kuo li-tai hsiao-shuo hsü-pa chi-lu: wen-yen pi-chi hsiao-shuo pu-fen — (Wuhan: Hua-chung Shih-fan Ta-hsüeh, 1989), pp. 94–5 (punctuated version of the Preface), and Li Chien-kuo , T’ang Wu-tai chih-kuai ch’uan-ch’i hsü-lu (Tientsin: Nan-k’ai Ta- hsüeh, 1993), v. 1 (of 2), pp. 463–89 (on the preface, author and relations of the Kuang-i chi with other texts). 4 Published with Ming-pao chi (Peking: Chung-hua, 1992). Bookrev.p65 3/1/99, 1:13 PM 183 184 bibliographie/book reviews The conclusions here fit closely Jordan Paper’s recent definition of Chinese religion in his The Spirits Are Drunk, Comparative Ap- proaches to Chinese Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, pp. 2–3 and 14): The fundamental difficulty in studying Chinese religion is that ... there is no traditional Chinese linguistic equivalent of the word religion. ... Following Clifford Geertz’s well-known definition of religion, the Chinese term wen (modern term: wen-hua = “culture”) ... could have been used. ... Although Geertz’s definition has been criticized by some as being so broad that it does not clearly distinguish religion from culture, this feature could also be understood as its strength. Chinese religion is not a universal religion as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam but is an ethnic religion. In ethnic reli- gions, such as Judaism for a Western example, religion can only be meaning- fully uploads/Religion/ religious-experience-tang.pdf