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Abstract
Historians of literature are well acquainted with early medieval stories of shapeshifting animals and other beings seducing unsuspecting men and women. This paper re-reads such narratives from the shapeshifters’ point of view. This requires escaping the customary disciplinary boundaries and viewing these creatures’ depictions against the backdrop of concurrently circulating “arts of the bedchamber” (fangzhong zhi shu 房中之術), one of several classes of techniques for “nurturing life” (yangsheng 養生). I argue that the shapeshifters’ actions make sense when understood within the framework of this mode of self-cultivation. This in turn implies a view of nonhumans as selves striving to realize aims—among them health, longevity, the acquisition of enhanced capabilities, and, ultimately, metamorphosis into higher species on the ladder of beings. The tales emerged, then, in a culture to some extent shaped by a worldview of the sort often termed “animistic,” one that saw nonhuman beings as co-participants with humans in self-transformational projects grounded in a common cosmology.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to participants in the Harvard-Yale symposium “The Margins of the Human in Medieval China” (spring 2022), organized by Lucas Bender and Xiaofei Tian, and the 14th Annual Chinese Medieval Studies Workshop hosted by Wendy Swartz at Rutgers University and sponsored by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation; Xiaofei Tian; and an anonymous reviewer for their comments. This paper represents an early piece of a larger research project.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Small Gods (London: Gollancz, 1992), 6.
2 How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 73–74.
3 Zhuangzi jijie 莊子集解, ed. Wang Xianqian 王先謙 and Liu Wu 劉武 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987), 41–42, adapting the translations in A. C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 72–73, and Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 63–65.
4 Xinji Soushen ji xinji Soushen houji 新輯搜神記新輯搜神後記, comp. Li Jianguo 李劍國, 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 2:6.535–36. Space limitations preclude listing all the loci where this and similar tales are attested (often with interesting variant readings) in Tang and Song anthologies. Stories featuring foxes are relatively well known, but other animal species as well as insects, spiders, and even household objects also figure in stories of this type, as we will see. As Roel Sterckx states, “Fox demons and fox possession were known at least as early as the third century B.C.E.” Sterckx, The Animal and the Daemon in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002], 256n111; see also 35. On early recipes for countering fox possession, see Donald Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts (London and New York: Kegan Paul, 1998; hereafter ECML), 262, 264. For partial listings of pre-Tang anecdotes involving enspirited creatures, see Robert Ford Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996; hereafter SW), 254.
5 See Sherry B. Ortner, “Patterns of History: Cultural Schemas in the Foundings of Sherpa Religious Institutions,” in Culture Through Time: Anthropological Approaches, ed. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 60–63.
6 W. Allyn Rickett, Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China, Vol. 1, rev. ed. (Boston: Cheng and Tsui, 2001), 14. Guanzi was assembled around 26 BCE by Liu Xiang 劉向 (79–8 BCE) from older materials. See W. Allyn Rickett, “Kuan tzu,” in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1993), 244–51; idem, Guanzi, 3–39; and Piet van der Loon, “On the Transmission of Kuan-tzu,” T’oung Pao 41 (1952): 357–93. On the “Neiye” in relation to contemporaneous debates, see A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1989), 100–5, and Michael J. Puett, To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002), 109–21.
7 Li Xiangfeng 黎翔鳳 and Liang Yunhua 梁運華, eds., Guanzi jiaozhu 管子校注 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2004), 931, consulting Rickett, Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China: A Study and Translation by W. Allyn Rickett, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 39; Graham, Disputers, 101; Puett, To Become a God, 110; and Harold D. Roth, Original Dao: Inward Trainings and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 46.
8 Paul W. Kroll, A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 216; Manfred Porkert, The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 176.
9 Du Guangting, Yongcheng jixian lu 墉城集仙錄, DZ 783, 1.5b–6a. Texts in the Ming Daoist canon, Zhengtong daozang 正統道藏, are cited as DZ and by the number assigned them in Kristofer M. Schipper and Franciscus Verellen, eds., The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
10 Du, Yongcheng, DZ 783, 1.5b–6a.
11 Ge Hong, Baopuzi neipian jiaoshi 抱朴子內篇校釋, collated by Wang Ming 王明, 2nd ed. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985; hereafter NP), 114. A seminal recent study of this ubiquitous notion is Michael Stanley-Baker, “Qi 氣: A Means for Cohering Natural Knowledge,” in Vivienne Lo and Michael Stanley-Baker, eds., Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (London: Routledge, 2022), 23–50.
12 Puett, To Become a God, is a compelling study of this discourse of self-divinization from the Shang through the Western Han.
13 Or perhaps, in some cases, accumulated essence forms spirit, and metamorphosis at will is one of the capabilities of spirits.
14 Lu Xun 魯迅, comp., Gu xiaoshuo gouchen 古小說鉤沈 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1954; hereafter LX), 380. On Xuanzhong ji, see SW, 93, and Robert Ford Campany, A Garden of Marvels: Tales of Wonder from Early Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015), 74–75.
15 Shuyi ji, in Han Wei congshu 漢魏叢書, comp. Cheng Rong 程榮 (n.p., 1592), 1.19b. The identification of jue 玃 is uncertain; see Kroll, Student’s Dictionary, 231. On Ren Fang and his Shuyi ji, see SW, 83–85; Garden, 58–60; David R. Knechtges and Taiping Chang, eds., Ancient and Medieval Chinese Literature: A Reference Guide (Leiden: Brill, 2010–2014; hereafter AMCL), 751–58.
16 See Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Lee, and David Schaberg, trans. and intro., Zuo Tradition/Zuozhuan 左傳: Commentary on the “Spring and Autumn Annals,” 3 vols. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 1:600–1, and the discussion in SW, 103–4.
17 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 4.
18 Overviews of yangsheng practices include “Methods of ‘Nourishing the Vital Principle’ in the Ancient Taoist Religion,” in Henri Maspero, Taoism and Chinese Religion, trans. Frank A. Kiernan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 441–554; Sakade Yoshinobu坂出祥伸, ed., Chūgoku kodai yōsei shisō no sōgōteki kenkyū 中國古代養生思想の総合的研究 (Tokyo: Hirakawa shuppansha, 1988); idem, “Changsheng shu 长生术,” in Daojiao 道教, ed. Fukui Kōjun 福井康順 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1990), 1:195–231; idem, “Daoism and the Dunhuang Regimen Texts,” in Medieval Chinese Medicine: The Dunhuang Medical Manuscripts, ed. Vivienne Lo and Christopher Cullen (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 278–90; ECML, 112–47; Stephan Stein, Zwischen Heil und Heilung: Zur frühen Tradition des Yangsheng in China (Helzen: Medizinisch Literarische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1999); and Livia Kohn and Yoshinobu Sakade, eds., Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1989). On Dunhuang manuscripts, see Catherine Despeux, “Hygiène de vie et longévité à Dunhuang,” in Médecine, religion et société dans la Chine médiévale: Étude de manuscrits chinois de Dunhuang et de Turfan, ed. Catherine Despeux (Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 2010), 769–870.
19 Rather than being restricted to Daoist transmission lineages, yangsheng methods and writings circulated widely, and many Daoist texts either condemned such methods outright or selectively subordinated them to self-declaredly higher regimens or goals. Nevertheless, the Daoist canon is an important repository of yangsheng works. Synopses may be found in Schipper and Verellen, eds., The Taoist Canon, 92–99 and 344–77.
20 For fuqi, see Fuqi jingyi lun 服氣精義論 (DZ 830), a comprehensive treatise based on centuries of precedent that was written by Sima Chengzhen 司馬承禎 (647–735), translated and studied in Ute Engelhardt, Die klassische Tradition der Qi-Übungen (Qigong): Eine Darstellung anhand des Tang-zeitlichen Textes Fuqi jingyi lun von Sima Chengzhen (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1987). For the other types of breathing techniques, see Ute Engelhardt, “Qi for Life: Longevity in the Tang,” in Livia Kohn and Yoshinobu Sakade, eds., Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1989), 263–96; Stephen Eskildsen, Asceticism in Early Taoist Religion (Albany: State University of New York, 1998), 43–68; and Robert Ford Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; hereafter TL), 18–21, 133, 279, 311, 365n23.
21 See Catherine Despeux, “Gymnastics: The Ancient Tradition,” in Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques, ed. Livia Kohn and Yoshinobu Sakade (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1989), 225–61; Vivienne Lo, “Huangdi Hama jing (Yellow Emperor’s Toad Canon),” Asia Major 14.2 (2001): 61–100; ECML, 310–27; and TL, 82, 173–75, 178, 182–83, 283, 333.
22 Gu 穀 in such contexts rarely means “grains” taken narrowly but is a synecdoche for processed foods. See Ute Engelhardt, “Dietetics in Tang China and the First Extant Works on Materia Dietetica,” in Innovation in Chinese Medicine, ed. Elisabeth Hsu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 173–91; and Robert Ford Campany, Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 62–87.
23 See the parallel passages from these two manuals, both of which were preserved in chapter 28 of Tamba Yasuyori’s Ishinpō 醫心方 (984) and are anthologized in Li Ling 李零, Zhongguo fangshu kao 中國方術考, rev. ed. (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 2000; hereafter ZGFSK), 502; translated in Art of the Bedchamber: The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics Including Women’s Solo Meditation Texts, trans. Douglas Wile (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 85.
24 In addition to Wile’s Art of the Bedchamber, other studies include Donald Harper, “The Sexual Arts of Ancient China as Described in a Manuscript of the Second Century BC,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47.2 (1987): 539–93; idem, “The Bellows Analogy in Laozi V and Warring States Macrobiotic Hygiene,” Early China 20 (1995): 381–91; ECML, 135–40, 412–22; ZGFSK, 382–433, 469–540; Li Ling 李零, Zhongguo fangshu xukao 中國方術續考 (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 2000), 350–93; Li Ling and Keith McMahon, “The Contents and Terminology of the Mawangdui Texts on the Arts of the Bedchamber,” Early China 17 (1992): 145–85; Yan Shanzhao 嚴善炤, Gudai fangzhong shu de xingcheng yu fazhan: Zhongguo gu you jingshen shi 古代房中術的形成與發展: 中國固有精神史 (Taipei: Xuesheng shuju, 2007); Zhu Yueli 朱越利, “Mawangdui boshu fangzhong shu de lilun yiju 馬王堆帛書房中術的理論依據,” in A Daoist Florilegium, ed. Lee Cheuk Yin 李焯然 and Chan Man Sing 陳萬成 (Hong Kong: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2002), 8–51; Paul Goldin, “The Cultural and Religious Background of Sexual Vampirism in Ancient China,” Theology and Sexuality 12.3 (2006): 286–308; Dominic Steavu, “Buddhism, Medicine, and the Affairs of the Heart: Āyurvedic Potency Therapy and the Reappraisal of Aphrodisiacs in Medieval Chinese Sources,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 45 (2017): 9–48; and TL, 30–31, 81, 172–86, 416–21. TL 172–86 and 416–21 translate and analyze the fourth-century Shenxian zhuan 神仙傳 hagiography of Pengzu 彭祖, which dispenses much bedchamber-arts instruction. Another such figure was Master Rongcheng 容成公, who was the subject of a Liexian zhuan 列仙傳 hagiography associating him with sexual arts (see TL, 358–59), who appears in Mawangdui manuscripts as a teacher of such methods (ECML, 393–99), and whose name was attached to a now-lost bedchamber manual listed in the Han shu bibliographic catalogue (ECML, 393n1).
25 This becomes explicit in texts preserved in the Ishinpō; see for example the passages in Art of the Bedchamber, 102. But the same idea is already implicit in the Mawangdui manuscripts (see ECML, 140, 333).
26 Art of the Bedchamber, 7.
27 ECML, 137.
28 See, for example, the passages from Yufang mijue anthologized in ZGFSK, 510, and translated in Art of the Bedchamber, 102.
29 ZGFSK, 501, and Art of the Bedchamber, 85.
30 See, for example, the passage from Sunü jing preserved in Ishinpō, anthologized in ZGFSK, 501–2, and translated in Art of the Bedchamber, 85.
31 See, for example, the passage in Art of the Bedchamber, 103 and 252n17. Incidentally, although this paper assumes that the sexual relations in question were heterosexual unless otherwise indicated, there was certainly the potential for gender fluidity, especially on the part of shapeshifters.
32 See the Yufang mijue passage anthologized in ZGFSK, 515. Art of the Bedchamber, 102, and Goldin, “Sexual Vampirism,” 287, both miss the force of sun 損 in sun bing 損病, which signals that it is because of their loss of qi and essence that they fell ill.
33 Liexian zhuan, DZ 294, 2.14a–b; Kaltenmark, Lie-sien tchouan, 180–83. The transcendent characterizes her practice as a dao dao 盜道; see Kaltenmark, 182–83n3 on the multiple valences of this term.
34 Ge Hong does, however, mention the need for oral instructions to supplement the written texts. NP, 129.
35 Harper emphasizes that in the social circles in which the Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan manuscripts circulated, yangsheng techniques, including sexual ones, were regarded as “normal” (Early Chinese Medical Literature, 147).
36 See Donald Harper, “La littérature sur la sexualité à Dunhuang,” in Médecine, religion et société dans la Chine médiévale, ed. Despeux, 871–98, and Sumiyo Umekawa, “Tiandi yinyang jiaohuang dalefu and the Art of the Bedchamber,” in Medieval Chinese Medicine: The Dunhuang Medical Manuscripts, ed. Vivienne Lo and Christopher Cullen (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 252–77.
37 See, for example, TL 81, 95, 178–79, 183–85, 205, 244, 355, 358–59, 390, 400, and 534–35.
38 See Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 43–46, 284–85, 330–31; Gil Raz, The Emergence of Daoism: Creation of Tradition (London: Routledge, 2012), 177–209; idem, “The Way of the Yellow and the Red: Re-examining the Sexual Initiation Rite of Celestial Master Daoism,” Nan Nü 10 (2008): 90, 98–99, 119; Terry F. Kleeman, Celestial Masters: History and Ritual in Early Daoist Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016), 101–4, 171–74; and Jinhua Jia, “The Identity of Tang Daoist Priestesses,” in Gendering Chinese Religion: Subject, Identity, and Body, ed. Jinhua Jia, Xiaofei Kang, and Ping Yao (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 104–12.
39 XJSSJ, 325–26.
40 In the two earliest collections of transcendents’ 仙人 hagiographies alone, Liexian zhuan and Shenxian zhuan, there are many dozens of examples. For two particularly striking cases see TL, 170–71 and 279–86. Several Buddhist monks whose stories are gathered in the “Wonderworkers” 神異section of the Liang monk Huijiao’s 慧皎 (497–554) Gaoseng zhuan 高僧傳 are credited with similar abilities. In one instance there even comes a moment when a shapeshifting monk, Shi Baozhi 釋保誌, “manifested his actual form for” 為其現真形 a family of lay followers; “in its radiance and marks it was like a bodhisattva icon” 光相如菩薩像焉. See Gaoseng zhuan, in Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經 (Tokyo: Taishō Issaikyō Kankōkai, 1924–1935; rept. Taipei: Xinwen feng, 1983), v. 50, 394c.
41 Brown, “Thing Theory,” 4. Compare Graham Harvey’s statement: “Ancestors are not individuals without social context. They are essentially and necessarily relational persons.” Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (London: Hurst, 2017), 58. For a provocative treatment of “animism” as, fundamentally, a “relational epistemology,” see Nurit Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology 40, supplement 1 (February 1999): 67–79.
42 LX, 287; trans. in Garden, 118. There is another, less frequently attested story type in which a nonhuman and a human form an ongoing relationship or marriage and even have offspring.
43 See, for example, the Soushen ji story involving Wang Zhounan and a clothed, talking rat (Xinji, 1:250–53), and its Lieyi zhuan version translated in Garden, 19 (where the protagonist is misidentified); and another story of a clothed, talking rat, who apparently tries to trick a man into dying in his stead (on this concept see Campany, Signs from the Unseen Realm, 40–43) by coming to announce his impending death date but fails because the man refuses to respond (Youming lu in LX, 305, trans. Zhenjun Zhang, Hidden and Visible Realms: Early Medieval Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 64–65.
44 Pre-Tang stories of metamorphosis mentioning large size or old age, beyond the two examples already discussed, include: Soushen ji (Xinji, 1:328), large turtle; Yi yuan 異苑 8.10 (I cite this work from the edition in Xuejin taoyuan 學津討原 [comp. Zhang Haipeng 張海鵬 (1755–1866); facsimile rept. in Baibu congshu jicheng 百部叢書集成, ed. Yan Yiping 嚴一萍 (Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1966) by the scroll number followed by the serial position of the item in question, so that 8.10 indicates the tenth item in scroll 8], trans. Garden, 100, large raccoon dog; Yi yuan 8.13, trans. Garden, 101–2, with another version appearing in Youming lu (LX, 307), large turtle and alligator (the turtle serves as go-between, the alligator as the sexual partner or 對, a term I mistranslated as “opponent” in Garden—here we see a team of nonhumans coordinating their actions to further the seduction project); Yi yuan 8.15, long earthworm; Yi yuan 8.17, large spider; Soushen houji (Xinji, 2:539–40), old dog; Soushen houji (Xinji, 2:535), trans. Garden, 63, old male fox; Lieyi zhuan (LX, 146–47), trans. in Jennifer Fyler, “The Social Context of Belief: Female Demons in Six Dynasties Chih-kuai,” Tamkang Review 21.3 (1991): 262–63, large carp; and the following items in Youming lu: LX, 210, old male fox; LX, 259, old raccoon dog (some—myself included—have mistranslated li 狸 as “fox”; it denotes instead a canid species distinct from the fox, namely Nyctereutes procyonoides [see Kroll, Student’s Dictionary, 260]); LX, 287, trans. Garden, 118, old otter; LX, 290, large raccoon dog (Zhang, Hidden and Visible Realms, 23, mistranslates 大狸 as “big wild cat”); LX, 294, large raccoon dog; LX, 313–14, large otter; LX, 319, old rooster. See also Rebecca Doran, “The Cat Demon, Gender, and Religious Practice: Towards Reconstructing a Medieval Chinese Cultural Pattern,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 135.4 (2015): 697. Most stories about haunted relay stations also mention that the shapeshifter turned out in the end to be a large or old member of its species.
45 See Sterckx, The Animal and the Daemon, 198–203.
46 Yi yuan 8.14.
47 Wang Chong goes on to grant, however, that some creatures are by nature equipped to transform without needing to be old. See Marc Kalinowski, Wang Chong, Balance des discours: Destin, providence et divination (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011), 275.
48 NP, 300. These and similar passages are discussed in Li Fengmao 李丰楙, Shenhua yu bianyi: yige chang yu fei chang de wenhua siwei 神化与变异: 一个常与非常的文化思维 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2010), 156–57.
49 Examples include Soushen ji stories in XJSSJ, 298–99, 321, and a Soushen houji story in ibid., 539–40; Yi yuan 8.17; Youming lu stories in LX, 294, 319; and a Lieyi zhuan story in LX, 146–47.
50 See, for example, Kaltenmark, Lie-sien tchouan, 179–80, and TL, 224, 245n413, 298n26, 302n37, 312, 337, 435, 436, 449, 517, 518. The same can be said of the old fox’s white hair; accounts of transcendents are replete with mentions of white or gray hair reverting to black thanks to their self-cultivation practice.
51 See Kaltenmark, Lie-sien tchouan, 55–58, and TL, 359.
52 Lieyi zhuan (LX, 146), trans. Garden, 18–19.
53 LX, 378. The bracketed sentence appears in only one of the multiple versions.
54 Youming lu (LX, 305).
55 Xuanzhong ji in LX, 377.
56 As Xiaofei Tian notes of cases of “haunted” objects such as pillows and shoes, “They stay close to the human body, and are made to carry the weight of the human body.” Tian, “The Cultural Politics of Old Things in Mid-Tang China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 140.2 (2020): 320. I suggest that it is implicitly because of this frequent contact with their human owners that personal objects were thought capable of garnering some of their qi and essence to become enspirited.
57 Yi yuan 8.9; modifying Tian, “Cultural Politics of Old Things,” 320.
58 Another tale involving a woman and two or more brooms appears in Youming lu and is discussed in Tian, “Cultural Politics of Old Things,” 321.
59 Some stories portray shapeshifters as accidentally revealing their root forms due to drunkenness, overconsumption of meat, or inattention.
60 To cite another example, Yufang mijue as preserved in Ishinpō ch. 28 (section 18, “Causing the essence to revert” 還精) has Pengzu explaining: “When essence is emitted, the body feels exhausted, the ears buzz, the eyes grow weary and try to close, the throat grows parched, the bones and joints become sluggish; although one briefly experiences pleasure, one ends up unsatisfied” 夫精出則身體怠倦, 耳苦嘈嘈, 目苦欲眠, 喉咽乾枯, 骨節懈墮, 雖復暫快, 終於不樂也 (ZGFSK 510–11; alternate trans. in Art of the Bedchamber, 91).
61 Yi yuan 8.8; trans. Garden, 99–100.
62 Youming lu (LX, 305); trans. Garden, 119–20.
63 Youming lu (LX, 307), trans. Zhang, Hidden and Visible, 77; another version in Yi yuan 8.13, trans. Garden, 101–2.
64 Soushen houji (Xinjin, 2:540); trans. Garden, 62.
65 Xinji, 1:311–12.
66 Yi yuan 8.41; attested in several medieval collectanea. On this work, see SW, 78–80, and Garden, 78–106.
67 These are the equivalent of moments in other anecdotes where, due to drunkenness or inattention, shapeshifters accidentally reveal their actual form to human onlookers.
68 One example, from Soushen houji (see Xinji, 2:535), trans. Garden, 63; another, from Youming lu (see LX, 210), trans. Zhang, Hidden and Visible Realms, 61.
69 See Campany, Making Transcendents, 14–16, 27, 109, 155–58, and 259.
70 On shijie, see Angelika Cedzich, “Corpse Deliverance, Substitute Bodies, Name Change, and Feigned Death: Aspects of Metamorphosis and Immortality in Early Medieval China,” Journal of Chinese Religions 29 (2001): 1–68, and TL, 52–60. In fact, Hu’s apparent prognostication of his impending death date is part of the theater of shijie, enhancing the verisimilitude of what was really only a feigned death.
71 An anonymous reader wondered how the story of the “downy woman” 毛女 in Liexian zhuan and in Ge Hong’s writings (on which see Campany, Making Transcendents, 78–79) squares with this, since “she reverts to an animal state as she nears transcendence, only to perish once she returns to human society and human form.” My response is that animals and transcendents are two distinct categories, not one. Transcendents are sometimes hinted to possess a few select theriomorphic features (furry or feathered bodies, sometimes wings and enlarged ears—see Campany, Making Transcendents, 47–50, and note 78 below), but this is not because they are in the process of transforming into animals. (Animals are not deathless, and if animals are already transcendents, what is Hu Daoqia trying to do here?) It is true that in Zhuangzi animals are sometimes used as instantiations of naturalness in contrast to the triviality of human preoccupations—see, for instance, Roman Graziani, “Combats d’animaux: Réflexions sur le bestiare du Zhuangzi,” Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 26 (2004): 55–87)—but this is a distinct trope.
72 See the careful compilation of listings in Okanishi Tameto 岡西為人, Song Yiqian yiji kao 宋以前醫籍考 (Beijing: Renmin yisheng, 1958; reissued by Nantian shuju in 1977), 546, accessed through the Hanji dianzi wenxian ciliao ku 漢籍電子文獻資料庫 electronic database.
73 On these works see SW, 49–52, 75–77, and Garden, 107–20. Bowu zhi has been translated and studied in Roger Greatrex, The Bowu zhi: An Annotated Translation (Stockholm: Skrifter utgivna av Föreningen för Orientaliska Studier, no. 20, 1987). On Zhang Hua and Liu Yiqing, see AMCL, 2156–63 and 588–90 respectively.
74 Bowu zhi variant: “toward the east” 向東.
75 Youming lu version in LX, 288 (trans. Zhang, Hidden and Visible Realms, 145); Bowu zhi version trans. Greatrex, Bowu zhi, 89; text in Bowu zhi jiaozheng 博物志校證, annot. Fan Ning 范寧 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), 111.
76 On the stock of recurrent properties and abilities attributed to transcendents (or seekers of transcendence), see Campany, Making Transcendents, 39–61.
77 The earliest examples of which I am aware are two passages each in Huainanzi 淮南子 (compiled in the second century BCE) and Ge Hong’s Baopuzi neipian, but more than a dozen other instances occur in hagiographies of transcendents preserved in the Daoist canon.
78 On their morphological hybridity as represented in Eastern Han tomb murals see, for example, Leslie V. Wallace, “Betwixt and Between: Depictions of Immortals (xian) in Eastern Han Tomb Reliefs,” Ars Orientalis 41 (2011): 73–101.
79 Relevant here is that the phrases “tortoise inhalation” (guixi 龜吸), “tortoise exhalation” (guihu 龜呼), and “tortoise breathing” (gui huxi 龜呼吸) all appear in texts in the Daoist canon as names of self-cultivational practices, not descriptions of tortoises. Perhaps, as an anonymous reader suggests, the practices were modeled on some turtles’ cloacal breathing, which might have been a model for taixi 胎息.
80 In the third chapter of his Baopuzi neipian, titled “Dui su” 對俗, for example, Ge Hong argued that some major classes of longevity practice were explicitly based on imitation of certain long-lived animals; see NP, 46–69. Daoyin and bedchamber manuals routinely named particular postures and movements after nonhuman animal species.
81 Fyler, “The Social Context of Belief,” 257 and 259.
82 Fyler, “The Social Context of Belief,” 259.
83 Tian, “The Cultural Politics of Old Things,” 318.
84 Compare Robert Ford Campany, The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE–800 CE (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center Publications, 2020), 15.
85 J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, vol. 6 (Leiden: Brill, 1910), 1187.
86 The Religious System of China, vol. 4 (Leiden: Brill, 1901), 157.
87 Ibid., 156.
88 Ibid., 253.
89 Webb Keane, “Estrangement, Intimacy, and the Objects of Anthropology,” in The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others, ed. George Steinmetz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 72.
90 Although this article focuses on a single story type, stories are not, of course, the only sort of evidence for the views of nonhumans discussed here. Even the earliest dictionary, Xu Shen’s 許慎 (d. ca. 149) Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 (completed in 100 CE), preserves evidence that “the ancient Chinese acknowledged a dog’s psychological, physiological, and cognitive makeup; they recognized that dogs had a personality … . These traits are of course from a human point of view, but they are assigned to dogs considered as individuals, maybe even as persons who have personalities and respond differently when confronted with a particular situation.” Claire Huot, “The Dog-Eared Dictionary: Human-Animal Alliance in Chinese Civilization,” Journal of Asian Studies 74.3 (August 2015): 602.
91 For rich studies of anthropomorphism—stressing its complexity and variegated uses—see, for example, Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds., Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Steven Wagschal, Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds: A Cognitive Historical Analysis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018); and Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey, eds., Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality (London: Routledge, 2018).
92 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), xiv.
93 Marshall Sahlins, How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, For Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 169. Compare Campany, The Chinese Dreamscape, 20–21, 171n87.
94 That is, many worlds-as-experienced by beings of different species. For further discussion of the concept of Umwelt and a more expansive use of it to interpret early medieval narratives, see Campany, The Chinese Dreamscape, 26, 132–60.
95 On what is entailed in taking this idea seriously, see Kohn, How Forests Think, and Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Regarding the Anishinaabe view of some stones as living persons, Harvey observes: “They are known to be so only partly because they move or speak. It is their participation in a community of persons attempting to live well that is most significant” (Harvey, Animism, 41; emphasis added).
96 For more on this point, see Campany, The Chinese Dreamscape, 157–58.
97 Zhuangzi jijie, 148, consulting Watson, Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, 188–89, and Graham, Chuang-tzu, 123.
98 On animisms as relational epistemologies, see further Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology”; Sahlins, How “Natives” Think, 122, 162–63, 169; Campany, “An Ant and a Man, a Rock and a Woman: Preliminary Notes toward an Alternate History of Chinese Worldviews,” in At the Shores of the Sky: Asian Studies for Albert Hoffstädt, ed. Paul W. Kroll and Jonathan A. Silk (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 199–210; and Campany, The Chinese Dreamscape, 147–51.
99 A. Irving Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View,” in Primitive Views of the World, ed. Stanley Diamond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 54–55. See also the discussion in Campany, The Chinese Dreamscape, 147–48.
100 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 223.
101 For a recent attempt to imagine them, see Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (New York: Random House, 2022).
102 Molly H. Mullin, “Mirrors and Windows: Sociocultural Studies of Human-Animal Relationships,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 202.
103 See Keith N. Knapp, “Noble Creatures: Filial and Righteous Animals in Early Medieval Confucian Thought,” in Animals Through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911, ed. Roel Sterckx, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar Schäfer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 64–83; Roel Sterckx, “Ritual, Mimesis, and the Nonhuman Animal World in Early China,” Society & Animals 24 (2016): 269–88; and SW, 384–94.
104 On dreams as communication portals, see Campany, The Chinese Dreamscape, 132–60.
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Robert Ford Campany
Robert Ford Campany is Professor of Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in the history of early medieval Chinese religions and in the comparative, cross-cultural study of religion. He is the author of Strange Writing; Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (1996), To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents (2002), Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China (2009), The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE–800 CE (2020), and Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE (2023), among other works.