Humor under the Guise of Chan: Stories of Su Shi and Encounter Dialogues.

• Author: Rao, Xiao

INTRODUCTION

The Song dynasty (960-1279) witnessed a surge of interest in anecdotal writing by educated elites, resulting in a large corpus of personal collections known as biji (miscellaneous jottings). (1) The loose structure and informal nature of biji allowed literati and literary monks to record gossip, musings, and jokes, forms of writing rarely found in ostensibly more formal genres. (2) Many stories in biji during this time feature witty and humorous interactions between Confucian literati and Buddhist monks, providing unique insight into Song cultural and religious history. (3) Among them, stories of the literary giant Su Shi's playful interactions with Buddhism deserve special attention because Su is not only a paragon of the literati culture, he was also a highly esteemed Buddhist layman. Su Shi's social exchanges with literary monks have been well documented in scholarship. (4) More intriguing and puzzling, however, are stories regarding Su Shi's jocular engagement with a group of religious texts often referred to as encounter dialogues. (5) Although not always reliable as information on the historical Su Shi, these stories unveil a heretofore overlooked aspect of Su Shi's humorous image and provide a unique insight into Buddhism's influence on lay literati.

Key to understanding Su Shi's penchant for playfulness as portrayed in these stories is the knotty problem of how to evaluate and study humor in religious texts at a temporal and cultural remove. Humor, as a phenomenon conditioned by historical and cultural factors, has a clear social dimension: it reflects the shared knowledge and beliefs of a certain group of people in a given society. (6) In premodern societies, humor has an important and complex relationship with religion: on the one hand, didacticism and laughter are intertwined; on the other hand, a great deal of laughter is evoked against normally revered religious scriptures. (7) As with the case of encounter dialogues, what may appear funny to modern readers might actually have been utterly serious. (8) Thus, the first imperative in trying to evaluate humor in encounter dialogues is not about whether they are entertaining now, but rather whether they were perceived to be entertaining during the Song, by whom and in what contexts.

On the surface, Chan Buddhist encounter dialogues, most of which were canonized during the Song dynasty, seem to be intrinsically related to humor: explicit laughter as well as comic elements such as paradoxical language and the masters' iconoclastic behaviors have fascinated readers through the ages. (9) Few Buddhologists who study Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen Buddhism regard encounter dialogues as merely joking matters. There are, however, scholars who have explored the place of humor in Chan rhetoric, especially the link between humor and Buddhist wisdom. For example, theologian Conrad Hyers's dated but still insightful work on Zen Buddhist laughter argues that "humor in Zen is both the occasion for and the result of satori (enlightenment, Ch. wu)." (10) Bernard Faure and Victor Sogen Hori in their influential studies on Chan rhetoric both unveil the relation between Chan discourses and literary games." In sum, the existing paradigm in religious studies views humor as an integral component of Chan literature: the seemingly witty and entertaining appearance of Chan discourse is regarded as a rhetorical device to convey the Buddhist notions of nonduality and the unmediated transmission of enlightenment. These discourses in fact often have profound doctrinal concerns and serve religious and pedagogical functions for monastics.12

However, approaching these religious texts solely from a doctrinal or liturgical perspective hampers a fuller understanding of the important roles humor might have played in the intersecting areas of Buddhist and literati cultures during the Song, where writings more generally tend to be entertaining, irreverent, and amusing. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the intersection between Song Buddhist and literati cultures through the lens of Buddhist monks' poetic productions.13 Contributing insights from a literary perspective, in this article I read encounter dialogues as Chinese literature by studying representations of Chan humor in an array of genres that were popular in the eleventh-century literati culture.

Viewing humor in Buddhism from a literary perspective has already been proposed by scholars of Indian literature and Buddhism. Gregory Schopen has suggested the idea of "doctrinal jokes," referring to "the citation of doctrine in an incongruous context meant to elicit laughter." (14) By reading Indian Buddhist texts as Indian literature, Schopen demonstrates, in a case study of Mulasarvastivada vinaya (Ch.), how doctrinal passages might have been read by Indian audiences for amusement. (15) The case for understanding humor in Buddhism from a literary perspective is also valuable for a fuller understanding of the dynamics of Buddhism in Chinese culture during the Song.

Setting aside the work of Buddhologists, scholars in Song literary studies have recently viewed humor in the work of Su Shi as a significant motif fraught with political and aesthetic concerns. Ronald Egan has shown that playfulness in Su Shi's poetry is used as a disguise for satirical political messages. (16) Zhou Yukai, pioneering the study of "Chan language" and its relation to Song poetics, discusses playful poems of Su Shi in the contexts of the Buddhist idea of "play in samadhi" (youxi sanmei") and the so-called Literary Chan movement. (17) However, the exact link between humor and "Literary Chan" remains to be systematically studied. Jason Protass's recent article in this journal traces how a witty and disparaging metaphor by Su Shi--that monks' poetry has a vegetarian stink--became an influential poetological label. (18) Beyond poetry, Zhu Gang has recently emphasized the value of studying the relationship between Chan Buddhist and Song literary cultures in vernacular performative genres such as dramas and plays. (19)

Building on the existing scholarship of religious and literary studies, this article aims to shed new light on the relation between encounter dialogues and entertainment during the Song via the perspective of vernacular plays and literati storytelling. (20) By closely examining stories featuring Su Shi's playful engagement with encounter dialogues, I attempt to unveil how literary factors of genre, performance, and aesthetics in Song-dynasty literati culture conditioned the entertaining effect of encounter dialogues. These stories also show how encounter dialogues have shaped the humorous image of Su Shi.

PRELUDE: HUMOR WHILE READING "TRANSMISSION RECORDS"

An important channel through which literati of the Song learned about encounter dialogues was by reading "transmission records" (denglu). (21) In order to explore in what sense Su Shi and his literati peers perceived encounter dialogues as humorous, it is necessary first to examine how denglu texts were read among literati in eleventh-century China. During Su Shi's lifetime, two of these texts were in circulation: Jingde chuandeng lu was completed in 1004 and Tiansheng guangdeng lu was issued in 1036. (22) Among the two, Jingde chuandeng lu was the most popular imperially sanctioned denglu among literati. (23)

Although Su Shi's literati peers, for instance, his brother Su Zhe (1039-1112), approached these officially sanctioned religious records piously, (24) one poem attributed to Su Shi shows that he found humor in the very concept of the denglu genre. An anecdote containing this poem captures a humorous moment when Su Shi was reading Jingde chuandeng lu:

Dongpo lodged at Caoxi for the night. While he read Records of Transmitting the Lamp, a piece of ash from his lamp fell on the book and burned a hole on the paper where the character "monk" was written. [Witnessing this scene], he used a brush to write [the following poem] on the panel between the windows on the wall: The night was tranquil in the mountain hall. I read Transmitting the Lamp beside a lamp. Before I noticed it, ash fell from the lamp, "Cremating" (25) a Buddhist monk. (26) The amusement Su Shi found while reading Jingde chuandeng lu was first hinted at by the metaphor of the lamp or flame (deng) in the titles of denglu literature. The notion that the Chan Buddhist transmission of the dharma is like the transmission of the flame from lamp to lamp is a crucial idea behind denglu literature. (27) Su Shi is delighted in this sketch by the joy of experiencing an intriguing moment when the phenomenal world and the brilliant metaphor he is reading about intertwine in a marvelous way. The poetic piece is an exemplar of wit. (28) Su Shi first expresses simple pleasure in the metaphor by playing with the word deng in lines 2 and 3, switching between referring to the physical lamp on his table and the metaphorical lamp in the title of the denglu. The punchline comes in the last line when Su Shi brilliantly chooses the verb "cremate" (tupi), a term used almost exclusively in the Buddhist context, meaning to cremate a Buddhist monk after death. The humor here lies in the unexpected incongruity that Su Shi uses such a formal and sombre term in this lighthearted context, referring to the moment when a piece of ash devoured the character "monk" on the paper.

Although the poem attributed to Su Shi provides light-hearted entertainment in this anecdote, one may still find the attempt to locate humor in denglu texts elusive because these imperially sanctioned religious texts were, after all, not compiled for the purpose of entertainment. On a more pragmatic level, however, evidence in the denglu suggests a strong correlation between encounter dialogues and various forms of vernacular entertainment that were popular in medieval China when Chan records were taking shape.

VERNACULAR PLAYS

One hypothesis is that...