| Focused on The Journey to the West ( Hsi-yu chi), one of the so-called four masterworks of Ming fiction, my dissertation engages with an earlier mode of Chinese literary criticism that viewed this work as an efficacious or a "ritual" text capable of effecting a psychophysical transformation in its readers. Liu I-ming (1734-1820), an exemplar of this school, states that the meaning of The Journey to the West is "outside words" and that its true significance lies not in the plot and characters but in the transmission of The Journey to the West itself. The radical implications of Liu's ideas in terms of ritual, gender, and self-reflexivity have not been explored until now. My approach, which concentrates on what Liu calls the "before heaven," or sacred realm, is vastly different from typical Western approaches to fiction. Moreover, my analysis is a departure from various allegorical interpretations focused on Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucian "themes." Most critics read the The Journey to the West as a "novel" whose religious themes require explication---but as a "novel" nevertheless. This simply does not to justice to the text. Rather than focusing on what this text says "about" religion, my alternative approach---which calls into question modern preconceptions about literature, genre, time, and subjectivity---explores the relationship between mindfulness and metanarrativity, while showing how the text presupposes, as necessary for its own interpretation, a familiarity with ritual practices such as meditation, visualization, and geomancy. These rituals are encoded in the text not merely as themes but as constitutive of the text's very structures of meaning. There is no ritual without polarity, as revealed by the gender dynamics informing the text. Despite surface rhetoric about nonduality and the complementary relationship between yin (feminine) and yang (masculine), the text contains a chain of metonymic equivalences wherein yin is devalued and identified with death, desire, the demonic, and the impure. By contrast, the "pure yang" logic that underwrites these dynamics implies that the way to become "real" is to become purely masculine. Finally, my analysis explores the text's affinities with visualization rituals in which the audience becomes co-creator. |
