Banner Image Source Original image held by the Harvard-Yenching Library
of the Harvard College Library, Harvard University

December 2020

Volume
80
Number
2
About the cover

We have chosen for the cover of this issue of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies a late nineteenth-century painting by Qian Hui’an 錢慧安 (1833–1911), entitled Su Shi (Su Dongpo) Admiring Ink Stones (Poxian pin yan tu 坡僲品研圖). We always aim to pick a cover image from the rich collections of the Harvard Art Museums and Harvard Yenching Library that connects somehow to the issue’s content, but the tiein is particularly strong with this painting. Thomas Kelly’s contribution, “The Death of an Artisan: Su Shi and Ink Making,” discusses the famed Northern Song poet and scholar Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101) and his engagement with the material culture of literary production. Su Shi was a man who knew and appreciated inkstones.

The painting’s Chinese title refers to Su Shi not by his name, but rather as Immortal Po (Poxian 坡僲). This respectful sobriquet—rendered using a rare variant of xian 仙, the usual character for “immortal”—is an elegant take on Dongpo 東坡, one of Su Shi’s many self-chosen artistic names, or hao 號. The painting bears the inscription, “A sketch for Teacher Lan Tianshu [from] the Woodcutter of Qing Creek, Qian Hui’an” (Lüe shi Lan Tianshu Qingxi qianzi Qian Hui’an 略師藍田叔清谿樵子錢慧安); the Woodcutter of Qing Creek is Qian Hui’an’s own artistic name.

The painter, Qian Hui’an, lived and worked in the vicinity of Shanghai. He was known best for his portrayals of human figures, particularly beautiful women, but he produced landscapes as well. He worked in a style that mixed brushstrokes typical of traditional Chinese painting with shading, linear perspective, and other typically Western techniques. The painting featured on the cover comes from an album of nine leaves in the Harvard collection. It is the only painting in the album that portrays a named historical figure; the others portray men, women, and children doing things like fishing, watching cranes, and looking at the sky. Perhaps Qian Hui’an included a historical figure in this one painting because he meant it as a gift to his teacher. HJAS thanks the Harvard Art Museums for their kind permission to reproduce the image.

Qian Hui’an, Su Shi (Su Dongpo) Admiring Ink Stones, late nineteenth century. One leaf from an album of nine leaves; ink and light colors on paper, H. 26.4 cm x W. 32.9 cm. Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Bequest of Dr. Arnold Knapp, 1956.122.3. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Editorial Preface & In Memoriam

Editorial Preface

Articles

The Death of an Artisan

Su Shi and Ink Making

Thomas Kelly
Abstract

Su Shi’s endorsement of an enigmatic artisan named Pan Gu as “the Ink Immortal” adumbrates the Chinese cultural valorization of ink production during and after the Song period. I parse the poet’s two-part effort to transform ink making into a legitimate field of scholarly endeavor in order to defend poets’ autonomy. In Su Shi’s view, such autonomy depends on controlling the tools that sustain literary self-expression. Resisting the passive position of a consumer, Su first identifies with and then comes to impersonate the artisan’s productive body. This pose was, however, predicated on Su’s struggle to influence the marketing of ink through verse and innovative strategies of inscription. After Su Shi, an inkstick was no longer simply a tool for the production of literature but a venue where distinctions between writing and craft could be transformed—a contested subject and substrate of literary art.

摘要 (中文)

本文通過蘇軾有關墨師潘谷的詩作來探討宋代文人與墨工之間的互動關係。蘇軾通過讚揚墨工的自主性以反思文人的身份,其對玩墨與造墨的記載揭示了書寫工具對詩歌創新的影響。從蘇軾筆下之潘谷的形象演变中,我們可以看到一種中國古代特有的媒介自覺性。

The Quest for Efficiency

Knowledge Management in Medical Formularies

Ruth Yun-Ju Chen
Abstract

New textual techniques emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to facilitate the search for and use of information collected in medical formularies (fangshu). These techniques differed from those used in the production of literary and historical reference books, such as encyclopedias (leishu), because the need to find a medical treatment could be a matter of life and death. Formulary authors thus sought great efficiency in the retrieval and application of knowledge. Several material factors constrained how quickly any medicinal remedy, once found, could be prepared and offered to a patient, and formulary authors worked to limit these material constraints as part of their search for efficiency. I argue that the medically derived material constraints were the key contributors to the new textual techniques’ distinguishing features—notably, abridgement of text and ingredients—and thus explain formularies’ divergent history of knowledge-management technologies in middle-period China.

摘要 (中文)

本文探討方書作者用來加速檢索和應用書中藥方的技術,及其技術在宋代的新發展。方書記載的藥方知識在應用時受到許多物質條件的限制,造成方書的檢索技術不同於類書等文史文類。探討這些新技術遂有助學界更深入地理解中古中國知識管理方法的多樣性。

Fetishism, Allegory, and Irony in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Historical Novella Bushūkō hiwa

James Reichert
Abstract

This article analyzes Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s idiosyncratic historical novella from the 1930s, Bushūkō hiwa. Structured around the masochistic decapitation fantasy of a fictional sixteenth-century warlord, the work conspicuously incorporates fetishistic elements into the sexual history of its protagonist. By employing the logic of the fetish, which enables a subject to embrace simultaneously two contradictory beliefs, the tale affirms and deconstructs a multitude of binary oppositions, including past versus present, reading versus writing, first person versus third person, figurative versus literal, and sadist versus masochist. I also consider the narrative from a formalistic perspective and argue that the linkage of two central rhetorical devices in the narrative, allegory and irony, parallel the logic of the fetish. The novella’s allegorical framework suggests the text is a fetishistic displacement in response to the era’s imperial terror, and the novella’s ironic structure simultaneously undermines any authoritative reading.

摘要 (日本語)

本稿では、谷崎潤一郎『武州公秘話』に見られるフェティシズムの意義を形式主義的観点、とりわけ、寓意的アイロニーとの関わりに注視しながら考察する。二元的表象を可能にしたこのフェティシズムは、執筆当時の帝国主義的脅威に取って代わるものであった。

Rebirth as an Animal in Early Medieval Buddhism and Daoism

Stephen R. Bokenkamp
Abstract

The doctrine of rebirth, particularly rebirth as an animal, was for early medieval Chinese one of the most difficult Buddhist doctrines to accept. This article explores the influence of pre-Buddhist Chinese ideas concerning the human-animal continuum on elaborations in tales of rebirth as an animal that appeared in apocryphal Buddhist scriptures likely written in China and in a late sixth-century Daoist scripture. I argue that this Daoist scripture borrowed Buddhist formulas explaining rebirth through the medium of a confession text authored by the Buddhist monks surrounding Liang Wudi 梁武帝 (r. 502–549), the first Chinese emperor to adopt the Buddhist religion. These texts elaborate a karmic hierarchy of beings, extending from the most loathsome of animals to the most exalted of humans. Thus these texts elucidate the social and political utility of the idea of animal rebirth for the religious writers who presented it to the ruling elite.

摘要 (中文)

轉世爲動物是中國中古早期最受抵觸的佛教觀念之一。本文探討古代人與動物之間的鬆散邊界及其對佛教偽經與一部六世紀晚期道經中轉世爲動物敘事的影響,並認爲這部道經模仿了梁武帝治下僧人撰成懺悔文中的輪迴觀,最後對階層式的輪迴概念及其社會政治作用加以闡述。

Review essays

New Perspectives on Medieval Daoism

Livia Kohn

Voices in Modern Japan

Raja Adal

Borders, Mobile Koreans, and the Making of Modern Northeast Asia

Kirk W. Larsen

Book reviews

Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education by Raja Adal

Mark Lincicome

Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains by Claudine Ang

Nam Nguyen

Many Faces of Mulian: The Precious Scrolls of Late Imperial China by Rostislav Berezkin

Mark Bender

Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies by Sayaka Chatani

Sungyun Lim

The Power of Print in Modern China: Intellectuals and Industrial Publishing from the End of Empire to Maoist State Socialism by Robert Culp, and: Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China by Suyoung Son

Lucille Chia

Guan Yu: The Religious Afterlife of a Failed Hero by Barend J. ter Haar

Philip Clart

Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism by Richard M. Jaffe

James E. Ketelaar

The Korean Buddhist Empire: A Transnational History (1910–1945) by Hwansoo Ilmee Kim

Jin Y. Park

Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan by Miya Elise Mizuta Lippit

Daniel Poch

Dispelling the Darkness: A Jesuit’s Quest for the Soul of Tibet by Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Thupten Jinpa, and: “More than the Promised Land”: Letters and Relations from Tibet by the Jesuit Missionary António de Andrade (1580–1634) by Michael J. Sweet

Matthew T. Kapstein

Astral Sciences in Early Imperial China: Observation, Sagehood and the Individual by Daniel Patrick Morgan

Nathan Sivin

Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries by Stephen Owen

Kang-i Sun Chang

Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650 by Gregory Smits

Harriet Zurndorfer

Chinese Architecture: A History by Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt

Johnathan Farris

The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms by Xiaofei Tian

Paul Rouzer