Review of Meir Shahar, Oedipal God

International Journal of Chinese Studies/Revue Internationale de Sinologie T’oung Pao 103-1-3 (2017) 291-296 291 Book Reviews Oedipal God: The Chinese Nezha and his Indian Origins. By Meir Shahar. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. xvi + 250 pages, illus. Meir Shahar’s book, Oedipal God: The Chinese Nezha and his Indian Origins, takes his familiar research skills into a completely new directions. Shahar has hitherto contributed largely to our understanding of the relationship between Buddhism and indigenous Chinese religion, exemplified by his books Crazy Ji: Chinese Religion and Popular Literature (Harvard Univ. Asia Center, 1998) and The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts (Univ. of Hawaii Press, 2008), but also by his early article “The Lingyin si Monkey Disciples and the Origins of Sun Wukong” (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 52 [1992]). These works are all meticulously researched studies, for the greatest part textually grounded, and fine examples of open-minded sinology. This new monograph, however, elevates his analysis from the level of religious relationships within China to the higher grounds of cross-cultural comparison. Oedipal God provides a history of manifestations pertaining to the famous— though poorly understood—child-god Li Nezha, paradoxical paragon of filial disobedience and filial piety, of youthful disorderliness and mature martial discipline, of the shapes and meanings of Chinese and Indian divinity. For those familiar with Shahar’s work it may be tempting to think that this history is a direct outgrowth of his earlier co-edited volume (with Robert Weller), Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China (Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1996), which also deals with the historical circumstances of disobedient gods. Yet if so, then only superficially: Shahar’s new study goes far beyond anything offered in the 1996 volume. Although his interest in antinomian and iconoclastic figures is clear from much of his earlier work, this new history of Nezha’s manifestations proudly stands at the culmination of a long process of fascination, curiosity, reflection, and, ultimately, thorough investigation. I must hasten to add that my choice for the term “history of manifestations” for this book is not to suggest that the book is written in a historical sequence, nor does it intend to explore the chronology of a historical development. Despite this, however, the book’s nine chapters each trace several micro-histories, connecting various aspects of Nezha to their historical backgrounds and relevant cultural environments. The author takes his readers through long stretches of time (from the first millennium BCE to the present day), vast geographical distances (from the Indian subcontinent through China to Japan and Taiwan), and a greatly divergent repertoire of source materials (Sanskrit sacred texts, Chinese popular literature, Japanese anime, Taiwanese cinema). This intellectual journey is in itself a dazzling cross-cultural comparison. Yet, as the title suggests, what most profoundly connects these often quite disparate elements is the drive to operate within a more theoretical framework, one that is specifically Freudian. Throughout the account of this multifaceted divinity, the author tests the thesis (forwarded by him and several other scholars) that Nezha exemplifies the fundamental traits of the Oedipus complex. As the author says © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 T’oung Pao 103-1-3 (2017) 291-296 DOI: 10.1163/15685322-10313P10 ISSN 0082-5433 (print version) ISSN 1568-5322 (online version) TPAO 292 Book Reviews explicitly, the first question that underlies his study of the unruly Nezha is “whether or not the Freudian hypothesis is applicable to Chinese culture” (p. xii). Here, the author should be commended for asking this question: very few students of Chinese culture have felt it necessary to explore the possibilities and impossibilities of the application of modern, Western “scientific” knowledge to a different culture and in different times. At a time when the intellectual achievements of modernity are hailed as the most beneficent for all of mankind, the mere acknowledgement of the need to test this hypothesis is timely. The second objective pursued by Shahar is to determine “the impact that esoteric Buddhism (also known as Tantric Buddhism) has had upon the Chinese imagination of divinity”. Though seemingly in line with the author’s earlier work, this inquiry deviates from the trodden paths in sinological studies of Buddhism, in that it recognizes the need to understand esoteric Buddhism not merely as a goal in itself but emphatically also in order to understand important aspects of “Chinese religion.” Indeed, Shahar’s study strongly suggests that even if the term “esoteric” itself suggests something obscure and marginal, the impact of esoteric Buddhism was clearly visible throughout the Chinese mainstream. Closely related to the complexity of the subject matter, the book is endowed with an extremely complex narrative structure, for one thing because, as the author warns, “the book is written backwards in time,” which he readily admits “might be confusing” (p. x). Indeed, the reverse chronological order in combination with an extremely multi-faceted research agenda asks a lot from the reader, but the rewards are generous: Shahar has produced an outstanding study of an important deity that the reader can now finally see in a constantly changing web of implications, interpretations, and innovations. This is a major feat. Chapter 1, “Sons and Fathers,” provides a useful summary of the Nezha legend that received its most widespread form in the seventeenth-century vernacular narrative Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi). This book, alongside The Journey to the West (Xiyouji), one of what Shahar calls “the two largest and most influential novels” of the late Ming, forms the starting point of much of the monograph’s analysis. The story told in Canonization of the Gods treats the historical conflict between the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600-1066 BCE) and the much-lauded Zhou dynasty (ca. 1066-221 BCE). This conflict lends itself perfectly for an investigation into the theme of patricide and regicide, and, more pointedly, filial piety and political loyalty—an area of analysis that plays an important role throughout Shahar’s study. Indeed, Shahar pays detailed attention to the (apocryphal) story that lies at the heart of how Canonization of the Gods sets the tone for its narrative about Nezha, namely that of the supposedly sagely King Wen, spiritual founder of the great Zhou dynasty and “paragon of virtue” (p. 7) knowingly consuming his own child’s flesh. This tale serves as the basis for an extended—and delicious—treatment of the theme of cannibalism and its multifarious antecedents within Chinese culture. Wonderfully fitting within Shahar’s broad approach is his discovery of temple murals in Henan that depict exactly this theme of King Wen eating his own son’s meat (and later vomiting it out again). T’oung Pao 103-1-3 (2017) 291-296 Book Reviews 293 Chapter 2, “Patricide and Suicide,” takes the themes from the first chapter and elaborates them in different ways. Though filial piety was a predominant value in the “hegemonic Confucian discourse” (p. 22), this could never guarantee universal following or even avoid tensions. Shahar zooms in on one aspect that was crucially relevant within the Oedipus complex, namely patricide. This “gravest of all crimes” (p. 25) was an important aspect of the Nezha legend—despite the fact Nezha ultimately failed to kill his father. As Nezha in Canonization of the Gods ends up killing himself by cutting the flesh off his own bones and returning it to his parents as an act of cutting the ties between himself and his patrilineal family line, Shahar takes up a reverse perspective, namely filial suicide. In particular the author relates Nezha’s self-maiming to the late Ming practice of “cutting the thigh” (gegu; pp. 29-33). Where Nezha’s suicide was meant to exonerate his parents from culpability for his assassination of a dragon prince, an act of extreme filial piety, the historical practice of cutting a piece of flesh from one’s own thighs and feeding it to a sick parent had become a prominently visible way of curing illness of senior family members. Shahar takes interest in the fact that such extreme filial piety paradoxically “violated a cardinal aspect of filial piety: the preservation of the body. Confucianism considered the body a gift from one’s parents, which it was forbidden to mutilate” (p. 29). Needless to say, this same form of filial piety also sheds a different light on filial cannibalism. Indeed, as Shahar concludes, “the Nezha legend expressed grievances with the social order while at the same time succumbing to its hegemonic discourse” (p. 37). The third chapter, “The Chinese Oedipus,” asks questions about the universality of the Oedipus complex. It does so by offering a basic introduction to Freud’s ideas, using authorities like Melford Spiro and Peter Gay to support the universality of the Freudian hypothesis (pp. 38-39). My biggest critique of Shahar’s book lies in this chapter, because it does not quite fulfill its promise of testing the theory; instead, the author seems favorably predisposed and sympathetic toward an Oedipal reading. While this need not be a problem in itself, I would suggest some critical notes. First, it leads the author to seek willfully to fit the Freudian theory into Chinese traditional culture. This outcome-oriented approach likely obscures some interesting discrepancies between these two angles, and potentially forecloses some venues of analysis. Then again, this may be true for most research—whether in the humanities or the sciences. Secondly, to find in Nezha an example of the Oedipus complex leads to a very undesirable outcome when it comes to the need for taking “religion” seriously as a phenomenon in itself, in that it ultimately reads Chinese religion as a metaphor for (modern, Western) psychoanalysis. In other words, some readers may find confirmed in Chinese religion the same secular frameworks they already know subconsciously from that major global trove (and trope) of knowledge, psychoanalysis. Let’s not forget that is exactly what Freud argued over and over again: religious phenomena are essentially nothing but mental projections of insufficiently mature minds. In chapter 4, “Teenage Delinquent or Revolutionary Martyr,” Shahar presents three sets of alternative Nezha narratives (narrated by storytellers, playwrights, T’oung Pao 103-1-3 (2017) 291-296 294 Book Reviews and moviemakers, respectively). In the section on storytelling the author explores three versions, all “presented as transcriptions of oral performances” (p. 61): a midnineteenth-century drum ballad (guci) called The Roster of the Gods (Fengshen bang); an early twentieth-century Taiwanese ballad (gezai) titled “Song of Nezha Wreaking Havoc in the Eastern Ocean” (Nezha nao donghai ge), and an early twentieth-century Fujian chantefable titled Nezha Wreaking Havoc in the Eastern Ocean (Nezha nao hai). These versions, though each individually connected to its own distinct region of provenance, all closely follow the plot of Canonization. Relevant for the theme of the Oedipus complex, all revolve around the “animosity of father and son” (p. 69). This applies to dramatic versions as well, “betraying open hostility of patriarchal authority” (p. 70). In the section on animated movies, Shahar treats the Japanese anime versions of Nezha from the 1970s and 1990s, called Nataku, and the Chinese animated movie about Nezha’s rebellion produced in 1979 Shanghai. Whereas the former presents the main protagonist consciously as an “oedipal youth” (p. 72), in the latter one can rather see “the oedipal child becoming a revolutionary martyr” (p. 75). The chapter concludes with an interesting discussion of some Taiwanese representations of Nezha “as a trope of the adolescent quest” (p. 76-77). Most famously embodied by Tsai Mingliang’s 1992 film Teenage Nezha (Qing shaonian Nezha), the young urbanites of modern Taipei live a life of boredom and alienation, engaging in meaningless sex and petty crime. In this film, “the youthful delinquent enacts the vengeful role that Nezha devotees expect him to fulfill in society” (p. 79). The analysis in chapter 5, “Divine Warrior,” shifts attention to Nezha’s ritual role as an exorcist and demon queller. This martial aspect of Nezha as divine warrior, closely related to Daoist and Buddhist religious institutions, is the one most frequently narrated in late imperial plays and hagiography. It is in this context that Shahar contrasts Nezha with the violent hero of another Ming narrative, namely the monkey-god Sun Wukong from Journey to the West. Once the two are discussed side by side it is clear that Sun Wukong “shares significant similarities with Nezha” (p. 91). It is also in this chapter that Shahar fortifies his argument that one important late Ming hagiography of Nezha has a Yuan dynasty antecedent. Interestingly, this antecedent—a story complex of older stories that involved the female deity Lady Rock and a dragon king—is depicted on two pagodas on the grounds of the Kaiyuan temple in Quanzhou (Fujian). The last section of this chapter (pp. 97-102) is dedicated to a discussion of the “magic” weaponry of Nezha. Here, too, the author relates these powerful tools of warfare with antecedents from a different sphere, namely the ritual paraphernalia of Buddhists and Daoists. One of the most interesting chapters is chapter 6, “The Child God.” Succinctly put, this chapter makes explicit what one may have suspected already, namely that Nezha was not easily appreciated by the various cultural elites—at least not publicly. This, however, did not mean that Nezha was not prominently visible in late imperial (and modern) Chinese society. To illustrate this, Shahar focuses on three areas where Nezha would often manifest himself on public occasions: temples, T’oung Pao 103-1-3 (2017) 291-296 Book Reviews 295 rituals, and spirit-possession. The largest section of this chapter revolves around a survey of various temples in China and in Taiwan (pp. 105-125), where Nezha is commonly present in the form of statues. Sometimes these statues reveal Nezha as the “General of the Middle Altar” (pp. 125-31), which is also the manifestation of Nezha that is most frequently summoned by ritualists such as the fashi (“vernacular ritual master”) or the daoshi (“Daoist master”). In this capacity Nezha leads the invisible battalions of spirit soldiers known as the “Five Armies” (p. 126), guardians of the sacred spaces represented by five cardinal points, be they temples, villages, towns, and so on. Most gruesomely spectacular, however, is Nezha’s living embodiment in human beings that are subject to trance-possession (p. 133-40). Adorned in the style of young children, with their upper bodies clad only in a red stomacher, spirit-mediums are indeed themselves fashioned after the image of the child-god Nezha, with one common epithet literally meaning “divine child” (shentong). This link is powerfully significant, because “all mediums—not only Nezha’s—are by definition unfilial, for they mortify the parental gift of the body” (Shahar paraphrasing Charles Stafford, p. 138). It is nowhere more viscerally apparent that the most extreme transgression against the Confucian hegemony at the same time produces the most potent effects of filial piety. Chapter 7, “Biological and Spiritual Fathers,” is a short ten-page chapter that deals mostly with the aspect of Nezha’s lotus rebirth, which Shahar links to the ideology of “floral incarnation” as a lotus flower in Amitabha’s Pure Land. It also relates aspects of Nezha’s story to similarities with the legend of Miaoshan, that is, the tale of the last incarnation of the “bodhisattva” Guanyin.1 The subject matter of Chapter 8 is readily apparent from its title, “Esoteric Buddhism.” It is an admirably meticulous account of Nezha’s close ties to the pan-Asian divinity Vaisravana, most commonly rendered in Chinese as Pishamen. This esoteric deity, the god of wealth and lord of the awesome yaksa spirits, became a powerful military god during the Tang dynasty. In this regard Shahar digs up some gems of efficient data-mining. One example is the story, told by Duan Chengshi (ca. 803863) about one of his servants who had a tattoo of Pishamen on his back, stating that it gave him divine strength. Moreover, the servant “would instruct his wife and children to make offerings and worship his back” twice a month (p. 155). This chapter ends on another interesting note, relating Nezha to his direct predecessor Nalakūbara (pp. 166-73). Some of the most interesting of the book’s illustrations are also reserved for this chapter. 1) In a recent article I suggestthat the term “bodhisattva” should not be understood at face value as a marker of Buddhist ideology and, indeed, that Miaoshan’s legend has much more affinity with indigenous Chinese religious institutions such as spirit-possession than it has with Buddhist ones. See my “Death and Demonization of a Bodhisattva: Guanyin’s Reformulation within Chinese Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84 (2016): 690726. T’oung Pao 103-1-3 (2017) 291-296 296 Book Reviews The ninth and last chapter, “Nezha, Nalakūbara, and Krsna,” again is a short chapter of eleven pages. It suggests there may be strong ties between “Nezha and the Krsna incarnation of Visnu” (p. 185). It presents the complex web of similarities and possible relationships between the yaksa Nalakūbara, the child Krsna (BālaKrsna), and the Chinese Nezha myth (p. 176). It is in this chapter, also, that Shahar reaches an almost poetic insight about the shared fate of youthful gods, who are raised by parents they almost inevitably abandon: “Divine children have a destiny that transcends their parents” (p. 177). In conclusion, Shahar’s book bursts with an energy that almost rivals the youthful powers of Nezha himself. It is rich in detail, broad in scope, ambitious in its theoretical inclination, and relates to important aspects of Chinese culture past and present. All this is readily apparent even in a cursory reading. And yet the book offers more than it states. Without ever saying this explicitly, Shahar’s study is also a richly documented reception history. First and foremost presented as the reception of a “Chinese” figure throughout various times and media, it is also the history of an “Indian” divinity received in “China.” It is precisely in the mastery of comparing Nezha’s manifestations across different times and cultures without losing focus that Shahar’s book transcends the sum of its parts: it has grown into an intellectual offspring that should find its destiny beyond sinology alone. Mark Meulenbeld, Hong Kong Polytechnic University T’oung Pao 103-1-3 (2017) 291-296