It is difficult to believe that there has been little sustained analysis in English of Daoist philosophy or practice in The Story of the Stone (Honglou meng), given its importance to the work, but Zuyan Zhou's book does much to fill this lacuna in Stone studies. More than that, his book presents a history of Daoist thought, terms, and symbols in the late imperial period that is sure to be useful to those with interests that reach beyond this novel. One of the great virtues of Zhou's work is that it does not seek to define Daoism as any one set of beliefs or practices. Rather, it recognizes that Daoism is a moving target, continually evolving to integrate new forms and patterns from a wide variety of sources, changing in accordance with political and economic developments, and simultaneously creating stability and continuity through the establishment of belief systems, myths, rituals, and lines of lineage. Zhou's book traces some of these trends, particularly as they developed in the Ming and Qing, and shows how Stone contributed to them in unique ways. Daoist Philosophy also provides concrete examples of Stone’s deployment of identifiably Daoist concepts, texts, and symbols, and in so doing it functions as an important intervention for Stone studies, which tend to emphasize the novel's Buddhist dimensions.
Daoist Philosophy takes three different approaches to looking at the interactions between Stone and Daoist thought. The first chapter examines the impact of Quanzhen Daoism on the novel, and it is particularly illuminating in its discussion of Quanzhen hagiographies and their affinity with the characterization of Zhen Shiyin. Zhou's discussion of the “Won-Done Song,” Lü Dongbin lore, practical Daoist ritual divination, and fulu talismans in this chapter is also a gratifying corrective to the usual conflation of all religion in Stone.
The second approach, developed in chapter 2, is to convincingly demonstrate the popularity of Lao/Zhuang philosophy in the Ming and Qing dynasties, as well as literati deployment of those philosophies to subvert Cheng-Zhu orthodoxy and, paradoxically, also to combat the perceived decadence of their age. I found that this chapter in particular provides important context for the reading of not only Stone, but all manner of vernacular literature of the late imperial period. It also informs our understanding of Baoyu's own reading of Zhuangzi. Commentators have long acknowledged Stone’s rhetorical indebtedness to Zhuangzi, but Zhou demonstrates that the debt extends to narrative strategies and philosophical ideas as well.
Zhou's third approach, elaborated in chapters 3, 4, and 5, is to analyze the history of paired symbols: Chaos and Gourd, Bird and Fish, and the Pure and the Natural, respectively. These chapters engage in some close reading, discussing provocative topics that have been largely or entirely overlooked in previous scholarship, including Jia Yucun's journey to enlightenment, the maid Yuanyang's importance to the story, and Daoist notions of sexual and aesthetic purity as a means of celebrating qing.
Whether or not something is identifiably or uniquely “Daoist,” rather than “Zen” or part of the unnamed folk religions of China, be it an image of fish or individualistic thinking, can be a difficult argument to make. The placement of some attitudes and symbols in the Daoist camp, even if they arguably belong to more than one tradition, is perhaps the largest problem some readers will find with this book. Yet it is also one of the book's great virtues. Perhaps so little has been written about Daoism in Stone because it is such a difficult subject to nail down. Zhou has thus done a bold service in writing this book, offering compelling historical surveys of these concepts and symbols, but also provocative claims about how they worked in the late imperial period. Zhou's reference to Stone commentators, showing that many Qing readers read Daoist meaning into the text, is particularly satisfying and illuminating. For instance, I had not previously understood why the commentator Zhang Xinzhi believed that the “Demon King” appellation that Baoyu's mother gave him revealed an identification with the Dao (p. 145). Zhou instructively argues that this demon king ruled over a chaotic realm that Zhuangzi identified as the place in which man returns to his true nature.
Some of the book's arguments presume that there is some original, though no longer extant, alternate ending to Stone, and this can be problematic. For instance, Zhou's otherwise enlightening section discussing the chastity and purity of Baoyu's widowed sister Li Wan claims that “it is generally agreed that the mother and the son's happy ending in the current 120-chapter edition violates Cao Xueqin's original conception” (p. 229), and Zhou uses this discrepancy to show “the author's unmistakable disapproval of neo-Confucian purity” (p. 230).
But even if some individual claims may not be entirely persuasive, Zhou's book as a whole is a magisterial study of Daoism as conceived and employed by literati writers of the Ming and Qing. By foregrounding a largely unexamined, but central aspect of The Story of the Stone, Zhou makes a crucial contribution to the study of this novel and thereby also enriches our understanding of late imperial thought and culture.
