Download The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T'ang Literature ePub

Schafer presents a world of wondrous beauty, where ancient goddesses live on in medieval literature. The stories and poems combine shamanism with eroticism, and devotion with adventure. The goddesses appear in the forces of nature, and seldom in world mythology do we see nature treated with such tender admiration. No wonder Gary Snyder wanted to write the foreword.

Over the centuries down to through the T'ang dynasty, Schafer shows the powers of Chinese nature goddesses in decline. From primordial deities wearing feathers or shells, they slowly fade into ghostly, silken-gowned courtisans. A poem attributed to the "Maiden in the Mist of the Hsiang" [River] reads:

That red tree -- the color of intoxication in autumn,
That blue stream -- a string strummed at night.
A delightful meeting that may not be repeated:
This wind and rain are blurring them, as will the years.

In this medieval literature, the beauties of nature evoke reverence and pleasure, as they still do. And the book focuses on only one class of Chinese goddesses, namely the sacred powers of waters, seas, rivers, and the mountain sources of cloud and rain. Besides these are other goddesses and divine women of Daoism, Buddhism, and popular religion, many of them revered by millions of people today.

--author of A Galaxy of Immortal Women: The Yin Side of Chinese Civilization

This short book, "The Divine Woman," was originally published by the University of California Press in 1973. It is one of a series of studies of T'ang Dynasty China, following the vast "The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics" (1963) and the briefer "The Vermilion Bird: T'ang Images of the South" (1967). Unlike its two predecessors, which concentrated on Chinese contacts with the outside world ("Golden Peaches") and the lands to the south the T'ang Dynasty was attempting to incorporate into the Empire ("Vermilion Bird"), "The Divine Woman" deals mainly with literary developments of Chinese traditions already ancient to the T'ang. It is a book about some of the more obscure corners of Chinese culture, about poetry and short stories, and, incidentally, how foreign influences were assimilated and naturalized to fit Chinese conceptions of the world. The "Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens" are the stars of a large cast of supernatural beings -- and some not-so-supernatural ones -- male as well as female.

Other works by Schafer concerning China during the T'ang dynasty are similarly specialized: "Pacing the Void: T'ang Approaches to the Stars," "Shore of Pearls: Hainan Island in Early Times," "Mirages on the Sea of Time: The Taoist Poetry of Ts'ao T'ang," and, on a major holy place, the very brief monograph "Mao Shan in T'ang Times" (Society for the Study of Chinese Religions, 1980, 1989). Schafer had a gift for evocative titles (one wonders what he wanted to call the "Mao Shan" study). [See below for possible new editions of these and other books by Schafer.]

Goddesses and other supernatural women, ghosts, and a variety of dragons and water-monsters share the pages with sacred mountains and rivers (Those familiar only with the standard, mostly benevolent, *lung* as "the Chinese dragon" may be in for a shock at the range of creatures Schafer catalogues.) A fair amount of linguistic and ethnographic information is provided, and there are plenty of notes to satisfy Schafer's fellow Sinologists. As often in Chinese studies, much of the secondary literature turns out to be in Japanese -- very, very appropriately, in this case, since it was T'ang China which provided the first great foreign model for Japan (which in turn preserved elements of Chinese culture that were nearly obliterated in China itself -- another story). Some of the themes treated here were fully naturalized in Japan, and now show up in manga and anime.

The North Point Press edition ten years later added a laudatory Foreword by Gary Snyder. Unfortunately, many readers will really need, instead, a brief introduction to the T'ang Dynasty, one of the great periods of Chinese history, roughly equivalent to the High Middle Ages in Europe (but a few centuries earlier in time). Fortunately, there are a number of political and cultural histories of China, and some excellent anthologies of Chinese literature (see below), even though most of those Schafer cites are now dated and often difficult to obtain.

A major theme of "The Divine Woman" is how the Confucian official ethos attempted, with considerable success, to historicize, trivialize, and sentimentalize the ancient goddesses of China, and how versions of them lived on in popular culture, surfacing in literature from time to time. Schafer translates and interprets a selection of poems and summarizes other literature. Despite Schafer's complaints of the tedium of poems loaded with stock images, his descriptions of the best of the poems and stories make one long for an anthology of his favorites. Fortunately, a good selection of this material now can be found, along with much else, in Stephen Owen's huge "An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911" (1996).

Although fuller details on the T'ang would have been nice in this context, I have also been impressed by Jacques Gernet's comprehensive "A History of Chinese Civilization" (1972; translated 1982, second edition 1996), with a helpful English-language bibliography, very much including Schafer; another very large book to serve as a companion to the richly packed, but surprisingly brief, "The Divine Woman." Schafer's own "History of China" is available in digital format (missing half a dozen maps), and sometimes used -- but besides being out of date, is no more than a brief introduction to the major political events and social trends.

Note, May 2005: There is now underway a project of reissuing in paperback Schafer's out-of-print works (essentially everything except "The Golden Peaches of Samarkand') by the Antique Collectors' Club and Floating World Editions, beginning with "Pacing the Void" and "Tu Wan's Stone Catalogue of Cloudy Forest: A Commentary and Synopsis" on March 30. The former was originally scheduled for release about a year ago, by Weatherhill Inc. according to the original listing, but is now actually in my hand. See the Amazon pages for these two works for other details. No date has been announced for their edition of "The Divine Woman." (Meanwhile, some of the asking prices for used copies have become more reasonable.)

(Reposted from my "anonymous" review of September 8, 2003)