Late Imperial China

In his play Tanhuaji (Story of the Millennium Flower, preface dated 1598), Tu Long, a late Ming man of letters, begins act seven, Xianfo tongtu (Daoist Immortal and Buddhist Master on the Same Path), with a poem: "The techniques for practicing the Way are divided into three teachings, which all flow from the same family. Daoist immortals pick fairy grasses; the Buddha's disciples sit on lotuses."¹ This poem exemplifies a significant characteristic of late imperial Chinese culture: the synthesis and cross-fertilization of Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist teachings, which was often summed up with the term sanjiao heyi (the three teachings coalesce [End Page 1] in the one).² As Tu Long states in the "Fanli" (general regulations) of Tanhuaji, the play itself "broadly discusses the three teachings."³ This study investigates the way in which this educated man adopted the dramatic medium to reinterpret the three teachings, and reconsiders the boundary between elite and folk culture in late imperial China.

Existing scholarship on sanjiao heyi has largely focused on discursive treatises and epistolary essays by intellectuals, but has rarely taken their works in popular literary genres into serious consideration.⁴ In his influential essay on the three teachings, Timothy Brook convincingly demonstrates that the term "syncretism," as widely used in previous scholarly work, cannot capture the diverse approaches to discussing the three teachings in late imperial China. In highlighting this plurality, Brook establishes a contrast between highbrow and lowbrow by distinguishing their divergent strategies of synthesizing the three teachings. He argues that elite Confucian thinkers and Buddhist masters usually considered their primary intellectual tradition as orthodox and superior to the other two. On the contrary, popular texts "produced by lesser literati for an audience even less schooled than themselves" often took seriously the full incorporation of the three teachings and [End Page 2] thus appeared "radically syncretic."⁵ Nonetheless, a close reading of the writings by individual thinkers problematizes both the definition of an "orthodox" elite and the dichotomy between the elite and the popular. When a specific intellectual adopts various modalities of self-cultivation over a long lifespan, is it possible to define his or her primary adherence to a particular tradition?⁶ Likewise, can we draw a clear line between elite writings and popular texts, given that some intellectuals were involved in the composition and circulation of (semi-)vernacular texts aimed at a mass audience?

Using these questions as a starting point, this article will rethink the general model of sanjiao heyi and Brook's binary paradigm through a case study of Tu Long, with particular focus on his most renowned dramatic work, Tanhuaji. I center this study on Tu Long and his play for two reasons. First, by participating in various social and religious practices, Tu Long resisted a clear classification of his identity and exemplified late Ming elites' multiple religious interests.⁷ Modern-day scholars have variously characterized him as a "Daoist," a Neo-Confucian "Taizhou thinker," or an "enthusiast of Buddhist thought."⁸ In fact, Tu Long [End Page 3] never acted as a gatekeeper of a single intellectual tradition, but instead explored the possibilities of all three teachings in pursuit of his path to self-cultivation. Second, unlike discursive treatises on the three teachings, drama provided Tu Long with a narrative and theatrical space to play with multiple personae for multiple audiences. While late Ming intellectuals often directly stated their views on the three teachings in their treatises, narrative genres like drama offered them a more personalized structure to engage these traditions. The more personal image of Tu Long discernable in Tanhuaji reveals the limitations of hitherto more categorical understandings of his religious stance within the cultural norms of late Ming literati.

This article opens with a discussion of Tanhuaji as an idiosyncratic "deliverance play," which differs from conventional deliverance plays by interweaving multiple religious trajectories into its setting and characterization. It then contextualizes this idiosyncratic structure by situating Tanhuaji within Tu Long's own spiritual journey, in light of the intertextual evidence between the play and his treatises on the three teachings. Finally, it investigates...