¦ What is the importance of Inner and Central Asia as a region of interchange during the Tang period?
¦ What were the effects of the fracturing of power in Central Asia and China?
¦ How did East Asia develop between the fall of the Tang and 1200?
¦ To what extent do shared practices justify thinking of East Asia as a unified cultural region in the post-Tang era?
The powerful and expansive Tang Empire (618907) ended four centuries of rule by short-lived and competing states that had brought turmoil to China after the fall of the Han Empire in 220 c. e. (see Chapter 6). Tang rule also encouraged the spread of Buddhism, brought by missionaries from India and by Chinese pilgrims returning with sacred Sanskrit texts.
The Tang left an indelible mark on the Chinese imagination long after it too fell.
According to surviving memoirs, people watched shadow plays and puppet shows, listened to music and
Scholarly lectures, or took in less edifying spectacles like wrestling and bear baiting in the urban entertainment quarters that flourished in southern China under the succeeding Song (soong) Empire. From the 1170s onward, singer-storytellers spun long romantic narratives that alternated prose passages with sung verse.
Master Tung's Western Chamber Romance stood out for its literary quality. In 184 prose passages and 5,263 lines of verse the narrator tells of a love affair between Chang, a young Confucian scholar, and Ying-ying, a ravishing damsel. Secondary characters include Ying-ying's shrewd and worldly mother, a general who practices just and efficient administration, and a fighting monk named Fa-ts'ung (fa-soong). The romance is based on The Story of Ying-ying by the Tang period author Yuan Chen (you-ahn shen) (779-831).
As the tale begins, the abbot of a Buddhist monastery responds to Chang's request to rent him a study, singing:
Sir, you’re wrong to offer me rent.
We Buddhists and Confucians are of one family.
As things stand, I can’t give you A place in our dormitory,
But you’re welcome to stay In one of the guest apartments.
As soon as Chang spies Ying-ying, who lives there with her mother, thoughts of studying flee his mind. Romance takes a detour, however, when bandits attack the monastery. A prose passage explains:
During the T’ang dynasty, troops were stationed in the P’u prefecture. The year of our story, the commander of the garrison, Marshal Hun, died. Because the second-incommand, Ting Wen-ya, did not have firm control of the troops, Flying Tiger Sun, a
Subordinate general, rebelled with five thousand soldiers. They pillaged and plundered the P'u area. How do I know this to be true? It is corroborated by The Ballad of the True Story of Ying-ying.
As the monks cower before the bandits, one of them lifts his robe to reveal his “three-foot consecrated sword.”
[Prose] Who was this monk? He was none other than Fa-ts'ung. Fa-ts'ung was a descendant of a tribesman from western Shensi. When he was young he took great pleasure in archery, fencing, hunting, and often sneaked into foreign states to steal. He was fierce and courageous. When his parents died, it suddenly became clear to him that the way of the world was frivolous and trivial, so he became a monk in the Temple of Universal Salvation. . . .
[Song] He didn't know how to read sutras;
He didn't know how to follow rituals;
He was neither pure nor chaste But indomitably courageous. . . .1
Amidst the love story, the ribaldry, and the derring-do, the author implants historical vignettes that mingle fact and fiction. Sophisticates of the Song era, living a life of ease, enjoyed these romanticized portrayals of Tang society.
World History
