Existence, Illusion, and Time in Xue Mo's Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia.

Existence, Illusion, and Time in Xue Mo's Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia.

By Andrea Lingenfelter, PhD

Thematically rooted in the Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism practiced by its renowned author Xue Mo, the novel Curses of the Kingdom ofXixia takes readers on an extended journey through time. Events depicted in the novel take place in a handful of key locations near the ancient town of Liangzhou (present day Wuwei, Gansu province). Crafting a story that spans roughly a thousand years but remains in one place, Xue Mo creates on the page a densely layered world of simultaneity and impermanence. This essay will discuss the structure, style, characters, and the broad outlines of the many tales contained in Curses of the Kingdom ofXixia, connecting all of this to some of the novel’s important themes, including the Buddhist concept of impermanence and a code of ethics informed by Buddhism. Although this article will leave a more extensive and learned analysis of the novel’s Buddhist concepts to specialists, I will nonetheless call attention to concepts that are essential to our understanding of the text.

Structure:

The Frame:

The novel’s structure is modeled on traditional Chinese novels. As is common in traditional works of fiction like Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 CE) chuanqi (literary short fiction) as well as the earlier zhiguai tradition of urban legends, the author/narrator often constructs a frame story introducing the provenance of the tale we are about to read in terms of real-world events. This grounding in verisimilitude is an important feature of early traditional fiction. In a similar fashion, in the opening pages of Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia, the narrator identifies himself as the author Xue Mo and Treats readers to detailed account of the genesis of the novel. In the novel’s opening pages, he tells of the discovery of a cache of eight ancient manuscripts in a grotto located in territory that was once part of the ancient kingdom of Xixia (1038 – 1227 CE). The population of Xixia itself was obliterated by the armies of Genghis Khan, erasing the kingdom from the map; but this collection of manuscripts, written in different hands and on different paper stock —mostly in Chinese but with some phrases written in the lost language of Xixia — surfaces in the late 20th century.

“Everything started with a rock fall,”  the narrator tells us, making it sound like a chance event; but nothing that happens in this novel is coincidental.

Xue Mo employs a strategy common in Tang chuanqi, whereby the narrators would describe, often in some detail, how they first heard the story they are about to relate, along with who they heard it from. He names the person he learned about the discovery from, leavening the account with earthy humor, while also suggesting the cosmic forces at work in the unearthing of the lost texts:

According to an old man surnamed Qiao, rocks fell several times in that cave. Once when the grotto was being repaired, a fella said, “Why repair such crap?” A huge rock tumbled down past his head and took his hat with it.

The same thing happened when we performed our ritual offering. Just as we were chanting the Offering Mantra to the point of forgetting ourselves, a rock plummeted and smashed a mud pagoda. There were many such pagodas in the cave, which were originally used to house the relics of venerable monks. However, this pagoda did not contain any relics. It housed a pile of manuscripts in both Chinese and Xixia writing. Most of its contents were written in Chinese, but Xixia writing was used for terms specific to certain periods that might have been misunderstood otherwise. I stayed indoors for three full months in order to decipher them.

After the valuable manuscripts’ initial discovery in the 1970s by “illiterate peasants” who had no concept of their value, some parts of this “treasure” are destroyed by fire. Only later do the manuscripts come into the possession of the author:

On a windy day laden with whirling yellow dust, many years later, Grandpa Jiu solemnly handed the treasure that had been hidden for the past thousand years in a Xixia cave to a man named Xue Mo.

Further grounding the frame story in real life, the narrator names the man who gave him the manuscripts and also describes the weather on the day it happened. The narrator also reinforces the lost manuscript frame story, from chapter to chapter and section to section, referencing manuscripts by name, depending on which of them is the source for a particular chapter. Five titles recur with some frequency: Nightmares; Crazy Ramblings of Ajia; Tale of the Goddess; True Records of the Curses; and Historical Mirror of Forgotten Events. These frequent citations serve to bolster the meta-fictional conceit, the story within a story.

Adding another layer of significance, the narrator Xue Mo describes Diamond Maiden Cave, the grotto where the manuscripts were discovered, as “one of the totemic guideposts of my life”: “my religious beliefs and creativity are all linked to it.”

The cave itself is named for a deity:

Diamond Maiden is one of the deities of Tantric or Esoteric Buddhism. She is the main deity among the millions and millions of Dakini goddesses. According to legend, there are two Diamond Maiden caves in China. One of them is in the province of Xinjiang; its exact location is no longer known. The other is in Liangzhou.

As for the contents of the rediscovered manuscripts, the narrator describes them as follows and details the process whereby he crafted them into the novel we are now reading:

They recorded events in a village named Diamond Clan, with emphasis on the spiritual journeys of a monk, or madman, named Jasper and a woman named Snow Feather… I spent several years interpreting, clarifying, researching, and footnoting the seemingly confusing and antiquated language order to present them to my readers in a style akin to a vernacular novel.

When Xue Mo refers to the “vernacular novel,” he is talking about a traditional Chinese novel. As discussed above, the framing device detailing the ostensible real-life origins of the (fictional) tale is often found in traditional fiction, and there are other ways that Curses of the Kingdom of Xixiaresembles traditional Chinese vernacular novels. For instance, the chapters are headed by poems or parts of poems that relate to the chapter’s content. In addition, the novel’s structure is episodic, with lyrical passages alternating with action sequences, all of it punctuated by dashes of humor, some of it witty and some of it earthy. Last but not least, the novel illustrates a guiding sense of moral principles and Buddhist concepts, including impermanence, the illusory nature of reality, karma, samsara, and the principle of nonviolence.

The Characters and Their Stories:

As the narrator writes at the beginning, the novel centers on the intertwining fates of two characters, Jasper and Snow Feather:

Jasper is a protagonist of this book. He was thought to have been a monk who had broken his vows. The ludicrous romance between Jasper and Snow Feather brought fame to Toad Cave [Diamond Maiden Cave]. This book is about them.

Jasper’s spiritual journey is the focus of many of the tales in the book. He exists in recent memory, as people known to the narrator report having seen him in the past. At some point he came to be known as Indigent Monk, and later as Mad Monk. Then he disappeared. But these events are not as central to the story as Jasper’s quest for enlightenment.

Gifted with the extraordinary ability to see ghosts, this exceptional young man has long wished to become a monk, an aspiration his mother supports. However, Jasper’s quest is complicated by conflict with his father Braggart, a local thug turned village headman. Braggart wants Jasper to marry Snow Feather and join the “family business” of bullying the local people for fun and profit. If the opposition of a politically powerful parent weren’t enough, Jasper’s deep physical attraction to Snow Feather further complicates his progress towards purity.

Snow Feather, sometimes identified as Diamond Maiden, is a Dakini/Vajrayogini with the ability to fly swiftly from place to place. This will ultimately get her in trouble with the authorities when she uses her power to commit some high-profile heists. After she steals sheep (out of necessity and compassion in a time of famine, the authorities catch up with her and try to bring her to justice. Their attempt to carry out her death sentence fail when a goodhearted bullock spares her life. Sent to a labor camp, she will treat prison as “a ritual space.”  As the author comments, “herding sheep in the desert can help one’s soul settle into clarity. If you lie on the sand and look at the cloudless sky, you will feel the clear brightness dissolve you, and your consciousness will resemble the void.”  This reflects Xue Mo’s emphasis on the spiritual dimension of the natural world.

Snow Feather is portrayed as a filial daughter to her elderly and infirm mother. Stigmatized by her fellow townsfolk for her past status as a sex worker, Snow Feather’s mother endures persecution. Snow Feather manages to protect her for a time, but ultimately the mother is subjected to a cruel death by the sadistic local authorities. But she means more to the story than her victimization would imply, for Snow Feather’s mother exemplifies the practice of nonviolence. In one key scene, the women have fled to the mountains, seeking refuge from vengeful. Snow Feather wants to shelter in a cave, but a family of bears is already living there. The bears, who have cubs, are prepared to defend their territory, and for her part Snow Feather is willing to fight them for it and kill them if necessary. However, the mother admonishes her daughter to choose compassion and kindness rather than violence. The women negotiate with the bears, and Snow Feather constructs a treehouse near the cave. Thanks to the mother’s intercession, Snow Feather and her mother coexist peacefully with the bears, and later the bears will become their guardians.

The third primary character is Ajia, a local deity who has been watching over Liangzhou for a thousand years. A bit of a trickster figure, Ajia is described as a storyteller par excellence:

Ajia’s narratives were very good — they were much better than mine — even though I’m a writer and the legendary Ajia was a nobody. He wasn’t even a farmer since he had no land, no agricultural implements, and no desire to work. Back then, no one would hire Ajia as a laborer. So he went to a wealthy household during meal times. Its manager would say, “Come and eat!” And Ajia would eat noisily and self-righteously. Later, Ajia became a butcher. And then because of special karma, he became a guardian god. But that will be the subject of another book.

While Ajia plays an important supporting role in the story of Jasper and Snow Feather, he also plays a unique, meta-fictional role. Unlike the other characters, he is able to move back and forth between the world of the narrative and the world of the narrator, sometimes participating in the story and interacting with other characters, and at other times bantering with the narrator outside of the story per se. For example, Chapter 6, “Origin of the Flying Thief,” is an account of events from Ajia’s point of view, which the narrator is more or less transcribing. In one particularly vivid passage about the feeble attempts of local police to catch Snow Feather after a spectacular theft, the narrator reels off a string of increasingly exaggerated and ridiculous metaphors contrasting the virtuosic thief with the inept police (“yamen runners”):

Who was the thief? This thief was a blue steel blade, created through forging hundreds of times, with thousands of times of hammering each round, while the yamen runners were just rusty iron scraps! This thief was a treasured broadsword capable of slicing through metal as if it were mud, while the yamen runners were but a tong [sic] used in a kitchen stove. This thief was bubbling, boiling water, while the yamen runners were but the crystals of dried urine. Ajia wanted to give many more metaphors, but I shouted and stopped him, “Enough! Aren’t you just a minor guardian deity? You’re just an ant pretending to be an animal by wearing a bridle-headstall!” Ajia sniggered, “Okay, okay! I won’t rob your right to talk. In the future, you should stop robbing the philosophers of their right to talk too. You be a novelist and I’ll be a guardian god!”

The narrator breaks away from the story into a humorous exchange between himself and Ajia, which begins when the narrator interjects, “Ajia wanted to give many more metaphors, but I shouted and stopped him.”

By stepping back from the storyline, the narrator calls attention to the illusory quality of fiction, reminding the reader not to become too immersed in a story that is not real.

The narrator picks up the repartee several pages later, shifting seamlessly into metafiction:

Ghosts couldn’t enter monasteries since there was always the guardian deity, Ajia! The only time Ajia would allow ghosts to enter was when the monks were performing the Mengshan Alms-Giving Ritual. That was when all ghosts — fat ones, skinny ones, male ghosts, and female ghosts — would enter the monastery cautiously but self-righteously. Ajia loved to watch the shy female ghosts, although he would never admit to it. The ghosts of Liangzhou are just like the folks of Liangzhou. Ghosts are just like people. Oh, I forgot, Ajia was a deity, not a ghost. Please don’t take offense, Ajia! However, there’s almost no difference between ghosts and deities. Deities are but ghosts with power. What are you glaring at me for? You pick up a sieve and think you own the sky? If you’re worshiped, then you are a god. But if you’re not worshiped, then out you go with a sprinkle of vinegar! What do you think you are? Can you shit gold? Can you pee silver? Can you make me a section chief? I suggest you take it easy. We all know that you, Ajia, are no more than a poor ghost with power, with not even enough cash to fill a plate!

Midway through the paragraph, the narrator goes from referring to Ajia in the third person to addressing him directly in the second person. Interestingly, the reader does not have direct access to Ajia’s reactions or anything he says. We can only guess at Ajia’s side of the conversation based on how the narrator responds to him, an experience akin to hearing only one side of a telephone conversation. Such exchanges between the narrator and Ajia enliven the tale with humor, while also imparting useful information. The paragraph above is rich in information about local folk ways and beliefs, and it also reinforces the narrator’s portrait of Ajia as a transgressive trickster (“Ajia loved to watch the shy female ghosts, although he would never admit to it.”).

In addition to Snow Feather’s benevolent and long-suffering mother, positive secondary characters includethe narrator’s guru Grandpa Jiu, Jasper’s teacher Monk Wu, and John the Christian missionary, who pops up periodically for meaningful philosophical conversations with the main characters. These benign characters must often contend with a handful of antagonists, chief among them Braggart, Jasper’s gangster-like father.

Many of the subplots centering on Diamond Clan village feature Braggart. A reader can infer that during the Republican period (1911 – 1949), Braggart was a hired gun for local landlords and other powerbrokers. After 1949, he rises to “clan head” (apparently a veiled reference to his becoming the village cadre). Braggart is motivated by a lust for power, and he enjoys being widely feared. His violence and cruelty know few limits. Braggart has a henchman named Kuan San, who often does his bidding. In a karmic twist, Braggart is disabled in an incident involving one of his children, and he is forced to live out his rather long life as an object of public pity and scorn. In yet another twist, Kuan San is revealed on his deathbed to have helped the people of Liangzhou by secretly orchestrating a raid on a storehouse full of grain sequestered by Braggart, thereby saving many people from starvation during the Great Famine of the late 1950s:

It was said Kuan San confessed on his deathbed that he was responsible for the “Chicken Feather Notices” that led to the grain robbery incident. He only wanted to let the villagers eat a full meal and not starve to death, not expecting that some ended up “eating iron pellets” [being executed]. According to Historical Mirror of Forgotten Events, a careful tally shows that the deed Kuan San committed was ultimately a good one; since aside from the few who stuffed themselves to death, there were no more deaths by starvation in the village after the Chicken Feather Notices. To exchange the lives of the few who were shot for the ultimate survival of Diamond Clan — this was a winning trade, the matter how one tallied it.

This passage highlights the importance of karma in the lives of ordinary people. Indeed, karma is a pervasive force. At one point, Ajia remarks that the reason Snow Feather must endure so many trials and tribulations is that she broke a promise, and there will always be a karmic consequence for transgression.

The passage cited above also serves as an example of the novel’s nonlinear concept of time. Within the frame of the novel, Historical Mirror of Forgotten Events is a 1000-year-old manuscript dating from the Xixia; and yet it treats twentieth century events as history.

Butcher Zhang, despite a rather checkered past, is in the right place at the right time and gains salvation. Conversely, for Cripple Big, another skilled local artisan, there is no redemption. Although he had long been a filial son, he ultimately lures his mother into a trap, sacrificing her to end a feud between Diamond Clan village and their bitter rivals, Diamond King village. Cripple Big has other people’s blood on his hands as well, those he murdered so he could fashion their skins into ritual objects. His sins are too great for salvation.

The passage quoted above also highlights the novel’s nonlinear concept of time. Within the frame of the novel, Historical Mirror of Forgotten Events is a 1000-year-old manuscript dating from the Xixia; and yet it treats twentieth century events as history. As the narrator says in an aside towards the end of the book, neatly summing up the tale’s temporal ambiguity:

I heard that this was a prophecy.

I also heard that this was probably a fable.

The collapsing of time into a simultaneity recurs throughout the novel in various guises. For instance, the morally ambiguous character Butcher Zhang exists in multiple historical periods. He is described as a contemporary man who steals Monk Wu’s wok, vajra scepter, and other ritual items; “[but] in historical records, Butcher Zhang seems to have lived during the Tang or the Xixia dynasty.”  The narrator confesses to his temporal confusion around this character when he sketches a scene in which Butcher midst of forging a horseshoe: “I can’t tell whether he wore a Xixia outfit. His appearance was always vague in Jasper’s nightmares.”  Alluding to the unreality of dreams, the narrator often stresses the illusory nature of, chronological time in other passages like this one:

Nightmares’ contents are very confusing. It is not clear whether the events transpired during the time of the Kingdom of Xixia or the present.

This instability extends to the village of Diamond Clan itself. The narrator confesses that its origins are an “enigma.” What’s more, the place seems to exist simultaneously throughout time:

Judging from the manuscript, the dates for this Diamond Clan were also unclear. It seemed to have existed during the Xixia period; or it could have been the Republican period. It could also have been any of the dynasties during the last thousand years.

I would be remiss if I did not include the animal characters in this discussion. As observed above, the natural world is an integral part of Xue Mo’s moral universe. Celestial objects and natural forces that are typically regarded as inanimate are portrayed in Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia as animate and having agency. Scattered throughout the book are passages such as these: “the sun shouted loudly” ; “[the] mountain wind blew vehemently” ; “[the] stars would laugh loudly” ; and “[the] air was full of the bright laugh of sunshine.”  Likewise, members of the animal kingdom are portrayed as having personalities and moral agency. Not only is there a family of bears who become Snow Feather and her mother’s, there are also ravens, a horse, a benevolent bullock, and pythons that earn merit by guarding the manuscripts. All of these creatures play positive roles in the story and often have the ability to communicate with humans. Although most of the animals in Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia are allies of the protagonists, there are other animals which are their “karmic foes”— chiefly the red bats, which must be fought off and killed in a pivotal scene.

Deities like Snow Feather and Ajia are not the only supernatural figures in the novel’s cast of characters. There is also a significant population of ghosts, many of them hungry ghosts — victims of the man-made famine of the late 1950s. Snow Feather (who, like Jasper, is also able to see any interact with ghosts), has a frightening encounter with the ghosts of some of her relatives who attempt to kill her and eat her. Desperate to stay alive during the famine, they turned to cannibalism, but they died anyway. There was no one alive to bury them, and all of the unburied dead became hungry ghosts, doomed to wander the landscape and never find rest, forever reenacting their futile search for food.

It is worth noting that not only is time simultaneous rather than linear, identity or selfhood is fluid. The latter could be viewed as a corollary of the former, the ambiguity or instability of Butcher Zhang’s historical period being a case in point. In one passage, the narrator confesses:

I was never able to figure out the relationship between Jasper, Ajia, and Snow Feather of Nightmares and those in the other manuscripts. Although they have the same names, they seem to have experienced different life trajectories.

Elsewhere, the narrator Xue Mo mentions in passing that in a previous life he had been a butcher and possibly a wolf. The existence of past lives and multiple, divergent life experiences is a reflection of the Buddhist concept of samsara, whereby the soul lives many lives. Similarly, the lack of fixed identities is a hallmark of the notion of impermanence, and the instability of chronological time in the novel points to the illusory nature of time and phenomena.

All that is certain in the world of the novel are certain principles: impermanence, illusion, and nonviolence. Xue Mo devotes an entire section near the end to an impassioned plea for non-violence, in which he also questions received his story of graphical categories like “heroism” and “patriotism.” He argues forcefully that “[the] heads of the commoners are by far more important, by far, than the owner of an Emperor.”  In the context of the mercilessly bloody Mongol conquest of the Northern Song dynasty and the kingdom of Xixia (among others), Xue Mo offers a nontraditional reading of history. He castigates cultural heroes like the poet Lu You (1125 – 1210 CE), who urged others to take up arms against the invading Jin forces, and he praises the long-vilified Southern Song official Qin Kuai (1091 – 1155) as a pacifist motivated by a desire to protect the people:

Because of a “traitor” named Qin Kuai, the heads of the people of the Southern Song remain safely glued to their necks.

It is hard to overstate how shocking these assertions would be to most readers in China. It would be seen as akin to praising Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and condemning Churchill. However, in the case of the Mongol conquest of the vast territory that composes contemporary China, Xue Mo suggests that the Mongols were an unstoppable force. For the people of Xixia, resistance led to violent death on a massive scale in the extermination of an entire population. He points out that surrender allowed the common people to keep on living. He makes it clear that it is the common people who are sacrificed and more, whether on the battlefield or at home. Moreover, if one takes a long view of history, the Mongol Yuan dynasty, like any other dynasty, could not last forever.

Because the frame story rests the narrative on a hodgepodge of manuscripts, this portmanteau of a novel can accommodate such digressions. The narrator always circles back to the three main characters.

Conclusion:

Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia, spanning centuries, populated with numerous vivid characters (divine, human, animal, supernatural), and threaded with philosophical and spiritual observations, resists any simple summation. By way of conclusion, I will quote the wise fool Ajia:

“I’m a firefly,” Ajia coughed lightly, “although I know I can’t change the world, I still try to give off my own light.”

Author’s introduction:

Andrea Lingenfelter , A poet, scholar of Chinese literature, and a widely published translator of contemporary Chinese-language fiction (Farewell My Concubine,Candy) and poetry by authors from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

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