Chu Shui
In 1979, at a conference in Birmingham, England, the famous mathematician Hua Luogeng met the celebrated wuxia novelist Mr. Liang Yusheng. Hua excitedly told Liang that he loved reading wuxia novels and was naturally thrilled to meet the “grandmaster of a generation” he had long admired.
Hua said to Liang: “I have just read one of your great works, Romance of the Jade Bow (Yunhai Yugong Yuan). The ending is very distinctive and has literary value.” Liang modestly replied: “Wuxia novels can hardly enter the hall of refined letters.” Hua at once said seriously: “Not so! Don't be modest. Wuxia novels belong to literature. As I see it, they are fairy tales for adults!”
Hua probably never imagined that his offhand remark would later become the best description of wuxia fiction! For the stories of wuxia novels truly fit his words naturally—“fairy tales for adults!”
The Louguan Secret Manual (Louguan Miji) is the eleventh full-length novel by the writer Xiao Ji and his first “wuxia novel.” The quotation marks are there because it differs from every kind of wuxia novel that has appeared before! It is innovative. It is not the traditional kind of wuxia novel that is either about so-called “great righteousness under heaven” that is really personal ambition, or about revenge of every sort—for a murdered father, a murdered mother, a murdered (or stolen) wife, a murdered son—or about ethnic conflict and national hatred... with a crowd of so-called knights-errant who do no productive work, fighting and killing in a great commotion. Xiao Ji's mystery wuxia novel, by contrast, is about seeking the Tao, and it stands out as unique among wuxia novels of every style.
1. Since Ancient Times, Taoists Have Held to the Ideal of Descending the Mountain to Save the World in Times of Chaos
If earlier wuxia novels depicted the whole panorama of living beings, touching on Confucians, Buddhists, Taoists, the school of yin and yang, and military strategists, and ranging not only over the Central Plains but even to Ice-Fire Island and as far as Persia (The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber), then Xiao Ji's novel seems to have been crafted for Taoism. Its religion involves nothing else, and its Taoist temples are almost all within Shaanxi Province in China, such as the Zhongnan Mountains and Shiquan. The reason the protagonist Yu Yinuo acts chivalrously has to do with his origins, especially his Taoist surroundings. Whether it is the people his father knew—Zhang Qinjian, or Taoist priest Du, or Master Yuantong, the Taoist priest impersonated by Yu Yinuo's nominal father Yu Huofeng, or Master Yiqing of the Guiguzi Ancestral Hall in Shiquan, or Master Meng of Danyang Temple—or Yu Yinuo's adoptive father Sai Shibei, even the environment in which Yu Yinuo lived for more than ten years, Laojun Cave in Red River Valley, is a Taoist temple. Yu Yinuo, who has persisted in austere practice in order to uncover the mystery of his parents, comes down the mountain in a daze; though he is passive at every turn, he still insists on acting chivalrously. This closely fits the conduct of many legendary Taoists throughout history: they came down the mountain in times of chaos because the world was in great upheaval, and times of great upheaval are often when human life is cheapest, which goes against the Way of Heaven—and the Tao follows what is so of itself; the Way of Heaven is nature itself.
What Sai Shibei taught Yu Yinuo at Laojun Cave, besides martial arts, was still “the Tao.” This Tao helps not only in understanding the ways of the world but also in raising one's level in the martial arts. So although Yu Yinuo is repeatedly deceived and framed, he still has “the Tao” in his heart. This “Tao” is the inheritance of Chinese culture. The reason Taoism, as China's native religion, has flourished for thousands of years is not alchemy, not ghost-catching, still less sacrifices, but this philosophy of non-action in which “the Tao follows naturalness,” which runs deep in the bones of the Chinese people!
What Xiao Ji's novel interprets at every turn is the Taoist way of withdrawing from the world and engaging with it: one withdraws from the world to cultivate oneself, and one engages with it because the Way of Heaven waits for one to uphold it. Taoists come down the mountain because they have the Tao in their hearts.
2. How The Louguan Secret Manual Carries On the Traditional Wuxia Novel
Although I said above that Xiao Ji's novel differs from earlier wuxia novels in its setting and philosophical system, it can be called a wuxia novel because it naturally carries on much of the tradition. The chivalrous heart that acts for justice remains unchanged—as the saying goes, the greatest knight-errant serves the nation and the people; the lesser knight-errant serves friends and neighbors! The Louguan Secret Manual may not feature the greatest kind of knight-errant, nor the traditional wuxia pursuit of so-called justice for all under heaven, but the lesser kind of chivalry appears again and again. Take Yu Yinuo's adoptive father Song Youcai: though he constantly gets into trouble, he still has a sense of justice in his heart and keeps to his original intentions. As the saying goes, only an imperfect hero is a true hero. This martial man, also steeped in traditional Taoist culture, has not changed his original intentions in decades; the moment he hears his adopted son is in danger, he charges in regardless! This is chivalry. And Yu Yinuo, even when he can barely protect himself, still insists on protecting Zhao Yuyan and later Bi Ruoyan, without the slightest hesitation—these are important parts of traditional chivalric culture. And the importance attached to the sword, such as the Seven-Star Longyuan Sword that Yu Yinuo inherited from his father—is this not the material embodiment of the culture of the knight-errant? And Yu Yinuo's sword practice, the same every day for ten years—is this not also the principle of traditional knight-errant culture: “Every ten paces he kills a man; for a thousand li none can stop him. His deed done, he shakes out his robe and leaves, hiding both his person and his name” (Li Bai, “Ode to the Knight-Errant”).
Of course, because he never awakens to “the Tao,” Yu Yinuo's kung fu remains second-rate in the martial world. Then, while tied to a coffin board and even pierced through with iron chains, he unexpectedly masters peerless martial arts by a quirk of fate—just like Zhang Wuji after falling off a cliff, like Linghu Chong accidentally learning the Nine Swords of Dugu at Repentance Cliff, like Yang Guo falling off a cliff and finding the heavy dark-iron sword—and in the end turns defeat into victory through miraculous martial arts! This is all the more a feature of traditional wuxia novels, a novel and surprising stroke, and it is also the reason traditional wuxia novels are called “fairy tales for adults.”
3. The Distinctive Feature of The Louguan Secret Manual: A Rich Taoist Culture
As just discussed, The Louguan Secret Manual is almost purely about struggles between characters in a Taoist setting. There are no “Six Great Sects” besieging Bright Summit, no great sects convening a “Martial Alliance Conference” on Mount Song, no heroes of the land gathering at Xiangyang to resist a foreign invasion. What it has is purely the culture, the religion, and the “sentiment of the rivers and lakes” within Shaanxi. Of course, Shaanxi has many Taoist cultural sites. Mount Hua, for example, is always among what are generally called the country's ten great Taoist grotto-heavens. Mount Tayun in southern Shaanxi is also famous for Taoism; it is renowned for being perilous, strange, beautiful, magnificent, and numinous, and it has not only a deep and ancient Taoist culture but also colorful natural scenery.
In the 2011 selection of China's most beautiful scenic areas with potential, the Mount Tayun scenic area was chosen as one of China's ten Taoist mountains with the greatest potential. Ren Farong, former president of the China Taoist Association, wrote an inscription praising Mount Tayun highly: “The foremost immortal realm of the Qinling Mountains, the most perilous Taoist temple under heaven.”
The Palace of Perfected Ziyang in Ziyang County was the place of practice of Zhang Pingshu, founder of the Southern School of Taoism. Because Zhang Pingshu's style name was Ziyang, Ziyang County took its name from him. Zhang Pingshu wrote Awakening to Perfection (Wuzhen Pian) and other classic works of the Southern School, laying its theoretical foundation and pioneering modern internal cultivation; hence people call him Perfected Ziyang.
In addition, Mount Tianzhu in Shanyang County was a famous center of Taoist activity in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Xiangxi Cave on the outskirts of Ankang has been the largest center of Taoist activity in southern Shaanxi since the Ming. Moreover, when the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice first arose, although the Celestial Master Zhang Daoling and his descendants Zhang Heng and Zhang Lu founded the religion at Mount Heming (in present-day Dayi, Sichuan), their main area of activity was the Hanzhong region; Zhang Lu in particular established a theocratic regime in Hanzhong that lasted nearly thirty years. The later development of Chinese Taoism was deeply influenced by it. To this day, southern Shaanxi remains the region where Chinese Taoist culture flourishes most! Among the common people, whether for weddings and funerals or for schooling and promotion, they mostly consult the Taoists!
Moreover, Louguantai, described in The Louguan Secret Manual, is the birthplace of Chinese Taoist culture and the place where Laozi wrote the Tao Te Ching. Today's Chongyang Palace in Hu County is one of the three ancestral courts of the Quanzhen school. The Eight Immortals Temple in the city of Xi'an is famous because the eight immortals of the legend “The Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea” once manifested there. And in Chang'an County is the Jinxian Temple; jinxian, “golden immortal,” means “an indestructible immortal” and is a title for Taoist immortals. Because Taoist immortals originated in the Kunlun Mountains of the west and with the Queen Mother of the West, and the west belongs to metal, they were called golden immortals. The Jinxian Temple is also the ancestral court of Korean Taoism. The White Cloud Temple in Jia County in northern Shaanxi and Mount Erlang in Shenmu are also well-known Taoist holy sites.
If Shandong is the birthplace of Confucian culture, then Shaanxi is the birthplace of Taoist culture, for the following reasons. First, the Yellow Emperor, originator of the Huang-Lao teachings and the first ancestor of Chinese civilization, is buried in Huangling County, Shaanxi. Second, King Wen of Zhou, author of the Taoist classic the Zhouyi (the I Ching), lived at Zhouyuan; the Tao Te Ching was written at Hangu Pass in Shaanxi (broadly speaking, after the Qin dynasty Hangu Pass no longer belonged to Shaanxi but to Hongnong, Hengnong, or Henan Commandery, basically falling under present-day Henan; admittedly part of the old Hongnong jurisdiction, such as Shangluo, belongs to Shaanxi, but narrowly speaking, after the Sui and Tang—with Guo Prefecture, or the later Lingbao County set up by the Tang—Hangu Pass truly had nothing to do with Shaanxi. Still, it once belonged to the state of Qin and was largely inhabited by people of Qin, so in today's Lingbao County, the site of the old Hangu Pass, part of the local speech is still the Wenxiang dialect of Guanzhong speech) and expounded at Louguantai in Shaanxi. Third, the three dynasties in Chinese history that governed by Taoist thought all had their capitals at Xi'an in Shaanxi: Haojing of the Western Zhou, and Chang'an of the Western Han and of the Tang. The Tang emperors even claimed descent from Laozi! Fourth, many Taoist figures were active in Shaanxi: Jiang Ziya fished on the banks of the Wei River; Zhang Liang's fief was Hanzhong, and he was buried there after his death; Li Chunfeng, author of the Back-Pushing Chart (Tuibei Tu), was a native of Qishan, Shaanxi. Fifth, Shaanxi is the cradle of Chinese Taoism: Louguantai is the ancestral court of Taoism; the Way of Great Peace arose in Shaanxi; the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice flourished in southern Shaanxi; the Northern branch of Quanzhen originated at Longmen Cave in Long County, Shaanxi; and Chang'an was a main center of Chinese Taoist activity and the place where Taoist scholarly achievements were compiled.
So Xiao Ji's The Louguan Secret Manual is really a corner of Shaanxi's Taoist culture revealed, almost unintentionally, in literature. From it we can glimpse the power of Shaanxi's Taoist culture and the importance of this birthplace of Taoist culture.
4. The Tao Needs the Right Way, Chivalry Needs True Knights-Errant, and Mohist Culture Deserves to Be Carried Forward
The Louguan Secret Manual keeps asking what the Tao of martial arts really is, yet never gives a clear answer in the end, because having no Tao is having the Tao. This is rather like the “Sword Demon” Dugu Qiubai in The Return of the Condor Heroes: “For more than thirty years I roamed the martial world, killed all my enemies, defeated all heroes; there was no match for me under heaven. Having no choice, I retired to a deep valley and made the condor my friend. Alas! All my life I sought an opponent and could not find one; truly the loneliness is hard to bear.” Dugu Qiubai first used the sharpest sword under heaven, the soft Ziwei Sword, before the age of thirty; having wrongly wounded a righteous man with it, which was ill-omened, he cast it into a deep valley. Next he used the heavy dark-iron sword: “The heavy sword has no edge; great skill needs no craft.” Before forty he relied on it to rampage across the land. Finally, of all things, a wooden sword: “After forty I was no longer bound by objects; grass, trees, bamboo, and stone could all serve as a sword. From then on I refined my practice and gradually entered the state where having no sword surpasses having one.” He attained the sword-intent in which, as they say, “flying petals and falling leaves can all wound.”
Precisely because one seeks the Tao at Louguan and the way of the sword has no Tao, Yu Huofeng in The Louguan Secret Manual gains nothing in the end, and having no answer becomes the best answer. But having no Tao is also the Tao, and the Way of Heaven is also the Tao; the Tao follows what is so of itself—so what is “what is so of itself”? If the right way were not needed, why would Yu Yinuo have left Laojun Cave? Had he not left Laojun Cave, how could Yu Yinuo's rapid growth have followed? Without Bi Ruoyan's sacrifice, how could the mystery finally have been solved? And once Master Zhang Qinjian reveals the answer, everything seems to have its answer—yet in truth, how many answers are there in this human world? So a person who stands between heaven and earth, who can keep his conduct upright and his heart upright and make his own contribution, has made the Tao upright and is a knight-errant! As the saying goes, the greatest knight-errant serves the nation and the people; the lesser serves friends and neighbors. Either way, that is having the Tao.
In the novel, the great Taoist masters all come from Guigu, the Ghost Valley, in southern Shaanxi. Perhaps, as the author Xiao Ji says, it is because he got to know friends in Shiquan who were developing the Guigu site. But does this part of the novel not also tacitly accord with “having no Tao is having the Tao”? Remember that the Mohists were the group closest to a religion in the pre-Qin period, and Mozi himself was its leader, the “juzi” (the famous historian Guo Moruo wrote in “A Critique of Confucius and Mozi” in his Ten Critiques that Mozi had “the personality of a model religious founder”). And Taoism's doctrines of revering gods and sacrificing to spirits, valuing life, and prizing esoteric arts were drawn to a considerable extent from the Mohists, who modeled themselves on the Xia and took Yu the Great as their ancestor.
Although Taoism has always taken Taoist philosophy as its ancestor, examined at the roots it actually grew in Mohist soil. In particular, the Way of Great Peace of the Eastern Han and the Zhen Dadao (True Great Way) school of the Jin dynasty inherited a great deal of traditional Mohist thought; one could even say they resembled a continuation of Mohism—popular religious communities founded by later followers of Mohism at the end of the Han and the beginning of the Jin. Although the Way of Great Peace and the Zhen Dadao have died out, their scriptures and teachings were inherited by later Taoism. Thus Mohist thought and Mo Di, the founder of the Mohist school, still exert a traditional influence on Taoism and are held in reverence.
Taoism and the Mohist school are inseparable in both thought and style. That the Way of Great Peace originated from the Mohists, that Ge Hong's immortal Taoism revered Mo Di as an “earthly immortal,” that Taoist discussions of the transformations of esoteric arts esteemed Mozi's theory of the Five Phases, and that the Zhen Dadao and similar schools practiced “austere discipline and rigorous conduct”—all these have their inner intellectual reasons.
Blending Mohist culture into Taoism is thus quite natural. Besides, have not many of the positive legacies of Mohist culture been inherited by the Chinese of today? Even the great master of Chinese learning Zhang Taiyan regarded himself as a follower of Mozi, precisely because he saw the many fine cultural legacies of Mohism.
5. The Louguan Secret Manual Asks: Is the Tao Te Ching a Book of War?
In The Louguan Secret Manual, Xiao Ji presents the Tao Te Ching as having two parts: one is the traditional Tao Te Ching as we know it; the other, the so-called “lost” three thousand words, is the supreme martial arts manual, the Classic of War (Wu Jing). Many readers reaching this point may think the author is just amusing us—a novelist's invention! But in fact, since its birth the Tao Te Ching has never been regarded solely as a philosophical or religious work; it has also often been treated as “a book of war.”
In the military section of the “Treatise on Literature” in the Book of Sui (Sui Shu), there is an entry for “Laozi's Book of War, one scroll.” Wang Zhen, a gentleman-for-court-discussion under Emperor Xianzong of the Tang, pointed out in the preface and memorial to his Exposition of the Military Essentials of the Tao Te Ching that of the five thousand words of the Laozi, “there is not a single chapter that does not concern warfare.” He regarded all eighty-one chapters of the Laozi as a book of war and expounded them as such. The famous Northern Song scholar Su Zhe also pointed out in volume 2 of his Commentary on the Laozi: “...This comes close to using cunning; how is it different from Guan Zhong and Sun Wu?” He, too, regarded the Laozi as a book of war no different from those of Guan Zhong and Sun Wu.
Zheng Qiao of the Southern Song once again listed the Laozi under military writings in his Tongzhi Lüe. The early Qing philosopher Wang Fuzhi held that since the Laozi speaks of war, it should be “the teacher of those who speak of war” and “the ancestor of those who speak of war.” In modern China, Wei Yuan also regarded the Laozi as “the words of a military strategist” and “a book that speaks of war,” and praised and developed it. In his “Preface to the Original Meaning of the Laozi” he said: “There is the learning of Huang and Lao, and the learning of Lao and Zhuang. The learning of Huang and Lao comes from high antiquity; hence in the five thousand words there are frequent references to ‘the classic says’ and ‘the Most High has said,’ and many quotations from the ritualists and the military strategists.” And in his “Preface to the Collected Commentaries on Sunzi” he said: “Is the Laozi not a book that speaks of war! ‘Nothing under heaven is softer and weaker than water, yet nothing can surpass it in attacking the hard and strong’—in this I see the form of war. Is the Sun Wu not a book that speaks of the Tao! ‘To win a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the height of excellence; to subdue the enemy's army without fighting is the height of excellence. Therefore one who is good at war has no fame for courage and no merit for valor’—in this I see the essence of war.” Thus, “the Laozi among the philosophers and the Sunzi among the military strategists—their ways both encompass all that exists, their minds both illuminate the universe, and their methods both unite heaven and humanity and combine the constant and the changing.” The modern bourgeois revolutionary Zhang Taiyan, in “Confucians and Taoists, Third” in his Qiushu, held that the Laozi concisely summarizes the essentials of the ancient books of war, stating: “Lao Dan was an archivist who knew much of the old records; he condensed the purport of the Golden Tablets and the Six Secret Teachings into five thousand words, as a model for schemers of later ages.” Since the Laozi speaks of military strategies of concealment and stratagem, it is only natural that later military strategists took it as their model.
After citing this long list of sources, the well-known scholar Mr. Ge Rongjin further pointed out: In my view, although the Laozi is a great philosophical work, containing profound ontological thought on the Tao, rich dialectical thought, and a splendid philosophy of life, the dialectical thought it expounds indeed provided the philosophical basis for the military dialectics of the strategists, and its thoughts on the nature of war, military strategy, and command tactics became the teacher of later Chinese strategists and exerted a great historical influence. In this sense, regarding the Laozi as a book of war is fully justified and tenable.
In fact, any system of thought needs a philosophical foundation. When Bruce Lee introduced his Jeet Kune Do to Americans, did he not begin by introducing the Chinese philosophical system? And many Taoist martial arts, such as tai chi, with its principle of using the opponent's force against him—is not the intellectual source of such martial thought Laozi's simple theory of relativity? So can Xiao Ji's The Louguan Secret Manual also be seen as an effort to promote the Chinese Taoist system of learning? After all, having read The Louguan Secret Manual, even I picked up the Tao Te Ching again, hoping to dig something new out of it.
6. The Dilemmas of Writing Wuxia Novels in the New Era
Ever since the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) included its “Biographies of the Wandering Knights,” the knight-errant has been a special social stratum in China. Yet the word “wuxia” does not appear in ancient Chinese books; it first appeared instead in the modern literature of Japan, which shares the same script and cultural roots as China.
The Meiji-era novelist Oshikawa Shunro (1876–1914) took the Japanese literary world by storm with three novels bearing the name wuxia (bukyo). At that time cultural information traveled quickly between China and Japan, and so the word “wuxia” entered China. Some Chinese also wrote the earliest wuxia novels in classical Chinese. The bibliography in the Catalogue of Late Qing and Early Republican Chinese Fiction, compiled by Tarumoto Teruo and others, shows that works presented as wuxia novels had already appeared: Lin Qinnan and Qian Jibo both wrote wuxia fiction in classical Chinese, and in 1916 Qian co-edited Wuxia Congtan (Collected Tales of Chivalry) with Yun Tieqiao. Before the May Fourth new literature represented by Lu Xun took the stage, the literary scene was dominated by the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school, exposé novels, and the like, and wuxia novels were among them.
After the first generation of wuxia novels in classical Chinese came the so-called new-school wuxia novels that arose in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. Wuxia novelists represented by Jin Yong, Liang Yusheng, Gu Long, and Wen Rui'an ushered in decades of prosperity for wuxia fiction in the Asian cultural sphere, even influencing popular culture and the film, television, and entertainment industries.
Since the new century, however, wuxia fiction has steadily declined. This is due both to the general slump of the literary world and changes in public reading habits, and to changes in public entertainment habits. If in the era of the new-school wuxia novel people read wuxia fiction in newspapers, magazines, and published books, today they rely basically on mobile phones and the corresponding data traffic. If wuxia novels once led the trends, today all kinds of so-called xuanhuan fantasy novels set in invented worlds are better able to satisfy today's audiences under ever-growing social pressure. Xuanhuan fiction also seems to be expanding its audience; after all, more and more women now love reading xuanhuan novels, to say nothing of today's playable video games, whose immersive feel is far more direct than reading.
So although in recent years new wuxia novelists such as Sun Xiao and Bu Feiyan have appeared in China and achieved remarkable success, on the whole wuxia fiction continues to decline. In such an environment, the appearance of a novel like The Louguan Secret Manual—which has the kung fu and chivalry of the traditional wuxia novel, philosophical reflection on “the Tao,” a touch of mystery, and a strong regional flavor, almost as if crafted for lovers of Shaanxi culture and especially Taoist culture—is truly rare and precious.