In this pathbreaking study of three of the most familiar texts in the Chinese tradition—all concerning stones endowed with magical properties—Jing Wang develops a monumental reconstruction of ancient Chinese stone lore. Wang’s thorough and systematic comparison of these classic works illuminates the various tellings of the stone story and provides new insight into major topics in traditional Chinese literature. Bringing together Chinese myth, religion, folklore, art, and literature, this book is the first in any language to amass the sources of stone myth and stone lore in Chinese culture. Uniting classical Chinese studies with contemporary Western theoretical concerns, Wang examines these stone narratives by analyzing intertextuality within Chinese traditions. She offers revelatory interpretations to long-standing critical issues, such as the paradoxical character of the monkey in The Journey to the West , the circularity of narrative logic in The Dream of the Red Chamber , and the structural necessity of the stone tablet in Water Margin. By both challenging and incorporating traditional sinological scholarship, Wang’s The Story of Stone reveals the ideological ramifications of these three literary works on Chinese cultural history and makes the past relevant to contemporary intellectual discourse. Specialists in Chinese literature and culture, comparative literature, literary theory, and religious studies will find much of interest in this outstanding work, which is sure to become a standard reference on the subject. "This is a pathbreaking study of stone symbolism in three Chinese novels. . . . A thought-provoking piece of work and a major contribution to scholarship on "Dream of the Red Chamber,"" --Andrew Lo, "The China Quarterly" The Story of Stone Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism in Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, and The Journey to the West By Jing Wang Duke University Press Copyright © 1992 Duke University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-1178-2 Contents Acknowledgments, 1 Intertextuality and Interpretation, 2 The Mythological Dictionary of Stone, 3 Stone and Jade: From the Ficticious to the Morally Prescribed, 4 The Story of Stone: The Problematic of Contradiction and Constraint, 5 The Paradox of Desire and Emptiness: The Stone Monkey Intertextualized, 6 The Inscribed Stone Tablet, Conclusion, Notes, Bibliography, Index, CHAPTER 1 INTERTEXTUALITY AND INTERPRETATION There was not a single thing except a stone tablet in the center of the hall. It was about six feet in height, and was resting on a stone tortoise which was almost half in the soil. On the tablet were characters of the very ancient style, and they could not make out any of them. There was on top of that very mountain an immortal stone, which measured thirty-six feet and five inches in height and twenty-four feet in circumference.... One day, it split open, giving birth to a stone egg about the size of a playing ball. Exposed to the wind, it was transformed into a stone monkey endowed with fully developed features and limbs. Long ago, when the goddess Nü-wa [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [Nü-kua] was repairing the sky, she melted down a great quantity of rock and, on the Incredible Crags of the Great Fable Mountains, moulded the amalgam into three hundred and six thousand, five hundred and one large building blocks, each measuring seventy-two feet by a hundred and forty-four feet square. She used three hundred and six thousand five hundred of these blocks in the course of her building operations, leaving a single odd block unused, which lay, all on its own, at the foot of Greensickness Peak in the afore-mentioned mountains. This is how the three narratives begin: the excavation of an enigmatic stone tablet in the Shui-hu Chuan [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Water Margin ), the miraculous birth of a stone monkey in the Hsi-yu Chi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ( Journey to the West ), and the creation of a discarded sacred rock in the Hung-lou Meng [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ( Dream of the Red Chamber ). Read separately, each beginning appears to be a unique phenomenon of the fantastic, which conveys the aura of originality. Taken together, however, the three beginnings suggest a completely different strategy of reading that calls into question any appearance of the gratuitous. Take our reception of the Nü-kua stone: its seemingly idiosyncratic qualities appear less novel within the context of the image of the stone monkey. If we dig more deeply into the two narratives, we find analogies between these two stones that suggest that each text appropriates the other. Both the Nü-kua stone and the stone monkey bear the same epithet, wan [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ( wan shih [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in one case, and wan hou [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in another), and live up to the word's doubly s