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Oedipal God: The Chinese Nezha and His Indian Origins . By Meir Shahar. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. Pp. xvi+256. $54.00 (cloth).

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/692321

1545-6935

Stuart H. Young,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Previous article FreeBook ReviewsOedipal God: The Chinese Nezha and His Indian Origins. By Meir Shahar. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. Pp. xvi+256. $54.00 (cloth).Stuart H. YoungStuart H. YoungBucknell University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreNezha is a fascinating but perplexing figure in Chinese religion and literature. Introduced into China through early translated Buddhist scriptures, in which the name Nazha (later Nezha) ostensibly served as an abbreviated transliteration of the Sanskrit Nalakūbara, this figure came to play many different roles for Chinese authors and devotees throughout history and across geographic, social, and sectarian boundaries. Nazha first gained traction in China through Tantric ritual manuals translated during the Tang dynasty (618–907), according to which, as offspring and messenger of the Heavenly King Vaiśravaṇa, he could be summoned through esoteric spells to enrich and protect. During the Song dynasty (960–1279), Chan Buddhist authors advanced Nazha as exemplar of Dharmic over familial obligations, while Daoist adepts depicted him as a martial warrior functioning in rites of demonic exorcism. In Ming period (1368–1644) vernacular literature, then, Nezha’s mythic imagery blossomed through vivid tales of his inhuman birth, violent triumph over magical beasts, gruesome suicide and divine resurrection, and conflict with his erstwhile biological father. These tales were elaborated, truncated, and sometimes radically reinvented within all sorts of entertainment media in modern and contemporary periods, while Nezha’s devotional cults proliferated in temples throughout China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. All of this, evidently, can be traced back to Indian epic literature of the first millennium BCE, such as Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa, where Nalakūbara first appeared as a yakṣa spirit whose uncle raped his lover. The perplexity surrounding this figure stems from his spirited diversity across these historical, religious, and literary contexts. How did Nalakūbara the yakṣa prince become Nazha the Daoist warrior god or Nezha the patron saint of Taiwanese gamblers? How might we understand the relationships between these vastly different characters? What, if anything, ultimately ties them together? Do they share any commonalities at all, aside from their roughly equivalent names?Answers to these questions are suggested by Meir Shahar, a foremost expert on the intersections between Chinese popular fiction and religious practice, who documents with flair and imagination this cacophony of voices shaping the imagery of Nalakūbara/Nazha/Nezha. Shahar offers two main rubrics under which we might draw together these wide-ranging representations: First, as “oedipal god,” whose associations with familial conflict are seen to underlie his varying Asian manifestations (and further demonstrate the universality of Freud’s Oedipus complex theory), and, second, as exemplar of Tantric Buddhism’s enduring impact on the Chinese imagination of divinity. Shahar devotes a good deal more attention to the former hypothesis that Nezha is a prime example of the conflicted male psyche manifest in Chinese religious and popular literature. Shahar begins by introducing the main source text that anchors his analysis throughout the book: The popular seventeenth-century novel Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi), in which the child Nezha disembowels himself to atone for his killing of a dragon prince, thereby protecting his parents from retribution and returning his body to them, and is resurrected as a god/ghost to avenge the destruction of his temple and icon at the hands of his hateful father. In chapter 1 Shahar examines this tale of Nezha’s patriarchal rebellion in the context of Chinese stories about familial strife, cannibalism, and “filial slicing” (whereby children cut their bodies to feed their parents). In chapter 2 Shahar argues that the Canonization tale was composed to accommodate Confucian hegemony, with Nezha’s suicide serving to render his attempted patricide acceptable in a culture that has always valued filial piety above all else. In chapter 3 Shahar adopts an expressly Freudian psychoanalytic perspective in articulating his overarching interpretation of Nezha’s tale as manifesting the universal Oedipus complex. There is no hint of sexual attraction between Nezha and his mother in the story (the fact that his ghost appears in her dreams is seen to carry symbolic weight in this regard), and Nezha never actually kills his father, but Shahar presents these facts as attesting the repressive function of dominant Confucian ideologies in China. Chapter 4 then surveys later adaptations of the Canonization Nezha story in late imperial and modern oral literature, drama, television serials, and animated movies, which either reinscribe or completely elide its ostensive oedipal overtones.The remainder of Oedipal God elaborates these psychoanalytic themes only occasionally and obliquely. Chapter 5 examines Nezha’s role as divine warrior in a variety of sources from the thirteenth century to the present. Contemporary devotional cults are the topic of chapter 6, which presents an ethnographic survey of Nezha temples in Henan, Macau, Jinmen Island, and Taiwan, Daoist temples where he serves as “General of the Middle Altar” (Zhongtan Yuanshuai), and rituals in which he possesses spirit mediums. Chapter 7 focuses on the Buddha’s role as “substitute father” for Nazha in Chan writings of the Song period (141), which thereby, in Shahar’s estimation, foreground tensions between Buddhist monasticism and the Confucian social order. In chapter 8 Shahar surveys Tang Tantric sources concerning Vaiśravaṇa and his messenger-son Nalakūbara, “whose Chinese name Nezha attests to the significance of esoteric Buddhism in his history” (166). And finally, chapter 9 provides a brief overview of Nalakūbara in Indian literature, especially in myths concerning the celebrated child-god Kṛṣṇa, and advances the notion that “the Chinese Nezha was created by the merging of the Indian Nalakūbara with Kṛṣṇa” (181).This last hypothesis, as with many others throughout Oedipal God, will likely generate a good deal of controversy among interested readers. Shahar does illustrate several similarities between Indian stories of Kṛṣṇa and Chinese stories of Nezha, but scant evidence is provided that Chinese authors themselves were aware of this connection or of Indian Kṛṣṇa mythology. Similarly, while some readers may be compelled by Shahar’s excavation of oedipal undertones in some versions of Nezha’s myth—particularly the Canonization of the Gods—many other sources examined in this book provide no hint of familial conflict. Nezha’s contemporary devotional cults, his Daoist exorcistic depictions, his Tang Tantras, and his Song Chan representations all have little or nothing to do with this ostensive oedipal arrangement. This last body of sources does indicate that Nazha left his parents in favor of Śākyamuni, but to read them as thus entailing parental “defiance” and thus “oedipal significance” (146, 148) is anachronistic: only the much later Journey to the West (Xiyou ji), discussed in this same chapter, includes a Buddhist version of Nezha’s paternal animosity that appears comparable to the Canonization story. Indeed, it is difficult to sort out the historical development of Nezha stories from reading this book, whose chapters jump from Ming to modern to Song to contemporary, then back to Song, Tang, and finally India over two millennia. Were Shahar to argue that Nezha legends and ritual functions developed into unique or at least partially independent constellations within disparate historical or social contexts—perhaps like Paul Katz’s model of “cogeneration”1—a methodological eschewing of linear history would suit. But Shahar does view Nezha’s representations as building upon one another in historical sequence and, as noted above, cohering under the rubrics of oedipal tension and Tantric influence. This last theme is more assumed than elaborated throughout the book: only chapter 8 discusses Tantric sources concerning Nalakūbara/Nazha, who bears little resemblance to the Nezha of Ming literature that inspired Oedipal God overall. Also, Shahar does not engage theoretical or methodological questions concerning the trope of Indian “influence” (or Chinese “domestication,” also presumed here)—for example, concerning local agency, underlying notions of monolithic cultural systems, or whether Chinese authors themselves, medieval or modern, have understood “Indian” the same way as we do—questions that are begged when asserting that “Chinese literature and drama are to this day imbued with Indian supernatural beings” (xvi). Nevertheless, what one does find in abundance throughout Oedipal God is fascinating documentation of the Chinese Nezha in all his disparate guises, across the so-called three teachings of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, as well as “popular religion,” productively juxtaposed with a wide assortment of vivid Chinese legends, ritual practices, and visual cultures. Shahar engages a broad range of different source materials, from religious scripture and secular poetry to vernacular literature, visual arts, ethnographic records, and participant observation, and in this regard provides a useful model of interdisciplinary religious studies. Notes 1 . See Paul R. Katz, Demon Hordes and Burning Boats: The Cult of Marshal Wen in Late Imperial Chekiang (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995). Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by History of Religions Volume 57, Number 1August 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/692321 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.