CHAPTER 1 Fortune Telling, Storytelling

History to Fiction to History

Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi), one of the “four masterworks of the Ming Novel” (sida qishu / sida mingzhu), fictionalizes and mythologizes accounts from the historical Three Kingdoms period (ca. 184–280), a pinnacle in a long tradition of retelling those stories. In it, warring armies and their cunning generals battle to outwit, as much as to overpower, each other to either restore or replace the declining Han dynasty. The novel spends much ink on tacticians in general and on Zhuge Liang (181–234) in particular, the politician, statesman, scholar, and master strategist who fought for the heir of the Han, early accounts of whom, drawing on folk tradition, tended to portray him as a Daoist immortal capable of performing magical feats.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms (earliest extant edition, 1522) retains only some of these extraordinary talents. Zhuge’s depiction in the novel, often cited as one of the book’s great accomplishments, is primarily that of a wise statesman and brilliant tactician who labored tirelessly for his cause even as he realized that it was doomed.⁴ Even so, his abilities in these regards surpass mundane talent.

Zhuge is portrayed as having cunning schemes, great introspection, and a keen insight into human nature that allowed him to predict behavior and manipulate others. But more, Zhuge seemingly knew everything that went on in the world, even when he lived as a hermit. Moreover, he is portrayed as a man of profound understanding, not just of military tactics and developments but of moral rightness and of arcane and mantic arts. Zhuge could consult the Book of Changes (Yijing) and observe celestial phenomena to predict the future. His powers were not solely prognosticatory, however, as his wisdom and moral power enable him to effect change even on the weather.

In chapter 53 of the novel, Zhuge Liang (whom the novel usually refers to as Kongming) applies the liuren (art of the six yang waters) method to ascertain the status of a remote battle. He and Liu Xuande (i.e., Liu Bei) are organizing a support detachment when a banner falls over at the same time that a south-flying crow passes them, croaking three times. Surely, these signs have meaning, Xuande says. Kongming makes calculations on his hands under his sleeves and replies, “Changsha district is ours! And we have won over important generals.”⁵ Some scholars have pointed out how this manner of divination has only recently been studied, having been both outside of Confucian concerns and a military practice to be kept secret.⁶ For our purposes, suffice it to note that Zhuge Liang, in addition to acting as a scholar who could perceive changes in the hearts of men and in the formations of the battlefield, is depicted as seeing—and even influencing—far-away places as well as far-away future times.⁷

At one point in the novel, after all preparations have been made for the fire attack on the villain Cao Cao’s (155–220) fleet, the commander of the Southland suddenly realizes that for his plan to succeed, the wind must blow from the southeast, or his own fleet will catch fire. When he sees the wind blowing from the northwest, he vomits blood, faints, and becomes sick. Zhuge Liang visits him and points out the root cause of his illness—his worries about the wind. He then sets up an altar and performs detailed rituals—the mysterious gates escaping techniques (Qimen Dunjia)—for days, and indeed, the southeast wind starts blowing just before the fire attack is launched (chapter 49). Zhuge Liang reads the hero Zhang Fei’s death in the stars (chapter 81) and later predicts his own death through an incantatory ritual (chapter 103). He is not the only character in the novel who interprets omens, predicts the future, and influences events, but these talents contribute to an enduring portrayal of Zhuge Liang as a modest scholar-gentleman and a master of the mantic arts.

Several prognosticatory texts and practices that are still in use are attributed to Zhuge Liang, including the Secret Book of Zhuge [Liang’s] Divine Calculations (Miben Zhuge shenshu), a five-coin method, the movement of the stars for divining military strategy in Zhuge’s Art of War (Zhuge bingfa), a divinatory method called “quick predictions” (maqian ke), and others. The Qimen Dunjia method of calendar astrology that Zhuge employs in the Three Kingdoms becomes attributed to him in later periods. He has even been credited as the author of Records in a Jade Casket (Yuxia ji), an almanac and divinatory text, ubiquitous in China for at least two or three centuries. Chen Shou’s (233–97) biography of Zhuge Liang in the official History of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi) makes no mention of his having any interest in the divinatory arts, and nothing like the divinatory texts mentioned above are contained in his collected works, the Zhuge Liang ji, nor in the more expansive complete works of Zhuge Liang (Zhuge Liang quanshu), even though the latter contains a number of apocryphal works. Such divinatory attributions are the result of later tradition, most notably by the novel. The novel, having created an image of Zhuge Liang as a master of mantic arts, led to his apotheosis in the public imagination, leading back to even more mythologized acts in subsequent stories, as the object of worship of many temples and shrines, and as a door god.⁸

Fiction Explicates Fortunes, Fortunes Explicate Fiction

The Story of the Stone (Shitou ji), also known as Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng, hereafter Stone), features characters who have otherworldly sight and knowledge of the future, but the novel consistently asserts that while divinatory techniques can produce accurate data about the future, one must be a sensitive reader to make use of it. As in other premodern literati novels, characters often refer to the mantic arts casually or jokingly, suggesting that those characters, like their presumed readers, may not have taken practitioners of those arts very seriously. Wang Xifeng, for instance, mentions that she needs a fortuneteller when she misplays her hand in a game of dominos.⁹ In another instance, a corrupt minor official is advised to claim that a man whom he is reluctant to prosecute has died of a sudden illness. To back up this claim, he should pretend to be able to consult spirits through the planchette, who then “confirm” that plaintiff and defendant were enemies in a former existence and were fated to clash to settle scores. The falsified planchette reading would verify that the defendant had been hounded by his victim’s ghost and thereby perished of some mysterious disease.¹⁰ The attitudes of these characters, at times casually dismissive of divination or falsely practicing it, are belied by the world of the novel itself, which is undergirded by the structures, rules, interventions, and predictability of the unseen world.

As in other domestic novels, divination is taken seriously when a character is ill. In Stone, one of the masters of the house consults a fortune teller when his second wife falls ill. He discovers that her stars temporarily collided with those of some other female born under the sign of the rabbit—his concubine, who is already in competition with the other wives for their husband’s favor. Her astral influences were harming the second wife, and her subsequent removal from her rooms caused a great deal of anger and jealousy. This is a device we see in many works of entertainment literature, that divination both reveals and creates enmity, especially between women in a household. Divination and resentment are linked by making the implicit explicit, by reading aloud for illiterate or obtuse characters the structures of dominance and contestation that are the nature of their unhappiness.

Exception to the general suspicion of fortune tellers is made for expediency in emergencies. Usually, this is the case when a character is very sick and divination is employed as prognosis. Readers can readily distinguish between fortune tellers who possess real skill and charlatans. In Stone, when the matriarch of the Jia family falls ill after walking through the desolate, perhaps haunted garden, her son Jia Rong asks a fringe character, Half Immortal Mao (Mao Banxian) to divine the cause and outcome of her illness. He beseeches the Supreme Ultimate, the Generative Powers of the Cosmos, the Holy Signs in the Great River, and the Four Sages for an efficacious response to his inquiry. He throws coins to create trigrams (printed in some editions of the novel) and then consults the Book of Changes. Readers’ own views may have resonated with Jia Rong’s: “At the beginning of this rigmarole it was all Jia Rong could do to keep a straight face. But gradually Mao impressed him as a man who knew what he was talking about, and when he went on to predict misfortune for another relative, Jia Rong began to take him rather more seriously.”¹¹

There is little discussion about why a character practices a particular kind of divination in Stone. Mao admits the limits of the method in which he specializes: “I am afraid a precise diagnosis lies beyond the limitations of even a more elaborate milfoil reading of the Changes. For that, you would have to cast a six cardinal (daliu ren) horoscope.”¹² After being given the date and time of birth (stems and branches) of the patient, Mao adjusts his diviner’s compass and predicts a “transformation of the material soul” (pohua ke) with a delivering spirit leading to a “transformation of the material soul and return of the spiritual soul” (pohua hungui), a prediction as much of the entire Jia family fortune as the course of one or two of its characters.¹³ Why a character practices one kind of divination rather than another has more to do with the kind of language a method produces than accurately representing or discussing the cosmic mechanisms a method can access.

Stone, like other novels, uses divination as foreshadowing. It also represents prognosticatory practices as things that require sensitive reading, akin to using poems as evidence. Characters in the novel consistently demonstrate their relative talents at reading and composing poems and debating the meaning of passages in the Zhuangzi and other classics.

Some characters, particularly important female characters Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai, are superior readers. So in chapter 101, when Wang Xifeng, ill, goes to the temple to pray to the Bodhisattva of the Sacred Flowers, she draws a divination lot predicting her future, and the abbess interprets the oracle that “Xifeng comes home to rest, in finery arrayed” as a good omen because the abbess is a literal, surface reader of the poetic text. Xifeng, a savvy household manager and master schemer, shows that she is a more sophisticated reader (though marginally literate) when she reveals her doubts that this is a fortuitous omen. Baochai, too, suspects that it is not a lucky omen as many say it is; “the phrase ‘returns home in splendor’ may have a deeper meaning.”¹⁴ Baoyu, the scion of the wealthy Jia family, accuses Baochai of being skeptical, “forever trying to twist the meaning of the text where the truth [of its fortuitousness] is common knowledge, why read some other meaning into it?” This exchange reminds readers that Baochai has always been superior to Baoyu in composing and understanding verse.¹⁵ The true meaning of the oracle is hinted at in the chapter title couplet, “At Scattered Flowers Convent, the Fortune Sticks Give an Alarming Omen,” giving the reader information with which she can rate characters’ ability to read.¹⁶ The omen is alarming only to savvy readers of the novel and savvy readers within it. Their suspicions are borne out a few chapters later when Wang Xifeng dies, deliriously calling for a boat so that she can return to her ancestral home. The narrative spells out the meaning of the prognostication, and readers could judge their own abilities against it.

In one of the most important episodes in Stone, Baoyu loses the jade talisman that was in his mouth when he was born. The other characters in the novel believe the jade to be Baoyu’s soul, upon which “his very life depends.” Although it is the eleventh month, the crab apple trees in Baoyu’s residence that have been withered for a year suddenly burst into bloom. Everyone, except the ailing Xifeng, rushes over to have a look at the sight. There is disagreement about whether this is a good or ill omen. Baoyu does not wear his jade when he goes to look at the blossoms, and when he returns, he finds that the jade is missing. In its absence, Baoyu falls ill and becomes insensate. The family members, in a panic, consult all the fortune tellers of the marketplace. One of them, Iron Mouth Liu (Liu Tiezui), divines the character shang 賞 and gives a detailed glyphomantic (chaizi) reading of its meaning:

We should be careful to notice that the radical element was bei 貝, meaning “a cowry shell” and not the similar radical jian 見 meaning “to appear” hence the object’s disappearance. And the top element of the whole was very like dang 當 meaning “to pawn” so we should go straight to the pawnshop. Then he pointed out that by adding a ren 人 “man” to the left-hand side, the compound chang 償 meaning “to redeem” was formed. Find the man in the pawnshop, pay the price, and the lost object will be redeemed¹⁷

Some may interpret this passage to mean that the author(s) were skeptical of fortune telling or of this method of fortune telling, but as with the above example, it is really a matter of reading well. Later, when a mysterious monk returns the jade, we discover that the data were correct, but their interpretation was off. Again, it is Xue Baochai who (after the fact) realizes the correct parsing: “You said it had something to do with a pawnshop. But now I can see it was really pointing to the word ‘monk’ [shang 尚], which is contained in the upper part of the character shang 賞. We were being told by the word diviner that a monk had taken it!”¹⁸

One of the people tasked with searching for the missing jade says, “If you ask me, all of those word diviners and fortune tellers you find on the street are all charlatans,” right before she recommends the secular Buddhist nun, Adamantina (Miaoyu), for her skill in consulting the planchette (xianji). Adamantina’s hand and that of a friend are guided by an unseen spirit (we are later told that she invoked Iron Crutch Li, Li Tieguai) to write verse in sand. Adamantina, another superior reader, makes no attempt to interpret the poem, the meaning of which is clear to readers who know the origins of the jade: “Alas, it [the jade] left no trace nor sign / Gone to Greensickness Peak to lie / at the foot of an age-old pine / why traverse countless mountains / searching for your friend / follow me and laugh to see / your journey at an end!”¹⁹ This verse puts the readers in the shoes of the prognosticator, left to use their experience to read between the lines and understand the world system of the novel hinted at by divinatory glimpses. Moreover, the theme of insightful reading is entwined with the motif of the entire novel, namely the interplay of truth and fiction, the possibilities and pitfalls of reading and misreading.²⁰

Not surprisingly, dreams are among the most important prognosticatory media in Stone. Dreams are the bridge between reality and illusion and between now and the future. They need to be read in the same responsive way that fiction needs to be read, with attention to their constructedness, their figures, structures, and themes. Stone explicitly and implicitly reminds the reader that it is fiction, yet it also questions the nature of truth, particularly when it comes to human feeling. Jia Baoyu’s dream visit to the land of illusion in chapter 5 is a key to the novel. In it, he is escorted by the Fairy Disenchantment (Jinghuan Xiangu) to the administrative offices of the ill-fated fair, where he sees images and captions of the fates of most of the women in the novel and where he is then brought to a performance that also reveals those same fates in verse. Baoyu does not understand the meaning or gravity of his dream until he revisits the Land of Illusion (Taixu Jing) again (this time named the Paradise of Truth, Zhenru Fudi), 111 chapters later. Having learned the fates of the main female characters in the novel so early does not impede the sense that the novel is extremely real, since the emotions it elicits in readers are themselves truly felt. Fate is real, not just in the sense that prognostications are accurate but in that characters in fiction meet their fates—significantly, inevitably, and poetically.

Stone again and again questions its own fictionality and constructedness. Despite all the omens and oracles in its pages coming true, characters treat mantic practice as chicanery. Baochai responds to Baoyu’s joke that she can foretell the future: “Even if I hit upon the truth about Xifeng, I didn’t really know what was going to happen to her. I don’t even know what’s going to happen to me, so how can I tell about you? All such auguries are bogus. How can you believe in them?”²¹ All the omens in Stone come true, though, providing another instance of the novel playing with truth and fiction

One of Stone’s most famous commentators felt, remarkably, that Stone was itself an oracle. Zhang Xinzhi (fl. 1828–50) believed that the Book of Changes was a key to unlocking the meaning of Stone.²² His commentary draws on the notion found in the Changes and elsewhere that the constant transformation of outward form conceals inner, unseen patterns of coherence. He explains his revelation: “The whole book is nothing more or less than the way of the Changes! In fact, my commentary on The Story of the Stone really begins from this point.”²³ Zhang even conflates the divinatory practice of reading hexagrams with glyphomancy by viewing written Chinese characters contained in the text of the novel as hexagram-like. That is, he reads Stone the same way he reads the Changes. His views may not have gained much traction, and certainly his critical insight was underwhelming to some. One of his less forgiving detractors commented, “This kind of person cannot even read himself, yet he goes and composes a ‘how to read’ essay.”²⁴ His guide to reading Stone was reprinted in many popular editions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and therefore presumably had a wide and varied readership. While some found Zhang’s assertion that Stone was a fictionalized Book of Changes to be farfetched, others must have found it compelling, helpful, or even an example of how the elite read novels and how they should be read. At the very least Zhang’s commentary supported the view that The Story of the Stone was as complicated as the cosmos and required the same sort of sensitive reading to understand it.

Divining Novels / Novel Divination

Plum in the Golden Vase was published in the early seventeenth century but written and first circulated in the last years of the sixteenth. It is the story of a merchant and his household, which rises in glory and wealth as he, Ximen Qing, is appointed to official posts and abuses those positions. The lives of his many wives and servants and their machinations to gain access to Ximen and to control information as a means of having some measure of power constitute much of the story.

Plum includes all sorts of apotropaic and mantic practice, from women “walking off the hundred ailments” on the night of the Lantern festival to ward off illness, to “Yinyang Master” Xu’s prognostications about characters’ futures.²⁵ Sometimes characters or the narrator suggest that they think divinatory methods are spurious. But upon investigation, that wariness is usually directed at professional practitioners rather than disbelief that the unseen forces of the cosmos are knowable. The narration addresses the reader directly at times, in “gentle reader” (kanguan) statements that either explain complicated aspects of the plot or give the reader advice on aspects of daily life. The advice is consistent with prevailing literati attitudes of the time, and it is consistent throughout the novel, warning against the deceitfulness of humans, particularly women and professionals. Plum cautions the reader against those who seek only money—hangers-on, sing-song girls, monks, and nuns who expect payment—but it does not suggest that the world of demons is not real or that the workings of the cosmos cannot be gleaned through divinatory activity. Some “dear reader” passages warn that these practices do really access unseen patterns of time and fate: “Can the existence of such [mantic] arts be doubted?”²⁶ But Plum has a complicated stance toward these practices. The narrator warns the reader about female medical practitioners, including those who exorcise demons and prescribe herbal remedies, but it also presents mantic masters as real, even final, authorities on the course of disease. Plum, Stone, Three Kingdoms, and other novels affirm that a cure, or even a patient’s death after a dire prediction, served as evidence that these unseen forces of time and fate were real.

Plum records several divinatory practices in the heterodox medical tradition, often labelled “divination of the cause” (zhuyou). It even preserves one of the earliest accounts of a particular zhuyou practice in print: “Instructions on how to determine survival or death by means of emolument and horse” (luma ding shengsi jue).²⁷ The meaning of “emolument and horse” (luma) has to do with official reward and fate (luming) following the movement of the “heavenly steed” constellation (tianma).²⁸ It is not clear when the “emolument and horse” method to predict the course of an illness originated, but the first record of it in a printed text seems to be the story “Qiaoren Settles His Accounts” (Qiaoren suanzhang) in Xu Zhen’s (fl. 1377) early Ming drama Records of Killing Dogs (Shagouji).²⁹ Little about this method is recorded in any literature between this story and Plum.³⁰

“Emolument and horse” was a method of prognosis without diagnosis; it distilled the workings of fate and time into three simple possibilities. Calculations were carried out on a table of four columns of ten characters each composed of alternating characters ma 馬 “horse” and lu 祿 “emoluments.” The two characters were written in three different possible positions: upright, slanted, and upside down. The healer then counted the number of days from the beginning of the month to the date of the onset of the disease, moving a finger down or up the chart depending on the month. Depending on how the character landed on was written, the healer could then predict the course of the illness.

The Berlin State Library has an archive of eight hundred Chinese medical manuscripts created by healers for their own use. Mostly from the nineteenth century, these manuscripts provide insight into medical practice and are a corrective to overemphasis on orthodox medicine represented by printed medical texts. Most of the medical manuscripts contain bits of text copied by readers from medical works, novels, brush notes, and unknown sources.³¹ Three of these manuscripts, created three hundred years after Plum, describe the emolument and horse method and agree with the novel that if “emolument and horse are not upside down,” the patient was expected to recover. A key appended to the diagram in a medical manuscript labeled “Depiction of all types of fright [conditions displayed] by children” (Xiao’er gezhong jingtu) specifies the predictions:

When the horse stands, the person will live and can be rescued from his troubles.

When the emoluments are proper, the disease may be serious but will not harm the body.

When the horse lies in a reclined position, help will be successful.

When the emoluments are slanted, a physician will be able to cure the patient.

When the horse lies upside down, the disease has an unfortunate prognosis.

When the emoluments are reversed, there is only a bleak outlook.³²

This method of predicting the outcome of a disease was independent of the whimsy of gods, demons, and ancestors but also distinct from natural laws involving systematic correspondences between bodily organs, stars, and elements in the natural world. Horse and emolument seems to be a secular medicine that tied the individual to time and the cosmos but did not require mediation between them. This method revealed regularity, but it could not influence events or explain them.³³

This is how luma is used in Plum in the Golden Vase. When one of his wives, Li Ping’er, is ill, Ximen Qing calls in several doctors to diagnose and prescribe for her.³⁴ Another wife tells him that Ping’er is being overmedicated and that they should “send for Immortal Wu and have him prognosticate on her behalf to calculate if the lu and ma are up.”³⁵ Emolument and horse was a way of ordering the chaos of contemporary medical practice. With individual doctors giving various diagnoses and prescriptions, it made sense to have a fixed way to determine the outcome of the disease to limit the possibilities. That the practice of prognosticating with emolument and horse is recorded in xiaoshuo suggests something about the heterogeneity of literati practice as well. The narrator may argue against employing Buddhists and Daoists, but the author was certainly intimately familiar with these figures and their practices, along with the already copious and varied knowledge in the novel culled from elite life and literature.

In entertainment literature, prognostication generally proves to be accurate as the plot unfolds, serving as foreshadowing. The outcomes of fate and fortune are always significant, but fortune tellers are often scorned. Immortal Wu (Wu Shenxian), who visits the Ximen household in chapter 29 and predicts (correctly) the fortunes of all the main characters, is an exception. Immortal Wu’s first visit adumbrates almost the whole of the novel in certain essential points, and he is presented as stately, mysterious, and powerful. He seemed to be a bit over forty and of intelligent appearance. His bearing was like that of a “stately pine of Mount Hua,” with a commanding presence and “the grave aspect of a scholar.” The narrator praises Immortal Wu’s talents:

Master of the discriminating mirror of physiognomy, Adept at interpreting the rules of Xu Ziping³⁶

By examining celestial phenomena he understands yin and yang,

By perusing the Dragon Canon [Longjing] he can assess fengshui.³⁷

Profoundly conversant with the Five Planetary Features [Wuxing],³⁸

Deliberating to himself upon the three fates [sanming mitan];³⁹

By scrutinizing the astrological circumstances,

He can determine the success or failure of a lifetime;

By observing the humor and the complexion,

He can decide the good or evil of one’s allotted years.

If he is not Chen Tuan the realized adept who sojourned on Mount Hua⁴⁰

He must be Yan Junping, who sold fortunes in the market of Chengdu.⁴¹

Immortal Wu has been sent by an official colleague to Ximen’s house, so Ximen is obliged to invite him in and allow him to ply his trade. Before doing so, Ximen inquires which schools of yinyang and which varieties of physiognomy Wu practices. Wu replies with a somewhat different, detailed list of his mantic methods, adding that he distributes medicine and does not take payment, essentially bolstering the claims made by the narrator.⁴²

Initially hesitant, Ximen is impressed by the discourse and demeanor of the diviner and has him predict his future first based on the date and time of his birth (which Immortal Wu silently calculates on his fingers) and then from the features of his face. He then predicts the fates of Ximen’s primary wives using physiognomy. Although the fortune-telling jargon employed here and elsewhere in the novel is quite authentic, the horoscopes provided for the characters are calendrically impossible, which suggests that the author did not intend his readers to take them too seriously.⁴³ Readers with a rudimentary knowledge of the calendrical system would likely have noticed this, as did the anonymous commentator on the xiuxiang (the illustrated text, a.k.a the Chongzhen) edition of the novel, who pointed this out: “These ‘four pillars’ are entirely out of keeping with Song [dynasty] fate calculation.” It is a mystery why the author would have employed accurate lexicon but absurd math in his representation of diviners predicting fortunes that come true. Is it a kind of code? Did the author desire to disparage the practice or profession? He was familiar enough with the practices and theories and could have easily looked up the correct dates in an almanac, so why signal to the reader that the fortune tellers were anything less than reliable? Perhaps the math is off out of respect for readers with stems and branches in their own horoscopes identical to Plum’s meager-fated characters. Or perhaps the author blithely copied details from an almanac, divinatory manual, or daily-use encyclopedia, all of which had begun to circulate when vernacular novels became popular.⁴⁴

Not only are all the fortune-tellers in Plum perfectly correct in all their predictions, but historical fiction is always prognosticatory, since the reader knows how it all ends. In the case of Plum, dangers of critiquing Ming dynasty (1368–1644) politics and mores are obfuscated by its Song dynasty setting. And yet the author’s critique of the contemporary Ming court is not very subtle, since the novel is set in the years leading up to the invasion and collapse of the Northern Song (960–1127), a comparison that even casual readers would have noticed. The collapse of the dynasty foretells the collapse of the Ximen household (and, not incidentally, also foretells the collapse of the Ming dynasty, an event that happened thirty years after Plum’s first publication). Plum’s setting is also doubly indebted to the past, and beholden to its unfolding events, since it expands into eighty chapters an episode that happens in chapters 23–26 of Outlaws of the Marsh (Shuihu zhuan). Readers know that the Northern Song falls and that in literary history, Ximen Qing and Pan Jinlian are killed by Wu Song. Thus, when Immortal Wu predicts that Jinlian is inclined to wantonness and assured of a premature death, readers of Plum know he his trustworthy.

The wives and concubines have their fortunes told again in chapter 46, when out of boredom and whimsy they invite in an itinerant woman who is capable of divining with the “tortoise oracle” (linggui). She is unnamed, an “old country woman who made her living telling fortunes by means of the tortoise oracle and trigrams,” wearing a simple blue cotton skirt and patchwork jacket.⁴⁵ The woman asks the years of their birth, each in turn, and then gives the tortoise oracle a toss (in later divinations, it is a spin). This method of fortune telling is detailed in Tang Xianzu’s 1587 drama The Purple Hairpins (Zichai ji), perhaps the source for Plum’s author. The Daoist nun who practices this art describes it: “On the painting, there are stories of joys and sorrows, and of departures and reunions. I tell the people what will happen to them according to where the tortoise goes on the painting.” The play describes this practice unambiguously as a method to “fake an immortal’s ability”: “I have a lovely and clever tortoise, / with which I defraud people of some money.” The stage directions indicate that the Daoist nun performing the divination “clumsily forces its crawling route on the painting.”⁴⁶ For each woman in Plum, the tortoise (shell?) lands on an image on her board, and each of the images bears the name of one of the “twelve palaces” found on the face, among which, according to some schools of physiognomy, are the “palace of fate” (minggong), “palace of illness and adversity” (ji’egong), and the “palace of sons and daughters” (ernügong). Her predictions tally with those of Immortal Wu (which also combine physiognomy with other divinatory strategies), simultaneously justifying their methods of divination and establishing the predictions as fact.

Pan Jinlian complicates Plum’s attitude toward fortune telling. She is late to the gathering, and when she is told that she has missed her chance to learn her destiny, she remarks that fate is unchangeable and discovering its details is depressing. She repeats her aversion to fortune telling and then cites the aphorism “You may predict a person’s fate, but you can’t predict his conduct.”⁴⁷ This idea resolves the tension between the narrative’s insistence on destiny, doubtful characters, the story’s plot that bears out their fates, and the length of the novel, which could have been much shorter had the reader simply accepted foreknowledge of characters’ ends as fact. While prognostications in Plum are accurate, particularly in the case of Jinlian, who the reader knows is doomed from sources outside of the novel, they are not undisputed. All the characters who have died over the course of the novel reappear, in ghostly form, in the last chapter to report on the cause of their deaths, which at times seem to contradict what the reader has witnessed.⁴⁸

Pan Jinlian’s claim that you can predict a person’s fate but you cannot predict his actions is a key to understanding these seeming contradictions. Fortune is contingent. The tortoise diviner says to Li Ping’er, one of Ximen’s wives, “This year the planet Jidu impinges on your fate, meaning that you may suffer a bloody catastrophe.⁴⁹ Only if you can avoid hearing weeping in the seventh and eighth months will you be all right.”⁵⁰ This is a contingent fortune that takes the “if … then” form. Fate makes room for behavior. In this case, Jinlian is determined to make Li Ping’er miserable, which leads to much weeping in the household, and in the end, Li Ping’er is not able to escape her bloody catastrophe. Most of the prognostications in Plum are contingent on human action, and many are specific about time but vague about mechanism of fate. The predictions allow for the future to be in motion, for characters to change their fates enough to survive them. None of the wives do.

Ximen Qing repeats the claim that “one can calculate fate, but one cannot calculate behavior” and adds, “The physiognomic marks are produced following the heart [i.e., internal conditions].”⁵¹ That is, marks on the face literally appear or disappear depending on one’s intentions. Ximen is just repeating what Immortal Wu himself had said to explain physiognomy.⁵² Physiognomic features are not physical markers of an immutable fate but are mutable signs pointing to a fate that changes with behavior and intention.

Poems, sayings, and asides in the novel often suggest that all is determined by heaven and one must accept the inevitabilities of change and fate. But the characters evince a different attitude; none shows a profound belief in fate or fate calculation but only differing degrees of skepticism. Divination is also a game in these novels. Characters in Plum and other entertainment literature consult fortune tellers on a lark, a chance encounter, or in the case of Plum, when they pass by the house and there is nothing better to do. Very often, divination occurs in xiaoshuo as a diversion from boredom, but then, inevitably, it foreshadows something grave. When consulted as a game, the divinatory texts are like other omens—a kite breaking its string, a tree blooming out of season—in that they have meaning only to those who notice them, and when that happens, it is alienating and sad. That each character fulfils his or her destiny, no matter how bleak, is a testament to the characters’ normalcy, their unremarkable willpower, and their willful ignorance of the knowable but invisible forces that undergird their daily existence. They are, essentially, poor readers of their own lives.

Divination outside of Narrative Constraints

Fictional practitioners of mantic arts usually do not go into detail about why they practice one method of divination over another or even why there are multiple kinds of divination.

Each divinatory method presumably accesses the same cosmic information, so why is there a need to have more than one method? We see in Plum that the Ziping method, based on the date and times of one’s birth, provides more detail about the future than does the physiognomic mayi method, whereas “emolument and horse” seems to limit prognostication to a yes/no answer. Beyond the proclivities and fates of characters, divinatory methods reveal information about the real historical author by which practices are mentioned, esteemed, denigrated, omitted, or unknown.

One notable argument in trying to identify the anonymous author of Plum is that he affiliated himself with the philosopher Xunzi (third century BCE). Readers of David T. Roy’s English translation of Plum encounter this claim in the first pages of his introduction.⁵³ The most famous tenet of Xunzi’s philosophy holds that human nature is basically evil, and if allowed to find expression without the conscious molding and restraint of ritual, it is certain to lead the individual disastrously astray. This belief, Roy and others argue, lies at the heart of the novel.⁵⁴ The historian Sima Qian (145?–86? BCE) writes of Xunzi that he “hated the corrupt governments of his day, the decadent states and evil princes who did not follow the way but gave their attention to magic and prayers and believed in omens and luck.”⁵⁵ But the novel’s detailed descriptions of mantic arts, the invocation of spirits, and the various accurate prognostications of fortune and disaster at least argue against a complete adherence to Xunzi’s beliefs.

Xunzi’s work contains an entire chapter titled “Against Physiognomy” (Feixiang), and he remarks elsewhere in the book attributed to him:

One performs the rain sacrifice and it rains. Why? I say, there is no special reason why. It is the same as when one does not perform the rain sacrifice and it rains anyway.… One performs divination and only then decides on important affairs. But this is not to be regarded as bringing one what one seeks, but rather is done to give things proper form. Thus, the gentleman regards this as proper form, but the common people regard it as connecting with sprits.⁵⁶

Xunzi concludes this thought by saying, “If one regards it as proper form, one will have good fortune. If one regards it as connecting with spirits, one will have misfortune.” In other words, ritual propriety (“form”) is function. He acknowledges that it is fitting and proper to perform mantic arts, particularly at court, and particularly by those whose job it is to perform them. “The work of the hunchbacked shamans and lame-footed seers,” he writes, “is to assess the yin and the yang, to divine the omens and portents, to drill the tortoise- shells and lay out the hexagrams, to preside over ceremonies for warding off ills, selecting lucky days and the five prognostications, and to know good and bad fortune, the auspicious and the inauspicious.”⁵⁷ It is not the apotropaic methods that bring good fortune but an awareness of their form and the appropriate performance of their ritual aspects that please heaven and bring its rewards.

How is the reader to make sense of these views in Plum? On the one hand, the narrator and the story clearly criticize almost every character in the book for their behavior, and by extension, denounce late-Ming society and the court for the same selfish, decadent acts. The characters presented in Plum are squarely middlebrow—marginally literate nouveau riche social climbers—perhaps not the “common people” Xunzi refers to in his remarks but certainly less wise than Confucian “gentlemen” and officials. But if fortune telling is used in Plum to begin a conversation about fate, human nature, and individual agency, the resonances between human action the natural worlds’ responses to it are real. Plum is a work of such sophistication that it would be obtuse to assert that it cannot contain contradictory or complicated attitudes toward divination and toward Xunzi (or some similar moral vision), but the novel’s attitude toward divination does impugn the assertion that the author followed or asserted the views of Xunzi wholesale.

Apologies for xiaoshuo in late imperial China, whether prefatory or commentary or within the novel text itself, tended to focus on the act of reading as a particular kind of seeing. Reading about debauched characters with a detached air of sympathy could lead to enlightenment, some claimed, while others warned that the allure of representation would tempt naive readers to imitate what they encountered there.⁵⁸ Both apologies and accusations reinforced the notion that xiaoshuo were for sophisticated readers only, those who could look beyond the surface meaning to read between the lines and to appreciate the finely wrought structure of the novel, its devices and methods.⁵⁹ Reading fortunes included similar talent and implied dangers—whether it was reading facial features, images that corresponded to them, or dates and times of birth or interpreting obscure verses produced by an oracle—there were dire consequences for those who kept only to the surface meaning.

Fate both limits and makes room for human action. Realistic stories had to represent mantic and apotropaic practice, and the demands of fiction required prognostication to be tantamount to foreshadowing. But characters needed to misread or disbelieve their fates to make for an interesting tale; they also had to have the possibility to change their fates. The story knows that its readers, if not its characters, could discern the hidden meanings of oracular texts, be they verse or image, and had to provide those readers with the possibility of change. Hence, we have in Plum the repeated statement that “you can know a man’s fate, but not his actions,” and in Stone, that “you can know a man’s face, but never his heart.”⁶⁰ Some stories undermine fatalism through changing physiognomic feature, or the dates and times of birth. The latter is reflected in Li Yu’s story “After Modifying the Eight Characters, Suffering Ends and Happiness Comes” (Gai bazi kujin ganlai), in which young yamen runner Jiang Cheng sees his bad luck unexpectedly turn into good luck after a hermit fortune teller jokingly modifies the eight characters of his birth date and time. But more often, and more poignantly, xiaoshuo remind readers of the limits of our ability to read the world around us accurately. That is, even if we divine correctly and interpret the signs and images or texts that are produced during divination, there is still the matter of whimsy and the inscrutability of human behavior.