DRAMATIC SELF-FASHIONINGS: KONG RUOGU, ZHUOWU, AND THE LAYMAN WHO YEARNS FOR HIS FATHER

Central to this autobiographical essay is the narrative tension between Li Zhi’s contradictory impulses to lend coherence to his own life while refusing to slot himself into the established biographical categories that might help us feel that we have some stable knowledge of our biographical subject. Even as the self that Li Zhi presents in “A Sketch of Zhuowu” is highly fragmented, the theme of filial piety lends a sense of thematic coherence to the episodes that are strung together into this biography. Li Zhi creates a split authorial self through the invention of the fictional biographer Kong Ruogu; the felicitously surnamed Kong (empty), cast in the role of historian/narrator, is made responsible for creating the biographical persona of Li Zhuowu, who rejects any authority to ascribe meaning to, or even to name, his own life. As Wai-yee Li points out in chapter 1, the invention of Kong Ruogu splits Li Zhi into two aspects: the writing self and the objectified self. (I distinguish here the fictionalized Zhuowu, the subject of the “Sketch,” from the historical Li Zhi, the actual author of the account.) Ultimately, who is the Li Zhuowu presented in this essay? He is someone marked by ambivalence in most spheres of life save for his filial bond to his patriline.

In place of the more usual genealogical format used in autobiographical writing to give the subject a fixed and specific identity, Li Zhi uses a variety of techniques to hide himself from the reader. The introductory section of his biography throws up a smokescreen with its proliferation of names: Kong Ruogu, Zhuowu, the Layman, and Duwu. As Wai-yee Li argues, this resistance to creating a unified knowable self is continued in the closing paragraphs of “A Sketch of Zhuowu,” in which Zhuowu takes on two more names, Hongfu and Sizhai. The one name that remains constant throughout the biography, the self with whom Kong Ruogu is in dialogue, is “the Layman,” Jushi, an impersonal and objective descriptor of social identity that represents a stripping away of the individual and subjectively defined self. Even though Li Zhi wrote this text while he was still serving in office, projecting his speaking voice onto the persona of the Layman anticipates his retreat from the social by dropping those names that situate him in his former relational identities.

Only after this opening feint in which Zhuowu’s chosen biographer lays out a claim that Zhuowu’s name is unfixed and unknowable even to himself does Kong Ruogu begin a more conventional biography by providing his subject a date of birth. Kong then inserts another detail that mystifies more than it reveals: “He was born, and his mother née Xu passed away, leaving him orphaned. No one knows how he grew up.” Typically, it is only when a child’s father dies that the child is described as “orphaned” (gu); since men often remarried after the death of a wife, as did Li Zhi’s father, this new wife would be recognized as mother to any of her husband’s children. Because the biography provides no details about Zhuowu’s birth mother, her death creates a mysterious void in the line “no one knows how he grew up” (mo zhi suo zhang). Elsewhere, Li wrote that his mother died when he was “six or seven sui,” about the time Zhuowu began to study with his father.¹⁸ Curiously, only after Zhuowu is described as “orphaned” is his father introduced and given a meaningful presence in the boy’s life. At seven sui, Zhuowu begins to study with his father, learning to read, to chant odes, and to practice ritual ceremonies. The essay portrays Zhuowu’s father, Master Baizhai, respectfully, as a man who models Zhuowu’s own disregard for wealth and status, as someone who maintains careful self-control (“his eyes did not wander carelessly about”) and shows selfless generosity to friends.

Master Baizhai is an important presence in “A Sketch of Zhuowu”; he is invoked at regular intervals in the narrative. Indeed, Zhuowu’s father is a necessary character for the creation of Zhuowu as a filial son who puts the interests of his father and patriline above his individual desires. Kong Ruogu writes that by twelve sui, Zhuowu was able to show the fruits of his father’s efforts and wrote an essay that garnered widespread praise. Whereas others pointed to Zhuowu’s literary talents as a skill that could be exploited to bring his family wealth, the Layman comments that these people did not understand his father: “What sort of person was my father? He was seven feet tall and did not move his eyes carelessly. Although he was extremely poor, he would occasionally take jewelry from my mother, Lady Dong, in order to expedite the marriage of a friend. My mother Dong never stopped him. My father being like this, how could anyone compliment him on the basis of that which is commonly valued?”¹⁹

In “A Sketch of Zhuowu” Li Zhi deprecatingly refers to his own efforts as a pastiche of memorized essays. However, Zhuowu is able to take pride in his success at the provincial examination, showing how it enables him to fulfill his filial obligations. Rather than continue to study in the hope of passing the highest level of examination, Zhuowu cuts short his own aspirations to provide for his natal family: “The Layman says: ‘My luck could not have been better. For my father was old and each of my younger siblings had reached the age of marriage.’ He then took his official salary and took in his father and provided for him and concluded the marriage arrangements for each of his younger siblings.”²⁰

Multiple details about Zhuowu’s commitment to fulfilling his obligations to his patrilineal family are woven into the narrative of his official career. Positive or even neutral details about his conjugal family, such as his marriage and the births of his children, however, are absent. What are presented are those details that show Zhuowu prioritizing his obligations to his patriline over his own desires and affective bonds, including those to his conjugal family. Historically, the two family structures of patriline and conjugal family were paired as a gong and si binary. Although commonly translated as “public” and “private or personal,” in much of traditional usage gong and si should be thought of as contrastive and fluid terms that connote “appropriate, ritually sanctioned” (gong) and “improper, selfish, biased” (si). While a son’s selfless love for his mother is socially appropriate and validated, if his birth mother happens to be a concubine, his love for her would be si, in contrast to the gong love he owes his formal mother; the same is true for a parent who favors a younger child or a son born to a concubine over the wife’s firstborn son. A married couple’s affections for each other were si and to be subordinated to the gong affections they owed the husband’s parents; likewise a married woman’s attachment to her natal or uterine families was si, in contrast to the gong attachment to her conjugal family. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with intimate expressions of si love, but ritual propriety demanded that the ritually approved gong relationships be given priority if a choice needed to be made.

“A Sketch of Zhuowu” repeatedly shows how Zhuowu sacrifices his personal si interests and ambitions for the sake of his patriline. The section following the mention of Li Zhi’s examination success introduces Zhuowu’s ambivalence about official service. The Layman comments that he had hoped to serve somewhere close to his natal home, but in 1557, at age thirty-one, Zhuowu is posted to Gongcheng in Henan and has the worry of leaving behind his father. There is no mention at this point of his wife, Lady Huang, whom he had married ten years earlier, or of his children, one of whom had died two years previously. Even though Zhuowu is separated from his father and son by “ten thousand li,” the Layman wishes that his stay in Gongcheng, following the examples of the Song figures Li Zhicai (980–1045) and his disciple the neo-Confucian thinker Shao Yong (1011–1077), had enabled him to study the Way so that he could transmit it to both his father and his son.

During this period, Zhuowu takes the aspirational names Layman of Wenling (Wenling Jushi) and Man of the Hundred Springs (Baiquan Ren) or Layman of the Hundred Springs (Baiquan Jushi).²¹ The embrace of Buddhist identities by examination elites during the late Ming, especially those inspired by Wang Yangming’s concept of “pristine moral consciousness” (liangzhi), was both an act of symbolic resistance to the state’s instrumental view of classical studies being geared toward examination success and an acknowledgment of the spiritual and intellectual strength of Buddhist approaches to the learning of the heart and mind (xinxue).²² By taking on the identity of a lay Buddhist at this point in his career, Li Zhi expresses his regret that he is unable to make his own self-cultivation a priority.

The next recorded life event, several months into his posting in Nanjing in 1560, narrates Zhuowu’s response to the news of the death of his father. His personal mourning is repeatedly disrupted by public events and responsibilities. As discussed in chapter 1, soon after he returns to Nanjing, Zhuowu gets more bad news, this time concerning the death of his paternal grandfather, a character who had not been introduced into the autobiography before this point. Zhuowu’s mourning for his grandfather is the dramatic and emotional climax of the autobiography and takes up over a third of the text. This lengthy section narrates the disastrous chain of events that unfolds when Zhuowu insists on leaving his wife and children behind while he returns to Quanzhou to bury three generations of patrilineal ancestors. The pathos of his dilemma is amplified through multiple recorded conversations between Zhuowu, Kong Ruogu, and Li’s wife. Consistently in this narrative segment, the emotions that Zhuowu is likely feeling are projected onto his wife and Kong, while Zhuowu now displays a remarkable degree of emotional self-discipline. Rather than emote, Zhuowu asks for his friend’s help in persuading his wife to stay behind while he returns home to mourn his grandfather and arrange the burial of three generations of ancestors. Although the widespread famines make this a terrible time to leave his wife and children, Zhuowu’s single focus is on settling the ritual affairs of his patriline. His family’s failure to bury his great-grandparents, which he claims as his own responsibility despite the fact that they had died well before he was born, leaves Zhuowu feeling as though he has failed in his filial obligations—obligations that he treats as his highest priority. Throughout this episode, the Zhuowu character resolutely controls his emotions while his wife and friend express the emotions he represses.

Why is this particular life event given so much weight in “A Sketch of Zhuowu”? Although Li Zhi must feel some guilt over the death of his daughters, the symbolic capital he draws on to exorcize his personal failures to his wife and daughters is the extended dramatic retelling of how both he and his wife conform to ritual propriety each and every step along this tragic journey. Just as the authorial Li had earlier split off his feelings of grief over the death of his grandfather and second son onto the interlocutor Kong Ruogu, in this section he allows his wife to express, through her tears, the emotions he too must be feeling when he hears that his actions have resulted in the death of his two daughters. All the details in this extended narrative speak to the very conventional ritual value of prioritizing the gong, the larger, communally defined good, over the si, the personal interests of self, one’s own children, and a married woman’s natal family. In this section, Zhuowu repeatedly makes reference to his desire to be seen as filial. The episode directly highlights his unbending correctness in choosing to rank his obligations to his gong patriline over his si conjugal family. The text clearly dramatizes his painful decision to provide a proper burial for his patrilineal ancestors despite his wife’s emotional plea that she be allowed to see her own mother. It then narrates his refusal to allow his family to receive special treatment while everyone else in the district suffers from a severe drought. Both of these events show Zhuowu making the ritually appropriate choice to support the communal good, identified as gong in ethical discourse, over the personal si. This episode, translated in the preceding chapter, highlights the ability of both Lady Huang and Zhuowu to subordinate their personal interests for the sake of a difficult moral choice.

Li Zhi’s portrait of his wife, Lady Huang, is extremely sympathetic and positive: she first expresses her deep affective filial bond to her mother before realizing that she must repress her si feelings in order to support her husband’s decisions. She is never depicted as questioning her husband. Moreover, despite her direct experience of the famine, she follows Zhuowu’s model of rectitude; she too puts aside the personal interests of her uterine family and refuses to ask the official Deng Lincai for any special favors, despite the urging of an old woman. Lady Huang responds, “Women cannot meddle in affairs outside the household; I cannot do this.” After Deng initiates the much-hoped-for act of generosity, Lady Huang demonstrates her proficiency as a manager of household resources under very trying circumstances and supports the family by weaving cloth.

After the extended and highly sympathetic portrait of Lady Huang, the narrative voice returns to the Layman. He expresses his satisfaction that he had fulfilled his ritual obligations to his patriline; the text suggests that Li Zhi believed in the religious power of his filial behaviors to bring good karma to his family. And, for the first time, he allows himself to express his affection for his conjugal family:

The Layman said: “After I completed my mourning period and had accomplished the burial of my family members and brought good karma for three generations [xingle sanshi yeyuan], I gave no thought to serving as an official. I turned to face the horizon and thought of nothing but my wife and children from whom I was separated by ten thousand li, and so I traveled back to Gongcheng. When I entered the gates and saw my conjugal family, I was extremely happy. I asked about my two daughters and learned that they had died not several months after I had left for home.”²³

The narrative returns to Kong Ruogu’s third-person description of the scene: “At that time tears welled up in Lady Huang’s eyes, but seeing that the Layman’s expression was changing, she bowed and asked about the burial arrangements and her mother’s well-being.”²⁴ The narrative focalization is then returned to the image of the Layman restraining his feelings of heartbreak. As Wai-yee Li observes, Zhuowu’s ability to repress his emotions in this scene should not be read as a sign of hypocritical bad faith. Rather, his ability to focus on his filial obligations to his patriline over his si attachment to his own children is a powerful expression of his ethical self.

Life writings of other elite men also foreground the theme of how their subjects handled the mourning of status inferiors. Within a Confucian framework, the process of mourning is designed to channel emotions so that they are neither excessive nor insufficient given the status of the deceased. Since children younger than eight have no ritual status within ancestor worship, the Rites provide no guidance on how to, or indeed whether to, mourn them.²⁵ Although no age is given for his two girls, their status as daughters places them in a minor ritual relationship to Li Zhi; the only child for whom Zhuowu is described as mourning is his eldest son, who held an important role in the patriline as the ritual heir. The writings of the early Qing ritualist Yan Yuan (1635–1704) reveal the emotional pain of a father who was forbidden by the Rites to indulge in mourning for a beloved child.²⁶ Yan Yuan was acutely aware of the ritual expectation that men not indulge in inappropriate displays of emotion for status inferiors, no matter what they felt; several years after the death of his only son, Yan wrote about the need for men to control their emotions when their wives were approaching death in order “to avoid suspicion of impropriety [bixian].”²⁷ Yan’s biography describes his outpouring of emotion when his grandmother was buried: he knocked his head against her coffin and howled and wailed to such an extent that a friend admonished him for his excessive display of grief.²⁸ However, when his son died at five sui, the ritually precise Yan could not express his grief directly; although deeply distressed, he first threw himself into comforting his grandmother and wife.²⁹ He then channeled his own feelings by creating mourning rites based on the contemporary practice of mourning adult sons for one year.³⁰ Substituting days for months and wearing hemp shoes and a mourning robe and cap, he observed a twelve-day period of mourning during which he withdrew from all regular activities except serving his grandparents.³¹

An event in the life of Li Gong (1651–1733), Yan Yuan’s disciple, who was equally committed to ritual self-cultivation, may provide a more direct analogy to help us contextualize Zhuowu’s self-control when he first heard of his daughters’ death after he returned home. Li Gong rushed home when he heard that his beloved concubine, the mother of his sons, was dying. Even so, he managed to observe proper etiquette in greeting his birth mother first when he arrived at the house: “[Li Gong] returned on the twenty-third day of the second lunar month and reached home between 2 and 4 p.m. Concubine Lü had already passed away between 7 and 9 a.m. He entered the gates and first paid his respects to his mother, only then did he go to the side of her corpse to wail for her.”³² Although Li Zhi did not care about ritual form to the extent that Yan Yuan and Li Gong did, the parallels among these three acts of mourning status inferiors suggest that Li Zhi wanted to demonstrate even in this emotionally fraught moment that his behavior was appropriate. Delivering the news concerning the burials of three generations of his patriline and of his wife’s mother took precedence over any expression of grief for his children.

After this lengthy anecdote that highlights Zhuowu’s commitment to filial propriety and his prodigious emotional control, Kong Ruogu, the narrator of “A Sketch of Zhuowu,” returns us to the chronology of Zhuowu’s increasing disenchantment with his official career. This final section of the text mirrors the introductory section in destabilizing the reader’s confidence that Zhuowu is a coherent and knowable subject. He is both someone who prides himself on fulfilling his filial obligations to his patriline and someone who chafes under his obligations to provide financial support to his family. He returns to Beijing and notes his growing disenchantment with official life. While his peers worry only about their financial poverty, Zhuowu feels the impoverishment of one who has not heard the Way. As the Layman comments, what stands between him and the freedom to pursue his philosophical ideals are his obligations to his family: “Rushing north and south for over ten years on behalf of the affairs of my family, I had completely forgotten those thoughts about Wenling and the Abode of Bliss at Baiquan.”³³

“Sketch” concludes with Zhuowu taking on two contradictory names. One, “Broad-Minded Elder” (Hongfu), connotes his desire to be free of obligations; the other, Sizhai, denotes his yearning for his dead father: “During the five years the Layman served on the Board of Rites, his mind was immersed in the mysteries of the Way, and he regretted that he was unable to raise [his father] Master Baizhai from the underworld, and so he yearned for Master Baizhai even more intensely. He then called himself ‘The Layman of Yearning for [My Father Master Bai] Zhai’ [Sizhai Jushi].”³⁴

The careful structuring of the autobiographical sketch suggests Li Zhi’s ambivalence about his identity and official role at the point in his life when he wrote it. Bookending the narrative of Zhuowu’s life are the two significant absences of his mother and father. “A Sketch of Zhuowu” begins by undermining the certainty of Li Zhi’s name, Zhuowu/Duwu, and concludes by calling into question the certainty of his own existence: Kong Ruogu admits he does not know whether Zhuowu is dead or alive.³⁵ The chain of names—Zhuo, Du, the Layman, the Layman of Wenling, Broad-Minded Elder Layman, Yearning for My Father Master Baizhai—presents a fractured identity that seems endlessly mutable. The two qualities that are consistent in this portrait of Zhuowu are his filial piety and his commitment to moral learning. The introduction of the less commonly used name Baixia for Nanjing in the concluding sentence echoes, consciously or not, the style used for Zhuowu’s father throughout the text, Master Baizhai.³⁶ As a final touch, Li Zhi frames his existence in explicitly filial terms, as someone “not-yet-dead”; the expression “not yet dead” (weisi) parallels a term used for widows as “people not yet dead” (weiwangren).

LI ZHI AND FILIAL PIETY RECONSIDERED

For a figure reputed to be as iconoclastic as Li Zhi, “Sketch” is remarkably conventional in its construction of Zhuowu’s identity as embedded in filial relationships and obligations. Li’s writing of “A Sketch of Zhuowu” shortly before he left office in 1581 was no doubt strategic in that it presents him as a man who consistently made difficult choices that aligned him with established ritual values that prioritize the needs of his patriline over his conjugal family or his own desires. In this essay, Li Zhi seems to take pains to let others know that he is no scoundrel and has never acted out of selfishness. If the writing of this essay was motivated by his desire to construct himself positively, as a man who placed virtuous action above the pursuit of personal desires, it does call into question the representative value of the incidents he chose to highlight. There is clearly more to Li Zhi than he allows us to see in this work of self-representation.

What are we to make of the comparative importance of filial piety as a lived virtue in this influential essay? On some level, it was important to Li Zhi to leave an image of himself as a filial son. Unlike other late-Ming philosophers who identified Wang Yangming’s concept of the individual and morally perfect “pure knowing” (liangzhi) with filial piety, Li Zhi did not construct a moral or metaphysical philosophy based on filial piety.³⁷ Indeed, of the five canonical relationships, Li Zhi is best known for his promotion of the conjugal bond and friendship. Never a systematic or consistent writer, Li Zhi’s thirty-juan collection of anecdotes that illustrate “Ruist virtue in action,” Upon Arrival at the Lake, is organized in order of (1) the husband-wife relationship (four juan); (2) the father-son relationship (four juan); (3) fraternal relations (two juan); (4) relations between masters and disciples and friends (ten juan); and (5) the relationship between lord and subject (ten juan), although the collection is thematically dominated by anecdotes illustrating the ways, positive and negative, to be a friend and an official.³⁸

Although he did not privilege filial piety in his philosophical discussions of virtue, in a 1596 letter to Wang Shiben (Ruowu), Li Zhi shows the depth of his feelings in response to a mother’s appeal that her son wait until her death to travel in order to pursue Buddhist enlightenment. Li Zhi found the mother’s letter so moving that he chastises Shiben and reminds him of the cliché that “filial piety is the first of the hundred virtues.”³⁹ In the letter, Li Zhi argues that enlightenment must be sought in the heart and mind and that no matter how far Shiben were to travel, it would not help his pursuit of interior calm. As Li Zhi notes, intoning Amitābha’s name is a false form of worship because true Buddhism must be based on a spiritual practice: “Those who pursue Buddhism must follow Buddhist practices, and filial piety is the first of these hundred practices. If you chant the Buddha’s names but lack filial piety, how could Amitābha be a Buddha who is without filial piety? This logic is impossible.” Li Zhi ends his letter on an affective note: “If words arise from true feelings, they naturally pierce the heart, they naturally move people, they naturally cause people to suffer. I think you must be like me, there has never been a person who can hear a mother’s words like these and not suffer.”⁴⁰ The primacy of filial piety as an affective bond clearly held deep meaning for Li Zhi; just as he had for himself, he treated Shiben’s desire for autonomous self-cultivation as subordinate to his filial obligations and bonds to his parents.⁴¹

How does the portrait of Zhuowu as a filial son in “A Sketch of Zhuowu” fit with Li Zhi’s established reputation as an ideological radical willing to attack all forms of rote (or ritualized) behaviors as false? As seen in both “A Sketch of Zhuowu” and his letter to Wang Shiben, Li Zhi understood filial piety not as an empty obligation imposed upon individuals by ritual convention but as a deeply held and sincere expression of a person’s core ethical and affective values. As Li Zhi states in “A Sketch of Zhuowu,” his wife’s tears for her aging mother were an expression of “genuine emotions.” So too were Zhuowu’s yearning for his father and the pain he felt in his heart when reading the letter from Wang Shiben’s mother requesting that her son not abandon her. Even though Li Zhi was lionized during the May Fourth and Maoist periods for his willingness to reject the empty values and gestures of Confucian society, his identification of filial piety as the core bond that informed his life choices should give us pause before we project the May Fourth rejection of filial piety as an artificial and repressive value back into the late-imperial period. As depicted by Li Zhi, Zhuowu is a filial son who repeatedly prioritizes his filial bonds over his ties to his wife and children and over his aspirations for himself. The affective tone of the autobiography is dominated by Zhuowu’s yearning for his dead parents, emotions that bookend the narrative. In essence, his filial emotions are as genuine an expression of himself as his desire for the autonomous freedom to pursue the Dao.

NOTES

This chapter began as comments on Wai-yee Li’s paper presented at the Li Zhi Conference at the University of Chicago (2013) on the genuine in Li Zhi; I am indebted to her and the other conference participants for this opportunity to reconsider the relationship between filial piety and “genuine emotions” in Li Zhi’s writings. Portions of this chapter draw from material published in my monograph Orthodox Passions: Narrating Filial Love during the High Qing. Harvard University Asia Center, 2019.

1.   1    Shortly before the 2013 passage of laws known as “Protection of Rights and Interests of Elderly People” requiring that adult children visit their parents “often,” PRC governmental bureaus concerned with women and aging began to circulate a modernized version of the traditional Twenty-Four Exemplars of Filial Piety called the “New Twenty-Four Ways of Filial Piety” (Xin ershisi xiao).

2.   2    See Wu Yu, “Jiazu zhidu wei zhuanzhizhuyi zhi genju lun,” “Shuo xiao,” and “Chiren yu lijao” in Wu Yu wenlu, 1–13, 14–23, 63–72.

3.   3    Fu Sinian (published under his courtesy name, Meng Zhen), “Wan’e zhi yuan.”

4.   4    Meng Zhen, “Wan’e zhi yuan,” 125.

5.   5    Meng Zhen, “Wan’e zhi yuan,” 127.

6.   6    Wu Yu, “Shuo xiao,” in Wu Yu wenlu, 15. Quotation marks follow the Chinese text.

7.   7    Jinbu zazhi published only the first installment of this essay. Wu Yu, “Ming Li Zhuowu biezhuan,” Jinbu zazhi 9, no. 3 (1916): 19–24; Wu Yu’s complete essay can be found in Wu Yu wenlu, 2:20–51. This essay is also reprinted in LZ 26:313–23.

8.   8    Lin Shu, “Zhi Cai Heqing shu,” cited in LZ 26:325.

9.   9    Wu Ze, Rujiao pantu Li Zhuowu.

10. 10    After one article on Li Zhi was published in 1973, over 105 were published in 1974 and 1975. See LZ 26:362–66.

11. 11    For recent discussions on the negative impact of the culture of filial piety on individual psychological development, see Sun Longji, Weiduannai de minzu and Zhongguo de shenceng jiegou.

12. 12    Two important examples are Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, and Lu, True to Her Word.

13. 13    The text can be found in LZ 1:233–42. For an English translation, see Li Zhi, A Book to Burn, 75–83. Translations are my own. Zhang Jianye dates the composition of this essay to 1578, but Lee places it closer to 1580; see Pauline Lee, Li Zhi, 154n1.

14. 14    See, for example, Rong Zhaozu’s (1897–1994) annalistic biography of Li Zhi’s life that draws heavily from this essay, Ming Li Zhuowu.

15. 15    Pei-yi Wu discusses how the format of the account is based on the generic conventions of the “commentary” (lun), brief judgments by the historian appended to the biography (zhuan) in dynastic histories (The Confucian’s Progress, 20). Also see Pauline Lee, Li Zhi, 17–18.

16. 16    For a critical reading of Li Zhi’s use of the term “genuine,” see chapter 1.

17. 17    On autobiographical writings as iterative, see Marjorie Dryburgh, “Introduction: Writing and Reading Chinese Lives,” in Dryburgh and Dauncey, Writing Lives in China, 11.

18. 18    Li Zhi, “Yu Geng Kenian,” in LZ 3:65.

19. 19    Li Zhi, “Zhuowu lunlüe,” in LZ 1:233.

20. 20    Li Zhi, “Zhuowu lunlüe,” in LZ 1:233.

21. 21    For more on the significance of these names and Li’s relationship to Shao Yong, see chapter 1.

22. 22    Brook, Praying for Power, 90; Eichman, Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship, 48.

23. 23    Li Zhi, “Zhuowu lunlüe,” in LZ 1:235.

24. 24    Li Zhi, “Zhuowu lunlüe,” in LZ 1:235.

25. 25    For the rules on mourning children, see Ebrey, Chu Hsi’s Family Rituals, 95–96.

26. 26    Epstein, “Writing Emotions.”

27. 27    Yan Yuan, “Juyou yujian,” 164.

28. 28    Li Gong, Yan Yuan nianpu, 22.

29. 29    Li Gong, Yan Yuan nianpu, 15.

30. 30    See Ebrey, Chu Hsi’s Family Rituals, 89n70.

31. 31    Li Gong, Yan Yuan nianpu, 15.

32. 32    Feng Chen, Li Gong nianpu, 115.

33. 33    Li Zhi, “Zhuowu lunlüe,” in LZ 1:235.

34. 34    Li Zhi, “Zhuowu lunlüe,” in LZ 1:235.

35. 35    For discussion of Kong Ruogu’s uncertainty and translation of relevant passages, see chapter 1.

36. 36    The essay concludes, “Some say the Layman died in Baixia; others say that he is still in Yunnan and is not yet dead.”

37. 37    Miaw-fen Lu has written extensively about a group of mainstream Zhejiang scholars who promoted filial piety as both the foundation of ethics and generative materialism; see Lu, “Wan Ming Xiaojing,” published in English as “Religious Dimensions of Filial Piety.” Also see her Xiao zhi tianxia, especially 120–21, 133–68.

38. 38    Li Zhi, Chutanji. It is important to note that Li Zhi’s famous essay on the primacy of the conjugal bond, “Fufu lun,” actually promotes the cosmological importance of husbands and wives as the material embodiment of yin and yang energies. Li Zhi, “Fufu pian zonglun,” in LZ 12:1.

39. 39    Li Zhi, “Du Ruowu mu jishu,” in LZ 2:19.

40. 40    Li Zhi, “Du Ruowu mu jishu,” in LZ 2:19–20.

41. 41    The prioritizing of filial obligations to parents and unmarried children was a common pattern among late-Ming literati who were drawn to Buddhism; see Eichman, A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship, 62–65.