What, you may ask, was the origin of this book?
Though the answer to this question may at first seem to border on the absurd,
reflection will show that there
is a good deal more in it than meets the eye.
Long ago, when the goddess Nu-wa 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 thirty-six thousand,
five hundred
and one large building blocks, each measuring seventy-two feet by a hundred and forty-four feet
square. She used
thirty-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
aforementioned mountains.
Now this block of stone, having undergone the melting and moulding of a goddess, possessed
magic powers.
It could move about at will and could grow or shrink to any size it wanted Observing that all
the other blocks had
been used for celestial repairs and that it was the only one to have been rejected as unworthy,
it became filled
with shame and resentment and passed its days in sorrow and lamentation.
One day, in the midst of its lamentings, it saw a monk and a Taoist approaching from a great
distance, each
of them remarkable for certain eccentricities of manner and appearance. When they arrived at
the foot of
Greensickness Peak, they sat down on the ground and began to talk. The monk, catching sight
of a lustrous,
translucent stone—it was in fact the rejected building block which had now shrunk itself to
the size of a
fan-pendant and looked very attractive in its new shape—took it up on the palm of his hand
and addressed it with
a smile:
‘Ha, I see you have magical properties! But nothing to recommend you. I shall have to cut a
few words on
you so that anyone seeing you will know at once that you are something special. After that I
shall take you to a
certain
brilliant
successful
poetical
cultivated
aristocratic
elegant
delectable
luxurious
opulent
locality on a little trip.’
The stone was delighted.
‘What words will you cut? Where is this place you will take me to? I beg to be enlightened.’
‘Do not ask,’ replied the monk with a laugh. ‘You will know soon enough
when the time comes.’
And with that he slipped the stone into his sleeve and set off at a great pace with t
he Taoist. But where they both
went to I have no idea.
2
*
Countless aeons went by and a certain Taoist called Vanitas in quest of the secret
of immortality chanced to be
passing below that same Greensickness Peak in the Incredible Crags of the Great Fable
Mountains when he
caught sight of a large stone standing there, on which the characters of a long inscription
were clearly discernible.
Vanitas read the inscription through from beginning to end and learned that this was a once
lifeless stone
block which had been found unworthy to repair the sky, but which had magically transformed
its shape and been
taken down by the Buddhist mahasattva Impervioso and the Taoist illuminate Mysterioso into the
world of
mortals, where it had lived out the life of a man before finally attaining nirvana and
returning to the other shore.
The inscription named the country where it had been born, and went into considerable detail
about its domestic
life, youthful amours, and even the verses, mottoes and riddles it had written. All it
lacked was the authentication
of a dynasty and date. On the back of the stone was inscribed the following quatrain:
Found unfit to repair the azure sky
Long years a foolish mortal man was I.
My life in both worlds on this stone is writ:
Pray who will copy out and publish it?
From his reading of the inscription Vanitas realized that this was a stone of some
consequence. Accordingly he
addressed himself to it in the following manner:
‘Brother Stone, according to what you yourself seem to imply in these verses, this story of
yours contains
matter of sufficient interest to merit publication and has been carved here with that end in
view. But as far as I
can see (a) it has no discoverable dynastic period, and (b) it contains no examples of moral
grandeur among its
characters—no statesmanship, no social message of any kind. All I can find in it, in fact,
are a number of females,
conspicuous, if at all, only for their passion or folly or for some trifling talent or
insignificant virtue. Even if I
were to copy all this out, I cannot see that it would make a very remarkable book.’
‘Come, your reverence,' said the stone (for Vanitas had been correct in assuming that it
could speak) ‘must
you be so obtuse? All the romances ever Written have an artificial period setting—Han or
Tang for the most part.
In refusing to make use of that stale old convention and telling my Story of the Stone exactly
as it occurred, it
seems to me that, far from depriving it of anything, I have given it a freshness these other
books do not have.
‘Your so-called “historical romances”, consisting, as they do, of scandalous anecdotes
about statesmen and
emperors of bygone days and scabrous attacks on the reputations of long-dead gentlewomen,
contain more
wickedness and immorality than I care to mention. Still worse is the “erotic novel”, by
whose filthy obscenities
our young folk are all too easily corrupted. And the “boudoir romances”, those dreary
stereotypes with their
volume after volume all pitched on the same note and their different characters undistinguishable
except by name
(all those ideally beautiful young ladies and ideally eligible young bachelors)— even they seem
unable to avoid
descending sooner or later into indecency.
“The trouble with this last kind of romance is that it only gets written in the first place because
the author
requires a framework in which to show off his love-poems. He goes about constructing this framework
quite
mechanically, beginning with the names of his pair of young lovers and invariably adding a
third character, a
servant or the like, to make mischief between them, like the chou in a comedy.
‘Wat makes these romances even more detestable is the stilted, bombastic language— inanities
dressed in
pompous rhetoric, remote alike from nature and common sense and teeming with the grossest
absurdities.
‘Surely my "number of females", whom I spent half a lifetime studying with my own eyes and
ears, are
preferable to this kind of stuff? I do not claim that they are better people than the ones who
appear in books
written before my time; I am only saying that the contemplation of their actions and motives
may prove a more
effective antidote to boredom and melancholy. And even the inelegant verses with which my story
is interlarded
3
could serve to entertain and amuse on those convivial occasions when rhymes and riddles are
downs
of fortune,
are recorded exactly as they happened. I have not dared to add the tiniest bit of touching-up,
for fear of losing the
true picture.
‘My only wish is that men in the world below may sometimes pick up this tale when they are
recovering
from sleep or drunkenness, or when they wish to escape from business worries or a fit of the
dumps, and in doing
so find not only mental refreshment but even perhaps, if they will heed its lesson and abandon
their vain and
frivolous pursuits, some small arrest in the deterioration of their vital forces. What does your
reverence say to
that?’
For a long time Vanitas stood lost in thought, pondering this speech. He then subjected the
Story of the
stone to a careful second reading. He could see that its main theme was love; that it
consisted quite simply of a
true record of real events; and that it was entirely free from any tendency to deprave and
corrupt. He therefore
copied it all out from beginning to end and took it back with him to look for a publisher.
As a consequence of all this, Vanitas, starting off in the Void (which is Truth) came to
the contemplation of
Form (which is Illusion); and from Form engendered Passion; and by communicating Passion,
entered again Into
Form; and from Form awoke to the Void (which is Truth). He therefore changed his name from
Vanitas to
Brother Amor, or the Passionate Monk, (because he had approached Truth by way of Passion),
and changed the
title of the book from The Story of the S tone to The Tale of Brother Amor.
Old Kong Mei-xi from the homeland of Confucius called the book A Mirror for the Romantic
. Wu Yu-feng
called it A Dream of Golden Days. Cao Xueqin in his Nostalgia Studio worked on it for ten
years, in the course of
which he rewrote it no less than five times, dividing it into chapters, composing chapter
headings, renaming it
The Twelve Beauties of Jinling, and adding an introductory quatrain. Red Inkstone restored
the original title when
he recopied the book and added his second set of annotations to it.
This, then, is a true account of how The Story of the Stone carne to be written.
Pages full of idle word
Penned with hot and bitter tears:
All men call the author fool;
None his secret message hears.
*
The origin of The Story of the Stone has now been made clear. The same cannot, however,
be said of the
characters and events which it recorded. Gentle reader, have patience! This is how the
inscription began:
Long, long ago the World was tilted downwards towards the south-east; and in that lower-lying
south-easterly part of the earth there is a city called Soochow; and in Soochow the district
around the Chang-men
Gate is reckoned one of the two or three wealthiest and most fashionable quarters in the world
of men. Outside
the Chang-men Gate is a wide thorough-fare called Worldly Way; and somewhere off Worldly Way
is an area
called Carnal Lane. There is an old temple in the Carnal Lane area which, because of the way
it is bottled up
inside a narrow Cul-de-Sac, is referred to locally as Bottle-gourd Temple Next door to Bottle-gourd
Temple lived
a gentleman of private means called Zhen Shi-yin and his wife Feng-shi, a kind, good woman with
a profound
sense of decency and decorum. The household was not a particularly wealthy one, but they were
nevertheless
looked up to by all and sundry as the leading family in the neighbourhood.
Zhen Shi-yin himself was by nature a quiet and totality unambitious person. He devoted his
time to his
garden and to the pleasures of wine and poetry. Except for a single flaw, his existence could,
indeed, have been
described as an idyllic one. The flaw was that, although already past fifty, he had no son,
only a little girl, just
two years old, whose name was Ying-lian.
Once, during the tedium of a burning summer's day, Shi-yin was sitting idly in his study.
The book had
4
slipped from his nerveless grasp and his head had nodded down Onto the desk in a doze.
While in this drowsy
state he seemed to drift off to some place he could not identify, where he became aware
of a monk and a Taoist
walking along and talking as they went.
‘Where do you intend to take that thing you are carrying?’ the Taoist was asking.
‘Don't you worry about him!’ replied the monk with a laugh. ‘There is a batch of lovesick
souls awaiting
incarnation in the world below whose fate is due to be decided this very day. I intend to
take advantage of this
opportunity to slip our little friend in amongst them and let him have a taste of human life
along with the rest.’
‘Well, well, so another lot of these amorous wretches is about to enter the vale of tears,’
said the Taoist.’
How did all this begin? And where are the souls to be reborn?’
‘You will laugh when I tell you,’ said the monk. 'when this 8tone was left unused by the g
oddess, he found
himself at a loose end and took to wandering about all over the place for want of better to do,
until one day his
wanderings took him to the place where the fairy Disenchantment lives.
‘Now Disenchantment could tell that there was something unusual about this stone, so she kept
him there in
her Sunset Glow Palace and gave him the honorary title of Divine Luminescent Stone-in-Waiting
in the Court of
Sunset Glow.
‘But most of his time he spent west of Sunset Glow exploring the banks of the Magic River. T
here, by the
Rock of Rebirth, he found the beautiful Crimson Pearl Flower, for which he conceived such a
fancy that he took
to watering her every day with sweet dew, thereby conferring on her the gift of life.
‘Crimson Pearl's substance was composed of the purest cosmic essences, so she was already
half-divine;
and now, thanks to the vitalizing effect of the sweet dew, she was able to shed her vegetable
shape and assume
the form of a girl.
‘This fairy girl wandered about outside the Realm of Separation, eating the Secret Passion
Fruit when she
was hungry and drinking from the Pool of Sadness when she was thirsty. The consciousness that
she owed the
stone something for his kindness in watering her began to prey on her mind and ended by becoming
an obsession.
‘ “I have no sweet dew here that I can repay him with,” she would say to herself “The only way
in which I
could perhaps repay him would be with the tears shed during the whole of a mortal lifetime if he
and I were ever
to be reborn as humans in the world below.”
‘Because of this strange affair, Disenchantment has got together a group of amorous young souls,
of which
Crimson Pearl is one, and intends to send them down into the world to take part in the
great illusion
of human
life. And as today happens to be the day on which this stone is fated to go into the world too,
I am taking him
with me to Disenchantment's tribunal for the purpose of getting him registered and sent down to
earth with the
rest of these romantic creatures.’
'How very amusing 1' said the Taoist. 'I have certainly never heard of a debt of teats before.
why shouldn't
the two of us take advantage of this opportunity to go down into the world ourselves and save
a few souls? It
would be a work of merit.'
'That is exactly what I was thinking,' said the monk. 'Come with me to Disenchantment's
palace to get this
absurd creature cleared. Then, when this last batch of romantic idiots goes down, you
and I can go down with
them. At present about half have already been born. They await this last batch to make
up the number.'
'Very good, I will go with you then,' said the Taoist Shi-yin heard all this conversation
quite clearly, and
curiosity impelled him to go forward and greet the two reverend gentle-men. They returned
his greeting and
asked him what he wanted.
'It is not often that one has the opportunity of listening to a discussion of the operations
of karma such as
the one I have just been privileged to overhear,' said Shi-yin. 'Unfortunately I am a man of
very limited
understanding and have not been able to derive the full benefit from your conversation.
If you would have the
very great kindness to enlighten my benighted understanding with a somewhat fuller account
of what you were
discussing, I can promise you the most devout attention. I feel sure that your teaching
would have a salutary
5
effect on me and—who knows—might save me from the pains of hell.'
The reverend gentlemen laughed. 'These are heavenly mysteries and may