Karmic Retribution and Moral Didacticism in Erotic Fiction from the Late Ming and Early Qing

Abstract

The fundamental Buddhist doctrine of karma has had a widespread and profound influence in traditional Chinese social life and culture, beginning from the period when Buddhism was first introduced. This was inevitable, a result of Buddhist concepts of salvation - liberation from transmigration in 'samsara' - being translated into a Chinese idiom by early proselytisers. While Buddhism's status in China has a mixed history, the late imperial period witnessed a popularisation of Buddhist ideas stimulated by economic prosperity, urbanisation, and the availability of mass printing, developments which also "promoted both widespread literacy or non-literacy and the broad marketing of books." With a growth in the circulation of popular morality books ('quanshan shu') in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) the discourse of karmic retribution ('yinguo baoying') was further popularised, and its role in popular fiction ('xiaoshuo'), classical-language or vernacular, has been a subject of considerable interest in the study of the literary and intellectual history of the period.