重建晚明信仰:王世贞“昙阳传”的书写策略及意图叙事

Belief Reconstruction in the Late Ming Dynasty:Writing Strategies and Narrative Intention of Wang Shizhen’s The Biography of Master Tan Yang

王世贞《昙阳大师传》通过隐藏或改动事件细节神化昙阳子,而梦境与现实的交叉书写使得“昙阳传”更具真实感。“昙阳传”灵异书写则由文本延展至现实,助推佛教与昙阳信仰的联动。“昙阳传”叙事伦理与现实伦理的错位,引发庶民舆论的反噬与攻击,因而王世贞不得不转变《昙阳师外传》徐景韶之死等事件的叙述,借助社会伦理将昙阳子推向女子守节的“典范”。这一书写策略直接将儒家所排斥的鬼神之事转化为推动昙阳子守节品质建构的驱动力,完成了昙阳子从“异类”向“典范”的转变。屠隆等精英文人参与到“昙阳传”的书写之中,试图争夺传记撰写权与昙阳子话语解释权。“昙阳传”书写盛行的背后是中晚明士人精神世界的荒芜与内心的虚无。心学影响下放纵自我的文人士大夫逐渐转向禁欲无为,却未回归提升自我政治素养及治国理政能力之路。王世贞等人重建晚明信仰的意图最终归于寂无,无法挽回晚明大厦将倾之势。

In his The Biography of Master Tan Yang, Wang Shizhen deified Tan Yang by hiding or altering the details of her events, and his cross-writing of dreams and reality makes the biography more authentic. Wang’s writing of supernatural powers influenced the real world of the time, as it associated Buddhism with the Tan Yang Belief. Nevertheless, because the dislocation of narrative ethics of the biography from realistic ethics triggered public criticism, Wang had to change the narrative of Xu Jingshao’s death and other events in his The Unofficial Biography of Master Tan Yang and established Tan Yang as the role model of women’s chastity through the social ethics. With this writing strategy, the supernatural events rejected by Confucianism were directly used as a driving force for Tan Yang to preserve her chastity, changing her image of a“heterodoxy”into a“role model”. In addition, elite scholars like Tu Long also wrote Tan Yang, competing to dominate the writing of her biographies and interpretation of her discourse. The present paper holds that behind the popularity of Tan Yang’s biography writing is the barren and empty spiritual world of scholars in the middle and late Ming Dynasty. Influenced by the philosophy of the mind, self-indulgent literati officials gradually turned to abstinence and inaction, but did not return to the path of improving their political literacy and governance ability. Therefore, Wang and other scholars’ efforts to rebuild the belief for the late Ming people by writing Tan Yang’s biographies were a failure and they could not reverse the falling trend of the dynasty.