15 “Violence for Violence is the Rule of Beasts” Karmic Punishments and Human Mercy in the Tale of Wu Daozong

Wu Daozong’s story, collected within the Qi Xie Records, is quite the simple one. In it, Wu Daozong’s mother is transformed into a tiger as karma for a past life, and after disappearing and attacking the town several times in her tiger form, returns to her and her son’s shared house and dies, upon which Wu Daozong mourns over her body. Though it contains a bit of mystery and some dramatic flair, the text as a whole barely fills more than half a page. And yet, within the short tale is a wealth of symbolism regarding violence, familial ties, Buddhist ideals, and the implications of a tiger form in general.

In the story of Wu Daozong, the emphasis on family is present directly from the beginning. The first information we get on our protagonist past their name and place of origin is the fact that: “His father had died while Daozong was still a boy” and that “He lived alone with his mother and had not yet married or had children.”^[1] It is crucial to the story’s themes that we understand that, aside from his relationship with his mother, Daozong seemingly has no other close relationships. The reader is led to understand that Daozong is working, absent from the house on business of some nebulous variety, so he is not wholly dependent on his mother, nor does he spend all of his time with her. However, in terms of emotional, familial, or otherwise “loving” relationships, the mother appears to be all Daozong has to speak of. We see the culmination of this relationship in the story’s finale, where Daozong takes his only notable action as a character within the tale by mourning the death of the tiger: “Daozong wailed and wept, just as he would in mourning his mother. Morning and evening he remained beside her, weeping.”^[2] Even if it is to be understood as a display of filial piety, something not likely to be expected of Daozong in this unlikely circumstance of a mother-turned-beast, Daozong’s family situation and isolation has left him deeply affected by the death of his mother.

To understand the significance of his mourning and his mother’s death, we must turn to the story’s other major through-line: that of violence. Already, the main symbol of the story, the tiger, is one laden with deadly connotations. Huaiyu Chen’s article on the subject, “Transforming Beasts and Engaging with Local Communities: Tiger Violence in Medieval Chinese Buddhism,” explains that in medieval China, tiger attacks on livestock and people alike were an all-too-common occurrence, and were a significant worry for both the general population and local governmental authorities.^[3] However, the violent implications of tigers extended past the literal threat they posed to the population.

The tiger, within the context of Buddhist conceptions of the reincarnation cycle, is to be understood not only as a distributor of violence, but as a product of it as well. Animal forms and tigers in specific being karmic punishments for sins is a fairly common belief, but the connection is much more specific. One tenet of Buddhism (as well as tales of the supernatural in general) is the reincarnation of human beings as animals as a karmic punishment for the killing and eating of animals. Notably, the reasoning behind this was inherently tied to filial relationships, as Donald E. Gjertson explains in “Rebirth as an Animal in Chinese Buddhism”:

The idea that in eating meat you were possibly eating an immediate relative is illustrated in a number of miracle tales, which would seem to show that 20 it was fairly widely understood as an encouragement to vegetarianism.^[4]

The reasons to adhere to Buddhist tenets and refrain from consumption of meat were not only drawn from one’s own desire to not be reincarnated into a lesser form, but also from the desire to avoid harming your loved ones, even in different forms.

These concepts in mind, we return now to the story. Already, we have Daozong’s mother laying out plainly that her tiger form is the result of misdeeds from a previous life, though the exact details of these sins are left to the reader’s imagination: “‘I am being punished for sins in a former life. I am about to be transformed.’”^[5] Note the inevitability of the way this punishment is framed—regardless of what Daozong or his mother do, her transformation is inevitable. There is also an undercurrent of violence, not only from the tiger’s vicious attacks, but from the townsfolk as well. The story describes the townspeople shooting the beast and stabbing it with spears, neither of which seem to affect the tiger enough for them to catch it.^[6] Here, violence is both the cause of the problem as well as a failed solution, emphasizing its uselessness in declawing the actual threat at hand. This concept, once again, has its roots in propping up the tenets of Buddhism. During the medieval period, Buddhist texts emphasized that, while the tiger could be a sinful and cruel beast, it was capable of being redeemed, and Buddhist monks that showed mercy could in fact tame tigers.^[7] This idea, while Chen suspects was a larger ideological attempt to depict Buddhism as above rivaling schools of thought which had lesser methods of dealing with the threat posed by tigers, still has its roots in Buddhist tenets of mercy and compassion for all forms of life. Though the karmic transformation is inevitable, the violent response is not. While the tiger’s killing of the townsfolk is certainly not a good or desired result, the violent response is an inferior solution, or even no solution at all. Perhaps a Buddhist monk’s presence in the town could have turned the course of the entire story, but that’s beside the point.

While the story doesn’t specify what eventually leads the tiger to cease its attacks and die, it does specify that it returns home, and the fact that the story ends on Daozong mourning the tiger’s (who we have come to understand by this point is the mother) passing is significant. In essence, the story has shown the consequences of violence. It would be inaccurate and anachronistic to say that what is being depicted here is the cycle of abuse, as the story gives no information as to how Daozong’s mother acted in this life or how she treated her son, nor did such a concept exist at the time. All the same, the core idea that violence breeds violence, and that compassion is the only tool by which one can break the cycle is one that seems to be present in the story of Daozong. The violence of Daozong’s mother’s past life has already been enacted, and the violence of the tiger is inevitable—such is the nature of such a beast, untamed and unrestricted by the guiding hand of Buddhism. But Daozong’s response, to mourn a death even though it has taken many with it, is the core around which the Buddhist ideals within the story turn.

Bibliography

Campany, Robert Ford. A Garden of Marvels: Tales of Wonder from Early Medieval China. University of Hawai’i Press, 2015.

Chen, Huaiyu. “Transforming Beasts and Engaging with Local Communities: Tiger Violence in Medieval Chinese Buddhism.” Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, (2018). https://doi.org/10.2979/pjhs.3.1.03.

Gjertson, Donald E. “Rebirth as an Animal in Medieval Chinese Buddhism.” Society for the Study of Chinese Religions Bulletin, Vol. 8, No. 1, (1980): 56–69., https://doi.org/10.1179/073776980805308568.