At the same time, these stories bear the stamp of the society and traditions that originally produced them. They illuminate the Chinese social order through the structured relationships that defined it: emperor and subject, father and son, husband and wife (or wives), official and peasant, human and beast.#4425•
The Confucian philosophers who dominated the Chinese state conceived these relationships as a harmonious balance of obligations, and a number of pieces in this collection illustrate their view of order and authority. By and large, the Confucians were the voice of the superior orders—emperor, father, husband.
The majority of our tales, however, speak for the other side, for they come from the Taoists, philosophers and social critics who represented the subordinate orders and historically opposed the Confucians.#4411•
The Taoist view found vivid expression in popular literature—novels, plays, and the tales and legends we read here. Indeed, one of the purposes of this genre, typically scorned and even banned by Confucian authorities, was to publicize the crimes of the mighty and the injustices suffered by the subordinate order, including children, women, and animals.
As the conflict between those above and those below gave shape to Chinese history, the rivalry of these two great philosophies gave shape to Chinese culture.#4415•
The literary countertradition of which P'u may be the principal figure has its roots in Taoism, a philosophy as old as Confucianism and the one most consistently critical of it. Tao (literally "the way" or "the main current") is the universal ancestor and the universal annihilator. As the ultimate leveler of all living creatures, it creates all things equal, giving no one of them dominion over another by virtue of birth or any other inheritable power.
Tao's authority is absolute; it transfers no authority to what it creates—quite unlike the Confucian heaven, which gives its "son" the emperor a mandate to rule.
As destroyer, Tao gathers up again all it has produced; none of its myriad creatures can transfer influence, property, or status beyond its ordained time.
Animals and all other creatures exist on the same level as humans, and each exists for one lifetime alone, free of obligations to either ancestors or descendants.
According to the Taoists, the artifices of civilization only lead people away from the original and benign state of nature.
Thus at one blow the Taoists shattered the fundamental premise of the Confucian order: the social hierarchy founded on hereditary right.#4413•