Home > Catalogue > Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale > 57 | 2021 > The Notion of bianxing 變形 in the Monkey Tales Contained in the Three Chapters "Chushou" 畜 獸 of Taiping Guangji 太平廣記

Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale | Vol. 57 | June 2021

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Research Article

The Notion of bianxing 變形 in the Monkey Tales Contained in the Three Chapters "Chushou" 畜 獸 of Taiping Guangji 太平廣記

Giovanni Ruscica    Fudan University, China    

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abstract

The 10th-century leishu 類書 (encyclopaedia) by Li Fang entitled Taiping Guangji 太平廣記 (Extensive Records of the Taiping Era) is a Song period collection of miscellanea of strange persons and events divided into 500 juan 卷. The classifications of the entries about animals in this collection are from juan 418 to 479. This study examines twenty-five anomaly accounts of shape-changes within the last three juan of “Chushou” 畜獸 (Domesticated and Wild Beasts) dedicated to apes and monkeys, i.e. juan 444, 445, and 446. This paper also analyses the concept of bianxing 變形 (transmutation) related to the physique and spiritual forms of these apes and monkeys, after their clashes and contaminations with human beings. The research considers four categories of changes considering extracts from all the entries. When possible, further information on apes and monkeys is given.

Published
June 30, 2021
Accepted
May 3, 2021
Submitted
Feb. 2, 2021
Language
IT

Keywords: Ancient Chinese literature • Chushou • Ape • Monkey • Transformation • Taiping Guangji

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2021/01/014

Copyright: © 2021 Giovanni Ruscica. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.