Many Faces of Mulian: The Precious Scrolls of Late Imperial China by Rostislav Berezkin (review)

Abstract

Rostislav Berezkin, with the publication of Many Faces of Mulian 目連: The Precious Scrolls of Late Imperial China, has presented the world of Chinese vernacular studies with a landmark work. The volume presents in-depth and well-researched information on both the precious scrolls’ (baojuan 寶卷) prosimetric tradition and the story of Mulian rescuing his mother, a Buddhist narrative that has been adapted into many styles of drama, local storytelling, and vernacular print editions. As Victor Mair notes in the foreword, the present work follows in a line of outstanding scholarship on baojuan, conducted by scholars that include Sawada Mizuho 澤田瑞穂, Daniel L. Overmyer, Che Xilun 車 錫倫, and Wilt L. Idema (p. ix). While surveying the historical baojuan traditions (which sometimes go by names other than baojuan), the author gives especial focus to clues about performance contexts embedded in the texts. In doing so, he draws on theory of the “performance school” of folkloristics, particularly the work of Richard Bauman.1 He often cites John Miles Foley, a scholar of epic, who combined the performance approach with the Parry-Lord theory, his own Immanent Art theory, and ethnopoetics theory.2 This body of theory, which is productive for the study of both oral-connected written texts and associated performances situated within specific social contexts, has informed several previous studies of Chinese vernacular and folk narrative, and it continues to be fruitful in this work.3 Berezkin is especially interested in Foley’s ideas concerning