Jin Shengtan’s (1608–1661) Sixth Work of Genius: Story of the Western Wing (1656) has long been appreciated from the standpoint of drama criticism. Literary scholarship’s emphasis on genre, however, tends to relegate the multi-generic and extra-literary features of Jin’s commentary to the sidelines of interpretation or subordinate those features to drama. This is problematic given that Jin Shengtan’s commentary on the Western Wing meticulously associates this work with other genres of writing and, moreover, with a variety of Buddhist texts, practices, and ideas. Taking Jin’s commentary on book 4, act 2, “Interrogating the Amorous” as a case study, this paper considers what it might look like to read the dramatic text not as a representative of its genre, but as an aesthetic form that affords certain forms of subjective experience. Jin Shengtan’s commentary intrusively reworks the form of this act to engage its latent therapeutic potential through association with other literary works as well as the Buddhist practice of repentance (chanhui). The outcome of Jin’s commentarial reworking is a hybrid textual form, neither purely literary nor strictly religious, which I describe as the therapeutic text, the potential of which is activated through the reader’s aesthetically mediated apprehension of the Buddhist truth-body. This hybrid textual category is in fact applicable to all of Jin Shengtan’s commentarial works, which I propose constitute a new program of Buddhist hermeneutics that he presented as a complement to the Six Classics.
