Weretiger; transformations of the tiger; reincarnation; retribution; correlative thinking; environment
摘要
In 1901, in volume four of his monumental work The Religious System of China, J. J. M. de Groot devoted one section titled “tigroanthropy” to the study of weretigers in ancient and medieval China, in light of the werewolf tradition in Europe. He mainly focuses on describing numerous cases in traditional Chinese. Ninety years later, Charles E. Hammond analyzed two collections on tigers for examining the symbolic uses of tigers in traditional Chinese lore. Scholars who work on the weretigers in South Asia and Southeast Asia published some significant studies in the past three decades. The scholarly interest in the weretigers in Asia is virtually renewed. Given some new contemporary development of Animals Studies, this paper attempts to revisit the weretigers in medieval China, focusing on the transitional period when Buddhism was introduced and adapted into China and met with Chinese traditions. Both traditional Chinese sources and Buddhist sources provide some interesting cases on the transformations between tigers and humans. These transformations should be analyzed from multiple perspectives. One of the challenging questions would be what happened when the Buddhist reincarnation thought and Buddhist concept of retribution encountered with the Chinese traditional correlative thinking between nature and human world based on moral and ethical values. Interestingly, tigers have appeared as humans, gods, ghosts, and demons in Buddhist sources in medieval China. Another question is concerned with the locality and environment change on the tigers and their relations with the changing development of the weretiger stories in the medieval period. The third issue is the transnational perspective on the weretigers in both Chinese and Korean Buddhism, as some medieval Chinese sources manifest.
