勸善文本的符號欲望：從《目連救母 勸善戲文》〈羅卜描容〉談起=The Semiotic Drives in Didactic Dramatic Texts: Reading Ekphrastic Passages in “Lo-pu’s Portrayal of His Mother” in Maudgalyāyana’s Deliverance of His Mother
The stories about how Maudgalyāyana (Mu-lien) liberates his mother from sufferings in hell have been told for thousands of years, and the performances of these tales called Mu-lien Plays (Mu-lien Xi) have lasted for more than eight hundred years since they were turned from Buddhist sutras into folk tales and dramatic performances. In Ming Dynasty, Cheng Chi-chen (1518-1595) compiled and published The Didactic Play of Maudgalyāyana’s Deliverance of His Mother (also called The Didactic Tales) in 1582, basing on the various versions of Mu-lien plays and tales up till his time. Mu-lien plays have been treated as didactic texts about Buddhist-Confucian perspectives on filial piety, and have been named “the living fossil records of ancient drama” because their miscellaneous performances in all dialects have provided living records of ancient Chinese drama. Although recent discoveries have yielded rich records of these texts and various researches have been done on Mu-lien plays, most studies focus on their roles in folk traditions, religious rituals, performing arts, history and development of ancient Chinese drama. Unlike canonical plays which have been extensively studied for their literary merits such as Romance of the Western Bower, Dream in Peony Pavilion, The Lute Story, and Blood Stains on Peach Blossom Fan, as a didactic play, Cheng’s text has been marginalized in literary studies of traditional Chinese drama and deserves more close reading and theoretical discussions. Although there have been commentaries on the literary and structural merits of the play, one scene in this didactic text of 104 scenes deserves closer analyses for it is more aesthetic than didactic: in the scene, Lo-pu (Maudgalyāyana) tries to portray his dead mother in a painting and meditates on its impossibilities. Hence, this paper shall first explicate the ekphrastic significance of the scene and its structural significance; then, it shall contrast it with ekphrastic passages in The Lute Story and Dream in Peony Pavilion to explore how these dramatic texts may interact with their contemporary aesthetic discourses.
