Kongkong Daoren

His Story

He stands outside the mortal roster because he is not a person in the story. He is the reason there is one. Nothing that happens to the Jia family happens to him; his whole function is to find the book, argue with it, and carry it out.

Chapter 1. After ages beyond counting, a Daoist looking for the Way passes below Greensickness Peak on the Cliff of Nonsense in the Great Waste Mountains — 「忽从这大荒山无稽崖青埂峰下经过」 — and finds a great stone with writing on it, plainly legible: the record of one lifetime spent down in the red dust. He reads it and objects, in the tone of a man refusing a manuscript. There is no dynasty or reign to date it by; there are no great and loyal ministers setting the court and the customs to rights. Who will want to read it? The Stone answers him back, and he is persuaded. He copies the inscription out from beginning to end and takes it into the world.

The copying changes him. 「因空见色，由色生情，传情入色，自色悟空」 — from emptiness he saw form, from form was born feeling, feeling he carried back into form, and out of form he woke again to emptiness. He renamed himself 情僧, the Passionate Monk, and renamed the book from The Story of the Stone 《石头记》 to The Record of the Passionate Monk 《情僧录》.

Then he is gone for a hundred and nineteen chapters. In Chapter 120 he returns to the same peak, finds that the inscription has grown a new ending, and decides to copy it again. Looking for someone to hand it to, he finds Jia Yucun asleep at a ferry crossing, who sends him on to the Nostalgia Studio 悼红轩, where a man called Cao Xueqin is turning over old histories. He leaves the manuscript there. David Hawkes translates his name as Vanitas.

In Xiang Li's Hands

A barefoot old Daoist against a washed pale blue-grey sky — one of the few sheets here that is not bare paper. Bald crown, immense black hair and beard blown out to the right in dry sweeping strokes; head tipped back, eyes shut, mouth open, laughing or singing. The yellow and white robe has come off both shoulders, chest and belly bare, a red sash knotted low with its streamer running to the bottom edge. A staff leans past him. And held up in his hand, a blue-bound book. She paints him not as the seeker but as the man walking away with the copy.

The Calligraphy

Down the lower left the sheet reads 空 〻 道 人 — four characters, but the second one is not brushed. It is written as a repetition mark, so that the doubled 空 of his name arrives on the paper as a blank standing in for a word meaning empty. He has no personal name in the novel to use instead; 空空道人 is a religious style, and the inscription takes it at its word.

Connections

• The Stone 石头 — whose inscription he read, argued with, and copied out twice.
• Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 — to whom he delivered the manuscript at the Nostalgia Studio in Chapter 120.
• Jia Yucun 贾雨村 — found asleep at a ferry crossing, who told him where to take it.
• Zhen Shiyin 甄士隐 — the other mortal of the frame, who wakes into the story where this Daoist wakes out of it.
• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — the life written on the stone, and therefore the thing he is carrying.

Others of the same kind · mythic frame / immortal Jinghuan Xiangu 警幻仙姑 · Zhongqing Dashi 钟情大士 · Yinchou Jinnü 引愁金女 · Duhen Puti 度恨菩提 · Shenying Shizhe 神瑛侍者 · Jiangzhu Xiancao 绛珠仙草

Dream of the Red Chamber
Xiang Li painted all 413 characters of the novel between 1975 and 1985, the first person to complete the entire cast. See the whole collection · Chinese Empresses