Two Precious Scroll Narratives of Guanyin and Her ... - Khamkoo

Introduction 27
Henricks has not included in his consideration of variants of
the legend of Shun the most extensive treatment of these materials,
the Tale of the Son Shun (Shunzi bian), one of the texts discovered
among the Dunhuang manuscripts together with the Tale of Maudgalyāyana
Saving His Mother from the Dark Realm (Da Muqianlian
mingjian jiumu bianwen) and most likely of roughly the same
date. 97 In this version of the tale of Shun, the stepmother plays a
very prominent part indeed. While she is said to hate Shun, she
also attempts to seduce him during her husband’s absence (or at
least she tries to create the impression that he is flirting with her
when she asks him to remove a thorn from her foot). Later she accuses
Shun of having tried to rape her. 98 Once she has convinced
her husband of Shun’s sins, she first hatches the plots to burn
Shun while he is repairing the barn and then to kill him with stones
when he is down in the well. In this way, the unnaturally close relationship
between heaven and earth in the reconstructed early myth
is, in this Tang-dynasty version of the tale, replaced by the equally
unnatural desire of a (step)mother for her son. It seems a safe assumption
that in this version the burning barn no longer represents
the scorching heat of a heaven that lies too close to the earth, but
rather the unnatural desire of the stepmother. After all, fire as a
symbol for desire is one of the oldest tropes in Chinese literature.
The basic configuration of characters in the Tale of the Son Shun
now is very close to the one in the fully developed Mulian legend:
an absent husband, a filial son, and a sinful (step)mother.
If the growth and spread of the Mulian legend may have been a
precondition for the rise of the legend of Miaoshan, the narrative of
the Tale of the Son Shun offers a remarkable structural parallel to
the legend of Miaoshan as told in The Precious Scroll of Incense
Mountain. Whereas Shun is pursued by his (step)mother, Miaoshan
must live in fear of her father’s desires. Whereas Shun escapes from
a burning barn, Miaoshan is almost engulfed by flames when her
father torches the White Sparrow Convent. When Shun is trapped
in the family well, a dragon bores a tunnel for him to the well of a
neighbor’s house, a journey below the surface of the earth, which
may be said to be equivalent to Miaoshan’s visit to the Yellow
Springs. 99 Both then retire to the wilds of a mountain, where they
enjoy the help of animals and achieve supernatural powers (Shun
establishes his unique qualifications as king by being the only one
to reap a bountiful harvest; Miaoshan through her religious exer-