Review

Author(s): Russell Kirkland

Review by: Russell Kirkland
Source: Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), Vol. 16 (Dec., 1994), pp. 161-166
Published by: Chinese Literature: essays, articles, reviews (CLEAR)
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 BOOK REVIEWS 161

WILE, Douglas, Art of the Bedchamber:The ChineseSexual Yoga Classicsincluding

Women's Solo Meditation Texts. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. 293
pages. $59.50 cloth; $19.95 paper.

This unparalleled book is an important work of scholarship that remains prob-

lematic in some regards. Most sinologists have learned to beware exploitative books
revealing "Chinese sexual secrets." The present book is assuredly not of that ilk: it is,
for all its peccadillos, a serious exposition of significant materials. One should note,
however, that the publisher does the author some disservice. First, while the main
title takes its due place on the book's spine, it is dwarfed on the front cover by a mas-
sive rendition of the subtitle, assuring that potential readers cannot miss the key
words "sexual" and "women"--each of which guarantees sales. Secondly, the cover
features an unidentified print of a voyeur leering into a window to watch a couple in
flagrante delicto. Though the author's style at times does wax casual, his goal is clearly
not to titillate, and the book's contents are sufficiently sober and technical to put off
all but the most determined of novices.
The book falls into two sections. "Part One: Introduction" discusses aspects of
Chinese sexual practices and the pertinent literature, primary and secondary. "Part
Two" consists of annotated translations of twenty-one relatively brief texts, dating
from Han times to the 20th century. Within the Introduction, the most important sec-
tions are Chapter I, "Motive and Focus"; Chapter II, "The Ethos of Chinese Sexual
Practices"; and Chapter V, "Thematic Progressions." Chapters III and IV, "Sexual
Practices and Medicine" and "Sexual Practices and Taoism," are more technical.
Chapter VI, "The Development of Chinese Sexology," deserves special comment. It is
actually an extended bibliographic essay on previous publications about sex in
China. The first half discusses Chinese publications, the second Western publications.
These discussions are frequently interesting, but they are often of dubious relevance
to the material that Wile translates. At times one is led to suspect that the author
wishes not only to illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of previous scholarly and
popular works, but also to establish his own status as the leading authority on sex in
China by finding fault (here as in the notes to Part Two) with everyone else who has
ever published in the field. Such exertions seem quite unnecessary, for the body of
the book clearly demonstrates Wile's formidable expertise. One may note, however,
that some of the works reviewed in this chapter are missing from the bibliography.
A primary problem with this book is that Wile gives the reader no real starting
place. The Introduction generally assumes that the reader is already acquainted with
Part Two. The reader will thus be baffled by frequent references to "the Exposition,"
etc., and must constantly interrupt her/his perusal of the Introduction to consult the
table of contents for a hint of the date of such a text, and to pore through the intro-
duction to the pertinent section in Part Two for an idea of the text's content and pur-
pose. Even within the Introduction, the chapters are virtually independent, and
having read any given chapter may not help one understand any other chapter. Fur-
thermore, the author's assumptions and conclusions are scattered throughout the
book. Thus, only when one has read everything can one fully understand anything.
The texts translated in Part Two are "essentially instructional manuals" (4). Chap-
ter VIII, "The Han Classics Rediscovered," translates two manuscripts discovered in
the Ma-wang-tui tombs in 1973. Chapter IX, "The Sui-T'ang Classics Reconstructed,"
presents five works that constitute the core of Wile's canon. All are reconstructed

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162 ChineseLiterature:
Essays,ArticlesReviews16 (1994)

from fragments preserved in a tenth-century Japanese medical compendium called

the Ishimpo. Chapter X, "Medical Manuals and Handbooks for Householders," in-
cludes five texts of uncertain date, grouped together because of shared emphasis in-
stead of shared date. Chapter XI, "The Elixir Literature of Sexual Alchemy," presents
five texts of "middle to late Ming, and possibly the Ch'ing" (146). Chapter XII,
"Women's Practices," translates four texts of the 19th and 20th centuries, and claims
to be "the first attempt to make available in translation a significant body of works on
women's solo practice" (192). That claim is mistaken. Though deeply flawed, Thomas
Cleary's 1989 book, ImmortalSisters:Secretsof TaoistWomen,translates similar texts.26
Since Wile gives extensive attention to the popular literature in his field, one wonders
how he could have overlooked Cleary's publication.
Regarding the collection of texts that Wile translates, one may well ask whether it
does not artificially link quite disparate texts that are related only in that they involve
sexuality. The Han-T'ang texts concern ordinary sexual activity between lovers, and
give instruction for enhancing it. The only important element that those texts seem to
share with the texts of late imperial times is that they encourage the male partner to
exercise self-control, rather than dissipate his energy in ejaculation. Such self-control,
the early texts teach, benefits both partners, enhancing health, pleasure, and integra-
tion with the natural order. On the other hand, the Ming-Ch'ing texts generally ig-
nore ordinary sexual relations: they are manuals of esoteric ritual techniques. Wile
concedes that the later texts leave behind "the bedroom art": "Questions of emotional
harmonization, sexual synchronization, eugenics, and therapies for sexual dysfunc-
tion have become completely irrelevant" (148). Yet Wile insists that these manuals are
united with the earlier texts of "the bedroom art" by virtue of the shared theme of
"the cultivation of ch 'i" (149). By that logic, it would seem that Chinese "sexual yoga"
was founded by Mencius (see II A. 2).
Though Wile concedes the "distinction in emphasis" among his texts (149), one
still wonders whether his "corpus" truly constitutes a coherent tradition. His use of
the quite alien term "yoga" shows that his view involves an analogy with the various
practices that go by that name in India. While, at first glance, that analogy is highly
suggestive, further reflection leads one to question it. In the Indian context, the term
"yoga" is a generic term for a disciplined life directed toward spiritual development.
However, in the brahmanical tradition, such sexual practices as Wile's texts concern
are generally regarded as heterodox. And, like India's brahmans, China's Confuci-
ans, Buddhists, and Taoists were generally unreceptive to the idea that sexual prac-
tices could be legitimately considered the central focus of a healthy moral/spiritual
life. Wile tries to finesse this problem. Paradoxically, he claims that his texts reflect
both "the Chinese ideal" concerning sexuality (3) and the esoteric teachings of a co-
herent (though never specifically identified) "sexual school" that was devoted to the
perfection of technical practices. One wonders whether Wile has not succumbed here
to an "error" that he imputes to previous scholars like Henri Maspdro, who "misrep-
resented the exception for the rule" (56). Scholars and general readers alike will at
times be confused as to whether the various practices commended in Wile's texts
were really the standard for couples throughout China's history, or whether they "re-
flect an elite, even esoteric tradition" (5). Wile tries to have it both ways.

26Boston and Shaftesbury: ShambhalaPublications.A much more serious study is Suzanne Cahill,
"PracticeMakesPerfect: Paths to Transcendencefor Womenin MedievalChina." TaoistResources
2, no. 2
(1990),23-42.

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 BOOK REVIEWS 163

Another serious problem is that he plays fast and loose with the social, intellec-
tual and religious history of China. One can certainly understand him limiting the
scope of his study (3-4). But at times he seems oblivious to pertinent issues. Histori-
ans will at times be troubled by Wile's disregard for the profound differences among
distinct periods of Chinese history. He sometimes writes as though the institutions of
the Chinese state, and their relation to other aspects of Chinese society, were un-
changing from Chou times to the 20th century (13-14). One is also puzzled by the
phrase "the medieval court," which one would imagine to refer to something in the
T'ang or Sung periods, until one finds Wile adducing "the official histories of the
Yiuan,Ming, and Ch'ing" as our sources for it (14).
Elsewhere, the author writes in broad generalizations of "the Confucians," "the
Buddhists," etc. This shortcoming is felt most strongly in his unrestrained use of the
term "Taoist." Others have pointed out that in Wile's usage "[t]he idea of Taoism is
used in a way reminiscent of a generation ago; that is, as a disembodied essence dis-
cussed as if it were a social entity, but not related to the actual Taoist movements that
have been carefully distinguished" by the scholars of the present generation.27 Wile
does cite certain important authorities on Taoism, such as Isabelle Robinet and
Kristofer Schipper. But examination of his bibliography reveals few references to the
crucial scholarship on Taoism published since 1980. Wile completely ignores many
pertinent works, such as TaoistMeditationand Longevity Techniques.28
More fundamentally, Wile refuses to take seriously the fact that Taoism was a
specific religious tradition that has been the subject of significant scholarship.29 He
thus commits numerous factual errors. For instance, he refers to the fourth-century
maverick Confucian Ko Hung as a "Taoist alchemist" (24) when in fact Ko was nei-
ther Taoist nor alchemist.30 Elsewhere, he states that "Ethical prerequisites are con-
spicuously absent from the sexual literature . . . [b]ecause ethics were so closely
associated in the minds of the Taoists with the conventional morality of the Confu-
cianists ..." (17). In fact, ethical values were fundamental to virtually all forms of re-
ligious Taoism, and are prominent in many Taoist texts.31 Elsewhere, Wile incorrectly
states that "[b]oth [Confucians and Taoists] aspired to another world, but the Taoists
did not want to die to get there" (12). In fact, it has been clear for some years now that
Taoists actually envisioned a "post-mortem immortality."32 At times Wile simply
makes up history as he goes, as when he declares, "The private Taoist citizen at times

27Nathan Sivin, reviewing Wile's book in Journalof Asian Studies 53 no. 1 (February 1994), p. 185.
28Edited by Livia Kohn. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1989. Isabelle
Robinet has pointed out that Wile seems unaware of a 1985 study of a Taoist text to which he refers on
several occasions. See her review in Journalof ChineseReligions 21 (1993), 201-204, at page 203.
29For an overview of Taoism as it has been illumined by recent research, see, e.g., Anna Seidel,
Taoismus: Die Inoffizielle Hochreligion Chinas (Tokyo: Deutsche Gesellschaft for Natur- und
Vl1kerkunde
Ostasians, 1990); and Russell Kirkland, "Person and Culture in the Taoist Tradition," Journal of Chinese
Religions 20 (1992), 77-90, and "Taoism," in The Encyclopedia of Bioethics, 2nd edition (New York:
Macmillan, forthcoming).
30This point was long ago driven home by Nathan Sivin in "On the Word 'Taoist' as a Source of
Perplexity," History of Religions 17 (1978), 303-331. See also Russell Kirkland, "The Making of an Immortal:
The Exaltation of Ho Chih-Chang," Numen 38 (1991-92), 201-214.
31 See Kirkland, "Taoism," "The Making of an Immortal," and "The Roots of Altruism in the Taoist
Tradition," Journalof the AmericanAcademyof Religion 54 (1986), 59-77.
32See, e.g., Anna Seidel, "Post-Mortem Immortality, or: The Taoist Resurrection of the Body," in
GILGUL: Essays on Transformation,Revolution and Permanence in the History of Religions (Leiden: Brill,
1987), pp. 223-237; and Stephen R. Bokenkamp, "Death and Ascent in Ling-pao Taoism," Taoist Resources
1, no. 2 (1989), 1-20.

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164 ChineseLiterature:
Essays,ArticlesReviews16 (1994)

was tolerated and at other times persecuted for engaging in sexual practices" (13).
Taoists were, to the best of my knowledge, never persecuted at all, and on those rare
occasions when political conflicts did stir up imperial opposition to Taoism, it was
certainly not because of any "sexual practices" in which the Taoists supposedly en-
gaged. Here, in fact, is the central flaw in Wile's use of the term "Taoist." While it
may be true that many Chinese and Western writers of the past often associated Chi-
nese sexual practices with "Taoism," Wile is naive to believe that such writers were
justified in making such a connection.33
Unaware of the true subtraditions into which Taoists historically divided them-
selves, Wile arbitrarily divides Taoism into two camps: the "sexual school" and the
anti-sexual "pure practitioners." In actuality, "the sexual school of Taoism" is a fig-
ment of his imagination, and one can think of no basis for his contention that "the de-
bate in Taoism over the role of sexuality finds those who reject sexual intercourse, but
none who cast out sexual energy, and even 'pure' practitioners engage in genital
massage and eagerly await the awakening of the 'original yang,' manifesting in erec-
tion during meditation" (28). While there were many forms of meditation within the
Taoist tradition, I am not familiar with any that featured "genital massage."
The problem is that, throughout the book, Wile is determined to demonstrate
"the critical role of sexual energy in Chinese meditation" (192). He therefore focuses
exclusively upon those meditational traditions that involved-or could be interpreted
as having involved-sexual practices. Consequently, he exaggerates the importance
of such practices in traditional Chinese history, and misrepresents the Taoist tradition
in particular. No less an authority than Kristofer Schipper has pointed out that the
sexual handbooks such as Wile translates "are wrongly considered to be Taoist": "It
is a mistake to look for Taoism in the idea of 'nourishing yang at the expense of yin';
Taoism moves on an entirely different level."34 Wile is aware of these statements, but
rather than availing himself of the insights of such a respected scholar, he conducts
an unseemly ad hominem attack upon Schipper himself: Schipper is merely "venting
personal antipathies" because he "was so revolted by some of what he saw [in the
sexual literature] that it became more important to share and support his personal
reaction than to give a complete, much less fair, account of what is there" (60). In ac-
tuality, any scholar of Taoism can testify that in this matter Schipper is indeed quite
fair and entirely accurate. It would seem, in fact, that what we find here is Wile him-
self "venting personal antipathies" when confronted with the fact that his ideas about
sexual practices within Taoism are simply unfounded. My own research into medie-
val Taoism (involving scores of texts from every possible provenance, by Taoists and
non-Taoists alike) has revealed no trace whatever of sexual practices, or indeed of
any condemnation of them. Over the course of Chinese history, sexuality was simply
not important to Taoists (male or female), and sexual practices appear only at the

33As Michel Strickmann has noted, "Western scholars generally have placed emphasis on certain
practices or crafts that they suppose have been particularly 'Taoist,' notably the quest for physical
immortality, breath control, techniques of sexual union, herbalism, dietetics, and alchemy. In such a view,
though...there is some ambiguity between what is specifically Taoist and what is simply Chinese." Michel
Strickmann, "Taoism, History of," in The New EncyclopediaBrittanica (1980), Macropedia, 17: 1044-45. In
fact, research of the 1980s and 1990s has demonstrated that none of those practices was typically (much
less exclusively) "Taoist."
34 Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body, translated by Karen C. Duval (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), pp. 146, 149. The original French edition, Le Corps Tao'ste,which Wile used, was published in
1982 by Librairie Arthbme Fayard, Paris.

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 BOOK REVIEWS 165

outer fringes of the tradition (along with many other practices long wrongly regarded
as principal elements of Taoism).
To shift to another level, one must note that the organizational and stylistic prob-
lems in this book are so serious that the reader is not merely distracted, but some-
times driven to doubt the competence of the author and/or publisher. Some can be
explained as poor copy-editing. There is, for instance, an unbecoming abundance of
typographical errors, some of which are truly egregious. One would love, for exam-
ple, to hear Mencius and Hsiin-tzu debate the proposition that "even in the present
age, immorality [sic] still is assumed to be a universal birthright" (12). And given
Wile's penchant for witticism, one has to think several times before inferring the
presence of typos in several passages, such as one that reads: "For the patriarch of
the polygamous household, outnumbered by the adult females, the one chink in his
amour [sic] is closed .. ." (15). A more substantial case of poor editing is the opening
paragraph of Chapter VII: it clearly belongs in the introduction to Chapter VIII.
Other problems are much more substantial. The entire Introduction, for instance,
is plagued by inadequate documentation that is as inexplicable as it is shocking. Chi-
nese characters appear only sporadically, and seldom when one truly needs them.
(By contrast, characters are abundant in the notes to the translations in Part Two,
though often without romanization.) Compounding that problem, many works cited
in the text do not appear in the bibliography. When, for instance, one reads of Wang
Mou's Yeh-k'o tsung-shu or Shen Te-fu's Pi-chou-chaiyii-t'an (12), the scholar is non-
plussed: nowhere is there a full bibliographic citation, or even Chinese characters. To
track down such references, one must hie to a sinological library armed only with a
romanized author and title (which, in some such libraries, are largely useless). An
equally strange reference is to "Etiemble's Yun Yu: An Essay on Eroticismand Love in
Ancient China,"which, Wile says, was "published in French" (63). Again, the item is
not in his bibliography, and while one may be able to reconstruct the original French
title, one can only guess as to Etiemble's given name.
The basic problem is that the entire first half of the book (Chapters I-VII) is com-
pletely lacking footnotes. Wile cites both primary texts and secondary studies by
author and title only, giving no page references, even when he quotes extensively.
Among many examples, one is struck by an inflammatory quotation alleging ram-
pant sexual abuse of women and children in late imperial China: it is attributed sim-
ply to "a nineteenth century missionary" (54-55). On the other hand, notes for the
translations in Part Two are, if anything, inordinate. By Wile's own admission (61), "I
have devoted several hundred footnotes to indicating specific shortcomings in" pre-
vious translations by people whose shortcomings hardly need belaboring. One won-
ders whether Part One might have originally been arrayed with a similar abundance
of notes, which were expunged by some misguided editor. It is difficult to imagine
such a miscarriage on the part of so respectable a publisher. Whatever the explana-
tion, the Introduction as it stands does a disservice to the reader, the subject, and the
author himself.
Finally, one cannot pass over Wile's fondness for the colorful bon mot. In his en-
thusiasm for the clever turn of phrase, he creates some confusion, as with his refer-
ence to "this breatharian state" (65), which one painfully deciphers as a
too-clever-by-half neologism coined to parallel the word "vegetarian." Wile is also
given to inscrutable metaphors, as when he declares that "the Chinese have done for
sex what they have done for the soybean" (5), or that "[r]ather than squandering the

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166 ChineseLiterature:Essays, Articles Reviews 16 (1994)

gold coin of sexual energy, it is pounded thin enough to guild [sic] the entire body in
a coat of shining armor" (73). It seems that the author and publisher wished to pro-
duce a book lively enough to engage students and general readers. But one doubts
that such readers will have the patience to plow far into this book, and Wile's at-
tempts at cleverness and topicality will likely be lost upon the scholarly reader.
In sum, this book is both fascinating and frustrating. Clearly the product of years
of painstaking research, it not only provides sound translations of a number of inter-
esting and important texts, but it often corrects earlier writers' errors, and at times
edifies even the most seasoned sinologist with insights of true profundity. For all of
the book's flaws, it will clearly be the authoritative study of traditional Chinese sexu-
ality for many years, and all sinologists should find something of value in it. On the
other hand, novices and non-specialists may take from this book misconceptions as
serious as those that Wile dispels. While his knowledge of Chinese sexual practices
seems beyong challenge, his attempts to relate them to the social, intellectual and re-
ligious history of premodern China are often unsuccessful. For those reasons, this
book should be used with some caution.
Russell Kirkland
University of Georgia

Enchantmentand Disenchantment:Loveand Illusion in ChineseLiterature,by Wai-Yee Li.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 294. US $35.00 (cloth).

This book makes an ambitious attempt to trace an important theme and aesthet-
ics in the Chinese literary tradition-the dialectics of enchantment and disenchant-
ment, love and enlightenment, and illusion and reality-in different genres, showing
how poetry, drama, and classical fiction influenced the writing of the eighteenth-
century masterpiece Hung-lou meng.
Revised from her Ph.D. dissertation "The Rhetoric of Fantasy and of Irony: Stud-
ies in Liao-chaichih-i and Hung-lou meng" (Princeton University, 1987), the book ob-
tains its title from the name of the goddess, Disenchantment (Ching-huan hsien-ku),
who appears in Pao-yii's dream vision in chapter 5 of the Hung-lou meng and whose
mission is to disenchant through enchantment. By "enchantment" Li means "the proc-
ess of being drawn into another world that promises sensual and spiritual fulfill-
ment," while "disenchantment" is the "awareness of enchantment as mere
enchantment, a condition of limited duration subject to inevitable demolition" (3).
The paradox of "enlightenment through love," according to Li, is essential to the his-
tory of fictionality in Chinese literature.
The introductory chapter traces the prototype of the goddess Disenchantment
from the ambivalent divine woman in the Ch'u tz'u and the fu (rhyme-prose) to Han
and later periods such as "Fu on the Goddess of the River Lo" and "Fu on
Stilling the
Passions," demonstrating how the dialectics of feeling (ch'ing) and negation or tran-
scendence of feeling (pu-ch'ing) have already existed in this poetic tradition as
epito-
mized by the goddess figure.
Chapter Two moves to the late Ming which, Li contends, discovered radical sub-
jectivity and was obsessed with self-expression and the transformative power of love.
Beginning with an analysis of Chang Tai's fascination with dreams and illusions, Li
then turns to the dramatic mode in which the dramatist is both dreamer and the

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