The Three Leaps of Wang Lun Read Free

Yat-sen to topple the Ch’ing dynasty.
    The historical Wang Lun was a short, stocky martial arts adept from western Shantung, who taught therapeutic yoga and meditation as well as boxing, and became regarded by his disciples as a White Lotus sect teacher. 19 His 26 direct pupils had pupils of their own, totalling perhaps two or three hundred; they included a travelling actress, peddlars, Buddhist monks, minor yamen employees, possibly salt smugglers. The actress (a detail unknown to Döblin but in keeping with the atmosphere of the novel) was a pretty and accomplished acrobat, who was cured by Wang Lun of a skin infection. Widowed, she was taken by Wang as his “daughter”, mistress in fact; later she brought a dozen women, former associates, into the movement. (During the rebels’ final stand she put superstitious fear into the Imperial troops, whose bullets and arrows left her unscathed. Only when the soldiers fired the severed genitals of a captured rebel at her was she killed.) In 1771 Wang began to talk of “manifesting the Way” and to plot rebellion. His motivation is unclear: perhaps an Imperial tour of the district brought home the contrast between ruler and ruled; perhaps Government action from 1768 onwards against kindred sects, resulting in executions and banishments, led to a stark choice between rebellion or arrest. Millenarian preaching had its own dynamic, as vague predictions became ever more definite preparations for the arrival of the Future Buddha.
    Forced to premature action by the leak of their plans, Wang and his followers rose in the autumn of 1774, attacking several towns in western Shantung before gathering in the city of Linch’ing, where Imperial troops besieged them. Within a month the rebels were defeated, Wang dead. They had numbered just a few thousand. Other sectarian revolts occurred in 1786, 1796–1803, and 1813, the latter far more bloody and widespread.
    The empire under Ch’ien-lung was larger and stronger than it had ever been. The learned, energetic Emperor—poet, patron of scholars, lover of the hunt—had done his duty to Heaven and his ancestors. Sinkiang had been conquered by the ruthless Chao Hui; Tibet was under Chinese control. But the Wang Lun uprising was a portent of the long decay that would last until 1911, and the Panchen Lama’s death from smallpox, during a visit to Peking of great significance, also rattled the Imperial government. Chao Hui, in the novel the prime instigator of violence, actually died ten years before Wang Lun’s hopeless venture, and the Panchen Lama’s fatal visit, described in such vivid, tender, horrific terms in Book Three, actually occurred six years later. Poetic licence allows the novel to draw from these events a coherent theme: the theme of earthly power against the power of the Way.
    Döblin gave an account of his conception of
Wang Lun
in a 1929 essay, “The Structure of the Epic Work”. 20 “I have it in mind, for example,” he wrote,
    to depict a revolutionary ferment in a population, and as a start a harshly lit scene urges itself on me, an attack on a high official, a night scene. This is then felt entirely as an introduction, a kind of muffled drumroll, a single sharp report, then silence. Each individual point is fully worked out from the character of this violent, eerie prelude.… I began a Chinese novel with just such a drumbeat and just such a muffled roll of subterranean revolution.
    The German reader finds this passage puzzling, for the introductory scene outlined here was dropped from the first edition of the novel and has never been restored. 21 Yet years later Döblin saw it as the indispensable starting point for the structure and the dynamic of the whole work. Why was it dropped? How does its absence affect the novel?
    The scene, included here as the Prologue, sets the theme firmly in a political context. The attack on Chao Lao-hsü is a political act; its consequence—the conspiring of civil and military