Gods 087: Wrap-up: Investiture of the Gods
Some listener questions and closing thoughts on Investiture of the Gods.
Transcript
Welcome to the Chinese Lore Podcast, where I retell classic Chinese stories in English. This is episode 87 of Investiture of the Gods.
So here we are, done with the Investiture of the Gods and about ready to go on to our next novel, Journey to the West. But before we do that, I want to use this episode to briefly share some closing thoughts and answer some listener questions about Investiture of the Gods.
When I first started Investiture of the Gods, I mentioned that one of the reasons I decided to cover it before going on to Journey to the West was because it provides a backstory of sorts for some of the side characters in Journey to the West. And one of the questions I got from one of the listeners was which characters from Investiture of the Gods we’ll see in Journey to the West.
So, in no particular order, here are a few: Lotus boy Nezha, his brothers, and his father all show up at one point or another. His fellow Daoist warrior Yang Jian makes an important cameo. Several members of the Chan sect’s class of 12 will also appear in their later incarnations as Bodhisattvas. In fact, one of them ends up playing a pretty key role as an important recurring guest star. Beyond those, we also see some parallels between the two novels where it’s not exactly clear that a particular character from one novel is the same character from the other, but there are a lot of similarities.
Listener John asked: “At the very beginning of Investiture of the Gods, you skipped over a bunch of spoilers. I’m glad you did, but now that the end is in sight I’m really wondering what they said. I’m curious, too, whether you have any thoughts on the role of spoilers like that in Classical Chinese literature. Is it that readers would be expected to know the history, so it puts everyone on the same page? Would past readers have taken surprises differently than modern ones?”
Ah yes, the spoilers. This was something I got some pushback on early in the run as some listeners felt like I was trying too hard to avoid spoilers. I would say I hear ya, but I also stand by my decisions to omit certain things from some early parts of the novel. Mostly, those had to do with revealing Jiang Ziya’s side mission of filling 365 jobs in the bureaucracy of heaven. Revealing that mission so early won’t have been an issue if the novel didn’t then proceed to tell us whenever a character got killed that their soul went to the Terrace of Creation to await the day when they would be made a god. As I said in the previous episode, I felt that really took any emotional stakes out of the story. What’s the point of all these powerful beings slugging it out if in the end, they all end up in the same place with the same fate anyway?
The other major spoiler I was trying to delay for a little bit was about how the Zhou would be the one to displace the Shang as the ruling house. This wasn’t as big a deal as the other spoiler, but it was just kind of annoying to start revealing this before we even established any of the main players on the Zhou side. We had certain lines where some senior member of the Chan sect said, oh let’s save so-and-so and stash them away for when Jiang Ziya leads the Zhou campaign to overthrow the Shang, and some of this was being said before Jiang Ziya even ended up in the service of the Zhou.
As to the question of the role of such spoilers in classic Chinese literature, it’s my observation that many classic Chinese works are written from the perspective of the omniscient narrator. They are also often imbued with a predeterministic outlook on things. See, for instance, every case in Investiture of the Gods where someone laments that so-and-so’s death was preordained and could not be averted by human acts. In many of those cases, there were some line or another earlier in the novel that not only hinted at the character’s demise but actually clearly told you that so-and-so was destined to die.
Because many of these works began as orally transmitted stories before they were written down, I think there probably is an expectation that most if not all the readers would have some level of background knowledge. For instance, they would probably know that Jiang Ziya was a legendary minister who played a key role in helping the Zhou overthrow the Shang, or the broad strokes of some version of Nezha’s origin story, or that some of the characters we meet were in the pantheon of gods from Chinese folk religion.
That dynamic, I think, does affect how these stories are written, read, and told. And I’d also point out that even after these stories were written down as novels, most people’s primary exposure to them for a long time were still through oral storytelling. And those storytellers were constantly tweaking how they handled the source material depending on their audiences and their goals. So I think of my editorial decisions to omit some spoilers in the same vein. I’m speaking to an audience where I can’t assume pre-existing contextual knowledge, so I’m going to tell the story with that in mind. So I most likely would make the same decisions again, though maybe I just won’t have called out as often the places where I did decide to omit a spoiler. But of course, sometimes I did that to make a point, because I feel that the degree to which this novel gives away later plot developments is also one of its weaknesses, when compared to the other novels we’ve covered.
Speaking of that, let’s get into my critique of Investiture of the Gods. Aside from the spoilers, one of my issues with the novel is how repetitive it gets at times. This is something I called out on multiple occasions and something that some of you have noted as well. The most obvious example of this is how repetitive the conversations between characters are on the battlefield. It seemed like every time enemies were about to trade blow, they first took turns claiming to have the will of heaven on their side, and someone on the Zhou side invariably rattled off the litany of terrible things that King Zhou was doing.
Listener David asked about the purpose or context of the novel. For instance, was it a hidden commentary on the court of the day. On that front, the introduction in the 1973 edition of the book suggested that this was indeed one of the themes. The novel was written in the Ming Dynasty, whose founder was notorious for bloody purges. In fact, this was a running theme for the life of the whole dynasty. So it’s easy to read the criticism of King Zhou as veiled commentary on that aspect of the political situation, though I won’t exactly call it veiled given how much the author repeatedly hammers that point.
The repetitive nature of the novel also reared its head in the plot. Once we got to the section of the novel where the Shang was sending one campaign after another to attack the Zhou, it just quickly became a “villains of the week” trope, where a group of Jie sect Daoists or Shang generals or both would show up outside the Zhou capital, present some initial difficulties for our protagonists, maybe kill a few low-level Zhou officers or Chan sect Daoists, and then invariably succumb to the powers of whichever topline Chan Daoist or their Buddha friends that show up in the weekly act of deus ex machina. A little bit of this repetition is ok, but for me that point was maybe 10 Shang armies into the string of 36 that went to attack Western Qi.
All this repetition might’ve been less of an issue if the villains, or more of the heroes for that matter, were better fleshed out. We have that on occasion, like with Grand Tutor Wen on the Shang side or with Nezha on the Zhou side. But for most of the characters, there just wasn’t any level of depth. Even among the recurring characters, there wasn’t a whole lot to distinguish one from the next. One member of the Chan sect’s class of 12, for instance, seemed as flat and bland as the next. Same with the carousel of Shang generals who went west to attack the Zhou.
And it’s even worse among the characters who got killed. Most were introduced specifically for the purpose of participating, and being slain, in the next upcoming fight. So their fates had zero emotional resonance. They were just the redshirts who got killed to show that the situation was serious. And because of the repetitive plot, you quickly catch on to the fact that the situation was never SO serious that our protagonists couldn’t deal with it just by trotting out the leaders of the Chan Sect or their Buddhist buddies. So again, you never felt like there were truly any serious stakes. You were just waiting to see which character would reach into their utility belt and pull out that week’s version of Batman’s shark repellent spray.
My final major criticism of the novel is the fact that at the end, seemingly EVERYBODY became a god, which, as I said in the final episode of the narrative, makes you wonder what was the point of it all. This brings me to a question that came in from listener Kwee, who said:
“The ending of Investiture is thought-provoking because many heroes and villains on both sides of the conflict were canonized as gods. However, this seems contrary to the usual good guy-bad guy demarcation. The ending also seems consistent with that of the Hindu epic Mahabhrata where at the end of the day, the protagonists on both sides all meet in Heaven smiling. Seems that the ancients are able to distinguish virtues even if the characters were unsavory and a lot more open minded about conflict and conduct.”
So on that point, my take is that Investiture of the Gods probably has a definition of “hero” that’s closer to the concept of “hero” found in ancient Greek myths — where being “heroic” was less about morality and more about great feats of strength and power, like killing a bunch of enemies in battle. Certainly Investiture of the Gods is not alone in this, as we see similar dynamics at play in, say, the Water Margin. But even so, I’d say that Investiture of the Gods takes it too far when even King Zhou gets canonized as god. I mean, if the guy who gets his kicks from burning people alive and cutting open pregnant women can be a god, then it seems there really aren’t any standards. Also, some of his sycophant officials also became gods, and you have to wonder exactly what heroic deeds they accomplished to warrant that, considering they were the ones giving the king rotten advice that contributed to his ultimate downfall.
Despite those shortcomings, there are some things I did like about the novel. For instance, I give it credit for building a fictional world that incorporated the myriad myths and gods of Daoism, Buddhism, and Chinese folk religion. Also, some of the early arcs were pretty interesting. I particularly liked the arc following Jiang Ziya in the early days after he left Kunlun Mountain to make his way in the world at age 70, and how he was apparently terrible at just about everything. I also enjoyed the origin story of lotus boy Nezha. Overall, I thought the novel was pretty interesting up to the point where the wars really started.
The other aspect of the novel that I found interesting was the traces of influence from the great works of Chinese literature that preceded Investiture of the Gods. For instance, the various characters’ political commentary would not be out of place in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The cast of characters, each with their own special weapons and skills, calls to mind the outlaws of the Water Margin. And of course, all the supernatural elements would feel at home in the Journey to the West. You can call it copying, paying homage, or just playing to common tropes, but to me it is interesting to see how elements from those earlier works are reflected in their progeny.
To wrap things up, here are a couple more questions, both from listener Giovanni. First, regarding the Chan and Jie Sects of Daoism portrayed in the novel, he asked, “Are the two main sects of the novel still represented in China, or were they still alive as the novel was written? How does the story reflect on the standing on Taoism in society?”
So, neither of those sects actually existed in reality, and the exact origin or inspiration for their names is unknown. Daoism didn’t even exist as a formal religion at the time period in which the Investiture of the Gods was set. Lao Zi, the historical figure deemed the founder of Daoism, won’t be born until some five centuries later.
However, we can make some guesses based on circumstantial evidence and connections. The word Chan typically means orthodox, while the word Jie means evil or deviant. At the time the novel was written, there were two main sects of Daoism, and these were actually codified by the court of the Ming Dynasty. These were the Zhengyi (4,1) and Quanzhen (2,1) Sects. The Zhengyi Sect tended to focus more on charms and incantations. The Ming rulers favored the Zhengyi Sect, and most of the Daoists who were involved in court affairs came from that sect.
The Quanzhen Sect’s members, meanwhile, tended to be on the outside when it came to involvements in the court, and they stressed living as recluses. They focused more on the cultivation of body and mind. In this regard, they even absorbed influences from the Chan Sect of Buddhism that was popular in China.
So based on that, it does seem like the Chan Sect of Daoism in the novel was a stand-in for the Quanzhen Sect, while the Jie Sect was a stand-in for the Zhengyi Sect.
Giovanni also asked, “How should we interpret the basic conflict of the novel between formal loyalty to a lord, even when he is unjust, and loyalty to “the will of heaven” and to a shared sense of justice and propriety Time and time again in the novel different characters are faced with the choice between these two loyalties, incarnated by the Shang and the Zhou respectively. The novel seems to suggest that the second kind of loyalty can trump the first with no particular qualms. How would a Chinese reader interpret this fact? Is the novel ‘seditious’ in a way? Does it not put in question the ordinary bonds of loyalty in Imperial China?”
That’s a great question, and I think you see similar dynamics at play in other classical Chinese works like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, where loyalties are constantly shifting. We hear characters preach to each other about the importance of loyalty to one’s lord, and yet at the same time, we also hear sayings like, “Good birds choose their perch and talented officials choose their lord” as justification for switching loyalties.
Nowhere is this conflict more clearly illustrated than in the character of Flying Tiger. Despite all of King Zhou’s brutality, he remained steadfast in his loyalty to the Shang court. That is, until King Zhou finally went a bridge too far and forced Flying Tiger’s wife to kill herself to avoid dishonor. At that point, he and his family rose up in rebellion.
My take on how people viewed when it’s justifiable to rebel versus staying loyal is that loyalty should be the default until the lord goes so far that his vassals are essentially forced to rebel, and the tipping point for that is supposed to be pretty high. Of course, it’s also highly subjective. You see some of the Shang officials who rebelled doing so when they were facing dire situations in battle, but then this was often justified with “Well King Zhou is just the worst.” So were they renouncing their loyalty to him because he was terrible, or just because the tides had turned against them?
I’ll add that there’s also a notion of “Foolish Loyalty”. This is the idea that one could hold too stubbornly to the concept of loyalty where an undeserving lord is concerned. The eunuch who threw himself on the bonfire that ultimately consumed King Zhou would be one such example. Yes, there was no questioning his loyalty to his lord, but when you give such loyalty to one so obviously evil, is that a good thing? I’d say the traditional Chinese view is that no, it’s not. So every vassal has to make that determination of when their lord has become evil enough that their oath of loyalty to him should be discarded. And if that moment just so happens to coincide with the turning of the tide in battle, well, that’s just how things go.
Anyway, this feels like a good place to cap our time with Investiture of the Gods. I’m going to take a little bit of time off to rest and prepare for our next journey — the Journey to the West. Just stay tuned in to this feed, and you’ll start getting new episodes when I come back in a month or so. Thank you all, as always, for listening, writing, and supporting the Chinese Lore Podcast. Talk to you soon!
Music in This Episode
- “Sao Meo” by Doug Maxwell / Zac Zinger