Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

to obtain social status. We cannot say that she is the serene image that she presents to herself and others. The imagined self, as seen with Du Liniang’s self-portrait being hidden in the garden, differs considerably from her real self with its inner troubles and external emaciation, as well as from the person who expresses herself in wordplay to her lover Liu Mengmei 柳夢梅 and her parents. Is she the beloved daughter seen and imagined by her parents, the little girl segregated in their house, waiting for their decision to join another family into marriage and bear them a longed-for male heir? She certainly is not, for her awakening to sexual desires and love is completely ignored by her parents as well as by her pedant teacher.¹⁵ Another Du Liniang is found also in the image created by Mengmei after he discovers her portrait. In his imagination grown out of the contemplation of her painted figure, she becomes the increasingly attractive object of desire, sublimated in the inner beauty which he attributes to her. In analyzing Du Liniang’s split identity—the separate entities of the corpse, the ghost, and the portrait figure—Tina Lu has stressed Du Bao’s 杜寶 doubts were not so absurd: any rational scholar who meets an unknown youngster being involved in many strange events, such being the case of the passionate and naïve lover of Liniang and his beloved dead daughter, could honestly consider him either an ambitious adventurer, a liar, or a tomb robber.¹⁶ Thus, Tina Lu further comments: “[d]oes Du Bao think the ending represents the culmination of a romantic comedy or a frightening conspiracy?”¹⁷

The complexity of the question concerning the unity or oblivion-dissolution of self is even more complicated if we consider Buddhism and Daoism doctrines that have influenced the Neo-Confucianism.¹⁸ Suffice it to recall here the influence of Buddhism in reworking these notions, especially of the concept of anatta (Sanskrit anatman, meaning “no-self”) which helped acknowledge that there is no permanent, eternal, unchanging, or autonomous “self” identified with an individual body or life.