Akihiro Osawa

The tale of filial piety known as "A Spurting Spring of Dancing Carp" 湧泉躍鯉 that appears in the Twenty-Four Tales of Final Piety 二十四孝 and elsewhere recounts the story of the filial son Jiang Shi 姜詩 and his aged mother, and how Jiang Shi's wife Mrs. Pang 龐氏 cared filially for her mother-in-law even though she had been driven from her home. The denouement of "a spurting spring of dancing carp" is unusual, however, in that it is the result of the filial care provided by the wife, Mrs. Pang. By way of contrast, all that Jiang Shi could claim to have done was simply to have abandoned his wife due to his mother's thirst and nothing more. Tracing the content of "A Spurting Spring of Dancing Carp", one learns that the wife's filial care has been denigrated and there has been a move to rewrite the tale of the wife as filial mate into a story of the son's filial piety. It appears that two distinct types of tales, that of the miracle of carp appearing in a spring, which was originally seen in the tale of "Shi-you's filial piety'' 士遊孝淳 found in the Dong-guan han-ji 東觀漢記, the Shui-jing zhu 水經注, and the Hua-yang guo zhi 華陽國志, and that of the tormented wife driven from her home, as seen in the tale of "Pang who was filial to her mother-in-law" 龐行孝姑(also in the Hua-yang guo zhi), were transmitted separately. It also appears that they were joined later in the "Tales of Virtuous Women" 列女傳 in the History of the Later Han 後漢書. This was a tale centering on Mrs. Pang and therefore appropriate to the "Tales of Virtuous Women", but the fact that Jiang Shi had been appointed to office during the Six-Dynasties period was esteemed, and thus he came to be exalted as a filial son. The name of Jiang Shi grew to have a distinct life of its own, growing out from under the shadow of the tale of the "Filial wife Mrs. Pang". As the name Jiang Shi came to be synonymous with filial piety, his action, i.e., driving his wife out of the house for the sake of his mother, came to be equated with filial piety, and Jiang Shi became linked with the tale of the banished wife 出妻, with which his story was recounted. However, when the Twenty-four Tales of Final Piety were recorded in writing during the Yuan dynasty for purposes of edification in the Xiao-Xin 孝行錄 and the A Collection of Verse on the Twenty-four Tales of Final Piety 二十四孝詩選, the motif of the tormented wife driven from her home no longer appeared, and then in late Ming one even sees the filial piety of the son and his wife being emphasized. One witnesses in this manner the denigration of the wife's status in the sphere of literature for moral edification, but, on the other hand, there also existed those tales like the "Record of Dancing Carp" 躍鯉記, in which the tribulations of Mrs. Pang and the love between her and her child An-an 安安 are depicted. To the extent that filial piety can be recognized in the Jiang Shi who nevertheless submissively drove out his wife, and who would not recount his pain at the death of his child when he sought to draw water, he serves neither as a figure of a husband nor of a father. It is the wife, whose husband had been usurped by her mother-in-law, who possesses the son, and in this act, which compensates for the denial of the emotional bond between husband and wife in the name of filial piety, the unity of mother and child is elevated in the name of filiality.