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Author ORCID Identifier

0009-0001-7488-3825

Abstract

This paper proposes and defends the concept of affirmative transcendence through a systematic analysis of the 2012 Chinese television drama Mazu (38 episodes, CCTV). Affirmative transcendence names a structure in which the protagonist achieves sacred status (shen 神) not by negating her human relationships but by maintaining them while exhibiting a mode of moral perception that exceeds the limits of role-based ethics. The paper argues that what is analytically distinctive about this structure is its internal character: the tradition is not rejected but exceeded, and the exceeding is accomplished through resources the tradition itself provides. The paper identifies two complementary sets of resources. The Confucian sage-king ideal, actualized through Mazu’s universal moral concern, popular mandate, and practice of moral transformation (jiaohua), provides a form of authority that licenses her departure from specific role-prescriptions regarding marriage, domesticity, and the scope of female authority. The remaining resources are not Confucian alone. A non-relational mode of moral perception (responsive affect, ganying) is articulated in all three traditions the drama inherits: in the Daoist mirror-mind, in the Buddhist ideal of responding to cries of suffering, and, within Confucianism itself, in Zhu Xi’s and Wang Yangming’s formulations; and it is sustained in the drama beyond any single school’s articulation. A recognizably Buddhist practice of compassionate relinquishment (dāna) transcends specific Confucian prescriptions where the Confucian vocabulary supplies no alternative. And a folk-religious repertoire of the numinous (prophecy, thaumaturgic power, celestial mentorship) supplies the extraordinary capacities from which the protagonist’s obligations arise. The paper further examines the drama’s treatment of identity continuity through deification, arguing that the invention of a memory-preservation crisis that the tradition’s metaphysics does not generate dramatizes the claim that transcendence is expansion rather than substitution, and analyzes the structural limits that the institution of marriage imposes on affirmative transcendence. The concept operates simultaneously as a reconciliation of tensions internal to the Confucian ethical imagination and as an authorization of reinterpretation capable of challenging its specific prescriptions.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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30

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