Chinese Literature

妙玉栊翠庵 · 7

Leaf 7 of the Red Chamber · 槛外人 One Outside the Rails

Miaoyu 妙玉

In Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢 (c. 1791) · in the Main register (正冊) · nicknamed 槛外人 “One Outside the Rails”

A nun who means to burn the cup a guest drank from and signs her card One Outside the Rails: her leaf carries the register's coldest line, purity sunk in muck.

Origin
Of a prosperous family at Suzhou; put into a nunnery as a child to cure her illnesses
Given
Kept the garden nunnery under her own roof, its tea, its cups and its standards of clean
Rank
Fifth leaf of the main roll — the only one of the Twelve already under a religious vow
判詞 The register verse

欲洁何曾洁， 云空未必空。 可怜金玉质， 终陷淖泥中。

She wanted purity — was she ever clean? She spoke of emptiness — was it ever empty? Pity this substance of gold and jade: it ends sunk in the black mire.

畫 One fine piece of jade, fallen into mud and dirt.

The great deeds 大事記

  1. ch. 18

    Entering Green-Gem Hermitage

    入庵

    Fetched by formal invitation to take charge of the garden's nunnery, she moves into Green-Gem Hermitage with her own three attendants and refuses to be called on.

  2. ch. 41

    The Tea of Five-Year Snow

    品茶

    Entertains the old dowager's party: an aged tea, snow swept off plum blossoms and buried five years, one cup for Baoyu, and a valuable old cup she means to burn after Granny Liu uses it.

  3. ch. 63

    A Card Signed Outside the Rails

    拜帖

    Sends Baoyu a birthday card signed One Outside the Rails; he is too awed to reply until Xiu-yan tells him to answer as One Inside the Rails.

  4. ch. 112

    The Drugged Nunnery

    遭劫

    Robbers find the nunnery open on the night her mind has slipped, drug the room and carry her off; the household, frightened of the affair, makes no search.

結局 The ending

Her verse says it before the story shows it: wanting purity she was never pure, calling things empty they were never empty, and the gold-and-jade substance sinks at last into the slime. The tune beside it had warned that the too proud are envied and the too clean is loathed by the world.

In the same register & chapters 同冊

The book itself: what happens, how long it is, which English version to read — The story · How long it is · Which translation · The lamp-oil night · The family tree · The first expulsion