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Notes
2 Depending on context and usage, qing can refer to colors as varied as blue, green, or black. This is why the qing in the different forms of the White Snake’s companion’s name appear in English translation sometimes as “blue” and sometimes as “green,” and her stage costume can be either color.
3 Probably the most famous appearance of this crossing place (du 渡) across the river dividing the mortal world from the dwelling place of the Buddha is chapter 98 of the Ming novel, The Journey to the West (Xiyou ji 西游記), where only the Monkey King is willing to think about making the crossing and so the Tang Monk and his disciples end up getting ferried across the river.
4 Jing are animals (or sometimes plants or even things) who have, by dint of extended self-cultivation, attained magic powers, including the ability to take on human form.
5 The translation of the second installment below is based on the text given as an appendix to Jiang Yuxiang 江玉祥, Zhongguo yingxi 中國影戲 (Chinese shadow theater; Chengdu: Sichuan renmin, 1992), pp. 315–30. The original of that text is described by Jiang (p. 330) as “a manuscript produced from memory and edited” (huiyi zhengli de chaoben 回憶整理的抄本) by Chen Jiyu 陳繼虞, the sole surviving member at the time of the book’s publication of Chunle yuan 春樂園, a famous shadow troupe in Chengdu during the 1920–1930s. Jiang says that Chen was over seventy years old when the manuscript was recorded. The play would be considered an example of the Chengdu Shadows tradition and uses the same music as the tanxi 彈戲 genre of Sichuan opera. On the source of the text of the first installment, see below.
6 For English translations of the play, see Donald Chang and William Packard, trs., “The White Snake,” in John D. Mitchell, ed., The Red Pear Garden: Three Great Dramas of Revolutionary China (Boston: David R. Godine Publishers, 1973), pp. 49–120, and Yang Hsienyi and Gladys Yang, trs., The White Snake: A Peking Opera (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1957).
7 Yang Hsienyi and Gladys Yang, trs., Lu Xun, Selected Works of Lu Hsun, Volume Two (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1964), p. 83.
8 Lu Xun, “Lun Leifeng ta de daodiao” 论雷峰塔的倒掉 (On the collapse of Thunder Peak Pagoda), Lu Xun quanji 魯迅全集 (Complete works of Lu Xun), 16 vols. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1981), 1: 172.
9 This is absent in Tian Han’s version.
10 The story was preserved in chapter 458 of Taiping guangji 太平廣記 (Broad gleanings of the Taiping reign period). For an English translation, see Wilt L. Idema, The White Snake and Her Son (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2009), pp. 115–17. In the same section (pp. 117–18), Idema also translates two tales from Hong Mai’s 洪邁 (1123–1202) Yijian zhi 夷堅志 (Records of the listener), one in which a man marries a woman who always wears a white gown but prevents others from seeing her in the bath (when the husband does finally get to see her in the bath he sees her as a big white snake and is shocked at first but then gets back together with her but ends up dying early), and another in which a young seductive woman is revealed to be two snakes (a large snake and a small snake because she is already pregnant) from whom the young man she has seduced is saved by a Daoist priest, but in which the color white does not figure.
11 White Snake’s husband’s name changes over time from Xu Xuan 許宣 to Xu Xian 許仙. The Xuanzan in Xi Xuanzan’s name might actually be his official title. See Idema, The White Snake and Her Son, p. 126, n. 12.
12 A translation of the story is available in Idema, The White Snake and Her Son, pp. 121–34.
13 English translations include H. C. Chang, tr., Chinese Literature: Popular Fiction and Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973), pp. 203–61, and Shuhui and Yunqin Yang, trs., Stories to Caution the World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), pp. 474–505. The latter includes Feng Menglong’s marginal comments.
14 Chang, tr., Chinese Literature, p. 253; Feng Menglong, ed., Jingshi tongyan, 2 vols. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1984), 2: 460.
15 Chang, tr., Chinese Literature, p. 257; Feng Menglong, ed., Jingshi tongyan, 2: 462.
16 The play is reproduced in the convenient volume, Huang Tubi 黃圖珌 and Ma Rufei 馬如飛 et al., Baishe zhuan hebian 白蛇傳合編 (Collected versions of the White Snake story; Taibei: Guting shuwyu, 1975), pp. 281–338. This is a Taiwanese reprint of Fu Xihua 傅惜華, comp., Baishe zhuan ji 白蛇傳集 (Collection of versions of the White Snake story; Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1958).
17 In the Jingshi tongyan story and this Qing play, White Snake’s maid is in fact a fish spirit.
18 A scene summary of Fang’s version is available in Pei-yi Wu, “The White Snake: The Evolution of a Myth in China” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1969), pp. 198–215. For more on these two plays, plus an intermediary version, see Idema, The White Snake and Her Son, pp. 137–49.
19 See Shi Huijiao 釋慧皎, Gaoseng zhuan 高僧傳 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1992), pp. 5–6.
20 See Judith M. Boltz, A Survey of Taoist Literature: Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1987), pp. 71–78. The anonymous Ming novel, The Iron Tree (Tieshu ji 鐵樹記) is replete with stories of Xu’s subjugation of serpents and evil dragons. For bibliographic details and plot summary, see the entry on the novel by Sun Yizhen 孫一珍 in Zhongguo tongsu xiaoshuo zongmu tiyao 中國通俗小說總目提要 (Bibliography of popular Chinese fiction; Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian, 1990), p. 136.
21 Snakes are frequently referred to as dragons in literary works. Even today snakes are sometimes referred to as little dragons.
22 For more on this, see Chen Li Fanping 陳李凡平 (Fan Pen Chen), “Xiangfu sheyao: Yi jianli xin xingyang de jiaodu taolun Chen Jinggu yu shejing de guanxi” 降伏蛇妖: 以建立新信仰的角度討論陳靖姑與蛇精的關係 (Subjugating snake demons: On the relationship between Chen Jinggu and snake sprites from the perspective of the establishment of new religious beliefs), in Zhongguo shoujie Linshui furen Chen Jinggu wenhua xueshu taolun hui lunwen ji 中國首届臨水夫人陳靖姑文化學術研討會論文集 (Essays from the first Chinese symposium on Lady Linshui Chen Jingguo culture), 2 vols. (Gutian, Fujian: n. p., 2010), 1: 35–41. On Chen Jinggu in general, see Brigitte Baptandier, The Lady of Linshui: A Chinese Female Cult, Kristin Ingrid Fryklund, tr. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
23 The character used for “blue,” lan, is different from qing, the one used in the White Snake legend.
24 See Zhejiangsheng wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 浙江省文物考古研究所 (Archaeological research institute of Zhejiang province), ed., Leifeng ta yizhi 雷峰塔遺址 (The site of Leifeng Pagoda; Beijing: Wenwu chuban she, 2005), pl. 231.
25 Ibid., p. 245.
26 See Luo Yonglin 羅永麟, “Baishe zhuan de lishi jiazhi he xianshi yiyi” 白蛇傳的歷史價值和現實意義 (The historical worth and practical significance of The Story of White Snake), in Zhongguo minjian wenyi yanjiu hui Zhejiang fenhui 中國民間文藝研究會浙江分會 (Zhejiang branch of the Chinese popular literature research association), ed., Baishe zhuan lunwen ji 白蛇傳論文集 (Collection of essays on The Story of White Snake; Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji, 1986), p. 18.
27 This is a copy kindly made for me by Professor Jiang Yuxiang of Sichuan University. The original is made up of two manuscripts held in the museum of the university (one contains scenes 1–8 and the other scene 9) that are described in his Zhongguo yingxi, p. 307, where he argues that because the story line of these two manuscripts is very close to that of the Chen Jiyu version of the second installment (translated below), and the museum also owns materials used by Chunle yuan, the manuscripts of the scenes of the first installment are probably a performance script (yanchu ben 演出本) from the same troupe.
28 This version comes from Sichuan sheng Nanchong diqu wenhua ju 四川省南充地區文化局 (Nanchong District, Sichuan, Cultural Bureau), ed., Chuanbei piying xi 川北皮影戲 (The shadow theater of Northern Sichuan; Chengdu: Sichuan wenyi, 1989), an out-of-print publication intended for internal distribution only (neibu ziliao 内部資料). I am indebted to Lu Tianxiang 盧天祥 in Tangshan for typing out the entire script for me.
29 I would like to thank Chinese Theatre Works of New York City, which owns Pauline Benton’s play script written by Benton herself in English, for allowing me to obtain a copy of the script and a video of her troupe playing an abridged version of the tale probably created for short performances. The White Snake was the main staple of Pauline Benton’s Red Gate Shadow Players, which took New York City by storm for a few years. This play script will be published in Grant Hayter-Menzies’ Shadow Woman: The Extraordinary Career of Pauline Benton (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming).
30 Published in Wilhem Grube and Emil Kreps, eds., Chinesische Schattenspeile (Chinese shadow theater; Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1915), pp. 1–34. The collection has a Chinese name, Yan yingju 燕影劇 (Shadow plays of the Beijing area) and was printed in Yanzhou Prefecture in Shandong by a Catholic missionary press. It can be accessed online in retyped and photo reprint formats at http://wagang.econ.hc.keio.ac.jp/∼chengyan/index.php?『燕影劇』 and http://kindai.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/926009/120.
31 I am immensely grateful to Lu Tianxiang for his assistance in providing me with copies of both the Tangshan and Laoting play scripts for this play, which involved personally typing out a copy of the Laoting play script from the subtitles of a video performance that can only be accessed online in China. I am also grateful to Guo Xiufen 郭秀芬, who helped procure for me a copy of a hand-copied manuscript of the play from the shadow troupe in Tangshan, and had Lu Tianxiang upload it for me in digital format. Besides these play scripts of the story, an eight-part (bu 部) shadow theater script with the title Baishe zhuan is reproduced in Huang Kuanzhong 黃寬重 et al., eds., Su wenxue congkan 俗文學叢刊 (Collectania of folk literature), 500 vols. (Taibei: Xin wenfeng, 2001–2006), 338: 5–339: 164. No information about the provenance of the script is given.
32 In Tian Han’s Beijing opera, Little Blue burns down the pagoda, while in the Laoting and Tangshan shadow plays, Little Blue topples it by force.
33 I have not encountered another shadow play on the topic of Little Blue’s revenge. Although the play translated here does not seem to bear too much resemblance to Little Blue’s vengeance as found in other genres, it might be considered a variation of this theme. In the nineteenth-century baojuan 寶卷 (precious scroll) translated by Idema, Little Blue builds up her magical powers on Mount Emei 峨眉 for seven years and then tries to take revenge on Fahai. She fails and is taken by Dragon Daughter to Guanyin (The White Snake and Her Son, pp. 66–67). In the zidi shu 子弟書 version translated by Idema, Little Blue accedes to the request of the imprisoned White Snake to go to the Western Paradise to see the Buddha on her behalf (pp. 97–101). The summary of a tanci 彈詞 (songs for plucking) titled Yiyao zhuan 義妖傳 (Tale of the virtuous demon) in Idema’s volume (pp. 153–55) has Little Blue sneaking away with the intent to take revenge after White Snake is imprisoned. In the novel, Baishe zhuan qianhou ji 白蛇傳前後集 (Legend of the White Snake, first and second parts), published by the Wuguitang 五桂堂 of Hong Kong (undated but probably originally written or rewritten during Republican times), Little Blue attempts to take revenge on Fahai in Chapter 46 after perfecting her skills for fourteen years on Beixuan 北玄 Mountain. The reviewer who pointed out the above, for which I am most grateful, also mentions a long narrative shange 山歌 (mountain song) from the Wu area that records the adventures of Little Blue in detail and has her fight a great number of sprites and demons.
34 See Wei Fuping 魏福平, Emei congtan 峨眉叢談 (Discussions on Emei; Emei: Xinan jiaotong daxue, 1986), p. 96.
35 Ibid., p. 112. Wei quotes a district county gazetteer for this information.
36 Lu Xun’s short story, “Achang yu Shanhai jing” 阿長與山海經 (Achang and The Classic of Mountains and Seas), describes his nurse telling him that Taiping soldiers had her and other women lined up along the city wall with their pants off so that cannons shooting at the city would either become incapacitated or explode. See Lu Xun sanshi nian ji 魯迅三十年集 (Collection of thirty years of Lu Xun’s writing), Vol. 16 (Hong Kong: Xinyi chuban she, 1970), pp. 18–25. A tale about the founder of a type of Nuo ritual known as Incense Altar (xianghuo shenhui) 香火神會 also mentions the use of female nudity as a weapon against Buddhist deities. When the founder, Scholar Shuijin 水金書生, was trapped by ten thousand streams of golden light emitted by various Buddhist treasure-weapons, ten female immortals he had saved earlier came to his rescue. They arrived on a cloud stark naked, and the golden light dispersed instantly and the bodhisattvas opposing them left in defeat. See Huang Wenhu 黄文虎, Jiangsu Liuhe xian Ma’an xiang Wuxing cun Songzhuang ji Maji zhen Jianshan cun Gongying Hanren de jiapu xianghuo shenhui 江蘇六合縣馬鞍鄉五星村宋莊及馬集鎮尖山村龔營漢人的家譜香火神會 (A Family Incense Altar of the Han People at Songzhuang, Wuxingcun and Gongying, Jianshancun, Majizhen of Ma’anxiang at Liuhexian of Jiangsu; Taibei: Shihezheng jijinhui, 1996), p. 55. One of the most elaborate magical battle arrays used by the Khitans against the generals of the Yang family contained a barbarian princess standing in the nude with a skull in her hand. She is supposed to render the enemy unconscious by weeping out loud when she encounters them. See Yangjia jiang yanyi 楊家將演義 (Romance of the Yang family generals; Beijing: Baowen tang shudian, 1986), chapter 33, pp. 174–75. The earliest edition of this novel is dated to 1606. For more examples on the power of female nudity, see Jimmy Yung Fung Yu, Sanctity and Self-inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500–1700 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 138, and Eric Henry, “The Social Significance of Nudity in Early China,” Fashion Theory 3·4 (1999): 475–86.
37 See Lienü zhuan 列女傳 (Accounts of illustrious women; SPPY edition), juan 7, item 3, pp. 2b–3a.
38 See the item “Lingyundu” 凌雲渡 in Chuanju jumu cidian 川劇劇目辭典 (Dictionary of the repertoire of Sichuan opera; Chengdu: Sichuan cishu, 1999), p. 57. The idea that Fahai ended up in a crab shell (which was thought to explain the color of the roe to be found in crabs) is also mentioned by Lu Xun in his essay on the collapse of Leifeng Pagoda quoted above.
39 See http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTgzNjYxMjE2.html (part one) and http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTgzNzY4MDc2.html (part two), accessed March 26, 2013.
40 According to Jiang Yuxiang, no one is able to perform such an extensive shadow play in Sichuan any more.
41 For one take on Li Diaoyuan and Chuanju, and mention of his authorship of Lingyun du, see Jiang Weiming 蔣維明, “Cong Qianlong chao houqi yige ‘feng jiao xue’ xiban kan Chuanju de xingcheng” 從乾隆朝後期一個風絞雪戲班看川劇的形成 (Looking at the development of Chuanju from the case of a mixed musical mode troupe of the later part of the Qianlong reign), Sichuan xiju 四川戲劇 (Sichuan theater) 2007·3: 12–15.
42 Jiang Yuxiang, Zhongguo yingxi, pp. 304-305. On the scripts that he is comparing, see pp. 306–308, where he comes to the conclusion that the extant play version is earlier than the shadow theater one.
43 The synopsis is based on two manuscripts, one covering the first eight scenes and the second the ninth scene only. For a description of the two manuscripts and their relationship, see Jiang Yuxiang, ZHONGGUO YINGXI, p. 306. As noted above, I am indebted to Jiang Yuxiang for providing me a copy of the former.
44 Although the Buddhist realm is usually referred to as xitian 西天 (the Western Paradise), this play script uses xifang 西方, which I have translated as “The Western Realm.”
45 According to the shadow play version of the White Snake story from Northern Sichuan mentioned above, this Daoist priest was originally a frog sprite that had cultivated itself for five hundred years in order to transform into human form.
46 The summary of this last scene is based on Jiang Yuxiang’s synopsis in his Zhongguo yingxi, p. 302.
47 Professor Jiang Yuxiang learned to perform shadow theater from Chen Jiyu, the source of this script. I would like to thank Professor Jiang for explaining to me some of the technical terms in the script. As noted above, the text being translated appears in the appendix to Jiang Yuxiang, Zhongguo yingxi, pp. 315–30.
48 In the original, the cast of characters for each scene appears before each scene. I have provided a comprehensive single list to save space. A number of the characters transform into different shapes. Transformations appear in this list only when the stage directions use a different name when they speak and present them as if they were a separate character.
49 Vajras are the Buddha’s warrior guardians.
50 It is the script itself that presents this option.
51 As told in chapter 42 of The Journey to the West, Red Boy is not a willing convert and Guanyin puts the same kind of fillet around his head that can be used to give him tremendous headaches as is also used in the novel to discipline the Monkey King.
52 This appellation evolved from shancai tongzi 善才童子, Boy of Excellent Talent, to shancai tongzi 善財童子, Boy of Excellent Wealth, a god of wealth.
53 This is a festival held on the 15th of the 7th lunar month for the deliverance of hungry ghosts.
54 Erliu (and sanban, daoban, etc., below) is the name of an aria type. Below, when arias are shared by multiple characters, the stage directions do not say that the next character continues the same aria, but the reader should assume that that is what is happening.
55 Yingzhou and Penglai are islands off the east coast of China where immortals were supposed to dwell.
56 The first four characters of this line appear at the beginning of each stanza of the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經) poem “Heming” 鶴鳴 (Cranes call), a poem which has been read allegorically about how good people can be obscure but still be able to become known, but it does not seem likely that an intentional allusion to that reading of the poem is involved here.
57 In this script, the end of arias are marked by the character qi 齊. According to Professor Jiang Yuxiang, this indicates that the music accompanying the arias stops at this point. This character does not appear after the end of the instrumental pieces.
58 Literally, a golden roar.
59 Refers to the jewels found after the historical Buddha’s body was cremated.
60 Of course, in shadow theater, the figures appear behind a screen and not on a stage, and one could speak of this character as first singing “off screen.” The stage direction actually says nei 內 (inside) here, which could be also translated as “back stage,” but in both cases what happens in the performance is being analogized to what happens in stage productions, something that is quite common in the stage directions in this script. The reader of either the translation or the original should always keep in mind, of course, that the action takes place on a backlit screen.
61 The mountain is said to have gotten this name either because its shape resembled the head of a vulture, or that vultures were numerous on account of the exposed corpses there.
62 This is the name of Hangzhou during the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279).
63 This refers to Xu Shilin, White Snake and Xu Xian’s son.
64 Little Blue is the leader. She is addressed as niangniang 娘娘 (Madam) by Red Snake and the water creatures.
65 These are four Buddhist guardian deities whose statues are typically placed just inside the main gate of a temple.
66 In the first installment it is said that this bag holds the Ocean-Stabilizing Magical Pearl (Dinghai shenzhu 定海神珠) that belonged to Zhao Gongming.
67 Literally, Amitabha Buddha. This is the most common Buddhist invocation.
68 The previous arias have all been made up of couplets that typically have the same number of characters in each line and the arias themselves can be as short or as long as necessary and in the translation the stage directions have been translated as “sings in [name of the aria type]”. The technical name for this general aria form is banqiang ti 板腔體. “Pudeng e” belongs to a different class of arias that use “tune matrices” (qupai 曲牌) that stipulate the number of lines and number of characters in each line. When this class of arias is used in the play, the translation of the stage directions will read “sings to [name of the qupai]” to distinguish them from the other type.
69 The text has a note making clear that 般若 (wisdom), which might ordinarily be read as banruo, should be read bore.
70 Boluo 波羅 is now used to refer to the pineapple but here it is surely a short form for youtan boluo 優曇波羅 (Sansrit: udumbara; also transliterated as wutan baluo 烏曇跋羅, youtan bohua 優曇缽華, wutan hua 烏曇華, etc.), a plant mentioned by the Buddha that was supposed to bloom only once every three thousand years.
71 Buddhism considers the body, with its flesh and skin, as illusory and only prone to decay.
72 In the case of this and the other instrumental tunes the main instrument is the suona 嗩吶, a reed instrument that is blown (chui 吹 is the term used in the stage directions).
73 What kind of beheading and transformation is involved becomes clear below.
74 The text says that they have already passed the crossing, but that contradicts what follows below.
75 Red Boy is able to make use of a special kind of fire but this image of him flying on wheels (or a single wheel) of fire seems to borrow from the iconography of another boy with special powers, Nezha 哪吒.
76 Literally, little/young elder brother. Girls used to call boys they are attracted to “elder brother” as a term of endearment.
77 Mandarin ducks are supposed to mate for life and symbolize conjugal bliss.
78 “Wind and flowers” and “snow and moon” are two ways to talk about romance.
79 The fact that he has just defeated them accords well with this statement, but the notion that he now needs to pull out the stops and use his strongest weapon on them (see below) does not.
80 The traditional hairdo for young boys.
81 She uses nu 奴 (slave) to refer to herself here, which is a very common way for proper women to refer to themselves before others in popular literature, but this marks the first time that any of the sprites in female form have done this. She quickly goes back to using the standard first person pronoun to refer to herself.
82 Mount Wu is in one of the Three Gorges on the Yangzi River. It is the reputed site of an overnight love tryst between a local goddess and King Xiang of Chu, a story that is the source for referring to making love as “clouds and rain” (yunyu 雲雨). The “Yang Terrace” of the third line of this aria also features in that story.
83 There is presumably a pun hidden in this line but what pun is not clear.
84 These are metaphors for the mind and will figure prominently, for instance, in The Journey to the West.
85 If the way bees pollinate flowers is used in the West to talk about the act of human sex obliquely, in China the emphasis tends to be more on how bees (i.e., males) are “disloyal” and flit from one flower to the next.
86 Usually one person (the manipulator in some traditions, a different person in others) speaks and sings for all the roles in traditional shadow plays. The shadow figure that moves is the one associated with the voice behind the screen, so when all three figures move, the audience assumes that they are speaking at once.
87 As noted above, the idea that Red Boy flies on a fire wheel or wheels seems to have been borrowed from Nezha’s iconography.
88 Of which he is one, of course.
89 This is what the text says, but a typo could be involved.
90 Drinking medicinal wine spiked with realgar on the “Double Five” festival is what causes the White Snake to reveal her true form to Xu Xian.
91 Xiachang kou 下場口. As is also the case with the traditional Chinese theater, in Chinese shadow theater almost all exits take place on the audience’s stage right and that is where the “exit” is located.
92 Both Fahai and fabao (Buddhist treasures) begin with the same character, fa 法 (dharma).
93 Red Boy already identified Fish Girl as a carp sprite but this is the first time one of her fellow sprites refers to her this way.
94 According to the first installment, Clam Girl was elected as the head of the water creatures and addressed by them as Auntie Clam (Bangke gugu 蚌壳姑姑).
95 I.e., they enter.
96 Here she refers to herself as niangniang, the same term of respect the others have been using when they speak to her.
97 Tiji wantou 提技挽頭. According to Professor Jiang Yuxiang, this term refers to something that the operator of the figures would do to show off his skill.
98 The table refers to the narrow table upon which the shadow screen is placed. The shadow figure of a screen is stuck there in preparation for the special effects to be performed later in this scene.
99 Once again she refers to herself as niangniang.
100 The unusual format here follows the original.
101 Kalpa is a Sanskrit word and refers to a tremendously long period of time.
102 “Daluo jinxian” 大羅金仙 is probably the Buddha who is often called the “golden immortal.”
103 See Fig. 1. For the shadow figures to show their hair in this fashion marks them off from what is proper or normal. How their hair is presented is similar to the way (false) hair is displayed (and swung around) in traditional Chinese theater when an actor plays a character who has met up with a big shock.
104 I.e., bound feet.
105 The three flowers on the head represent Buddhist achievements.
106 The stage directions here do not indicate that he sings below, nor do they give the aria type, but the stage directions that indicate the end of the playing of music (qi 齊) and that the next text is spoken (bai 白) appear after these four lines of verse.
107 As noted above, the “exit” is audience stage right. The “entrance,” conversely, is audience stage left.
108 Seems to be a mistake for “Jin feng ru song” 緊風入松.
109 It is, of course, odd for the Buddha to seem to be commending taking revenge here. The type of righteousness (yiqi 義氣) that the playwright has him speak of here is strongly connected with popular culture and tends to stress the obligations owed to individuals that you are connected with (usually through choice rather than birth) rather than more general obligations to society, truth, etc.
110 The Daoist supreme deity. Although the Buddha seems to be more powerful than the Jade Emperor (for instance, in The Journey to the West, it is up to the Buddha to subdue the Monkey King after the Jade Emperor and the deities under him fail), in popular literature it is common for him to defer to the Jade Emperor, as in this instance.