Abstract
Gao Xingjian’s Snow in August is based on the life of Huineng (633-713), the Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism and founder of the Sudden Enlightenment School. Snow in August is the first time in Chinese drama that Zen has been successfully integrated into a play. Drawn from Huineng’s Platform Sutra (《壇經》) and various koan (《公案》) cases, the play, on the one hand, is about Huineng’s life and teachings, and on the other hand, demonstrates Gao Xingjian’s politics of resistance. In the play, Huineng is first referred to as “the barbarian from the south” and the episodes of Huineng’s life are highlighted in Snow in August. What is the portrayal of Huineng in the play of Gao Xingjian’s Snow in August? Is Huineng, an illiterate Chinese Zen Buddhist master, an enlightened monk? a religious nonconformist? Or a freewheeling political thinker? Is he a mouthpiece of the Chinese quintessential intellectual freedom and spontaneous truth? Is Huineng’s life the perfect vehicle to manifest Gao’s worldview, theatre vision, and philosophy of life? Is Huineng’s life an embodiment of Gao Xingjian’s self-exile, anti-establishment thinking, and politics of resistance? Snow in August suggests that both Huineng and Gao share the same belief that the primal thing a person needs to accomplish is to look inward, to scrutinize oneself, and to look for one’s atman. Refusing to assume the playwright’s role as a spokesman for humanity who engages in political intervention, Gao’s politics of resistance sees the process of self-exile not as a dissident gesture or a means of resisting totalitarian politics, but as a path to self-salvation and to total independence and freedom. Gao’s play sets up a framework for alternativeness and dissident unorthodoxy. However, Gao’s politics of resistance carefully depoliticizes it in his dramatic adaptation. In this paper, I propose to deal with the issues of characterization, dramaturgy, and theatricality which have strong bearings on the question of politics of resistance in Snow in August. I argue that instead of heightening the political issues and debates, Gao’s politics of resistance does not endorse any political moves and views, in spite of the fact that the characterization of Huineng as a nonconformist thinker has made him an archetypal representative of resistance against norm and orthodoxy in Buddhism.
https://ror.org/059dkdx38 
