**1. Introduction**

It should be pointed out at the outset that the corpus of this paper on the narrative of the willow trees in Yuan *zaju* 雜劇 (variety play) is based on the *Quan Yuan xiqu* 全元戲曲 in 12 volumes, edited by Wang Jisi 王季思 (1906–1996), which is the most complete collection of plays of the Yuan dynasty ever compiled. According to the electronic version of the *Quan Yuan xiqu*, 28 species of trees appear in Yuan drama texts, including willow, peach, apricot, elm, mulberry, osmanthus, Chinese parasol, acacia, pomegranate, and jujube trees. Among them, the willow tree is mentioned about 2000 times,<sup>1</sup> and that is 1.5 times the mentions of all other kinds of trees combined. Narratives of the willow in Yuan *zaju* were created by 48 playwrights. According to our statistics, there are 67 known authors in *Quan Yuan xiqu*.<sup>2</sup> This means that, in *Quan Yuan xiqu*, more than 70% known playwrights had written about the willow in their works. There are three types of narratives related to the beliefs about the willow in Yuan *zaju*, namely, the willow shooting ritual, deities delivering willows to immortality, and willows as references to people. Many Yuan *zaju* plays involve narratives of willows: two plays mention the willow shooting ritual, four involve deities delivering willows to immortality, and almost half of all the Yuan *zaju* plays in the corpus compare willows to people (see Table 1). This phenomenon is not common in the history of Chinese literature and deserves to be explored in depth.

**Citation:** Wang, Qian, and Qiong Yang. 2022. Ritual, Legend, and Metaphor: Narratives of the Willow in Yuan *Zaju*. *Religions* 13: 55. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel13010055

Academic Editor: Xiaohuan Zhao

Received: 30 October 2021 Accepted: 4 January 2022 Published: 7 January 2022

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### **Table 1.** Three types of narratives of the willow in Yuan *Zaju* \*.

\* Source: Wang Jisi ed., *Quan Yuan xiqu*, 1990.

Unfortunately, most scholars in China and overseas regard willow narratives in Yuan *zaju* as literary imagery only and tend to explore the topic of willow imagery archetypes, ignoring the connection between these willow narratives and the beliefs in the Yuan context of multiethnic intermingling. For example, Zheng Wang (2013, pp. 108–15) explores the one-to-one correspondence of ritual elements (month, surroundings, and costume of shooters) between willow shooting rituals in Yuan *zaju* and that of the Khitans and the nobles of the Jurgens, but he does not take into account the conceptual link between narratives on willow shooting rituals in Yuan *zaju* and the ancient shamanic belief in the willow of the Khitans and Jurchens in present-day northeastern China. Based on the concept of ghosts, Zhao (2015, pp. 1–31) interprets the ways ghosts and deities appear on stage, the types of ghosts and deities, and the endings of ghostly figures in the narratives of deities delivering willows to immortality in Yuan *zaju* plays. Zhao's focus is the view of ghosts as shown in Yuan *zaju*. The narratives about willows are only a case study to support his arguments. Recently, some young scholars have explored the function of the willow tree in the construction of the imagery of the back garden in Yuan *zaju* as well as the metaphorical function of the willow tree (Zhu 2015, pp. 48–55; Zhang 2019, pp. 32–34). However, limited to their examination of the willow tree *per se*, these studies have not fully demonstrated the role of the narratives of the willow in shaping the literary imagery in Yuan *zaju*.

In short, existing studies on narratives of the willow in Yuan *zaju* are not systematic and have not paid enough attention to the folkloristic implications of the narratives. To fill this lacuna, this paper explores the relationship between the narratives of the willow in Yuan *zaju* and folk beliefs through examining the presentation of folk beliefs about willows as shown in these works as well as the shaping force of these beliefs on the narratives of the willow. The following questions will be discussed in this paper: Why are there so many

narratives on willows in Yuan *zaju*? What roles do these willow narratives play in Yuan *zaju*? What is the connection between these narratives and the beliefs about the willow in China? The tentative conclusion this paper draws is that special narratives about the willow in Yuan *zaju* were not a new creation of the playwrights in the Yuan dynasty but an artistic manifestation of the centuries-old folk beliefs and literary traditions against the background of cultural exchanges among multiple ethnic groups in the Yuan dynasty.
