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ordophilosophicus · 3 days ago

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Jin Guangyao and Nie Mingjue as Broken Mirror Reflections of Each other

An interpretation I want to try throw out there is that Jin Guangyao and Nie Mingjue are more alike than they might seem. The amount of privilege that Nie Mingjue has should not make it harder for him to understand what Jin Guangyao is coming from. On the contrary, the specific ways in which he does and does not have privilege should make it easier for Nie Mingjue to understand Jin Guangyao’s challenges as a low born cultivator, perhaps even more than let’s say Lan Xichen. So Jin Guangyao and Nie Mingjue are not so much two ends on a spectrum on privilege, but broken mirrors of each other.

What’s in their Names: Two Men Alike

Jin Guangyao and Nie Mingjue’s names mean the same thing. Guangyao (光瑶) means bright jade. Mingjue (明玦) also means bright jade. There are, admittedly, subtle ways in which their names are different

Significance of their names

Nie Mingjue’s name was given from a desire that he be bright, and complement others like how a jade pendant completes a gentlemanly attire, like in this line of a poem “侵衣明佩玦”.But JGY’s courtesy name an insult from his father, who refused to give him the generational character zi 子 like Jin Zixuan and Jin Zixun, while recycling the “Yao” from his personal name, though according to naming conventions his courtesy name is supposed to be completely different from his personal name. Is this foreshadowing that it is his father’s mistreatment that sets Jin Guangyao up to be Nie Mingjue’s “evil” doppelganger? Or rather Nie Mingjue’s inability to recognise how while they seem to be similar in status, the origins of their status are profoundly different.

Differences between words for Jade: Yao and Jue

The Yao (瑶) in Jin Guangyao’s name means “beautiful jade” or anything that is lovely, precious, or pure like a beautiful piece of jade. (Side note: it does not mean pearl. I’ve seen that misconception in fandom and I’m guessing its from a bad definition given by an English Chinese dictionary that comes up in google search. I’ve never seen a Chinese dictionary entry define 瑶 as possibly meaning pearl sometimes).

But the Jue (玦) in NMJ’s name is a type of jade pendant that can symbolise the cycle of flourishing and suffering. Does this foreshadow NMJ’s gruesome death and fierce corpse afterlife? A Jue can also be gifted to someone to decisively cut ties with them, per the phrase 绝人以玦 (jue ren yi jue). It’s a play on how Jue sounds like the word for decisive (决) and to cut off (绝). It also kind of foreshadows how NMJ decides to be permanently suspicious of JGY since he saw him murder his commander in Langya and kill his men in WRH’s throne room.

Despite all these subtle differences, the fact remains that fundamentally Mingjue and Guangyao are insanely similar in meaning. So in what ways are they alike?

On Social Status: Butchers and Prostitutes

This I think is speculative, but it’s possible to imagine that there was a time when Nie cultivators were the most despised in the world of cultivation.

This theory would hinge upon the fact that the ancestors of the Nie Sect were originally butchers, the Nie Sect cultivates using the resentful energy of animals that they have butchered — and that depending on which historical period you look at in China, butchers are considered to be morally corrupt in some sense. This stems from some Confucian and Buddhist texts which were influential in China.

For instance, for Confucianism, Mencius wrote on the conduct of a noble man: “A noble man when it comes to animals, they see them alive, and cannot bear to see them killed. If they hear their cries, they will not bear to eat their meat. Thus, a noble man stays far from the kitchen.” This is supposed to be a show of the compassion of a noble man for all living things. 孟子在《孟子·梁惠王上》中说：“君子之于禽兽也，见其生，不忍见其死；闻其声，不忍食其肉。是以君子远庖厨也”

Then for Chinese Buddhism, the religion is opposed to the taking of lives be it from people or animals. Thus butchers and butchering as a profession are looked poorly upon. For instance, there’s a funny story about how there were two friends, a monk and a butcher, who reminded each other everyday to read sutras and butcher animals respectively. The butcher goes to heaven for the good deed of reminding the monk to read the sutras everyday. The monk goes to hell for reminding the butcher to slaughter animals. Monks are also prohibited from directly killing, and are only allowed to eat 3 types of clean meat (三净肉 San Jing Rou). The three ways in which the meat is supposed to be clean are: you cannot have seen the animal that was killed, you cannot hear the animal being killed, and you cannot suspect that the animal was being killed for you to eat (i.e. donated surplus meat).

Thus, in East Asian countries with Confucian and Buddhist influences, like Korea and Japan, butchers tend to be treated as one of the lowest castes in society. It was fortunately not that bad in ancient China. But I think you can catch hints of how this impression of butchers as being impure factors into the history of the Nie Sect in MDZS. The dwelling of the Qinghe Nie after all is the Unclean Realm Bu Jing (不净世). It’s interesting to think about whether their dwelling is named that because people kept deriding it as being an unclean Bu Jing (不净) and a place that you should not set foot in. Or if the Qinghe Nie started to call their dwelling the Unclean Realm as a way to reclaim a slur. I think its also reasonable to imagine that in their initial years, the Qinghe Nie were also looked upon with a great deal of suspicion for cultivating using the resentful energy of animals. One defence that butchers in ancient China often used was that moral blame should not be imputed to them for butchering these animals, since they don’t actually eat the meat of these animals — its their customers who eat the meat and benefit from the death of the animal. But for the Nie, they are clearly benefitting from the resentful energy of the animal at its wrongful death, and could be derided as being even more cruel compared to ordinary butchers. And in general, they were the first out of all the Sects to use resentful energy to cultivate, which must have marked them out as an anomaly, possibly to be discriminated. Stretching this postulation even further, perhaps it was the desire to escape from the low social position that they were trapped in as butchers, that prompted them to undertake a method of cultivation as dangerous as cultivating using the resentful energy of animals, where their Sect leaders die young.

What I find so interesting about this particular theory is that it casts a different light upon then Meng Yao’s interactions with the Qinghe Nie. You could interpret the reason why Meng Yao first joined the Qinghe Nie as him seeing it as an example of a Sect that rose up to prominence in the world of cultivation, precisely through their occupation which was once as despised as his mother’s profession. This interpretation would add an extra knife’s twist to that moment in the MDZS novel, where when Meng Yao pours tea for some Nie cultivators in the Hejian front, they refuse to drink it because they think that it is dirty because of his mother’s profession. It would be an extra WTF moment for Meng Yao if, just a few generations earlier, it might have been other cultivators refusing to drink tea poured by Nie Sect cultivators, either because they think that the profession of butchering is “unclean” or because they think that the Nie Sect cultivators must be dangerously tainted with resentful energy. It would make the moments where Jin Guangyao talks about privilege with Nie Mingjue extra poignant, because maybe within Nie Mingjue’s Sect, the traumatic experience of social ostracism and stigmatisation might only just have faded out of living memory. It would be very “who are you that do not know your history” to quote Fallout New Vegas. The Nies could be read as like a nouveau riche class of cultivators, who have completely forgotten their origins, and who now take part in ostracising “lower” professions such as prostitution.

Related to this, Nie Mingjue’s experience as the Sect Leader of the Qinghe Nie should have allowed him to, more than anyone, understand that the acts of violence that Jin Guangyao commits does not entirely stem out of his free will, but on the exigencies of his circumstances. As the Sect Leader of the Qinghe Nie, he has to to cultivate with a saber, and thus accept that he will die young and succumb to saber madness. For instance, Nie Mingjue tries to kill Jin Guangyao after kicking him down Koi Tower while in saber madness. This is literally after implying that he has never killed without good reason. As one in a long line of Sect leaders who have bouts of homicidal violence, he should have have some understanding of how acts of violence do not necessarily stem out of a deficient moral character, but also by how one’s mind has been shaped by one’s upbringing. For instance, when facing Meng Yao who said that he killed his commander in Langya, after his rage boiled over from having his mother been denigrated and humiliation her entire life, he should have been better prepared to understand.

Finally, looking at the good relationship that Nie Mingjue had with Nie Huaisang who is only his half-brother, maybe at one point Meng Yao hoped that when he entered the Jin Sect, he too could live as peaceably as Nie Huaisang did in the Unclean Realm, as the half-brother of Jin Zixuan. Sadly we all know how all that worked out, and it is Nie Huaisang who brings about JGY’s death.

ANYWAY wrapping up this post that turned out a lot longer than I expected… I think this is an interesting interpretation of Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao’s relationship. That in some sense, Nie Mingjue is a tragic hero out of a Shakespearan play. He genuinely wants to act according to his ideals of justice. He probably pledged sworn brotherhood with Jin Guangyao despite having doubts about his character because he believed the he could guide Jin Guangyao along the right path. Worst of all, Nie Mingjue had all the pieces of the puzzle to bridge an understanding with Jin Guangyao on his difficulties with power and privilege precisely because of his background as the Sect Leader of the Qinghe Nie. And more importantly he had the power and privilege to back Jin Guangyao up, against the influence of Jin Guangshan. But in canon, (at least through this lens) he never picks up these pieces of the puzzle, even though they are right before his eyes. And so, he embitters the people around him like Nie Huaisang and Jin Guangyao, because no one wants to be “enlightened” so forcefully, especially if it is by someone who does not want to understand their difficulties. If he had less power and privilege, Nie Mingjue would only be ridiculous and annoying to Jin Guangyao. But as he is, he was so dangerous to Jin Guangyao, that Jin Guangyao had to kill him first, before Nie Mingjue killed him in his saber madness or because of his narrow understanding of justice. Likewise, there could have been a point where Jin Guangyao saw what Nie Mingjue had with Nie Huaisang, along with the status the Qinghe Nie commanded in the world of cultivation — and thought that this was hope — that he might be able to live with dignity as a bastard and a son of a whore in the world of cultivation. But alas no, at least in canon, Nie Mingjue and Nie Huaisang were his doom.

#we need more of this #mdzs

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