Yan Lianke novel quotes

“The fact that Yahui, an eighteen-year-old "jade nun," would soon become the object of the Daist Mingzheng's love was something neither the school's religious masters nor the deities themselves possibly could have anticipated. Yet Yahui didn't even feel this was love. Instead, she simply regarded it as the kind of secular attachment her religious mentor, or shifu, had once mentioned- like the mud that sticks to your shoes on a rainy day.” P. 17 Heart Sutra: A Novel by Yan Lianke

P.41 “ The Buddhist classes' gentle and secular attitude, the Daoist classes' pride and worldliness, the Islamic classes' egotism and competitiveness, and the Catholic and Protestant classes' emphasis on harmonious mediation, combined with their apparent unity in public but fierce rivalry in private-these all collectively represented the character and temperament of China's five great religions, the same way that a variety of fruits and leaves might represent a vast forest.”

Links:

I'm surprised Buddhist Fiction Blog doesn't have a review, though maybe since this is a satire about all religions in China, maybe it's not seen as Buddhist fiction. Nor does the website have a search feature on it's blog. Maybe the book is too interdenominational, it set in a state college where the 5 major religions of China study together. 

Yan Lianke’s Forbidden Satires of China (New Yorker). Fascinating article that mentions Wu Zetian, the only female emperor in China, who was from the 7th century. She used the Great Cloud Sutra to legitimize her reign, using a Buddhist sutra to prove she was the divine ruler. She claimed to be a manifestation of Maitreya and Vairocana, and devi of pure radiance referred to in the Great Cloud Sutra. 

"Yan is routinely referred to as China’s most controversial novelist, thanks to his scandalous satires about the brutalities of its Communist past and the moral nullity of its market-driven transformation." 

He has 17 novels and while unofficially banned in China, he sells well outside China.

"Yan’s style is experimental and surreal, and he is credited with developing a strain of absurdism that he terms “mythorealism.” As he puts it, “The reality of China is so outrageous that it defies belief and renders realism inert.”"

"...a world of remorseless venality—of corrupt local officials, amoral entrepreneurs, and peasants with get-rich-quick schemes that prey on desperation and run on an engine of betrayal."