《邦查女孩》的宗教意象研究

客籍作家甘耀明素以其誇張的魔幻筆法和神鬼傳說受人關注。繼《殺鬼》(2009)後推出鉅作《邦查女孩》(2015)，卻以平實筆調描摹70年代花蓮林場伐木與自然生態，其內容充斥各種宗教的神祇和傳說，甘耀明想藉此表達什麼？過去對甘耀明的研究大多由其鄉土寫作之風格入手，本論文欲借用宗教史學家伊利亞德的「聖顯」觀點梳理《邦查女孩》大量的宗教現象，企圖探討甘氏埋伏於文字底層之深意。所謂「聖顯」是「全然的他者」，與凡俗不同，可使人感受到一種奧祕或一種敬畏的力量。若從空間聖顯、時間聖顯、大自然的聖顯和人的聖化等不同面向分析，則可分別抽離出歷史血淚、國族聚散、生態省思、群我情感、生命哲思等綰合各族群的故事，進一步濃縮則不離二個宗教主題︰死亡和愛。因為面對死亡是人生的終極提問，知如何死，方知如何生。而愛便是生命顛簸時支撐的力量。以帕吉魯之言︰「大地就是個教堂，就是個廟。」，標示了大自然涵容萬物，不論老病殘窮，弱勢傷痛，皆能在此得到溫暖自在，也定調了此書的方向。小說時空鎖定1970年代末尾，正值臺灣外交艱難困頓之時，但內部正是各項建設起飛，蓄勢待發的開端，看似書寫過去的紛擾歷史，實則暗藏對未來族群共融的期許和展望。

關鍵字

甘耀明；邦查女孩；宗教；聖顯

並列摘要

ABSTRACT Hakka writer Gan Yaoming has been well-known for his favorite topic of folk legends and his style of magic realism. However, his second novel The Pangcah Girl, published in 2015, six years after his first one, The Ghost Slayer, drops the magic tone in his representation of the once-flourishing logging industry in Hualien and local ecology in the 1970s. One thing that has to impress the readers is the abundant quantity of religious gods and stories in the realist novel. Why did Gan Yaoming do so? The previous research on Gan Yaoming mostly focuses on the author’s style of nativist writing. This thesis, however, intends to use the religious historian Mircea Eliade's concept of "hierophany" to sort out the large number of religious phenomena of The Bangcha Girl, with an attempt to explore the deeper meaning hiding behind the text. The so-called "hierophany" is "the utter other", which functions to make people feel the power of mysteries with reverence. This thesis analyzes the concept of hierophany from various sanctified perspectives of space, time, nature, and human beings. The result shows that two religious themes-- death and love—has permeated the whole novel. Facing death is the ultimate question in life. Only when we know how to die, do we know how to live. Love is the power to keep us moving forward when life is difficult. As the male protagonist Pajilu says "The earth is a church, a temple”, nature in the novel has the most embracing power, protecting all kinds of minority groups—the old, the sick, the handicapped, and the poor. The timeline of the book was set in late 1970s, a time when Taiwan was experiencing difficult diplomacy, but enjoying an economic boom. Despite the fact that the political situation may seem gloomy, the prosperous society has provided the conditions for people of various ethnicities to develop harmonious relationships.