Eminent Nuns

Bu d d h i s m /Ch i n e s e l i t e r a t u r e (Continued from front flap) g r a n t collections of “discourse records” (yulu) Of related interest The seventeenth century is generally of seven officially designated female acknowledged as one of the most Chan masters in a seventeenth-century politically tumultuous but culturally printing of the Chinese Buddhist Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face creative periods of late imperial Canon rarely used in English-language sC r i p t u r e , ri t u a l , a n d iC o n o g r a p h i C ex C h a n g e in me d i e v a l Ch i n a Chinese history. Scholars have noted scholarship. The collections contain Christine Mollier the profound effect on, and literary records of religious sermons and 2008, 256 pages, illus. responses to, the fall of the Ming on exchanges, letters, prose pieces, and Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8248-3169-1 the male literati elite. Also of great poems, as well as biographical and interest is the remarkable emergence autobiographical accounts of various “This book exemplifies the best sort of work being done on Chinese beginning in the late Ming of educated kinds. Supplemental sources by Chan religions today. Christine Mollier expertly draws not only on published women as readers and, more im- monks and male literati from the same canonical sources but also on manuscript and visual material, as well portantly, writers. Only recently as worldwide modern scholarship, to give us the most sophisticated region and period make a detailed China Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century Women Eminent Nuns beginning to be explored, however, re-creation of the lives of these eminent book-length study yet produced on the textual relations between the are such seventeenth-century religious nuns possible. Buddhist and Taoist traditions. She pushes past the tired, vague, phenomena as “the reinvention” of and rather innocent-sounding trope of ‘influence’ to pinpoint much Chan Buddhism—a concerted effort Beata Grant brings to her study back- more complex—and fascinating—processes of textual repackaging, to revive what were believed to be the ground in Chinese literature, Chinese hybridization, adaptation, appropriation, reframing, pirating, remodeling, traditional teachings, texts, and prac- Buddhism, and Chinese women’s and transposing. Throughout, the urgent concerns of medieval Chinese tices of “classical” Chan. And, until studies. She is able to place the seven people—life, health, protection, salvation—are sensitively and elegantly now, the role played by women in these women, all of whom were active in evoked. Anyone interested in Chinese religions, in the ways in which religious developments has hardly Jiangnan, in their historical, religious, religious texts are formed, and in cross-religious interactions should been noted. and cultural contexts, while allowing want to read this book.” them, through her skillful translations, —Robert Ford Campany, University of Southern California Eminent Nuns is an innovative inter- to speak in their own voices. Together disciplinary work that brings together these women offer an important, several of these important seventeenth- but until now virtually unexplored, century trends. Although Buddhist perspective on seventeenth-century nuns have been a continuous presence China, the history of female monas- in Chinese culture since early medieval ticism in China, and the contribution times and the subject of numerous of Buddhist nuns to the history of Jacket photograph: Courtesy of Hedda Morrison Collection, scholarly studies, this book is one of Chinese women’s writing. Harvard Yenching Library. the first not only to provide a detailed view of their activities at one parti- Jacket design by Santos Barbasa Jr. cular moment in time but also to be Eminent Nuns based largely on the writings and Beata Grant teaches Chinese literature, self-representations of Buddhist nuns religion, and women’s/gender studies Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China themselves. This perspective is at Washington University in St. Louis. University of Hawai‘i Press made possible by the preservation of Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822-1888 www.uhpress.hawaii.edu Beata Grant (Continued on back flap) jack mech.indd 1 7/16/09 1:39:20 PM Eminent Nuns 1Grant_i-xiv.indd i 6/3/08 9:55:10 AM 1Grant_i-xiv.indd ii 6/3/08 9:55:10 AM Eminent Nuns Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China Beata Grant University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu 1Grant_i-xiv.indd iii 6/3/08 9:55:11 AM © 2009 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 14 13 12 11 10 09 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grant, Beata. Eminent nuns : women Chan masters of seventeenth-century China / Beata Grant. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3202-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Buddhist nuns—China—Biography. 2. Monastic and religious life (Zen Buddhism)—China. 3. Zen Buddhism— China—History—17th century. I. Title. BQ9298.G73 2008 294.3'9270820951—dc22 2008010177 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by University of Hawai‘i Press production staff Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group 1Grant_i-xiv.indd iv 6/3/08 9:55:11 AM Contents A Brief Preface / vii Acknowledgments / xi Abbreviations / xiii 1. Setting the Stage: Seventeenth-Century Texts and Contexts / 1 2. Images of Nuns in the Writings of Seventeenth-Century Monks / 17 3. The Making of a Woman Chan Master: Qiyuan Xinggang / 37 4. Qiyuan Xinggang as Abbess, Dharma Teacher, and Religious Exemplar / 58 5. Passing on the Lamp: The Dharma Successors of Qiyuan Xinggang / 77 6. From Hengzhou to Hangzhou: Jizong Xingche / 107 7. From Wise Mother to Chan Master: Baochi Jizong / 130 8. Reviving the Worlds of Literary Chan: Zukui Jifu / 146 9. From Beijing to Jiangnan: Ziyong Chengru / 165 A Brief Epilogue / 185 Notes / 191 Selected Bibliography / 225 Index / 237 1Grant_i-xiv.indd v 6/3/08 9:55:11 AM 1Grant_i-xiv.indd vi 6/3/08 9:55:11 AM A Brief Preface Caroline Walker Bynum, referring to religious women of medieval Europe, remarks that “the stories men liked to tell about women reflected not so much what women did as what men admired or abhorred. It is crucial not to take as women’s own self-image the sentimentalizing or the castigating of the female in which . men indulged.” 1 The only way to begin to redress the imbalance, she continues, is to take into consider- ation “works in which women wrote about their own visions and mystical experiences and about life among the sisters in their households, begui- nages, and convents.” 2 This book represents a preliminary effort to heed Bynum’s advice and to begin to redress the imbalance in the study of Buddhist nuns in premodern China. It does so by making primary use of the closest thing we have in Chinese to the kinds of materials she recom- mends studying: the handful of extant collections of “discourse records,” or yulu, composed (either orally or in writing), recorded, and compiled by nuns themselves.3 In the Chinese Buddhist tradition, only acknowledged Buddhist mas ters (the overwhelming majority of whom were men) were consid- ered qualified to leave such collections, which were regarded as con- stituting their primary religious legacy to posterity. The heart of most discourse record collections are the formal and informal Dharma talks and “encounters,” supposedly delivered spontaneously and recorded in situ by their disciples. The collections also include such things as letters, poems, colophons composed for paintings, and usually biographical and even autobiographical accounts or records of activities. In addition, they are usually accompanied by prefaces, stupa or funerary inscriptions, and other types of texts composed either by fellow monastics or, as is most often the case, by well-known literati figures. Nevertheless, as many scholars have pointed out, these types of religious writings, including the seemingly “spontaneous” Dharma talks, must be read primarily as highly crafted texts, even primarily as literary 1Grant_i-xiv.indd vii 6/3/08 9:55:11 AM viii Preface texts, rather than as historical documents. This is true, of course, of many Western materials as well. The European cloister chronicles studied by Anne Winston-Allen, for instance, despite all the factual, historical, and financial data contained in them, are “literary fictions just as much as they are ‘documents,’ a distinction that New Cultural historians have for the most part abandoned as moot, if not meaningless.” 4 The “fictional” nature of these texts is, however, only part of the prob- lem. Even more problematic, when it comes to the discourse records of Chinese women Chan masters, is that these writing nuns were subject to the same double bind to which writing women in most premodern cul- tures were subject: “As long as women remain silent, they will be outside the historical process. But, if they begin to speak and write as men do, they will enter history subdued and alienated.” 5 Seventeenth-century women Chan masters were no exception to this rule. They generally wrote “as men do,” having largely internalized and duplicated the patriarchal language of Chan Buddhism. In fact, most were regarded by others, and to a certain extent regarded themselves, as honorary men, or, to use the Chinese term, as da zhangfu (great gentlemen). Nevertheless, on the most fundamental level, an exploration of the discourse records of these seventeenth-century women can provide us a perspective much like the one Bynum describes as being provided by the cloister chronicles and other writings of medieval European Catholic nuns: [As] participants in the same institutional system, the female writers reflect and vary the ideological views that produced these institutions.

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