Gendering Chinese Religion

Subject, Identity, and Body

Jinhua Jia, Xiaofei Kang, Ping Yao, Jinhua Jia, Xiaofei Kang, Ping Yao

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781438453088, 9781438453071
• eBook ISBN: 9781438453095
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Chinese History

Gendering Chinese Religion marks the emergence of a subfield on women, gender, and religion in China studies. Ranging from the medieval period to the present day, this volume departs from the conventional and often male-centered categorization of Chinese religions into Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and popular religion. It makes two compelling arguments. First, Chinese women have deployed specific religious ideas and rituals to empower themselves in various social contexts. Second, gendered perceptions and representations of Chinese religions have been indispensable to the historical and contemporary construction of social and political power. The contributors use innovative ways of discovering and applying a rich variety of sources, many previously ignored by scholars. While each of the chapters in this interdisciplinary work represents a distinct perspective, together they form a coherent dialogue about the historical importance, intellectual possibilities, and methodological protocols of this new subfield.

Part I

Restoring Female Religiosity and Subjectivity

1

Tang Women in the Transformation of Buddhist Filiality

Ping Yao

Introduction

One dominant theme in the study of Chinese Buddhism is the Sinification of Buddhism through its endorsing the virtue of filial piety (xiao 孝), that is, that the inclusion of filial piety transformed Buddhism from a foreign religion into a Sinicized one. Scholars have argued that Buddhism flourished in China by promoting the idea that monastic life represented the ultimate form of the Confucian ideal of filial piety and thus was indispensable to the salvation of ancestors. They suggested that from very early on, Buddhist monks and scholars who translated Buddhist sutras often inserted Confucian concepts into their translations to make it seem as if Buddhism had all along advocated filial piety.¹ They also found that particular narratives—for instance, tales of a son’s filial action in saving his mother’s life and redeeming her sin—greatly accelerated the process of China’s Buddhist transformation.²

This transformation theory, however, has been increasingly challenged by scholars of Indian Buddhism. As early as 1983, John Strong attested that early Indian popular Buddhist stories contain many tales of Buddhist monks performing filial deeds.³ A more direct challenge to the theory is Gregory Schopen’s study of Indian epigraphical texts from the first through fifth centuries.⁴ Schopen finds that, among his data concerning donation of gifts for the purpose of benefiting parents, more than 60 percent of the donors were Buddhist monks, and many of them were the teachers and transmitters of “official” Buddhist literature. Thus, he argues that filial piety was an old, integral, and pervasive part of the practice of Indian Buddhism. Most recently, Guang Xing’s 廣興 study of Pali Nikāyas and Vinaya and the Chinese translation of Āgamas and Vinayas further confirm that filial piety constituted an important aspect of early Buddhist ethical teachings.⁵

While acknowledging the originality of Indian Buddhist filiality, some scholars nevertheless stress that the perception of filiality in early Buddhist sutras is different from the perception of filial piety in the Confucian tradition⁶ and that Indian Buddhist filiality was employed by Chinese Buddhists to advance the religion. Based on his reading of the Liang dynasty (502–557) monk Baochang’s 寶唱 Biographies of Chinese Buddhist Nuns (Biqiuni zhuan 比丘尼傳) and Buddhist inscriptions and colophons from early medieval China, Bret Hinsch contends that Chinese Buddhists created images of filial Buddhist women to counter the attacks against Buddhism. In so doing, Buddhism became a tool of filial piety and filial piety justified Buddhism; the new gender ideal thus served to reconcile Confucianism with Buddhism and allowed the creation of Chinese Buddhism.⁷ Indeed, it goes without saying that all early ethical systems had filial piety as a core component, as typified by the Ten Commandments in the Christian tradition. Most likely the Chinese Buddhists and scholars were aware of the discussion of filial piety in the Buddhist texts they translated and expressed the Buddhist ideal of filiality in specifically Chinese ways as they knew it, without a hidden agenda.⁸

This chapter takes the originality of Indian Buddhist filiality as a point of departure and focuses its inquiry on how such a borrowed tradition was manifested in medieval China, especially on the role women played in the making of a specifically Chinese Buddhist filiality. Epigraphical texts from the Tang dynasty (618–907), including votive inscriptions on Buddhist sculpture (Fozaoxiang 佛造像) and Buddhist pagodas (futu 浮圖) as well as funeral inscriptions on cremation stupas (huishenta 灰身塔) and epitaph stones (muzhi 墓誌), reveal that by the end of the Tang the Chinese had fully developed a broad and unique repertoire of expressions of Buddhist filiality that largely reflected Chinese cultural mores; they also reveal that Buddhist nuns and laywomen in medieval China played an extremely important role in the shaping, advancing, and expressing of Buddhist filiality. Moreover, these texts point to a close mother-daughter bond, which has been largely overlooked in the scholarship on the Chinese Buddhist tradition.

The Manifestation of Buddhist Filiality in Medieval China

While it is now clear that filial piety had long been a core Buddhist tenet and that early Chinese Buddhists and devotees imitated Indian practices of Buddhist filiality, such as donating Buddhist gifts on parents’ behalf or entering a Buddhist order to repay a parent for the favor and burden of one’s upbringing, Chinese Buddhists engaged in a much broader range of filial activities than their Indian counterparts, eventually developing a unique repertoire of expressions of Buddhist filiality.

A key example of this is donations. The predominant gifts prior to the Tang dynasty were Fozaoxiang (Buddhist sculptures), which are amply evident at the Longmen 龍門, Yungang 雲崗, and Dunhuang 敦煌 Grottoes.⁹ Fozaoxiang usually consisted of Buddhist statues or relief carvings that included inscriptions stating the purpose of the donation, the donor’s name, and the beneficiary’s name. Naming one’s parents as the beneficiaries of the pious act of commissioning Buddhist sculpture was certainly more in line with the Indian tradition than with Chinese ancestor rituals, as such a practice was unheard of before the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE).¹⁰ Prior to the introduction of these Buddhist traditions, filial piety in China was chiefly manifested through ancestor-worship rituals and through everyday reverence of and obedience to living parents. Buddhist notions of “transference of merit” (zhuifu 追福), both in this life and in subsequent ones, were completely absent from the indigenous Chinese worldview. Donating gifts to a person or institution other than one’s own parents and ancestors as an act of filial piety was nonexistent in early Chinese tradition. The large number of surviving Buddhist sculptures, however, proves that the Chinese quickly accepted the idea that such donations, though not being offered to the ancestors directly, would in fact greatly benefit those ancestors, as the merit from the generosity and devotion expressed by the donor was applied to the eternal well-being of the persons named by the donor.¹¹

While the popularity of donating Buddhist sculptures (attesting to the success of Buddhism in early medieval China) was unprecedented, the overwhelming embrace of such expressions of Buddhist filiality by the Chinese is nevertheless understandable. If entering the monastic order might well appear to critics as an abandonment of filial duty,¹² donating gifts to benefit one’s parents would not seem to be much of a departure from the ancestor-worship tradition. However, a close reading of the donation inscriptions shows that there is a difference between early India (first to fifth centuries CE) and early medieval China in terms of the individual donors: Chinese women were more actively involved in such filial expressions than their Indian counterparts. Even though Buddhist women in early India were active donors,¹³ and they held the same property rights as their male counterparts,¹⁴ Buddhist monks far outnumbered nuns among the filial donors.¹⁵ In contrast, Buddhist nuns in early medieval China clearly played a very dynamic role in Fozaoxiang donations: a large number of recorded donors in the Longmen Grottoes, Yungang Grottoes, and Dunhuang Grottoes were Buddhist nuns. In the case of the Longmen Grottoes, nuns outnumbered monks as the Fozaoxiang donors. Many empresses and palace ladies,¹⁶ as well as elite and commoner laywomen, were enthusiastic Fozaoxiang donors as well. A recent study shows that laywomen, the majority of whom were commoners, accounted for a quarter of donors during the Sui (581–618) and Tang dynasties.¹⁷ In addition, Fozaoxiang inscriptions indicate that parents outnumbered any other type of beneficiaries of the donations.¹⁸

During the Tang dynasty, while donating Buddhist sculptures continued to be a dominant form of transferring merit to ancestors, donating xiejing 寫經, or Buddhist sutra copies, on behalf of parents emerged and became increasingly popular.¹⁹ Not surprisingly, Buddhist women constituted a sizeable percentage of xiejing donors, as among donors of Fozaoxiang.²⁰ In addition, the new practice of erecting Buddhist sutra steles (zunsheng jingchuang 尊勝經幢) took root, again with many steles intended to transfer merit to parents.²¹ Yet another important development during this period was the practice of building funeral pagodas (futu) and cremation stupas (huishenta) for parents. These practices are clearly much more in line with Chinese ancestor worship than with the Indian practice of Buddhist filiality, as they do not seem to have a parallel to the Indian tradition of stupas serving as monumental reliquaries for relics of Buddhist “saints.”²² Since donations of Buddhist sutra copies and steles have been well documented and examined by scholars, this chapter will focus only on funeral inscriptions found on Buddhist pagodas (futuming 浮圖銘) and on cremation stupas (huishentaming 灰身塔銘, or huishengtaji 灰身塔記).

Futuming was usually carved on a stone pagoda. These pagodas often had Buddhist images and were built next to a deceased parent’s tomb. It seems both men and women were enthusiastic participants in building pagodas and stupas for their parents, especially in the Chang’an and Luo­yang regions.²³ However, existing data reveal that women were an important driving force behind the practice: the inscriptions dedicated to mothers by their daughters outnumber the ones that were dedicated to parents by their sons. Such a trend is best represented by one of the recent discoveries of futu donation for parents. The stone pagoda with an inscription entitled “Inscriptions of Jiao Daniang Building Stone Pagoda” (Jiao Daniang zao futuming ji 焦大娘造浮圖銘記) was excavated in the summer of 2006 in Luoyang, Henan Province. The flat surface is 73 cm in height and 30 cm in width. It has one carved image of Buddha and two carved images of Bodhisattvas. Underneath is an eight-line inscription, which reads,

Died on the nineteenth day of the fifth month, tenth year (722) of the Kaiyuan reign of the Great Tang. [The deceased] was commoner Liu Erniang of Linzhi Township, Luoyang District. The stone futu was built on the tomb site and recorded in inscription. [It was] Jiao Daniang who resolved to erect this for her mother. [It was] completed on the twenty-seventh day of the second month, the eleventh year (723) of the Kaiyuan reign.

大唐開元十年五月十九日. 亡洛陽縣麟趾鄉百姓劉二娘造石浮圖在于墓所, 銘記焦大娘爲母發心造. 開元十一年二月廿七日成.²⁴

While the language of this inscription is quite plain, or even colloquial, we do notice two very distinctive phrases in the text: faxin 發心 and zao 造. Both terms were prevalent in the inscription texts that record a Buddhist donation. Faxin implies an earnest intention to attain enlightenment for the sake of saving other sentient beings, as well as to give a donation. Zao, to build or to construct, usually indicates the result of such a faxin. “Inscriptions of Jiao Daniang Building Stone Pagoda” is thus an excellent example of how Buddhist filiality was expressed through such dedications and a testimony of a close mother-daughter bond within the medieval Chinese Buddhist tradition.

To this day, Tang cremation stupas have been found only at Bao shan 寶山, located near Anyang in Henan Province. A total of 155 stupas have been discovered, dating from the Sui dynasty to the Northern Song (960–1127), with a majority of them from the Tang period.²⁵ The cremation stupa inscriptions bear witness that during the Tang dynasty, building such stupas for the ashes of deceased parents was also utilized as an ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Restoring Female Religiosity and Subjectivity
• Part II. Redefining Identity and Tradition
• Part III. Recovering Bodily Differences
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover