Gender, Power, and Talent

The Journey of Daoist Priestesses in Tang China

Jinhua Jia

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780231545495
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de China

During the Tang dynasty (618–907), changes in political policies, the religious landscape, and gender relations opened the possibility for Daoist women to play an unprecedented role in religious and public life. Women, from imperial princesses to the daughters of commoner families, could be ordained as Daoist priestesses and become religious leaders, teachers, and practitioners in their own right. Some achieved remarkable accomplishments: one wrote and transmitted texts on meditation and inner cultivation; another, a physician, authored a treatise on therapeutic methods, medical theory, and longevity techniques. Priestess-poets composed major works, and talented priestess-artists produced stunning calligraphy.

In Gender, Power, and Talent, Jinhua Jia draws on a wealth of previously untapped sources to explain how Daoist priestesses distinguished themselves as a distinct gendered religious and social group. She describes the life journey of priestesses from palace women to abbesses and ordinary practitioners, touching on their varied reasons for entering the Daoist orders, the role of social and religious institutions, forms of spiritual experience, and the relationships between gendered identities and cultural representations. Jia takes the reader inside convents and cloisters, demonstrating how they functioned both as a female space for self-determination and as a public platform for both religious and social spheres. The first comprehensive study of the lives and roles of Daoist priestesses in Tang China, Gender, Power, and Talent restores women to the landscape of Chinese religion and literature and proposes new methodologies for the growing field of gender and religion.

Notes

Introduction

1. For a detailed discussion of the Tang ruling house’s promotion of Daoism, integration of the Daoist system, and establishment of Daoist monastic tradition, see chapter 2 of this book.

2. For a detailed discussion of the changes in gender relations, see chapter 2 of this book.

3. First applied in Stephen Wang’s master’s thesis and then adopted by his supervisor Edward H. Schafer (Schafer, The Vermilion Bird: T’ang Images of the South [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967], 7), scholars of Daoism have commonly translated the term xian 仙 or xianren 仙人 as “transcendent” instead of “immortal.” Indeed, this translation is in accordance with the connotations of these terms in English. The term “transcendent” connotes both the religious sense of transcending the universe and material experience and the common sense of surpassing others of the same kind, whereas for most Westerners an “immortal” calls up obsolete ideas of godhood, like the immortal gods of Greek mythology; to speak of “immortals” places such beings outside this world, existing only in theory or imagination. On the other hand, there are also reasons for the translation of “immortal.” Since the Eastern Zhou and onward, the concept that human life can be prolonged (changsheng 長生) and humans can become immortal (chengxian 成仙) has been developed and has pervaded the Chinese cultural tradition, not just within the Daoist tradition, though Daoism, especially the tradition before the Song dynasty, focuses particularly on prolonging individual life and attaining immortality of both body and spirit; legends of common people becoming “immortals” have appeared throughout history. See Benjamin Penny, “Immortality and Transcendence,” in Daoism Handbook, ed. Livia Kohn (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 109–33. The term “immortal” makes smooth sense to the Chinese ear. Furthermore, the traditional Chinese worldview is basically “one world,” with heaven, earth, gods, humans, the myriad things, and even the Dao coexisting in one single universe; there is never a transcendental world beyond this universe, as in the Western tradition. See Roger T. Ames, Sun-tzu: The Art of Warfare (New York: Ballantine, 1993), 43–67; and Li Zehou 李澤厚, You wu dao li Shi li gui ren 由巫到禮釋禮歸仁 (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2015), 132–37, 170–90. Although the term “transcendent” is an etymologically correct translation of xian and retains the sense of a being who remains in our universe but on a higher level of existence, it does not foreground the idea of immortality. Here we encounter the common difficulty of finding an English term that covers completely the meaning inherent in a Chinese term: both “transcendent” and “immortal” present their advantages and disadvantages as a translation of xian. For the purpose of consistency, I use “immortal” and “immortality” throughout this book. I thank Paul W. Kroll for offering knowledgeable information for the preceding discussion.

4. For a detailed discussion of the formation of Daoist priestesses as a gendered group, see chapter 2 of this book.

5. Susan Calef, “Charting New Territory: Religion and ‘the Gender-Critical Turn,’ ” Journal of Religion & Society 5 (2009): 2. Of course, we should also keep in mind the dark side of religious traditions concerning women, as Calef also indicates.

6. See Michel Foucault, “An Aesthetics of Existence,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 50; and Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 16.

7. See Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–75, esp. 1068.

8. Ursula King, “General Introduction: Gender-Critical Turns in the Study of Religion,” Gender, Religion and Diversity: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Ursula King and Tina Beattie (London: Continuum, 2005), 1–12.

9. See, for example, Catherine Despeux, Immortelles de la Chine ancienne: Taoïsme et alchimie feminine (Paris: Pardés, 1990); Patricia B. Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• I. The Rise of Daoist Priestesses as a Gendered Religio-Social Group
• II. Destiny and Power of the Ordained Royal Women
• III. Religious Leadership, Practice, and Ritual Function
• IV. Liu Moran and the Daoist Theory of Inner Cultivation
• V. Longevity Techniques and Medical Theory: The Legacy of Hu Yin
• VI. The Yaochi ji and Three Daoist Priestess-Poets
• VII. Unsold Peony: The Life and Poetry of the Priestess-Poet Yu Xuanji
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Du Guangting and the Hagiographies of Tang Daoist Women
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index