In This Issue

The theme of this issue is women and gender in Chinese Buddhist tradition. Inspired by religious studies and China studies within “women's studies” since the 1960s, the study of women and gender in Chinese Buddhist history has come a long way and is now a relatively well-established field. This volume, the very first published anthology focusing solely on women and gender in Chinese Buddhism, represents a timely effort by four renowned scholars to shed light on the approaches and central issues of the subject.

Early scholarship in this field, eager to discover women's experiences in major religious traditions, or to challenge the image of the “traditional Chinese woman” as passive victim of the Confucian “patriarchal” system, attempted to show that Buddhism provided a set of gender perceptions different from that of Confucianism and, therefore, provided an alternative path for Chinese women.¹ During the 1990s, scholarship on Buddhist women largely focused on the nuns whose names appear in Buddhist texts, historical writings, and literature, or on annotated translations of texts relevant to the topic.² While Buddhist nuns continued to be a popular topic during the first decade of the twenty-first century, scholars have broadened their research to explore the role of lay women in spreading Buddhist teaching,³ Buddhist women's agency and subjectivity,⁴ women's contributions to the naturalization of Buddhism in China, and Buddhist contributions to Chinese gender ideology.⁵ These studies clearly demonstrate the degree to which the study of gender in Chinese Buddhism has developed and matured over the last decade.

The articles in this volume represent a step further in thinking critically about the relationship between the Buddhist establishment, largely dominated by men, and Buddhist perceptions of gender, and how such perceptions influenced Chinese society. Collectively, they reflect an effort to answer the call for a “gender-critical turn” in the study of religion.⁶ The authors believe that, while women should continue to be the focus of our gendering of religious studies, “gender” is nevertheless not a synonym for women. In addition, the authors treat Buddhism as an integral part of Chinese tradition, intermingled with Confucianism, Daoism, popular beliefs, and sometimes, modern discourses. In this sense, Buddhist views of gender and women developed and evolved along with other historical and social changes.

The first article, by Yuet Keung Lo, sets out to prove that a Buddho-Confucian integration started very early on when Buddhism was introduced to China, and that Buddhist ideals of women and gender relations were very influential among the Chinese elite during the second to the fifth centuries. An excellent example is the Śrgalavadasūtra, which advocates a fulfilling husband-wife relationship as one of the ethical cornerstones of a blessed family. Through a detailed and comparative analysis of this early Buddhist text, Lo demonstrates that the Buddhist advice given in the Śrgalavadasūtra is fully consistent with the Confucian ideal of marriage and family. The Śrgalavadasūtra's continuing popularity reflects the fact that Buddhism contributed to the development of the ideal of family in imperial China.

In her meticulously researched study on early Tang Buddhist masters' take on nuns in monastic institutions, Ann Heirman also challenges the conventional wisdom that Buddhism provided Chinese women an alternative path or even equality with monastic institutions. In reading works of Daoxuan and Daoshi, Heirman finds ample evidence of gender inequality (and an acceptance of female religiosity) in Chinese monasticism: Buddhist nuns were considered overly emotional, and inferior to their male counterparts in intellectual capabilities; hence, they were very much in need of male guidance. Considering both Daoxuan and Daoshi were founding masters of a fully developed Chinese Buddhist institutional monasticism, their view of women and gender would have profound influence in Chinese Buddhist tradition as well as gender systems in Chinese history.

The third article, authored Beata Grant, examines the poems, sermons, and occasional letters by the most well-known and influential seventeenth-century Chan Buddhist masters: Tiebi Huiji and Poshan Haiming. She finds that these texts reflect a wide range of attitudes of the two masters toward women's spiritual practice and aspirations, from condescension and ambivalence to apparently genuine concern and admiration. Compared to Daoxuan and Daoshi of the Tang dynasty, however, seventeenth-century Buddhist masters, at least within the Chan Buddhist tradition, exhibited a stronger willingness to accept female devotee's religious piety, to the extent that they would shape their words to suit the particular life circumstances and religious aspirations of each of the female devotees they addressed, and, in one case at least, even selected a female dharma heir.

Three centuries later, as Elise A. DeVido's study of Buddhist modernizer Taixu and his female disciples shows, Buddhism evolved to reflect the reformist and global trends in women's education and women's networks. While insisting that the Buddha never intended to have female disciples and discouraging young women from entering the order, Taixu nevertheless established Buddhist schools to educate laywomen. The schools led to the creation of networks of Buddhist women, which played an active role in bridging eras, institutions, and regions in modern times. They are indispensable to the flourishing of global Buddhism today, as attested by the case of Cheng Yen, known as the “Mother Teresa of Asia.”

Taking together, the four articles endeavor to put gender squarely in the center of the study of Chinese Buddhist history. It is our sincere hope that this volume will provide readers an opportunity to reflect on the field, especially to contemplate the best approaches and explore all the possible source materials.

Notes

1 Diana Y. Paul, The Buddhist Feminine Ideal: Queen Srimala and the Tathagatagarbha (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1980); Paul, Women in Buddhism: Images of the Feminine in Mahayana Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Kathryn Ann Tsai, “The Chinese Buddhist Monastic Order for Women: The First Two Centuries,” in Richard Guisso and Stanley Johannesen, eds., Women in China: Current Directions in Historical Scholarship (Youngstown, New York: Philo Press, 1981), 1–20.

2 Miriam Levering, “Dōgen's Raihaitokuzui and Women Teaching in Sung Ch'an,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, 21, no. 1 (1997), 77–110; Beata Grant, “Female Holder of the Lineage: Linji Chan Master Zhiyuan Xinggang (1597–1654),” Late Imperial China, 17, no. 2 (1996), 51–76; Ding-Hwa E. Hsieh, “Images of Women in Ch'an Buddhist Literature of the Sung Period,” in Peter N. Gregory and Daniel A. Getz, Jr., eds., Buddhism in the Sung (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 148–87.

3 Mark Halperin, “Domesticity and the Dharma: Portraits of Buddhist Laywomen in Sung China,” T'oung Pao, 92, nos. 1–3 (2006), 50–100; and Ping Yao, “Good Karmic Connections: Buddhist Mothers in Tang China,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China, 10, no. 1 (2008), 57–85.

4 Beata Grant's series of articles and her two books, Daughters of Emptiness: Poems of Chinese Buddhist Nuns (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2003) and Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008); and Wendi Adamek, “The Literary Lives of Nuns: Poems Inscribed on a Memorial Niche for the Tang Nun Benxing,” T'ang Studies, 27, no. 1 (2009), 40–65.

5 Chün-fang Yü, Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Glen Dudbridge, The Legend of Miaoshan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Wilt L. Idema, Personal Salvation and Filial Piety: Two Precious Scroll Narratives of Guanyin and Her Acolytes (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008).

6 Ursula King, “General Introduction: Gender-Critical Turns in the Study of Religion,” in Ursula King and Tina Beattie, eds., Gender, Religion and Diversity: Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: Continuum, 2004), 1–10.