Chapter Seven. Chan Friends: Poetic Exchanges Between Gentry Women And Buddhist Nuns In Seventeenth-Century China

Abstract

Personal Buddhist devotional piety had, of course, always been a part of gentry women's lives, and this certainly continued in the late imperial period. This form of religious engagement was tolerated, if not always completely approved of, by Confucian fathers and husbands, as long as it remained within the domestic sphere. It would appear then, that proper - whether nuns or gen- try women - were ideally meant to live in parallel worlds of enclosure, with no direct contact between them. If this were actually the case, it would mean that friendships between such women would be relatively rare. However, the gap between the prescriptive and the actual being what it always is, such relationships were in fact not at all uncommon. Keywords: buddhist nuns; China; gentry women; seventeenth-century