Food and Philosophy in Early China

Reviewed by: Artisans in Early Imperial China Anne P. Underhill Artisans in Early Imperial China by Anthony J. Barbieri-Low. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Pp. x + 394. $60.00. Barbieri-Low’s engaging book, Artisans in Early Imperial China, tackles an important topic that has not been adequately addressed by historians, art historians, or archaeologists: the people behind the production and distribution of hand-crafted goods during the Qin and Han periods, 221 b.c.e.–c.e. 220. Whereas other scholars often discuss the finely made art objects from this era in isolation, Barbieri-Low breathes life into them, revealing their hidden human dimensions. He argues convincingly that “one cannot truly understand the visual and material cultural remains of early imperial China without understanding something about how they were made, who made them, and under what social and economic circumstances they were fashioned” (p. 26). Barbieri-Low succeeds in demonstrating the effectiveness of adopting a multidisciplinary approach to investigating ancient artisans and their products. He uses historical texts and inscriptions on objects to uncover information about the lives of artisans and the division of labor in production, art history to analyze the artisans’ creations, and anthropology to analyze the socioeconomic context. His aim is to employ historical, art historical, and anthropological (including archaeological) data in equal measure. He has, moreover, organized the chapters of his study to highlight the lives of artisans from different perspectives; he examines artisans in society (Chapter 2, which covers the topics of social status and social mobility), in the workshop (Chapter 3, which covers production methods, division of labor, work conditions), in the marketplace (Chapter 4, which deals with the organization of official markets and marketing methods), and at court (Chapter 5, which discusses the role of art objects in palaces and the organization of palace workshops). Chapter 6, “Artisans in Irons” examines non-free artisans, such as convicts, who were forced to produce for the state. His analysis of texts and inscriptions especially provides an illuminating view of the lives of artisans and the objects they made during the early imperial era. [End Page 491] Readers should know that anthropologists have long employed a holistic approach to research on craft goods, analyzing goods within systems of production, distribution, and consumption, rather than in isolation. For these scholars (including myself), the focus has always been the people behind the artifacts, revealed through the study of such topics as social identity, labor organization, craft specialization, exchange systems, consumption patterns, and regional economic systems.1 Research projects have included the production, distribution, and use of craft goods (especially ceramics, stone objects, textiles, metal objects) in prehistoric and early historic societies. Relevant publications exist for most world areas, including societies comparable in social complexity and scale with early imperial China such as the Inca empire.2 Considering the anthropological literature on these topics, I offer suggestions here for future research on early China. My intention is not to replace the productive multidisciplinary approach advocated by Barbieri-Low, but to discuss how one might amplify the anthropological component even further to provide more information on the producers and consumers of craft goods in early China. [End Page 492] The bulk of Barbieri-Low’s book treats the term “artisan” as a highly trained and skilled person who makes fine objects by hand. His book thus implies that such beautiful objects, works of art, were produced primarily for elite consumers. While recognizing that objects of beauty can be made for more than one type of consumer, the anthropological literature also distinguishes between various craft goods on the basis of class, status, gender, and ethnicity of the consumers. Researchers investigate how certain kinds of goods may bring prestige or wealth to consumers. They focus on how people actively use different kinds of goods in a social system. Also worthy of future investigation is the impact that consumer demand in early China had on the production of various kinds of craft goods. Consumer demand affects the production of both prestige-bearing goods and the common goods used in daily life. Barbieri-Low provides clues about variation in the social and ideological aspirations of consumers during the Qin and Han...

This paper proposes to provide an outline of the development of the concept of ghost in early Imperial China. I will first give a brief account of the emergence of a discourse on ghost in early China, then I will discuss the religious milieu of early imperial China, concentrating on both the establishment of the imperial order and official religious rituals, and the idea of ghost persisted in people's daily life that developed according to local traditions. I will examine how the official and the private idea of ghost interacted or overlapped with one another. Lastly, I will introduce the appearance of the literary ghost at the end of the Eastern Han, as a prelude to the Six Dynasty ghost literature.

Book Reviews 143 Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China ROEL STERCKX. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. vi, 235 pages. ISBN 978-1-107-00171-8. £55.00, US$90.00, hardcover. Roel Sterckx’s new book is a welcome addition to the growing volume of publications on early Chinese history. Sterckx explores aspects of food culture in early China, primarily— albeit not exclusively—in the context of sacrificial activities; this focus allows him to address manifold issues concerning the philosophy of sacrifices, conceptualization of human senses, and early Chinese economic history and political thought. This rich and well written book will become indispensable to everybody interested in China’s food culture, in early Chinese religious history, and also to many students of early Chinese philosophy. References to food and food-related metaphors are ubiquitous in early Chinese texts, and this very richness of sources may have impeded systematic research on these topics in the past. In facing this challenging task, Sterckx relies on his awesome erudition, which was fully visible already in his first magnum opus, The Animal and the Daemon in Early China.1 In Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood Sterckx utilizes, even if inevitably briefly, most of the received texts from the Springs-and-Autumns (770–453 BCE), Warring States (453–221 BCE), and the Han (206 BCE–220 CE) periods; these, in addition to occasional references to the paleographic sources and to archeological discoveries, allow Sterckx to present a panoptic view of Chinese sacrificial culture. The scope of the book is impressive both in terms of the periods covered (Sterckx expands his discussion at times both backwards, to the Western Zhou period [ca. 1045–771 BCE], and forwards, toward the post-Han sources) and in terms of topics covered, which include food habits of the elite, food as philosophical and political metaphor, nature of the human interaction with the deities, the economics of sacrifice, and aspects of sagehood and of rulership in pre-imperial and early imperial China. While not all of these topics are covered with equal density, and while the discussion on many issues may require further fine-tuning and modifications, overall the position of the Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood as a standard for any future exploration in the field seems to me undeniable. The quasi-encyclopedic nature of the Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood allows a reader to select a chapter close to his/her field of interest and read it as a separate essay; yet it is also possible to discern a few common ideas that underlie Sterckx’s discussions. Among these, the most interesting to the present reviewer is the author’s emphasis on multiple tensions that accompanied almost any imaginable aspect of food and sacrificial culture. Food and drinks were the source of nourishment and high joy, but also potentially of self-destructive overindulgence; deities had to be fed much like the humans, but the most exquisite offering was, paradoxically, the tasteless stew; sacrifices were essential for the community well-being, 1 Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002. 144 Journal of Chinese Religions but also potentially damaging due to the waste of resources; and, while the sage rulers were supposed to be all-hearing and clairvoyant (congming 聪明), their ears and eyes had to be covered to prevent direct contact between their senses and their environment. By highlighting these tensions, Sterckx adds another dimension to our understanding of the deeply contradictory nature of China’s sacrificial, and, more broadly ritual culture with its embedded tension between the ritual and reality, between the image of perfect order generated through elaborate ceremonies and the imperfect sociopolitical situation; between persistent appeal to divine support and a somewhat equivocal belief in its efficacy. Speaking of tensions, one may identify some of them in the book itself. Perhaps the most significant one is between Sterckx-anthropologist and Sterckx-historian. The first tends to depict Chinese food consumption and sacrificial practices as if they were uniform throughout the six to ten centuries under discussion, perpetuating, inadvertently, the long bygone image of changeless China. The author frankly explains why he eschews chronological treatment of the topics under discussion: given the notoriously unreliable dating of major texts, most notably of ritual compendia...

Early is best known for the dazzling artifacts it has left behind. These terracotta figures, gilt-bronze lamps, and other material remnants of the Chinese past unearthed during archaeological excavations are often viewed without regard to the social context of their creation, yet they were made by real individuals who contributed greatly to the foundations of early Chinese culture. With Artisans in Early Imperial China, Anthony Barbieri-Low combines historical, epigraphic, and archaeological analysis to refocus our gaze from the glittering objects and monuments of to the men and women who made them. This book represents the first in-depth social history of artisans in early China. How did they live? How were they trained? How did they market their products? How free were they? In this engaging and illuminating analysis, Barbieri-Low explores these artisans' lives and careers from a variety of aspects. First, he examines their position within early Chinese society, analyzing their social status, social mobility, and role in the early Chinese economy. Delving deeper, he steps into their workshops to learn how they were trained, what tools they used, and what workplace hazards they faced. Following their wares to the marketplace, he investigates some of the marketing techniques used by artisans and merchants, including such startlingly modern practices as family trademarks, rhyming jingles, and knockoffs of royal products. From the dirt and din of the marketplace, Barbieri-Low enters the rarefied air of the court, with its own visual and material culture and its own professional artisans. This court was constructed upon the backs of yet another class of artisans, the most abject, those found in labor camps and slave markets. These were the men and women who built and decorated many of the great palaces, temples, and tombs of early China. Barbieri-Low compellingly argues that the state used a cold-blooded mathematical formula to optimally exploit these coerced laborers without upsetting the balance of the economy or fostering revolt. Artisans in Early Imperial China humanizes the material remains of the past, revealing the men and women who made the beautiful artifacts we know today. This book will appeal to anyone interested in Chinese history, as well as to scholars of comparative social history, labor history, and Asian art history.

In early imperial China, the dead were remembered by stereotyping them, by relating them to the existing public memory and not by vaunting what made each person individually distinct and extraordinary in his or her lifetime. Their posthumous names were chosen from a limited predetermined pool; their descriptors were derived from set phrases in the classical tradition; and their identities were explicitly categorized as being like this cultural hero or that sage official in antiquity. In other words, postmortem remembrance was a process of pouring new ancestors into prefabricated molds or stamping them with rigid cookie cutters. Public Memory in Early China is an examination of this pouring and stamping process. After surveying ways in which learning in the early imperial period relied upon memorization and recitation, K. E. Brashier treats three definitive parameters of identity--name, age, and kinship--as ways of negotiating a person's relative position within the collective consciousness. He then examines both the tangible and intangible media responsible for keeping that defined identity welded into the infrastructure of Han public memory.

The Liji (Book of rites) , Yili (Rites and ceremonies) and Zhouli (Rites of Zhou) would become, in later Chinese history, the three most significant classics from early China for defining ritual behavior. The ritual compendia are a tremendously rich repository of material for historical, theoretical, and comparative work. This chapter analyzes the notions of rituals that are presented in these texts, discusses why such notions were developed and analyzes how and why the texts came to prominence over the course of Han and subsequent periods. It focuses in particular on mortuary rituals and rituals of statecraft. It gives overview of the nature, structure, and arguments of the three texts. It then focuses on one theme, namely, mortuary rituals, and compare how the different texts approach the topic. Next it turns to a concrete example dealt with by all three texts: views of mortuary rituals and political order in the texts. Keywords: China; ghosts; Liji (Book of rites) ; mortuary rituals; political order; Ritual Compendia; spirits; Yili (Rites and ceremonies) ; Zhouli (Rites of Zhou)

This article examines the moral ambiguity that surrounded alcohol consumption in early China and the ways in which the use and abuse of alcohol served as a measure to judge the past. Rule-guided drinking was part of social life but, importantly, it was also a cornerstone in sacrificial ritual and therefore an important measure to please the spirit world. In assessing the past, early Chinese writers often judged rulers and their regimes based on the way they handled alcohol and ritualized drinking. Moderation or excess in drinking was seen as a key indicator in a regime's health: bad and overindulgent rulers were pitched against sages, who were portrayed as masters in the art of moderate consumption. These judgments run as a red thread through the written record, from Zhou bronze inscriptions to Han memorials.

Reviewed by: Public Memory in Early China by K. E. Brashier Erica F. Brindley Public Memory in Early China by K. E. Brashier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. Pp. viii + 511. $69.95. Public Memory in Early China provides a rich, exquisitely detailed, and important account of early Chinese strategies for creating and maintaining a shared, public memory. Guided by such questions as, “What things should we remember?” and “How does a society measure and mark what is important to it?” Brashier discusses how certain oral and literary cultures in early China sought to mark, preserve, and commemorate individuals and ancestors, as well as other aspects of the past. With nuanced, mellifluous, and meticulously organized language, Brashier transforms the cold bones of mortuary culture—in particular, stele inscriptions, which form the springboard for his inquiry—into a wide-ranging intellectual feast. In the introduction alone, this feast includes in-depth discussions about education, about orality and literacy, about the mechanics and performative aspects of remembering, as well as about the role of the classicists in creating a memorial culture, to name a few. The bulk of the book presents a neat, threefold approach to discussing public memory. Parts I, II, and III highlight names, age, and kinship respectively as prominent ways of marking one’s status and public value during life and during the afterlife in early Chinese society. Parts IV and V examine what Brashier calls “the tangible and intangible tools of positioning the self” (pp. 263, 317). Central to the discussion of the first three parts is how names, age, and kinship help position the self [End Page 456] so as to locate individuals within a web of culturally meaningful relationships both during life and after death. This manner of organizing the book is innovative and interesting; it sheds light upon some of the most important techniques used in ancient Chinese culture to situate individuals not just hierarchically but also laterally and in every conceivable, three-dimensional direction, according to a complicated and dynamic calculation of social worth. In part I, on names, we learn about the circumstances in which various names, such as familiar, courtesy, posthumous, family, and clan names, were bestowed, used, and tabooed. We learn how names served to position individuals according to a hierarchy of value and to link them to a particular region or plot of land. Indeed, one of Brashier’s most interesting points in this section is his discussion of the tight relationship between territory and ancestral cult: the surname could locate and associate individuals with specific areas on the map of the known world. In part II, on age, we learn about the various administrative systems of valuation and ways of honoring people during and after their lifetimes. We learn about the office of the “thrice venerable” (san lao 三老; p 175), about why early Chinese culture venerated their living elderly as well as their dead, and about the administrative seniority system (jue 爵) that was used during the Han period. The overarching comparative point that Brashier stresses in this section contrasts traditional, Western views of the arc of life—which allegedly rises to midlife only to decline thereafter—with a dominant ancient Chinese view, expressed through administrative grades as well as through religious attitudes toward the dead, of an “ever-climbing stairway” (p. 166) from birth through death and afterward. Brashier’s discussion of the shared symbols used in stele inscriptions demonstrates how this medium helped reduce the particular qualities of a person’s life to a common language of hyperbole and praise, despite stele inscriptions’ ostensible focus on individual traits and biographies. A significant point that Brashier makes in part II thus has to do with the reductionism associated with age-related positioning of the self. In his discussion of “The Age of the Afterlife” (sec. 11), he especially zeroes in on this point. Specifically, his discussion of the spatial arrangement of ancestor worship and sacrifice shows how one’s individuality eventually recedes into a cloud-like, “corporate, ancestral body” (p. 200), indicated by the vertical height of an ancestral tablet [End Page 457] located at the top of the sacrificial hall. Noting the direct relationship between...

Book Reviews 129 moral submission from all. The humble aspect in ruling as son and younger brother and the caring aspect in ruling as father and mother of the people, according to Birdwhistell, resemble women’s roles as wives and mothers. In addition, Mencius’s four beginnings that take the feeling of compassion as the most basic of all, illustrated by the example of a child falling into a well (2A6), resemble maternal compassionate impulses. A more obvious reference to maternal caring can be seen in the Mohists’ characterization of the way of Ru 儒 as comparable to the way that parents attend to their new born infant. Mencius, in his response, takes this statement to mean that there must be priority given to one’s parents over strangers (3A5). A benevolent ruler must then begin with imitating the maternal activity of caring for the vulnerable, both young and old. The centrality of caring activities and the feeling of compassion, in a word, sets Mencius’s humane ruler apart from the dominant self-centered masculinity of King Hui at the time. But despite the affinities between Mencius’s compassionate ruler and feminist care ethics, Birdwhistell insists on the patriarchal, hierarchal nature of all Chinese intellectual thought. As she writes in chapter one as well as in the conclusion, Chinese philosophy is an affair of elite men and the masculine ideal developed under this pretence is not applicable to women (pp. 136-7). Birdwhistell’s rejection of the resiliency of Mencius’s thought indeed presents a problem in bridging Confucian ethics and feminist care ethics, despite the fact that both take maternal thinking and caring activities as paradigmatic, not just in the realm of personal relationship, but also in the wider world of politics and human community. If the question here is whether Mencius is sexist and whether his intended audience is male, the answer is obviously a “yes,” given the original historical and social context. But then that is true of most human traditions, whether East or West, South or North. So the real issue here, as I see it, is whether we can acknowledge Mencius’s inevitable human-all-toohuman shortcomings in the discourse on gender, race, and class, and, at the same time, celebrate the novelty of his benevolent, compassionate ruler in the face of today’s political reality in which maternal care and compassion are viewed as irrelevant to the masculine discourse on power. And I think in the end the answer for feminists or non-feminists alike should as well be a resounding “yes.” LI-HSIANG LISA ROSENLEE, University of Hawai‘i–West O‘ahu The Politics of Mourning in Early China MIRANDA BROWN. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007. xiv, 205 pages. ISBN 978-0-7914-7157-9. US$75.00 hardcover. Miranda Brown, in her first book, explicitly refrains from making grand claims about either her period (Han 漢, 206 BCE-220 CE) or her topic (mourning practices and policies), instead 130 Journal of Chinese Religions preferring the “open-endedness of historical interpretation” (p. 7). Her book, indeed, moves forward in very concrete steps, question by question. How to evaluate the deeply engrained Weberian views on filial piety that privilege the father-son relation, and see it as a training ground for dutiful service to one’s Lord? Is Emperor Wen’s 文 edict of 157 BCE to be taken as a prohibition on the observance of three years mourning? Are the classical texts (including the Analects [Lunyu 論語], Mencius [Mengzi 孟子], Classic of Filial Piety [Xiaojing 孝經], Gongyang’s Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals [Gongyang zhuan 公羊傳], Book of Rites [Liji 禮記], Annals of Lü [Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋]) as insistent on a son’s obligation to mourn his parents for three years as is often assumed? Can the greater prominence during the Eastern Han of accounts of mourning be attributed to changes in imperial policy? Do the dynastic histories dealing with the Eastern Han (25-220 CE) reflect the realities of the period or Six Dynasties sensibilities? Her answers to these and many other questions are always subtle, fair, and interesting, as she consistently refuses to take common assumptions for granted. Nonetheless, out of this concatenation...

2. Dynamics of Industrial Expansion in Early Modern Europe and Late Imperial China

From a comparative perspective, this paper argues that early Chinese empires lacked the concept of talion or tort law when malicious violence or intent became factors. Instead, wrongdoers were required to pay fines to the government or received punishment as hard labor for the state. Victims not only could not receive compensation but were sometimes punished along with the offender if their loss was perceived as a loss to the empire. I argue that the absence of corrective justice in criminal cases can be traced back to the philosophical underpinnings of the body politic, a prominent discourse in early China that viewed the emperor and the people as a single, organic entity. When people were conceived of as constituting a unified, singular entity, criminal actions against an individual were interpreted as damage to the empire. Therefore, punishments for offenders were designed to compensate the empire, not the individual. Furthermore, in the context of the body politic, the suffering of both victims and offenders was regarded as metaphysically equal, which justified frequently pardoning culprits on a large scale to secure harmony within the empire. Originally, the body politic was employed to admonish and criticize the throne, urging the emperor to align his interests with the well-being of his people, but in practice, it compromised the practice of justice.

Reviewed by: Women in Ancient China by Bret Hinsch Sheri A. Lullo Women in Ancient China. Bret Hinsch. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. 226 pp., 20 figures, glossary, notes, bibliography, index. Hardback US $79, ISBN 978-1-5381-1540-4. Bret Hinsch has made a number of contributions to the history of gender and sexuality in China, primarily for the ancient and premodern eras. His latest book, Women in Ancient China, "details the process of growing sexual inequality as it unfolded" across the Neolithic, Shang, and Western and Eastern Zhou periods (seventh millennium to third century b.c.) (p. x). This work greatly expands upon Hinsch's summary of these periods in a chapter in his other recent book, Women in Imperial China (Hinsch 2016:1–32). It also serves as a welcome and long-awaited companion to his Women in Early Imperial China (2002), which covers the Qin and Han periods (third century b.c.–a.d. third century). Like many of his books, Women in Ancient China takes a chronological approach, which allows Hinsch to examine the various ways that a woman's identity and status were affected by the shifting social, political, and institutional structures of each ruling power. Thus, each chapter is a comparative study that looks both back in time and anticipates future developments or changes. Drawing from multiple disciplinary perspectives, this useful and comprehensive study synthesizes the growing body of secondary scholarship on women's lives in ancient China. Hinsch's central thesis is that "growing institutional complexity affected female rights and privileges" (p. xii). The study details the various ways that gendered hierarchy became standardized with the expansion of a patriarchal governing system, relegating women to roles in which they invariably served to aid or help legitimize men. Interwoven within this narrative, however, are stimulating accounts of instances where women occupied positions of political, moral, and maternal authority. Hinsch's chronological study is framed by chapters that take up two prominent and influential "myths" in the study of gender in early China, including theories of matriarchy and a rhetoric of females causing the downfalls of major dynasties. Following the "Introduction," chapter 1, "The Myth of Matriarchy," addresses the "vexing methodological problem" with early and in some cases current scholarship that views early society in China as matriarchal (p. xiv). Such theories developed in the mid-nineteenth century under the influence of Marxism; to a certain extent, they remain part of state orthodoxy (though they are quietly disregarded by most scholars today) (p. 5). As Hinsch demonstrates, evidence of matriarchy and matrilinealism in Neolithic China and into the succeeding periods has been disproven. These approaches, however, must be acknowledged in an historical survey of women in ancient China since for decades they have been an underlying assumption of many scholars from numerous disciplinary perspectives, including archaeology, religion, social history, and linguistics. By including this "critical discussion" at the opening of his book, Hinsch positions his research as separate from this outdated body of scholarship (p. xiv). It should be noted, however, that a rather crucial part of the historiography of the "matriarchy myth" is missing from Hinsch's summary. Quite relevant to the purposes of his book are some of the positive outcomes that came with the quest to uncover China's matriarchal beginnings, as explained very clearly in an article by Gideon Shelach (2004) titled "Marxist and Post-Marxist Paradigms for the Neolithic." According to Shelach, misguided as they were, theories of matriarchy were foundational to the study of gender in the archaeological record of China: The Marxist paradigm fostered in China a coherent discussion on issues such as the family structure during the Neolithic period and forced Chinese archaeologists to think of archaeological methods that could flesh out these abstract social norms. Contrary to commonly held views in the West, Chinese archaeologists vividly debated theoretical and methodological issues related to concepts such as [End Page 413] matriarchy, matrilineality, patriarchy, and patrilineality. (Shelach 2004:14) These are some of the very issues that are central to Hinsch's book and as such should have been properly acknowledged. In chapter 2, Hinsch surveys the Early, Middle, and Late Neolithic periods of China, with dates provided...

This article examines the development of road networks in Roman and early Chinese imperial contexts, analyzing the role of political ideology and cultural frameworks in shaping infrastructure. It argues that Roman roadbuilding, deeply intertwined with notions of public participation and republicanism, developed into a system where roads symbolized power and facilitated state control. Early Imperial China saw similar approaches to roads with a few stark contrasts. These included a greater restriction of access and usage, and a more equivocal stance on the ethics of road construction, with roadbuilding becoming less emphasized in favor of waterways and hydraulic engineering in the Han period, reflecting a different mode of territorial management and imperial ideology. This study highlights key structural and ideological divergences in the two civilizations' approaches to infrastructure. The Roman 'hodological' worldview contrasts with the broader territorial understanding evident in early Chinese cartographical and hydraulic initiatives. By offering a comparative analysis, this paper provides a foundation for further inquiry into the political and cultural dynamics of imperial roadbuilding.

Texts from pre-imperial and early imperial China are replete with dietary information, regimens for nourishing the body and instructions on how not to soil its inner purity. Sources have far less to say about the body’s effluvia and the waste and muck that is shed and excreted by human and non-human animals. This article studies references to excreta and excretion in early China. It shows how human and animal faeces as well as the locus of excretion connoted both negative and positive spheres. Excreta were deemed noxious yet also beneficial, they were to be discarded yet also reused. Latrines were liminal zones, operating at the intersection of social propriety and physical and moral rejection. The process of excretion made the body vulnerable to external influences such as demonic illness, yet faecal matter of itself also had medicinal healing powers. In agriculture, matter exuded was matter used to fecundate and fertilize crops. The waste and human nightsoil that accumulated in the concealed domestic space of the latrine and pigpen ended up as sought-after produce infusing life into seeds, fields, and public productivity. By bringing together evidence across a range of textual and material sources – from latrines, to pigs, to a line in the Laozi 老子 and its commentaries – this article traces excretory experience and matter through its cycle from defecation to regeneration.

This paper traces the history of the notion of female chastity (zhen) in China from pre-Qin to the mid-imperial era and argues that, prior to the arrival of Buddhism in China, the idea of female “chastity” was concerned not so much with physical virginity as the dutiful fulfillment of wifely obligations as stipulated by the Confucian marriage rites. A woman's chastity was determined by her moral rectitude rather than by her biological condition. The understanding of the physical body as a sacrosanct entity that must be defended against defilement and violation emerged under the influence of Buddhist notions of the uncontaminated body, the pious observance of the Buddhist monastic code, and the performance of religious charity that became popular in early imperial China. Based on a critical analysis of a wide array of Confucian canonical texts, dynastic histories, Indian Buddhist scriptures, biographies of Chinese monks and nuns, the monastic code, and Chinese Buddhist encyclopedias, this paper delineates the gradual process by which the Buddhist concept of the “pure body” became fully assimilated into the indigenous Chinese notion of female “rectitude” and the notion of female chastity finally acquired an ontological identity around the end of the sixth century.