Rethinking Gender and Female Laity in Late Imperial Chinese Pure Land Buddhist Biographies

Xing Wang

doi:10.3390/rel12090705

Abstract

This paper explores how lay female believers are depicted in the Chinese monastic Pure Land Buddhist texts and how a particular late-imperial Chinese Buddhist biography collection betrayed the previously existing narrative of female laity. Moreover, I wish to show that there had existed a long-lasting and persistent non-binary narrative of lay women in Chinese Pure Land biographies admiring female agency, in which female Pure Land practitioners are depicted as equally accomplished to male ones. Such a narrative betrays the medieval monastic elitist discourse of seeing women as naturally corrupted. This narrative is best manifested in the late Ming monk master Yunqi Zhuhong’s collection, who celebrated lay female practitioners’ religious achievement as comparable to men. This tradition is discontinued in the Confucian scholar Peng Shaosheng’s collection of lay female Buddhist biographies in the Qing dynasty, however, in which Peng depicts women as submissive and inferior to males. This transition—from using the stories of eminent lay female Buddhists to challenge Confucian teachings to positioning lay females under Confucian disciplines—exhibits Peng Shaosheng’s own invention, rather than a transmission of the inherited formulaic narration of lay female believers, as he claimed.

Highlights

The pursuit of reincarnation in Amitabha’s (Ami tuofo 阿彌陀佛) Western Pure Land of Bliss (Sukhavati; xifang jile shijie 西方極樂世界 or anyang guo 安養國) is the root of one of the longest-lasting and most influential Mahayana Buddhist traditions, both in China and in East Asian societies more widely
During the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), the first work in the genre of Pure Land Reincarnation Biographies appeared. This medieval Chinese Pure Land genre later became one of the most popular and extensive types of Buddhist historiographic texts during the Song (960–1279 CE), Ming (1368–1644 CE), and Qing (1636–1912 CE) dynasties, when Buddhism as an intellectual and social institution is believed by some scholars to be transformed into a more secular and state-controlled religion in China (Chen 2019; Zhou 2014)
Beyond a Buddhist gender perspective, scholarly interpretations of Peng Shaosheng’s androcentric attitude toward gender are usually based on two factors: one is his identity as both Confucian scholar and Pure Land Buddhist, the other is the way women are represented in the Biographies of Good Women (Lo 2013; Wu 2020)

Summary

Introduction

The pursuit of reincarnation in Amitabha’s (Ami tuofo 阿彌陀佛) Western Pure Land of Bliss (Sukhavati; xifang jile shijie 西方極樂世界 or anyang guo 安養國) is the root of one of the longest-lasting and most influential Mahayana Buddhist traditions, both in China and in East Asian societies more widely. Inspired by translated Buddhist scriptures describing the magnificent environment of the Pure Land of Bliss and Amitabha’s sacred vows promising any sentient being reincarnation in his pure realm, Chinese monastic and lay Buddhists from the Western Jin dynasty (265–317 CE) forward started to follow this so-called “easy” and “convenient” religious ideal. According to their interpretation of these texts, such as The Buddha Speaks of the Infinite Life Sutra (or The Longer Sukhavatıvyuha Sutra; Wuliang shou jing 無量壽經) and Amitayus Visual Meditation Sutra (Guan wuliang shou jing 觀無量壽經), Amitabha’s promise offered a path to attaining Buddhahood with no possibility of failure. I wish to further exhibit Peng’s twist of Zhuhong’s gender perspective and show how Peng’s twist separates him from the earlier monastic Pure Land views on female laity

Androcentrism in a Buddhist Context

Peng Shaosheng in a Late Imperial Chinese Gender Context

Pure Land Biographies before the Ming Dynasty and Narratives of Lay Women

Narrative of Exemplary Lay Female Buddhists in Zhuhong’s Writings

Peng Shaosheng’s Modification of Zhuhong’s Gender Narrative

Conclusions