The Hearth and the Temple: Mapping Female Religiosity in Late Imperial China, 1550-1900

Localities of Women's Religious Experience

When the scholar and poet Lu Qi (b. 1614) married off his daughter, he gave her a didactic text authored by himself as a gift. Entitled Instructions for New Brides (Xinfu pu),the work contains a whole section on how the bride should act if she marries into a family where the mother-in-law is a Buddhist believer. Three different strategies are suggested in accordance with the manner of the older woman's practice. First, if the mother-in-law restricts herself to the observance of a vegetarian diet and the recitation of sutras at home, the bride is encouraged also to cultivate an interest in those practices. Second, if the mother-in-law likes associating with nuns, the bride should show respect but keep a distance. She is not to make donations or to have frequent conversations with those visitors. Finally, if the mother-in-law takes to offering incense at temples, the bride should use pretexts to refuse to join her company, and it would be even better if she could find an appropriate chance to remonstrate with the older woman. ¹

The advice Lu offered his daughter and other brides evinces a clear spatial dimension. Depending on whether a woman's Buddhist practices involved a crossing of domestic boundaries, she could meet with accommodation and approval (devotional practices at home), reluctant tolerance (receiving nuns at home), and strong opposition (temple visits). Such place-specific differentiation was rather typical of late imperial Confucian attitudes toward women's popular religious practices, although it appears in a much sharper focus here because the three distinct approaches are presented as practical advice to young daughters-in-law. Obviously, some vital interests must have been at stake for a patriarch to encourage the defiance of family hierarchy. What was at stake?

Charlotte Furth helps us answer this question in her important study of the genre of household instructions during the late imperial period. Having demonstrated that the patriarchs set a premium on ancestral rites and posited a close link between ritual decay and family decline, Furth (1990: 202) observes that women, by virtue of their perceived penchant for popular religious practices, were regarded as the main source of religious heterodoxy within the family. She does not examine "female heterodoxy" in light of the rituals and values of ancestor worship, however, and limits her discussion to the association usually made between those questionable religious activities (especially temple visits) and the relaxation of female seclusion and the rise of sexual license. ² The exclusive attention to an identification of sexual with ritual morality weakens the force of the crucial point that she goes on to make: "Inasmuch as female piety normally reflected an accommodation to a segregated life-style, often with a preoccupation with otherworldly salvation, and was carried on largely within the framework of the patriarchal home, it offered the system little to fear." ³ While these percipient remarks drive home the importance of the spatial dimension in Confucian attitudes toward women's popular religious practice, the emphasis on an equation between religious deviance and sexual misconduct blurs the significance of the ancestral rites themselves, and of women's role in the Confucian family as a sacred institution. ⁴

This article seeks to push further along the lines of Furth's inquiry in exploring late imperial Confucian views of the relationship between space and women's expression of their religious piety. Examining a body of literature that consists of epitaphs, biographies, didactic texts, and fiction from the period roughly between 1550 and 1900, I argue that the evident spatial concerns of the discourse should be understood in terms of efforts to defend and strengthen the values of ancestral rites and filial piety at a time when the influence of lay Buddhism reached a new height. As will be shown, when women consorted with clerics...