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in the early seventeenth century, a lay Buddhist scholar-o◊cial from Jiaxing (in present-day Zhejiang province) by the name of Gao Yiyong ( jinshi, 1613) wondered about the seeming absence of women in the written biographical and historical accounts of Buddhist monastic figures: Those who abandoned worldly glory and went in search of tranquility, seeking to transcend this dusty world and refusing to be entrapped by it, were for the most part all virile and heroic knights with wills of iron. Thus they were able to embark on this path and penetrate to the origin and become the famous religious figures of the ages. When it comes to the denizens of perfumed inner chambers and embroidered fans, they are as a rule gentle and submissive, weak and passive. If one looks in the various books of the Records of the Lamp for accounts of women who have taken refuge, one will find very few.1 As Miriam Levering points out, the first of the great genealogical histories, the Jingde chuandeng lu (Jingde period records of the lamp), completed in 1004, contained only one biographical record of a woman, Moshan Liaoran, a contemporary of Linji Yixuan (d. 866)— this despite the fact that a 1021 census reported 61,240 nuns. Subsequent Song-dynasty histories included a few more, including two women who for the first time were o◊cially recognized in these imperial-commissioned histories as Chan masters.2 In later compendiums there are more biographical references to Buddhist nuns—but still a very small percentage of the many thousands of Ming and Qing women living in hundreds of convents and hermitages large and small. It is not surprising, therefore, that Gao Yiyong should have had di◊culty finding any textual traces of these women. Fortunately for us, however, Gao and other Buddhist literati-o◊cials like him made an e¤ort to track down and preserve the writings of at least a few of the more eminent Buddhist nuns of his time. It is for this reason that the privately sponsored edition of the Buddhist canon and other supplementary texts, begun on Mount Wutai in 1589 but completed at Lengyan Monastery in Jiaxing in 1676, contains a 87 4 Through the Empty Gate: The Poetry of Buddhist Nuns in Late Imperial China Beata Grant number of “discourse records” (yulu) compiled by the disciples of female Chan masters of this period. Thanks to these records, together with literary works and biographical accounts in other scattered sources, we can a◊rm that in the Ming-Qing period, as in the Song, there were a significant number of women who were distinguished for their spiritual attainments, their leadership qualities, and last, but not least, their literary and artistic talents. The Ming-Qing period was in many ways even a more hostile environment for Buddhist nuns than previous periods. The momentous socioeconomic changes that began in the late Ming and continued through the Qing period resulted in the blurring of geographic, class, and gender boundaries; the traditional male elite responded ambivalently, especially when it came to the position of women.3 On the one hand, footbinding, concubinage, female infanticide , and the infamous widow chastity cult (which resulted in the suicide of thousands of women) were widespread, all much encouraged by many male literati scholars. On the other hand, there were men such as Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801) and Chen Hongmou (1696–1771) who argued for the education and literacy of women. And in fact, during this period there were more women reading, writing, and publishing—with the ready support of fathers, sons, and husbands—than anywhere else in the world.The result of this particular combination of oppression and opportunity was not, as one might expect, a revolution on the part of women. Rather, as recent studies of women’s writings from this period have shown, it was less a story of subversion and transgression (although there was occasionally that) and more one of negotiation between self-expression and self-e¤acement. This ambivalence extended to the religious world as well. Confucian literati were generally opposed to anyone’s abandoning his or her familial and filial duties to enter the monastery. However, their ire was more often than not directed toward women who in abandoning the home were in a sense divesting themselves of that with which they were almost entirely identified. These literati did realize that at times women had no choice in the matter; an eighteenth-century o◊cial...

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