Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China (review)

Scholars of late imperial China are nowadays scarcely surprised by the discovery of new sources that enable us to learn unexpected things about the society we study.¹ Yet Beata Grant, in Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of the Seventeenth-Century, does offer us a set of texts that surprise, as well as an analytical frame that helps us think about those texts and put them into context. Grant has located discourse records (yulu 語錄) written during the seventeenth century by seven women Chan masters of the Linji lineage. These were more or less hidden in plain sight in the Jiaxing Dazang jing 嘉興大藏經, an edition of the Buddhist canon completed in 1719. Through a careful reading of these records and her meticulous detective work in assembling fragments from other sources, Grant has written a remarkable story of female Chan masters-women who studied with male Chan masters, taught women and men, managed and built monasteries, and, most important of all for this study, wrote about what they did.

Grant argues that the prominence of the nuns was closely connected with what she calls the reinvention of Chan during the seventeenth century, and that the liveliness of Chan was connected to the disruptions of the Ming-Qing transition, when, in her words, "leaving home to enter the religious life became an acceptable, and even honorable, option for educated men and women of the gentry class" (p. 6). Subsequently, in the eighteenth century, Linji Chan returned to obscurity, as Grant chronicles in her epilogue: "Generally speaking, when, in the eighteenth century, male literati began to return in even greater numbers to the work of preparing for civil exams and appointments to official positions, the only proper place for an elite woman, including a pious woman, once again became the home" (p. 189). Grant thus suggests that the chaos of the Ming-Qing transition opened up new institutional possibilities for women religious figures.

With its emphasis on "blows and shouts"-that is to say, wordless teaching-Chan may seem at first glance to be an odd place to look for textual records. However, Chan masters understood that words were a path to the wordless. The Ming master Daguan Zhenke wrote, in a passage Grant has cited in earlier work: "Words and letters are like waves; Chan is like the water. Thus trying to separate oneself from words and letters in order to seek Chan is like a thirsty person refusing to drink the waves; trying to get rid of the water to get at the waves is the height of obscurantism."²

The difficulty of finding writings by nuns had been commented on already by the nineteenth-century scholar Jiang Yuanliang. Jiang wrote that, while he was compiling a text of writings by monks and nuns and lay men and women, he noticed that it was much harder to find works by nuns than by laywomen. He speculated as to why: "Could it be that they taught solely through their physical presence (shenjiao) rather than through words?"³ Teaching through physical presence may provide one kind of key to the puzzle; patronage may provide another. Scholars of women writers in China have long noted that it was often the patronage of a kinsman that allowed women to publish texts. Nuns were less likely to have such patronage than were gentry laywomen: they depended on a particular kind of institutional patronage to keep their works, and during the seventeenth century Linji Chan provided that kind of patronage. Grant's calling our attention to the institutional aspects of Linji Chan that facilitated the work of nuns and the preservation of their texts is invaluable.

Grant explores the lives of seven nuns in detail: the matriarch of the group Qiyuan Xinggang (1597-1654) in Chapters 3 and 4; two of her seven dharma successors who left yulu, Yikui Chaochen (1625- 1679) and Yigong Chaoke (1615-1661) in Chapter 5; Jizong Xingche (b. 1606) and Baochang Jizong (b...