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c h a p t e r n i n e From Beijing to Jiangnan Ziyong Chengru By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the social and political transition was pretty much over, and the Manchu dynasty was firmly established. As we have seen, even Baochi Jizong’s son Xu Jiayan had, perhaps reluctantly, traveled to Beijing in 1679 to take up an important office in the Qing court. Linji Chan monks in Miyun Yuanwu’s lineage had made the journey even earlier. Muchen Daomin, Miyun Yuanwu’s staunch defender and erstwhile ghostwriter, was invited to the capital in 1659 and soon became the favorite of the first Qing emperor (Shunzhi, r. 1644–1661), who bestowed on him the honorary title of Chan Master Hongjue.1 Yet another of Miyun Yuanwu’s twelve Dharma successors, Yulin Tongxiu, was also invited to Beijing in 1659, where he was given the title of Chan Master Dajue Puji. A year later, in the summer of 1660, Yulin Tongxiu helped officiate at the funeral of one of the emperor’s favorite consorts, a fervent Buddhist devotee and an enthusiastic patron of Buddhism —and less than five months later, at the funeral of the emperor himself, who died at the age of twenty-three, officially of smallpox. Nor were Muchen Daomin and Yulin Tongxiu alone. In her study of the Beijing of this period, Susan Naquin notes that, in the capital, “monks of (at least) twenty-one different temples associated themselves with the Linji, thus claiming a connection through successive teachers back to [the Tang dynasty]. . . . By the start of the Qing, a monk could claim to belong to the twenty-eighth generation, and by the late eighteenth century, the thirtyfiftieth .”2 Chan master Ziyong Chengru, the last woman Chan master for whom a discourse record collection is preserved in the Jiaxing canon, belonged to this northern branch of the Linji lineage. As has been the case with all of the seventeenth-century nuns in this study, the general outlines of Ziyong Chengru’s life as a Chan master must be teased from the snippets of information contained in, suggested by, or appended to her discourse records. Fortunately, among these mate- 166 eminent nuns rials is a brief biographical account (xingshi) in which she herself tells us about her background.3 From this text, we learn that her ancestors were originally from “east of the passes” (the Liaodong area). In the years immediately before and after 1644, many thousands of Chinese who had been living in the Liao River Valley of northeast China joined the Manchus and came “through the pass” to settle in the Beijing area.4 Ziyong Chengru’s family appears to have been one of these Chinese families. She herself was born around 1645 in Jingmen, in what is today central Hubei Province.5 Her father, whose name was Zhou Zhixiang, “followed in the service of the [Shunzhi?] emperor” in the early years of his reign, but “although he performed meritorious service, he was unwilling to accept an official position and [instead] went into retirement, devoting himself to farming and study.” Ziyong Chengru does not tell us the nature of the meritorious activities that her father performed for the emperor, but his refusal of an official position and his decision to retire to the countryside to pursue the life of a gentleman farmer would suggest, at least in part, an expedient move. Or then again, it might simply mean that he was a man whose personality was more suited to a life of contemplative seclusion than political service. Her father “was upright and honest, a pure and good man of integrity and cultivation,” Ziyong Chengru remarks, and “he had always been a believer in Buddhism.” Like Qiyuan Xinggang, Ziyong Chengru appears to have been an only child. In a text that reflects a combination of autobiographical possibility and hagiographical fiction, she recounts how her father, finding himself still without children at the age of fifty, prayed devoutly to the Bodhisattva , requesting an heir. “This stirred the Bodhisattva’s compassion, and I was born,” Ziyong Chengru tells us. She also tells us of her early religious inclinations: “As I child, I never engaged in silly talk or laughter, and as soon as I grew a little older, I became determined to leave the world.” Again, as in the case of Qiyuan Xinggang, her parents were reluctant to accede to this request from their only child. “When I reached the age of marriage...

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