Thirty Years of Dream-Wandering

Zhang Ruzhao (1900-69), also known as Zhang Shenghui, was ordained as a Buddhist nun, with the title Tiantai Master Benkong. In early life, Zhang established a reputation as a poet, and was actively engaged in many of the political and feminist movements of the 1920s. Disillusioned both politically and personally, she turned to Buddhism and reinvented herself as China’s premier female lay Buddhist scholar, writer and educator during the 1930s and 40s. From 1949, she took ordination as a Buddhist nun and was officially designated a lineage holder in the Tiantai lineage. She was persecuted severely during the early years of Cultural Revolution, and died in 1969. This study offers a historical overview of the life of this relatively unstudied twentieth-century Buddhist woman, with a special focus on a selection of autobiographical writings published in the early 1930s in which Zhang reflects, in both poetry and prose, on her first three decades of personal and emotional turmoil, and how they contributed to her decision to dedicate the second half of her life to the practice and propagation of Buddhism

Art · Buddhism · China · Dream · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Theology · Zhàng · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

• Reading Equality into Asymmetry

  Open Access•Ester Bianchi•Religions•2022

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