Rethinking Gender and Female Laity in Late Imperial Chinese Pure Land Buddhist Biographies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3370265 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Xing Wang (0000-0002-3230-3482, Fudan University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 9 |
| Pages | 705 |
| Publication date | 2021-08-31 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444 |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/rel12090705 |
| OpenAlex | W3198366042 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 16 |
This paper explores how lay female believers are depicted in the Chinese monastic Pure Land Buddhist texts and how a particular late-imperial Chinese Buddhist biography collection betrayed the previously existing narrative of female laity. Moreover, I wish to show that there had existed a long-lasting and persistent non-binary narrative of lay women in Chinese Pure Land biographies admiring female agency, in which female Pure Land practitioners are depicted as equally accomplished to male ones. Such a narrative betrays the medieval monastic elitist discourse of seeing women as naturally corrupted. This narrative is best manifested in the late Ming monk master Yunqi Zhuhong's collection, who celebrated lay female practitioners' religious achievement as comparable to men. This tradition is discontinued in the Confucian scholar Peng Shaosheng's collection of lay female Buddhist biographies in the Qing dynasty, however, in which Peng depicts women as submissive and inferior to males. This transition-from using the stories of eminent lay female Buddhists to challenge Confucian teachings to positioning lay females under Confucian disciplines-exhibits Peng Shaosheng's own invention, rather than a transmission of the inherited formulaic narration of lay female believers, as he claimed
Archaeology · Art · Biography · Buddhism · Literature · Narrative · Pure land · Social science · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
The Eminent Monk
Blood, Tigers, Dragons
The Inner Quarters
Dao Companion to Neo-Confucian Philosophy
A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship
Flourishing Yin
Chinese Pure Land Buddhism
Precious Records
Da Zhangfu
Women and the Family in Mid-Qing Social Thought
The Uses of Neo-Confucianism
Indeterminacy in Meaning
Women, Bodily Transformation and Rebirth in the Pure Land in the Writings of Chinese Buddhists in the Eighteenth Century
Women in the Pure Land
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |