Crossing the Gate by Man Xu

Author:Man Xu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Personal Practices

Song scholars did not apply their intense criticism of religion to pious women inside the jia. Elite men’s tolerant and sometimes supportive attitudes contributed to the prevalence of women’s personal religious practices. Although religions in the Song like Chan Buddhism “offered an alternative to the Confucian norms of gender and sexuality,” as Ding-hwa Hsieh suggests,60 “women of independent minds and religious aspirations” did not tend to claim celibacy. Upon fulfilling their familial commitment as “inner helpers,” an enormous number of Fujian women actively practiced religions in the domestic compound and advanced their religious pursuits in multiple ways. Mark Halperin does a comprehensive survey of Song epitaphs, and concludes more than 22 percent of elite women practiced Buddhism.61 Presumably the proportion of elite and commoner laywomen believing a wide range of religious teachings among the entire female population was considerably higher. And taking into account the extraordinarily strong religious atmosphere in Fujian, I believe the percentage of laywomen there was far higher than the average level that Halperin has calculated by examining empire-wide cases.

Meditation and chanting originated from temples and constituted a universal way to practice Buddhism and Daoism. They were widely imitated by lay people, although practitioners in many cases “appeared ignorant or unconcerned about the fact that their activities derived from Buddhist monastic roots” as Mark Halperin has suggested.62 They were probably the most popular religious practices across class and gender thanks to their privacy and low cost.63 By the Song, meditation had become an integral part of the Buddhist and Daoist traditions, which made up the lion’s share of the religious landscape. In Fujian, many devout laywomen practiced meditation routinely in their daily life. For example, Li Gang’s mother-in-law was obsessed with Buddhism in her middle age and became increasingly disinterested in worldly affairs. “She tidied one separate room for herself, where she sat at her leisure all day, entertaining herself with Buddhist pursuits.”64 She intentionally arranged a quiet and separate environment for her meditation to exclude family members’ interference. The private space she constructed for her own spiritual pursuit was not subordinated to any domestic norms in spite of its physical existence inside the jia.

The idea of conducting meditation and chanting in segregated locations was advocated in Song Buddhist manuals. In the “Method of Worshiping the Water-moon Master Perceiver” (Shuiyue guanzizai gongyangfa 水月觀自在供養法), the faithful are instructed this way:

Recite the mantra facing the image. All your desires will be fulfilled in a short time. If you want to have food and clothing, stay in an uninhabited place, choose either a pure place or an ordinary place, burn incense and prepare flowers to worship the Great Compassionate Worthy One (Dabei zunzhe 大悲尊者). All your sins will be dissolved. Your worldly and otherworldly desires will be accomplished.65

The manual concentrates on one specific bodhisattva, and the assumed readers were exclusively people who were devoted to or at least interested in the Guanyin 觀音cult. However, the method presented in this passage seems to have been widely adopted by Buddhists no matter what deity they believed in and worshipped.

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