Gender, Power, and Talent by Jinhua Jia

Author:Jinhua Jia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Comparing the two lists, we find that only two features—the practice of Daoist rituals and self-cultivation and the continuity between Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist values—roughly correspond between the two, though discrepancies remain in these two features, such as the compassion toward creatures and the Confucian virtue of loyalty, seen only in Du’s hagiographies. For all the other differing characteristics, our discoveries present an overall picture of Daoist priestesses as active participants in religious, cultural, and social relations and activities and as dynamic contributors to the functioning and development of society and culture, whereas Du’s narratives provide an image of individual salvation, liberation, spirituality, and an immortal utopia. Our picture is historical, realistic, complicated, and diversified, whereas Du’s imagery is ideal, holy, simplified, and unified.

On the other hand, although the Jixian lu hagiographies do not provide useful primary sources for studying the historical experiences of Tang Daoist women, these accounts are still valuable in presenting both Du Guangting’s reflections on women’s role and place in Daoist tradition and society and his architecture of the ideal role model for Daoist women, which synthesized Daoist self-perfection with Confucian values and Buddhist ethics. The self-disciplined, self-perfected, and goddess-like images described by the Jixian lu accounts may also imply Du Guangting’s unspoken disapproval of other roles, especially public ones, undertaken by Tang Daoist priestesses.

Moreover, Du Guangting’s reflections and his architecture were not his individual concerns alone but, rather, represented those of the Daoist tradition itself. Indeed, this tradition underwent tremendous changes from the late Tang to the early Ming (1368–1644) periods, and Du Guangting was a key figure at the beginning of this reshaping period. His reconfiguring of Daoist rituals, practices, cults, and traditions and his synthesis of the three teachings initiated new dimensions in the development of Daoism during the following centuries.2 Moreover, the role model he constructed in the Jixian lu accounts was to a considerable extent followed by female Daoists from the Song dynasty onward, such as the self-cultivation and self-realization of Sun Bu’er 孫不二 (1119–1182) and many other priestesses of the Complete Perfection (Quanzhen 全真) tradition and lineages of women’s inner alchemy. Additionally, Confucian and Buddhist virtues such as filial piety, loyalty, compassion, and selflessness were actually written into the manuals of women’s alchemy during the Ming–Qing era.3

Partly because of the changing religious scenery and images of Daoist women in later times, not only have the remarkable achievements of the Tang Daoist priestesses been mostly forgotten but also scholars from the Song dynasty to the present time have rhetorically reidentified the priestesses as “courtesans” and disparaged them as “licentious” in their critical discourses, in a way quite similar to the rhetorical construction of early-Tang female rulers’ sexual transgression.4 This reidentification was, however, biased, because the priestesses’ public actions and love poems presented nothing of a pornographic or licentious nature. Instead, these scholars may have undertaken this relabeling for one of two reasons: either they were following the traditionally embedded gender pattern that forbade women from going beyond the confines of family

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