Folk Rituals Rites; Buddhist Religious Rites; Chinese Middle Ages
摘要
In 662 C.E., the Chinese emperor Gaozong held an imperial debate on the question: should Buddhist monks and nuns be commanded to bow to their parents and to the emperor? Confucian imperial guest ritual required that all subjects bow to their ruler, and refusal to bow to parents was severely criticized as unfilial, but Chinese Buddhist monks had always claimed the right to abstain from bowing to any laity. This claim to exemption from orthodox social etiquette provoked conflict throughout the Medieval period. This dissertation first surveys this political history of bowing, the contours of Medieval anti-Buddhist polemics, and institutional strategies for constructing monastic and imperial bodies. The monks' claim to "disobeisance" was not, however, a rejection of the bow as a strategy of embodying hierarchical social distinctions, or as a method of spiritual cultivation. In fact, one of the most prominent lobbyists in the 662 debate was Daoxuan, the "founder" of the Chinese Vinaya (monastic discipline) lineage (Luzong). His treatise on monastic bowing: Shimen guijingyi (Buddhist Rites of Obeisance) contributes to the contextualization of the debate. Several groups of documents are analyzed: the legacy of debate on bowing, Daoxuan's writings on bowing, pro-bow and anti-bow speeches by high-ranking officials in the debate, letters from monks such as Daoxuan to members of the imperial house, and a general summation by the editor of the collection of these documents, Yanzong. There is almost nothing in Western scholarship about obeisance--and yet: the most common and pervasive Buddhist practice in Asia was and still is obeisance to Buddha. We are thus forced to find ways to imagine the bowing body as relevant to history, to social order, and to our categories of knowledge. The dissertation is a contribution to a theorization of the body as a relevant social and historical object or category, and presents a case study in the religious and political economy of embodiment.
