Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China. By Beata Grant. . University of Hawai'i Press, 2009. 241 pages. $46.00.
摘要
During the past decade, scholars of East Asian Buddhist traditions have increasingly turned their attention to the practices of nuns and laywomen. Studies of Japanese female writings often allow scholars to recover a distinctive female perspective and have been particularly noteworthy. In contrast, an archival search for pre-modern writings by Chinese Buddhist women is a time-consuming process that often yields little in the way of extant literature. Consequently, the ground-breaking effort of Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China by Beata Grant to bring to life the voices of seven seventeenth-century Chinese nuns and their communities is an invaluable contribution. One can only hope that more volumes like this will follow.
A nine-chapter book Eminent Nuns opens with a broader discussion of Chinese literary depictions of nuns either as hapless sexual prey or sexual vampires. Additionally, some convents gained reputations as little more than houses of prostitution, while others seem to have been an ideal way for some families to divest themselves of a “problem.” Against this backdrop, the female subjects of this study stand out for their high educational attainment, literati family background, and religious motivation to take the tonsure. Most significantly, all became abbesses who wrote Chan discourse records that were later published by their disciples. Collected and republished in the Jiaxing canon, these discourse records are the primary source for this study. They shed light on both how these women viewed themselves vis-à-vis their contemporary male monastic counterparts and within the larger narrative tradition of exemplary female nuns passed down throughout the preceding centuries.
In investigating how seventeenth-century monks depicted nuns, Grant observes that monks often compared contemporary nuns to a handful of well-known exemplary Buddhist …
