1. Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China. By Yuhang Li. Columbia University Press, 2020. 312 pages. $65.00 (hardcover), $30.00 (paperback), $29.99 (e-book).
2. Reviewer Affiliation: Ohio Northern University, USA
摘要
It is not uncommon for scholars who study Buddhist laywomen in late imperial China to feel frustrated at the scarcity of textual sources that speak to or about women’s religious experiences. Scholars largely rely on the poems, biographies, epitaphs, and eulogies that male literati wrote about women who were related to them in one way or another, or on the literary works, usually poems, by some of the women believers. However, the presentation of the women’s lives as reconstructed by these men served to address the male authors’ agendas and did not necessarily reflect the outlooks of the religious women themselves. Poems written by women provide a window to view women’s religious experiences, but a large majority of women in late imperial China could not or did not write poems. Therefore, the religious experiences and practices of women who could not write or did not write are still largely unknown to us. Yuhang Li’s Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China is a welcome contribution to filling in some of the gaps in the larger picture of Chinese women’s religiosity in the Ming-Qing period through her study on “women’s things” that are intimately related to women’s daily life and religious practices.
