GENDER AND RELIGION: GENDER AND CHINESE RELIGIONS

Chinese religious history opens with a shocking gender anomaly: a powerful priestess-class of shamanesses speaking the gods' own voices in the high court ritual of the Shang dynasty (c. 1766–1027 bce) Through ritual performance these women conducted purifications, summoned the rain and healed the ills of the state, and, as one ancient dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi, stated, "caused the gods to descend into them through the medium of dance." Nor were these powerful mystics honorary men. By virtue of their female and sexual natures they served as the proper conduit for the divine. Through ritual exposure of their breasts to the sun they bought the rain, and, if later poetic recastings of the rites were true, they legitimized the king with a sexual encounter that mimicked a divine marriage with the goddess. They were, as E. H. Schafer phrased it, "the kingdom's rightful rainmakers" (1951, p. 137). Of course, it would seem as if little in the way of customary assumptions about Chinese religion would allow for such a class of women. Bureaucratic, imperial, hierarchical, canonically rigid, clerical, and masculine—these are the frequently named features of Chinese religion. But, if Mircea Eliade is right in his observations made on religion over 50 years ago (that religions encode not just one pattern of human-divine contact, but rather the "multiple modalities of being in the world" [1957, p. 15] and that religion reveals a world that is "transpersonal, significant and sacred" [1957, p. 18], whose sanctity can be revealed to the worshiper through the theurgic summons in "rites of ecstasy"), then the figure of the feminine ecstatic should not be impossible. And, indeed, this survey of gender in China's religions will reveal that the hierarchical, bureaucratic model is a limited paradigm, and that ecstatic communication by female officiants, as well a varied cast of women mystics, adepts, religious teachers, and goddesses all share the religious stage with the sober deities of a divine bureaucracy.

The major concerns of gender studies in China have been several: the excavation of lost voices within competing narratives (especially feminine voices), the methods of suppression of marginalized voices, cultural tautologies and the demonization of the feminine, the complicity of women in these tautologies, and, more recently, the theory of agency, whereby constructs of the feminine are not defined exclusively by larger power structures that victimize women, but as constructs that offered limited freedoms within the framework of masculine definition. The history of gender studies in the field begins explicitly with one of these issues, namely, suppressed narratives. Chinese philologists of the Republican Period (1911–1949), eager perhaps to overturn the radically conservative philological thrust of the Manchu, with its court-approved manipulation of the Confucian tradition, rigorously explored the counter-traditions and subtexts of Shang and Zhou (c. 1150–256 bce) cultures. They hoped to establish the ways court-centered expositions of sanctity and legitimacy suppressed alternative constructs of the divine. They reconsidered epigraphy, the Confucian classics, and ancient poetry to retrieve the lost practices of popular and local cultures. Chen Mengjia, Wen Yido, Gu Jiegang, Marcel Granet, Edward Erkes, and Henri Maspero were among the first to uncover the significance of the goddesses Chang E, the lunar goddess; Nü Wa, the snail woman; and Xi He, the sun goddess, as well the authority of divine conduits called wu or shamanesses. A second generation of academics (e.g., E. H. Schafer, David Hawkes, Wolfram Eberhard, and Chang Kuang-chih) also retrieved the buried references to feminine sanctity in language, myth, and folklore.

The most important development in the field of gender studies, however, has come not from methodological innovation but from the exploitation of previously under-used materials. In some real sense, even into the 1950s, Qing dynasty (1644–1911) scholarly and political conservativism dominated much academic consideration of literary, cultural, and religious studies. The "little tradition," in all its manifestations, was considered beneath consideration, and consequently the vast issues of what shaped the culture beyond the walls of the court were neglected. But with the advent of research into uncensored documents with foci on regional, urban, and rural life—resources not winnowed, organized, and reproduced in the great Qing dynasty compendia—the construct of gender in religion has opened up. Recent scholars have exploited these sources, finding a canon of the counter-tradition and thereby remade the map of both male and female religious practice and ideation. They have, in particular, explored a plethora of sources that came with the expansion of the publication industry beginning in the Song dynasty (960–1279): mirabilia, Precious Scrolls, Goodness Books, ballads, pious tales, vernacular fiction, dramas, and popular songs as well as classical sources such as private journals (biji ), classical fiction, hagiography of the sectarian cults, gazetteer accounts of regional practice, temple records, accounts of secret societies and lay organizations, hagiography, and poetry religious canon. All these sources are now used by scholars to open up the consideration of both masculine and feminine narratives in China's religious history.

Parsing China's religious life into the major religious traditions of Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and popular religion has served bibliographers well. Worshipers and the worshiped, however, have found these neat divisions to be permeable. Popular religions have shaped Daoism, Indian Buddhism saw extraordinary shifts and elaborations as it became subject to the gravitational pull of local religions, and both sectarian and syncretic religions have thrived in complete ignorance of denominational categories; all, in fact, have given the lie to the neatness of the four categories. Considerations of gender further disturbs these categories for it is in looking at feminine and masculine icons of, for example, the sacred fool and the ecstatic, the divine marriage and ascetic, that we will find more of Eliade than the Qing bibliographer. But for the purposes of an overview we will yield to the familiar and exploit these four divisions as our method of organization.

Popular Religion

Popular religion—also referred to as folk religion, lay religion or diffused religion—is a vast aggregation of practices that includes shamanism, calendrical holiday festivals, ancestor worship, geomancy, ritual practices to assuage demonic influence, apotropaic practice tied to chronology and calendar, and prediction based on physical features of the human anatomy, the landscape, the detection of randomly heard voices, patterns of bird migration, and so on. Often this diffuse religion is defined by negatives: It lacks a centralized, clerical hierarchy, a large corpus of written, canonized texts, court affiliation, and an institutional identity. It is polytheistic to say the least, including door guardians, stove gods, a spirit of the privy, drought demons, avenging ghosts, a god of wealth, protectors of childbirth, drunken rebel-gods, astral spirits that cause disease or family strife, and ghosts, sprites, or demons of specific features of the landscape, whether mountain, roadside, river way, or neighborhood. There are many divine narratives: journeys to paradise or hell, supernatural visitations, and stern karmic principles of divine revenge. The connection to the divine can be through a class of mediums or through direct and personal discernment of the numinous. In the aggregate, popular religion is a kind of highly articulated and fully annotated animism. It mystifies the specific features of daily life and defines spirituality as a kind of esoteric knowledge of the divine signatures in nature, conveying, with a stunning degree of confidence, that life is, in some sense, sacramental.

Governing elites tend to favor a cooperative leadership class, the unimpeded collection of resources, and a religious practice that, in proving the connection of the state to the divine, legitimizes the state's efforts to perpetuate itself. Popular religions, however, reenact the powerful concerns and uncensored dramas of micro-cultures of individuals, families, clans, towns, regions, covenant affiliations, and ethnic groups. In the cults that thrive in such subcultures, views of sexuality, love, and lineage, of death and grief, of prosperity, production, and harvests, as well as of family continuities, community conflicts, and the connection (or lack of connection) between individual and state all find expression with some degree of autonomy from elite mandates. For women, who are excluded explicitly from the sites and definitions of power, as well as for men who may be rebels or misfits, it is in local religious practice that more complex and varied expressions of sanctity and identity are found than in centrally monitored religious practice. Thus, assessing these cults and practices, myths, and beliefs from the perspective of gender helps provide an astonishing illumination of the observer's field of vision, exposing a primordial soup of feminine archetypes and narratives and of feminine symbolic structures and thaumaturgic practices. Gender issues tend to reveal that official practice, although an efficient veneer, yet masks a powerful religious substrata.

Feminine sanctity and feminine religious power assert themselves vividly in popular religion, for however patriarchy may be lauded or reviled in elite tradition, in popular religion it is in some aspects blithely ignored. In popular religion, women are the domestic ritualists, the mediums, the warrior-saints, the magical adepts, and mystics. Female divinities benefit or terrify at every level, from the plethora of local ghosts appeased at uncountable numbers of riverside shrines to the great goddesses such as the Celestial Empress and the Eternal Mother. Yet this powerful aggregation of feminine practice and ideation has struggled as well, subjected to censorship and banishment. In the case of one of these practices—shamanism—we can see, in fact, a clear dialectic of the competing narratives of a vernacular feminine religious discourse eclipsed but never silenced by the orthodoxies of elite discourse. This dialectic, however, tells us much about how constructs of feminine sanctity survive without benefit of orthodox canon and centralized sponsorship, and proves not only the innate resiliency of the iconography of the feminine, but reveals as well the cultural mechanisms that help sustain the narratives.

Shamanism—condemned as heterodox and licentious, banned and declared illegal, denied the ample support accorded many religious cults—represents the prototypical suppressed feminine voice. Shamanism begins before either Daoism or Confucianism takes shape, in the Shang dynasty. It was central to court ritual, as the female—and to a lesser extent male—shamans constituted a class of divine conduits who revealed the voices of the gods through rituals of divine possession and the performance of ecstatic dance and speech. In the Shang dynasty shamanesses were the chief officiants in a court scapegoat drama, whereby the sins of the community were expiated through harsh sacrifice (often by maiming, drowning, or exposure to fire). Their ritual disfigurement or deaths purified the land in times crisis, especially times of drought and perceived astronomical anomalies. Nor were they mere ritual actors, but honored members of a ruling caste, serving as great officers of the court. During the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) through the Tang dynasty (618–907), due specifically to the influence of Confucianism, shamanism increasingly became a cultural outlaw, practiced in the breech. Wide-scale suppression of the cults relegated shamanic practice to the status of licentious rites, although literati noted that its "foolish rituals for healing the sick continued to delude the people" in more remote regions of the empire (Cass, 1999, p. 50).

The efforts of literati and court not withstanding, however, shamanism was consistently practiced and is known today throughout South China and in Taiwan and Hong Kong. In her research on the cult of the Medieval shamaness Chen Jinggu, titled "The Woman at the Water's Edge," Brigitte Baptandier found shamanic practice to be a solid feature of the local religious landscape. Like the shamanesses of the Shang period, the shamaness is "of the waters" (i.e., "the Woman at the Water's Edge"), and her help is sought times of drought, conception, and childbirth. She is a warrior-saint as well, pictured in statues and texts on horseback, armed with sword and whip, accompanied by her divine generals. Her current worshipers insist that her avatars have fought in many wars, including the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Thus, despite banishment, shamanic practice has survived intact in local cultures. The survival of this regional voice has seemed surprising to some, as court orthodoxies, preserved in written instruments, should logically dominate regional cultures. Yet recent scholarship has proven that person-to-person, oral transmission is as effective as court methods of perpetuation; indeed, local religious practice thrives on the oral, the intimate, and the immediate. Popular rituals and vernacular entertainments preserve iconography faithfully, pilgrimage and religious teachers convey practice among temple networks, and merchant culture spreads folk traditions through merchant associations along expanding canal and sea routes. Thus, notwithstanding the efforts of the Tang court (618–906) to abolish shamanesses as heterodox, of the Qing court (1644–1911) to eliminate warrior-adepts as treasonous, of the courts of the People's Republic of China to eradicate local female mediums as feudal superstition, a multitude of feminine religious expression are surviving—if not thriving—at the local levels. In other words, as Baptandier has pointed out, if all the mediums in a town in Fujian were arrested, the practices would reassert themselves after the cadres left.

Shamanism has not, however, been limited to local practice, but has found re-expression in multiple features of the cultural landscape, surviving as one of the most powerful archetypes in Chinese mythology, The shamanic iconography of the feminine is explicitly concerned with the ambiguous power of the feminine, allying the feminine with the polarities of both fertility and danger. The iconic imagery of her mythos epitomizes her ambiguity; she is allied with water, blood, and the yin polarity. In religion, this elaboration of the feminine is often repeated, seeping through the boundaries that separate one religion from another. Shamanic constructs of the feminine inform as well the rhetorical streams that feed both the arts and cultural myths. In poetry, history, fiction, and drama, as well as in sex-based archetypes, the contours of shamanism are seen repeatedly. In fiction, in particular, this watery, lethal, and sexually powerful woman, often allied with snakes or water-borne creatures, thrives; she is seen in vernacular and classical stories, expatriate fiction from all over the globe, and finally recast in film and television.

Confucianism

Confucianism, allied with the imperial court, presents the greatest contrast with popular religions. It has a meticulously maintained written canon, an institutional hierarchy with a rigorously apprenticed and centrally selected membership consisting of officiants and practitioners, and speaks generally with a unified voice—thus, firmly occupying center stage in the official version of China's religious history. It evolved during the Zhou dynasty (c. 1150–256 bce) from an aggregation of practices centered around the aristocratic cult of ancestor worship. Beginning in the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) Confucian beliefs were rigorously inculcated through the institution of what became the Examination System whereby entrance to political life required memorization of the Confucian canon. Confucianism was interlocked as well with the state cult, a set of theocratic practices sanctifying both the living family and the ancestral line of the emperor. Essential to Confucianism, especially in the late imperial periods—Song (960–1279) through Qing (1644–1911)—was the development of practices centered around the concept of the sacred lineage, or zong. A natural outgrowth of the cult of ancestor worship and the principles of piety, the practices of the sacred lineage formulated the family as a cult space. By this construct ancestors maintained active watch over the conduct of the living sending benefits or crises depending on the worth of the family's actions. In turn, individuals of the family lived consecrated lives, with all the myriad details of domestic life measured by the compass of family piety, examined carefully for ritual flaws.

The requirements of the sacred lineage created powerful resonances in constructs of both masculine and feminine sanctity. In Confucianism the ideal exemplar for both women and men was extreme self-sacrifice. For men, ideals of sanctity were rigorous. Men were idealized as lie, ardently heroic, or fiercely dedicated. The perceived magical connection to the ancestors required scarring personal sacrifice and an intense moral standard. Men realized the ideal through suicide in times of severe national crisis and through bold and dangerous challenges to corrupt power. Nor were these heroes of Confucianism simply icons of the state orthodoxy but exemplars told of in popular literature. Novels, drama, and short fiction lionized Confucian heroes who sacrificed their lives, configuring absolute dedication to the values of piety, loyalty, humaneness, or propriety as heroic feats of personal glory equal to the daring accomplishments of knights errant and warriors.

For women the pattern of divinity was extremely harsh; once a woman was engaged or married, her obligations to the sacred lineage (zong ) of her fiancé or husband redefined her as a consecrated vessel dedicated to the continuation of the line. Women realized Confucian forms of sanctity through motherhood, through the role of the family matriarch, and through stern maintenance of the teachings of the Ju. Much has been made of the idealization of the masculine and the patriarchal in Confucianism; but, Confucianism also greatly mystified and idealized motherhood and the mother-son dyad. In fact, in novels and confessional journals women often appear as more powerful, more dedicated, and more memorable than men in a Confucian family. The apotheosis of the feminine ideal was achieved through the notion of martyrdom, whereby a daughter, fiancée, wife, daughter-in-law, or niece sacrificed herself to resolve the crisis occurring to the lineage. In the case of the death of the spouse, the martyred wife or fiancée committed suicide or dedicated her life to widow-solitude. If an elder in the family was ill, the cult required a woman to concoct from pieces of her own flesh a magically healing soup to be consumed by the ill patient. She thus became a zhen nü —literally, a sacred woman, often translated as filial, martyred, or chaste woman. Nor did these acts simply express moral ideals but were considered acts of transcendence that could serve the community as sources of divine efficacy. Locals worshiped at the shrines erected to commemorate the sacred woman, and it was believed the spirits of martyred women could relieve droughts or ward off disasters. This cult was of less significance in the ancient and medieval periods, but became highly influential in the late imperial periods, as the concept of the zong —or sacred lineage—became more fully articulated.

Despite the importance of these women as local cult figures, their worship was by no means purely a matter of local customs, however. As Katherine Carlitz (1997), Jonathan Chaves (1986), and Mark Elvin (1984) have pointed out these cults functioned in state worship. The female martyrs were publicly acknowledged as talismans of imperial legitimacy and as emblems of the state's connection to the ancestral line. They were recognized with imperial shrines and parades of local officials and immortalized in the historical canon. Nor was the state naïve about the pragmatic implications in these local cults. Martyred women cults functioned explicitly as vehicles for imposing centralized Confucian values on the local mores of distant localities. The court explicitly used the martyred women cult and the worship of the city-god to manipulate local worship and local loyalties. Fear of the power wielded by popular feminine cults may be a factor as well in state sponsorship. In some cases, it is clear that the government deliberately adapted local popular cults dedicated to female ghosts: the Bureau of Rites co-opted local worship of the waterside divinity and declared them to be zhen nü and a riverside ghost became, by imperial decree, a Confucian martyred woman. It may seem that the local river-ghost is a distant cousin of the harsh exemplar of family piety; yet. they share certain features. Drought relief, maiming and physical sacrifice, and the accretion of local worshipers were the patterns of feminine sanctity of both the martyred wife and the shaman.

Daoism

Daoism, like Confucianism, arose out of Zhou-era (c. 1150–256 bce) ritual and beliefs, centered possibly around rituals of healing, alchemy, and the arts of longevity. Early Daoism of the Zhou period was articulated first by the two elliptical and brilliant writers known as Master Lao and Master Zhuang. They emphasized nonpurposive action and rejected the worldly, the hierarchical, and the mundane, celebrating intuitive insight over reason and suggesting the existence of specific esoteric practices that lead to the state of transcendence. From the late Han (206 bce–220 ce) and through the Six Dynasties period (220–589) Daoism sees elaborate articulations of practice and belief: the growth of large centers of worship centered around the teachings of the celestial master Zhang Daoling, the growth of a Daoist monastic movement, the development of a Daoist church with hierarchy and canon, the elaboration of the teachings of inner and outer alchemy, and the affiliations of secret societies and millenarian rebellious movements. Daoism is still practiced throughout Asia, especially in Taiwan, Southeast China, and Hong Kong. The celestial master in Taiwan is head of the Daoist church.

As with Confucianism, there is an elaborate hierarchical structure of officers and rigorously compiled and edited canon and codified ritual practice. Yet unlike Confucianism, Daoism has been pervasively shaped by the feminine discourse of the divine, for in the case of Daoism, a centralized hierarchical religion has not become a vehicle for masculine ideations of the divine. One reason for the richness of feminine narratives is precisely Daoism's long and profound connection to popular religion. Daoism has had a porous border with the rituals and beliefs of popular religion, especially shamanism. Exorcisms, purification rites, illness as punishment for ritual flaws, escorting the souls of the dead, and maimed mediums speaking in trance the words of the spirit world are all practices that have traveled from local practice to Daoist practice as easily as the skilled exorcist traveled to the realms of the dead. Daoism, in fact, mined popular practice, for, as Kenneth Dean noted, "Daoism seeks to channel the energies of the shamanic substratum" (1993, p. 9). Likewise, K. Schipper observed, with radical simplicity, "Daoism is the written tradition of local cults" (cited in Dean, 1993, p. 12).

Of course, many Daoist clerics have been eager to distinguish their practices from popular practice (especially blood sacrifices) but the liturgist's contempt for local practice reflected more a kind of sibling rivalry than structural distinctions between separate species. The implication for gender is obvious—popular religion is veined through and through with feminine narratives of the divine.

Even at the earliest stages of the formation of Daoism, in the earliest cosmological constructs, clear ideations of the feminine existed. Specifically the Zhou era texts of Laozi and Zhuangzi have multiple references to the great female, the dark valley, and, of course, the polarities of yin and yang. Analyses of these early texts to establish the significance of the feminine have, however, provided only limited satisfaction. The problem is not that such analyzes are groundless, because clearly the duality of yin and yang did profoundly shape the construct of Daoist iconography and beliefs, but that the texts are so terse, oracular, and elliptical, with little in the way of contemporaneous philological context, that the issue of the feminine in early Daoism is difficult.

The problem of inadequate context, however, is mitigated in the Han and Six Dynasties, in which texts are found presenting the pantheon, prayers, and ritual description, as well as texts recommending the religious, social, and domestic functions for both men and women. In these articulations of belief and practice, the role of the feminine becomes explicit, and feminine narratives are present in cosmology, myth, hagiography, and in descriptions of ritual practice and church leadership. Beginning with texts appearing in the third century, women appear alongside men as officers of the church, as female masters—both married and unmarried—who take on female disciples. Women in these texts have direct access to transcendence, govern in local parishes, and join religious organizations. Some women of the Dao are described in the domestic context as well. Wives and mothers are registered in the church as women dedicated to the Dao, proving that, even in the confines the family, "a woman could have a complete religious status of her own" (Overmyer, 1981, p. 100).

If women in the Daoist church had explicit importance, female saints and divinities ranked importantly in the Daoist pantheon. The Jade Girl, the Plain Girl, divine emissaries, immortals, and saints of the alchemical arts such as the Furry Woman and the Woman of the Great Polarities all had dedicated followers and temples throughout the empire. Daoist worshipers in the thousands gathered as well to worship the Goddess of the Azure Clouds, Bixiyuanjun, at her temple near the top of Mount Tai in Shandong. Indeed, a healthy portion of the Daoist pantheon was female. One of the most powerful goddesses was the Queen Mother of the West. Suzanne Cahill (1993) traced this cult of this goddess of kingship rites and of longevity. The Queen Mother of the West was patron saint of artists and of aristocratic women and was especially important to mystics and adepts who practiced astral travel. Many dedicated their lives to her at Daoist monasteries and abbeys.

As with the saintly women of Confucian practice, female mystics and divines were important to the court; many were brought to the capital to serve as "living auspicious omens," signs that the dynasty was blessed by the Dao. Some mystics gathered adherents in monasteries and hermitages in remote mountain sites; these teachers were maintained in monastic life by contributions from all classes of society from the poor to the aristocratic. Female religious leaders could gather worshipers even at their own homes in urban areas; the mystic Tan Yang Zi in the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644) gathered thousands of adherents in the city of Suzhou, and many of her followers were high-ranking members of the official class. Woman warriors were often allied as well with Daoist practice; the demon-quelling sword of the Daoist exorcist was her typical weapon. But these mystic-warriors summoned up dangerous political currents in her cult, and they were often allied with millenarian rebellions. As with popular practice Daoism has found drama, poetry, and fiction to be useful allies. From the medieval period come the Capeline Cantos, the songs of Daoist priestesses, as well as paens to goddesses. In the Late Imperial periods vernacular dramas, stories, and chantefables spread the mythoi of the goddesses and saints through urban areas. Daoism has provided one of the fullest possible articulations of feminine sanctity in China's religious history.

Buddhism

If Daoism opened its gates to the feminine, Buddhism, when it was first introduced to China, was less hospitable. The same groundswell of feminine archetypes that radiated through popular religion and Daoism, however, was no less active in Buddhism, and where Buddhism touched those ancient assumptions about the sanctity of the feminine, it found a feminine voice impossible to ignore. As Buddhism grew in China, it did not spread its influence like vat of dye spilled on the landscape, coloring all local practice and iconography in its path; rather, it transmogrified, changing and adapting to Chinese cultural assumptions, to local practices and native Chinese religious imperatives. And these changes in Buddhism tell, in turn, about the power of local religious narratives and, again, about the authority of native feminine ideations of the divine.

Buddhism entered China during the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) and dominated the religious landscape in the northern kingdoms of the Six Dynasties (220–589) period. Buddhist theocracies in northern China ensured that Indic Buddhism grew solid roots. Beginning in the Tang dynasty (618–906), Buddhism took firm hold empire-wide and, by the time of the Song dynasty (960–1279), had important centers in both the North and South. For both men and women, Buddhism presented problems specifically allied with gender. One debate centered on the configuration of feminine sanctity, or lack thereof. Women in Indic Buddhist doctrine were, as Diana Paul described it, "secular, powerless, profane and imperfect" (1985). Indian Buddhist construction of the divine was explicitly masculine; women's bodies were impure. "There are neither hell-beings, hungry ghosts, animals or women in the Pure Land," observed the Qing theorist Peng Shaosheng (cited in Grant, 1994, p. 77). Passage through karmic reincarnations—whereby a woman shed her female form—was required before a woman could, as a man, enter the Western Paradise. Both Indian Mahāyāna texts and Chinese Pure Land texts were explicit on the contaminated nature of the feminine.

If women were constructed as impure and incapable of divinity, however, the worshipers of popular Buddhist cults neglected to notice. Setting dogma aside, they implicitly reconfigured the feminine in Buddhism as sacred. The major example of this reconfiguration occurs in the change in the worship of the Indic god, the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. Chinese worshipers seized the notion of a god of mercy and, over time, over the course of the Tang and Song eras, recreated him as a goddess. Chün-fang Yü detailed brilliantly the change whereby Avalokiteśvara becomes the Goddess of Mercy, Guan Yin. Yü found that Buddhism was specifically changed through contact with native cults and, like Daoism, definitions of divinity were profoundly shaped by the gravitational pull of feminine narratives. Yü traces the transformation of god to goddess by "examining the relationship between Buddhism and indigenous cultural and religious traditions" (2001, p. 489), finding that the male god of mercy adapted to local beliefs, in which female divinities brought rain, watched over children, and relieved suffering. Thus, the male god of mercy became a white-robed goddess for Chan monks, a water-moon goddess for the literati, protectress of sailors for coastal worshipers, and finally a child-giving goddess for common folk. Orthodox monks of the monastic centers—like the disapproving clerics in the Daoist church—were quick to criticize the transformation of the god from male to female as heterodox practice, yet the pull of local belief proved too strong. The Goddess Guan Yin did, finally, redefine Buddhist sanctity as feminine; she became, in fact, one of the major Buddhist ideations of divinity. Ultimately, in the sectarian religions in late imperial China, she dominated in the pantheon, regarded as holding supreme position as creator and ruler of the universe. Ironically, it is just through such radical recalibrations of notions of the divine, attended by increased numbers of devotees to her cult, that Buddhism in Asia survived and still thrives. Her cult center on Putoshan Island, off the Yangzi Delta coast near Ningbo, was expensively and massively refurbished by donors from all over Asia at the beginning of the 1990s.

Chinese definitions of the domestic sanctity (i.e., idealized concepts of motherhood) also shaped Buddhist rituals and narratives. The Buddhist ritual drama of Mulian, one of the most popular ritual-narratives in China, reshaped Buddhist configurations of female impurity. Mulian was a saint whose chief work was the rescue of his mother from hell—a hell ordained for her by the doctrine of female corporeal corruption. Yet the ritual drama enacted to large audiences at temples and holiday congregations was, in effect, an enactment of the rituals of filial piety. Audiences seemed rather more interested in notions of the son's dedication than the mother's contamination. The tale of a mother's corporeal contamination was a weak shadow plot, inherently less interesting than the tale of piety for the mother. Thus Chinese concepts shaped the narrative which, in turn, helped resolve the inherent cultural conflict between Confucian piety toward motherhood and Buddhist revulsion for the female body. Elite Buddhist practice was no less subject to native reconfigurations. Chan (or Zen) Buddhism altered important aspects of gender-based sanctity. Beatta Grant (1996) has pointed out that although Pure Land Buddhism was explicit on feminine corporeal contamination, because Chan emphasized enlightenment, rather than passage to Paradise, Chan was more receptive to female students and masters. In fact, from the Chan yulu (discourse records of disciples) it is known that women served as teachers, pupils, and even "holders of the lineages" in Chan Buddhism.

In the late imperial period—Song through Qing—lay organizations contributed importantly to the expansion of feminine divine narratives and patterns of feminine worship. Beginning in the twelfth century, lay organizations began in affiliation with monastic organizations, but by the sixteenth century lay organizations were independent of monasteries, often located in urban areas of the South. These organizations had large numbers of female worshipers and an independent female leadership structure, they practiced economic support through tithing, and the members participated in a host of devotional activities: convocation and pilgrimage, large scale donation to build and sustain temples and monasteries, gathering at festivals to see ritual drama, reading or listening to vernacular tales and hagiography, and listening to teachers in public or in private. Whatever the regulations may have been for the cloistered woman—and many literati were at pains to remind women of these regulations—public congregation, study, religious dedication, travel, and even marriage-resistance societies were among the ideals for lay Buddhist worshipers. In addition to the practices allied with lay organizations, ritual dramas and vernacular hagiographies also expanded the constructs of feminine worship and sanctity, specifically offering women an ideal distinctly different from the ideal of domestic confinement. The immensely popular story of Miao Shan—celebrated in pilgrimage, ritual, and popular literature—articulates the conflict between family piety and devotion to Buddhist practice, offering an exemplar of Buddhist sainthood. Miao Shan converts her father before achieving apotheosis as the incarnation of Guan Yin.

In considering gender in Chinese religions the lines of two competing narratives can be clearly traced: the hierarchical, masculine, institutionalized, often state-sponsored paradigm and, in contrast, the regional paradigm that is, in varying degrees, charismatic, vernacular, and often feminine. Of course, these vernacular narratives are not fully transparent for court and state cultures do not typically condone variant constructs of sanctity. Indeed, the female narratives, in particular, often exist in competition with the hegemonic elaboration of sanctioned orthodoxies. The court and now the Communist Party regularly attack these micro-religions, measuring the competition they offer to mandarin pieties. But these religious narratives are linked to a thriving undercurrent of religious cultures and are a vigorous subcategory of the transpicuous in China, their cults summoning wide-scale support among both male and female worshipers and, in some cases, dominating regional subcultures. Thus the feminine and regional paradigm does not present a small voice in the religious chorus; rather, it is animated, energetic and forceful—able, in fact, to alter radically the orthodoxies of institutional religious traditions. Moreover, this dialectic between competing paradigms of sanctity unveils something useful about Chinese cultural history, revealing not only the elaborate and protean panorama that is Chinese religious history, but also enabling us as well to confront the bland assumptions made in ignorance of conflicts of interpretation that China is unchanging, monolithic, dynastic, imperial, and masculine.

See Also

Ancestors, article on Ancestor Worship; Buddhism, article on Buddhism in China; Buddhism, Schools of, article on Chinese Buddhism; Chinese Religion, overview article and article on Popular Religion; Confucianism, overview article; Daoism, overview article; Folk Religion, article on Folk Buddhism; Gender Roles; Patriarchy and Matriarchy; Shamanism, overview article.

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Victoria Cass (2005)