A late imperial Chinese prosimetric hagiographical narrative, the Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain charts the transformations in physical body and social position that make Princess Miaoshan (“Marvelous Goodness") into a powerful goddess and savior, the Bodhisattva Guanyin. The text is rich in material on late imperial gender relations and the female body, as all of its commentators recognize. Its narrative revolves around the conflict between Miaoshan's religious ambitions and the desires of her father, the Emperor Marvelous Splendor, for her to take a husband and give him an heir. Before her apotheosis, Miaoshan must undergo many persecutions and humiliations: exile from the palace, drudgery in a convent, exposure and imprisonment, execution by strangling at her father's hands, a trip through the underworld, and the voluntary loss of her arms and eyes to make medicine that will cure the disease her father has incurred through his sin. What's the source of Princess Miaoshan's power? What sort of causal theory does its sense depend on? Is she ultimately an exemplar of filiality or of anti-familism? In his introduction, the text's translator, Wilt L. Idema reads this father/daughter drama in the context of the mother/son discourse seen in other Chinese Buddhist legends, like those of Mulian and Woman Huang. These other tales revolve around the sinfulness of female sexuality: “Their sinfulness is reified by their uterine blood, which is a defilement of the gods. . . . I would argue that the legend of Miaoshan could only have emerged once the notion of the sinfulness of female sexuality had been firmly established. I read Miaoshan’s repeatedly expressed fear of death and of the punishments of hell as well as her refusal to marry as an expression of her fear of her own female, and therefore sinful, sexuality."¹ While I agree that this understanding of female sexuality would have been assumed context for any reader of the text, the fact is that the precious scroll does not use the misogynistic rhetoric of bodily foulness, and the sexuality stigmatized in the story is never Miaoshan's mother's, only her father's. I argue that we should take seriously this choice on the part of the authors, and locate the text carefully in a field of ideas on the female body and practices for obtaining divine power which was far from univocal. First, I show how the precious scroll synthesizes Buddhist ideas of gaining power through meditative self-cultivation into an indigenous popular model of spirit-mediumship and demonology, before examining how it deploys the notions of filial slicing and supernaturally efficacious bodhisattva bodies to take its position on familial obligations.

An early passage of the text lays out Princess Miaoshan's character and what will become the story's driving conflict:

When, as she grew up, she had reached the age of ten, the measure of her resolve was large and wide. She was loftily enlightened and profoundly grounded. Without any effort, she fully mastered the zither and calligraphy, colors and paintings, and weaving brocade into patterns. She could prepare all the hundred delicacies and special dishes. Her bodily posture was dignified and serious, [and she exhibited the virtues of] clear purity and appropriate yielding, harmonious modesty and filial obedience. She knew honesty and understood shame and, filled with kind compassion, manifested forbearance. She did not crave anything or cling to anything, and as if by nature kept to a vegetarian diet and maintained the precepts. By day she read the sutras and recited the name of the Buddha, and at night she composed her mind and practiced meditation. Without any slackening she devoted herself to cultivation like this. She grew up inside the palace and before long had reached the age of nineteen. Time and again the princess prayed to Blue Heaven: “Let me abandon the imperial palace, leave the family and venerate the Buddha, visit an enlightened teacher and follow the instructions of a good friend. I will walk in the right Way without any wavering. Leaving the earth-prison, escaping from this pit of fire, I want to become a buddha and ferry across the multitudes.” After she had made this vow, she went in a dream to the top of the Marvelous High Peak, where she received the announcement of her future buddhahood from the buddha Limitless Longevity. When she woke up from her dream, her heart was completely enlightened.²

I'd like to highlight three components of her practice here. First, there are relatively ancillary elements like vegetarianism, scripture study, and nianfo, which attest to her overall virtue. Second, meditation: Miaoshan will praise the “Gate of Meditation" throughout the story, and as with the historical Buddha, it's through meditation that she achieves enlightenment. Self-cultivation through meditation, then, is an obvious source for her divine power. Third, following the Way puts social demands on her, which will only be resolved when her father strangles her to death. That is, the “enlightened teacher" and “good friend" she requires can only be found by leaving her family and joining the White Sparrow Convent. A central point of the text is clearly to dramatize the conflicts of real women choosing the monastic life over marriage, and it's filled with arguments and justifications for that choice. However, to deify Miaoshan, it must depict her as a “super-nun" whose goodness and power exceed the real community, and so its hagiographical aim can be formally separated. Therefore, although Miaoshan insists on joining the convent, and does give it credit when she attains enlightenment (“How could I have achieved the right fruit today if it had not been for the White Sparrow Convent?"³), it's not shown as particularly conducive to meditation: her time there is spent either lecturing the other nuns or being forced into toil, intended to convince her to give up and go home. In fact, she's alone when she achieves enlightenment, and rather than depending on the monastic environment, she seems capable of engaging in meditation anywhere she ends up—whether exiled into a garden or alone on a mountain.

In a recent article, Mark Meulenbeld provocatively argues that since the story of Miaoshan, Guanyin has not been the Indian Buddhist bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, but a Chinese deity who fits indigenous notions of demonology, spirit-possession, and spirit-writing. For Meulenbeld, we should understand both the Miaoshan narrative and the history of its versions as struggling to pacify this potentially dangerous goddess. The oldest version of the Miaoshan narrative was recorded in 1104 by Jiang Zhiqi 蔣之奇. Jiang attributes it to spirit-writing explicitly, associating it with the Tang monk Daoxuan 道宣, who was known for communicating with divine beings. However, Jiang is forced to acknowledge that its rough language contradicts this image of a lettered monk, and copes by suggesting the actual writing was done by Daoxuan's disciple. Another account, from Zhu Bian 朱弁 (d. 1148), again suggests that the story was “embellished" and given written form by Daoxuan, again hinting that it had popular oral origins.⁴ Although later versions often omit references to an origin in spirit-writing, the Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain, claiming a date of 1103, does not. It also makes explicit Miaoshan's outright murder, and retains other elements Meulenbeld connects to the indigenous demonological tradition.⁵

Elements of Miaoshan's depiction link her to traditional spirit-possession practices. When her father orders the White Sparrow Convent burned down, she prays to the Buddha for relief, then “[pulls] a bamboo pin from her hair, and [stabs] the inside of her mouth until it [fills] with blood, which she then [spits] out into the sky."⁶ The effect of this is to summon a rain of blood which extinguishes the fire and saves the lives of herself and the nuns. This stabbing of the mouth to obtain blood imbued with divine efficacity is attested in actual practice; in “late imperial China, all sorts of ritualists could perform this type of technique."⁷ Her father recognizes this connection, accusing her repeatedly as “a bewitching sprite, a devilish monster."⁸ Miaoshan is the victim of violations of the “social body" (dying childless after being disowned by her father) and her physical body, culminating in her horrific and inauspicious death. This makes her a dangerous demon, an orphan spirit (孤魂 guhun).⁹ According to a common Chinese religious model, the presence of a particularly dangerous spirit might require—as eventually happened for Miaoshan—canonization in “a stable cult of local worship," which could then “grow in stature and accumulate prestige, thereby climbing the ladder of supernatural success and ultimately changing into divinities with divine title and rank, and sometimes even national prestige."¹⁰

To mediate between the popular religious model in which bodily violation creates demonic power and the conventional Buddhist paradigm of self-cultivation through meditation, the composers of the text had access to a variety of Buddhist bodily motifs. The most well-known is what Susanne Mrozik calls the “ascetic discourse on bodies": Buddhist sources are filled with images which try to reduce attachment to the physical body and sensual pleasures, especially sex, by depicting it as impermanent, foul and impure, and lacking in substantial reality. Meditations on the body attempt to conjure feelings of disgust by envisioning bodies in states of decay, or listing repulsive living parts such as “head hairs, body hairs, nails, teeth, bones, skin, flesh, marrow, sinews, fat, grease, synovia, liver, urine, excrement, stomach, blood, phlegm, bile, pus, snot, and brain."¹¹ Insofar as these texts take for granted a male, heterosexual monastic perspective, these descriptions focus on women and attribute to them responsibility for the monk's attraction to their (repulsive) forms. This produces a misogynistic ideology in which men are pure, sexuality is female, and women are both intrinsically foul and vile temptresses. Although Mrozik restricts herself to Indian sources, this ideology was greatly influential in Chinese Buddhism as well, especially in conjunction with ideas about menstrual pollution. Texts like the Blood Bowl Sūtra (Xuepen jing) and the tales of Mulian and Woman Huang prop up a Buddhist discourse of filial piety which focuses on the sin mothers incur by being born women, by menstruating, by having sex and producing offspring, and therefore on the responsibility sons have to repay their debts to their mothers by performing rituals which support the Buddhist monastic community.¹² For Wilt Idema, the Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain is underpinned by this theory of female sexual sinfulness. This seems best supported by the juxtaposition in a verse where Miaoshan proclaims, “As the three pathways of earth’s prison fill me with fear, / I swear I will never allow my body to be taken by a man."¹³ Miaoshan's resistance to marriage would be motivated by fear of her own sexuality, and her father's crime would consist not in his own greed and lust or his almost incestuous impositions on his daughter, but in the sin of distinctly female sexuality he demands of her.

We have, then, three interlinked elements: renunciation of the body, rejection of women or womanhood, and sexuality linked to disgust. The problem is that at the textual level, although it seems to deploy versions of all three, the Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain does not combine them. For instance, the only connection between sex and pollution is embodied by the emperor. There is a tone of sexual peril when he visits his naked and imprisoned daughter in the night, and she calls it out:

“If you are a Son of Heaven and an emperor of men, in possession of the Way, how would you, a father, ever think of entering this side palace at midnight, in the third watch, and urge your daughter to marry a husband? How would it look if the world came to know of this?"

A horse—it didn’t look like that, a mule it wasn’t either,
The very first move you made only brought you disgust.¹⁴

Later, he receives his punishment in the form of a grisly disease, described at length:

The hair on his brows and at his temples had all fallen out, while maggots crawled in his skin and flesh. Cramps and pains racked his body. His ears were blocked, his nose had collapsed, his eyes bulged out, and his teeth had rotted away. His gums were exposed and his tongue was swollen, and his fingers had dropped off at the joints. His Great Peace crown was covered with green flies, and his dragon robe was streaked with gore. His precious tablet and jade belt were dyed with pus, and his cloud-topped boots were smeared with blood.¹⁵

As for Miaoshan, she rejects both the body and womanhood, but seemingly not because they are tied together by sexual pollution. Though she wants nothing to do with “wine, sex, wealth, and honor,"¹⁶ or “riches and sex,"¹⁷ the text has little specific to say about sexuality, never associating it with with femininity, and Miaoshan's mother is always sympathetic, not a villain like her father.

That's not to say the text doesn't engage with the ascetic discourse on bodies at all. Miaoshan is quite intent on putting down bodily existence and is ready to give up her life on any excuse, but her arguments are more in line with what Mrozik identifies as a second aspect of the ascetic discourse: “Along with learning to regard bodies as impermanent and foul, bodhisattvas must also learn to regard bodies as devoid of any intrinsic and eternal essence such as an eternal self or soul (ātman). Such contemplation entails a more sophisticated level of philosophical reflection on the impermanence of bodied being."¹⁸ The princess warns frequently that the body's impermanence means one must practice the Way now to escape damnation, and that the body can be dispensed with because it is an “illusionary shell," to be contrasted with the indestructible “true nature."¹⁹ “Life in this world," she says, “is empty and insubstantial, like the dew on flowers; a bubble on water, it resembles a particle of dust on a plant."²⁰

As noted before, Miaoshan's desire not to become a wife is not primarily because it involves sex per se, but because that social role would conflict with an occupation as a nun or solitary cultivator. Miaoshan is clear that marriage compounds sin in some fashion:

Marrying a prince consort only adds to fetters and shackles,
As you create sinful karma, resulting in the three pathways.
Those who commit sins will suffer the consequences,
Because in the court of King Yama no mercy is shown.
The realm of shade, earth’s prison, fills me with fear—
I swear I will never use my body to serve some man.²¹

But other parts of her reasoning seem to be about renouncing what Meulenbeld terms the “social body."

All who sacrifice body and heart achieve buddhahood. But if I would marry a husband, I would suffer his restrictions and impositions. What would be the sense of that!²²

This contrast suggests that marriage is part of the “body and heart" which she must give up. If there's a precedent in Buddhist sources for this line of argumentation, perhaps it's not the Indian “ascetic discourse on bodies" at all, but the Sūtra on Transforming the Female Form (Zhuan nüshen jing 轉女身經, T. no. 564). This composition from early medieval China begins by using standard tropes for the emptiness of gender (“perception is like a flame," “actions are like a plantain tree," etc.) as part of an argument that women should strive to be reborn as men.²³ But it innovates on previous texts that made similar points, by introducing a fascinating series of arguments about the unpleasant social position of women:

Furthermore, the female body resembles that of a maidservant and cannot obtain self-sovereignty for she is constantly troubled by sons, daughters, clothing, food and drink, and other necessities related to family matters. They must remove dung and defilement, nasal discharges, saliva, and other impure things. A female will go through nine months of pregnancy, during which she will suffer numerous pains. When she gives birth to a child, she suffers great pains to the brink of death. For this reason, a woman must give rise to the thought of abhorring and getting rid of her female body. 又 觀此身，猶如婢使，不得自在，恒為男女、衣服、飲食、家業所須之所苦 惱。必除糞穢、涕唾不淨。於九月中懷子在身，眾患非一。及其生時，受 大苦痛，命不自保。是故女人，應生厭離女人之身。

Furthermore, as for a woman who is born inside the imperial palace, she necessarily belongs to another person. Throughout her life, she is like a maidservant who must serve and follow a great family, also like a disciple who must venerate and serve his master. She is beaten by different kinds of swords and staves, rocks and tiles, and is defiled by every evil word. These kind of sufferings deprive her of self-sovereignty. This is why a woman must give rise to the thought of abhorring and getting rid of her female body. 又復女人，雖生在王宮，必當屬他。盡其形壽，猶如婢使，隨逐大 家；亦如弟子，奉事於師。又為種種刀杖、瓦石、手拳打擲，惡言罵辱。 如是等苦，不得自在。是故女人應於此身生厭離心。

Furthermore, the female body is constantly being tethered and restricted, like a snake or a rat that is in a deep hole, from which they cannot come out at their will. 又此女身，常被繫閉，猶如蛇、鼠，在深穴中，不得妄出。

Furthermore, the dharma system for women does not allow a woman to have her own freedom: she must constantly be at the side of someone else, receiving food and drink, clothing, perfumes, and all types of adornment, as well as elephant and horse carts. This is why she must give rise to the thought of abhorring and getting rid of her female body. 又女人法，制不由身，常於他邊，稟 受飲食、衣服、花香、種種瓔珞嚴身之具、象、馬、車乘。是故，應當厭 離女身。

Furthermore, the body of a woman is that which is used by others, and cannot achieve self-sovereignty, as her labours are many—pounding herbs, milling rice, sometimes frying and sometimes grinding big and small beans and barley, pulling wool for weaving and spinning piles of it—these many types of suffering are immeasurable. For this reason, a woman must take her own body as a worry. 又此女身，為他所使，不得自在，執作甚多——搗 藥、舂米，若炒、若磨大小豆麥，抽毳、紡疊——如是種種苦役無量。是 故女人，應患此身。²⁴

This sūtra sets up becoming a nun as a direct escape from the female social body, in service to the longer term goals of taking on a male form and becoming a Buddha. The Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain belongs to the same problematic, but Miaoshan modifies the plan in that she manages to escape “constantly being tethered and restricted," without giving up her female form, even when she becomes a Buddha.²⁵

Another Buddhist motif informing the text is the “gift of the body." Stories in which a bodhisattva gives away their head, eyes, or flesh constitute an entire genre of Buddhist literature. In some of these stories, the body given has ordinary characteristics, such as when the bodhisattva as a hare donates his body to a Brahmin as food.²⁶ Miaoshan first invokes this genre when lecturing the White Sparrow nuns on their fear of death, making it the mechanism for reaching buddhahood and foreshadowing her own gift:

You do not yet know that among the sages of ancient times there were those who donated their body to feed a tiger, that there were those who cut off a slice of their flesh to feed an eagle, that there were those who set flame to their body like a torch, that there were those who donated their head and eyes, their marrow and brains, their arms and legs and hand and feet, and that there were those who donated their body just to obtain half a gātha! All those who donated their body and heart achieved the unsurpassable Way.²⁷

In a comic moment later, she tries to give her body to feed a tiger, only to discover that the tiger is an earth god there to assist her.²⁸

The most important episode for the interpretation of the Miaoshan narrative remains her gift of her eyes and arms as medicine to her father. This continues to draw on the gift of the body genre, which contains many stories in which a bodhisattva gives his eyes away or his body serves as medicine. It would be wrong to say it participates in the genre directly, as key elements of the format, like formulaic vows announcing the giver's intentions, are missing. Neither are there the usual “opposer" characters, who try to talk the bodhisattva down from giving their body.²⁹ The function of remonstrating with Miaoshan for her life choices has already been performed by everyone in the cast in the first half of the story, leading up to her death. In Miaoshan's two older sisters, though we see an analogue of the “false donors," “characters who are in the same situation as the bodhisattva himself but behave in a very different manner." These figures provide a more “reasonable," less extreme solution to the story's problem, which is negatively contrasted with the bodhisattva's body-gift. In the eighteenth chapter of the Suvarnabhāsottama Sūtra, for instance, the false donors are the bodhisattva's two less virtuous brothers, who search around for other food sources while the bodhisattva feeds his body to a tigress.³⁰ After being reunited with her sisters, Miaoshan castigates them for their inferior virtue:

My dear elder sisters, please listen to what I have to say.
Boasting of your filial piety, you married a prince consort,
So why did the two of you not donate your arms and eyes?
The one who can’t repay a favor in a time of need is not filial,
He shows ingratitude for all his parents’ feeding and nurturance.³¹

However, it's doubtful Miaoshan's sisters' bodies would have been so efficacious. Her healing power is predicated specifically on her virtue (“All you need is the arm and eye of one without anger"³²). This conceit partakes of a standing Buddhist “physiomoral discourse on bodies"³³ in which the bodies of those who act well, particularly bodhisattvas, are imagined to be beautiful, pure, and to have positively transformative effects on those who see, hear, touch, or consume them. The idea that human body parts can make potent medicines can also be traced in Chinese medical literature back to the Bencao shiyi 本草拾遺 (Supplement to materia medica) of 739.³⁴

Miaoshan's gift is certainly readable as primarily a filial act, and was cited as such. For instance, the late Ming filial slicer Chen Miaozhen was compared to a “new princess Miaoshan."³⁵ Filial slicing, or gegu 割股 (“slicing of members"), was a heavily contested practice in late imperial China in which a person cut and fed part of their thigh or side to a parent or grandparent in the hope of curing an illness. In Confucian style, the Chen Miaozhen story claims that “the act of flesh-slicing stems from deepest sincerity" of filial feeling.³⁶ However, as we've seen, when Miaoshan expounds the benefit of gifts-of-the-body, she speaks of it as part of the bodhisattva's universal generosity, not partial attachment to one's own parents. Her father might as well be a tiger or an eagle. This negates his familial specificity, rather than reinforcing their relationship. In fact, when the text describes her response to his illness, there's no mention of it.

When, with her Buddha-eye, the princess on Incense Mountain saw this, she discarded her illusory shell and, manifesting her true Dharma-body, emerged riding on a cloud from her heavenly grotto. Contemplating the cries of the world, she has only to hear a word to save those who suffer!³⁷

Miaoshan isn't immune to the language of “requital," as we see when the treatment is effective and she is reunited with her parents.

“Considering that the favor of nurture is hard to repay, I left the family to study the Way for my parents’ sake!"³⁸

We should consider, though, that gifts are always simultaneously backhanded. To give a gift is to force another person into obligation, and to repay a debt can mean cancelling a bond. What is the outcome of her gift? Her father himself asks to “leave the family"³⁹ (i.e. become a monk), and her obligation to reproduce seems forgotten. He even suggests that Miaoshan is “Our parent from a former life"⁴⁰, a reversal of their relationship which would certainly annul his authority over her. This makes Idema's contention that the story may “be seen, despite its surface narrative, as a tract designed to persuade daughters to accept marriage, to accept being sacrificed for the sake of the patriarchal family"⁴¹ seem difficult to sustain! Finally, and in line with the conventions of gift-of-the-body tales, her gift has a massive return on investment, as she becomes the Guanyin with a Thousand Arms and a Thousand Eyes:

She donated both her eyes, and now she has received a thousand eyes in return. She donated both her arms, and now she has received a thousand arms in return.⁴²

Along with meditative cultivation and indigenous Chinese demonology, then, we can distinguish this as a third mechanism for her attainment of divinity.