Gender, Body and Divine Power in the Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain
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."Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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.Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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?"Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
), 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.Meulenbeld, “Death and Demonization
of a Bodhisattva,” 697–99.
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.Meulenbeld, 706.
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."Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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."Meulenbeld, “Death and Demonization
of a Bodhisattva,” 712.
Her father recognizes this connection, accusing
her repeatedly as “a bewitching sprite, a devilish monster."Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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).Meulenbeld, “Death and Demonization
of a Bodhisattva,” 701.
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."Meulenbeld, 701.
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."susannemrozikVirtuousBodiesPhysical2007?
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.alancoleMothersSonsChinese1998?;
beatagrantEscapeBloodPond2011?
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."Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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.Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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.Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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,"Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
or “riches and sex,"Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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."susannemrozikVirtuousBodiesPhysical2007?
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."Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
“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."Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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.Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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!Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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.Balkwill, “The Sūtra on
Transforming the Female Form,”
141.
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。Balkwill, 142–43.
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.Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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.reikoohnumaHeadEyesFlesh2006?
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.Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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.Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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.reikoohnumaHeadEyesFlesh2006?
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.reikoohnumaHeadEyesFlesh2006?
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.Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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"Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
). This conceit partakes of a standing Buddhist
“physiomoral discourse on bodies"susannemrozikVirtuousBodiesPhysical2007?
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.Sibau, “Filiality, Cannibalism,
Sanctity,” 62.
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."Sibau, 69.
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.Sibau, 56.
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!Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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!"Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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"Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
(i.e. become a monk), and her obligation to
reproduce seems forgotten. He even suggests that Miaoshan is “Our parent
from a former life"Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
, 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"Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
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.Wiltl.idemaPersonalSalvationFilial2008?
Along with meditative cultivation and indigenous Chinese demonology, then, we can distinguish this as a third mechanism for her attainment of divinity.