Living Karma examines the life, thought, and practice of Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655), one of the most influential Buddhist monks of late Ming-dynasty China. The Buddhist cultures of the Ming have only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention they deserve, but Beverley Foulks McGuire has done much more than fill in blanks on our map of the Chinese Buddhist landscape. She has given us engaging and consistently insightful discussions of practices—divination, repentance, ritual, asceticism, and vows—that will be of interest to scholars across the fields of religious and cultural studies.
As the title indicates, this book revolves around conceptions of karma—how one deciphers it, repents for it, evokes the powers of buddhas and bodhisattvas to erase it, and attempts to alter it through ritual practice. Is karma a natural law with exact correspondence between action and consequence, or is it possible to intervene in the karmic process and affect its outcome? Ouyi Zhixu was convinced that every being would reap the due rewards of their actions, yet he was determined to develop the means to lighten the burden of karma, both for himself and for others. This was not an abstract, theoretical issue for Ouyi, and one of the many strengths of this book is the way McGuire is able to illustrate how doctrines manifest in and transform lived experiences and how experiences affect interpretations of doctrine.
Ouyi was haunted by his past transgressions and the specter of future retribution. The source of this anxiety might seem insignificant to some. As he confessed in his autobiography (the topic of chapter 1), at the age of eleven, under the baleful influence of his non-Buddhist teachers, Ouyi began eating meat, drinking, and writing anti-Buddhist tracts. Though he burned his critiques and renewed his faith in the Dharma five years later, he was certain that he had committed a sin of such gravity that he was forever barred from entering the Pure Land and destined instead for the ceaseless torments of Avīci Hell. He dwells on his impurities, describing himself as like someone whose “body, mouth, ears, and nose are all sunken into excrement” (p. 89). The adversity he encounters throughout his life—the passive afflictions of illness and obstruction as well as the active suffering of self-inflicted pain—are interpreted by Ouyi as both the manifestation and the purification of his past karma. In his view, pain and suffering are ripe with the potential for liberation. Punishment and self-abnegation give rise to shame, which, ideally, leads to faith in the saving grace of buddhas and bodhisattvas.
Ouyi diagnosed his own karmic impediments by means of divination (the subject of chapter 2) and through his self-assessed sluggish progress along the spiritual path. Knowledge of the barriers he faced, however, was not a source of despair for Ouyi but rather a spur to redouble his efforts. Karma, he believed, was not entirely mechanical; it could, under the right circumstances, be changed. The first step in this process was repentance (the focus of chapter 3). After sincerely confessing and repenting misdeeds, one could count on the aid of buddhas and bodhisattvas (Dizang is identified as particularly efficacious), who alone had the power to fully understand and intervene in the mysterious workings of karma. The end goal, for Ouyi, was to become a bodhisattva himself, putting an end to his own karma and assuming the karmic burdens of others. (The many vows Ouyi made committing himself to this arduous path are the subject of chapter 4.)
The struggle to atone for the suffering he had caused and to annul the suffering he felt he deserved played out most visibly on Ouyi's body. McGuire shows how Ouyi and other Buddhists of his generation conceived of their bodies on several, closely integrated levels: as gifts from parents that required repayment, as products of previous karma, as sources of suffering, and as vehicles for liberation. Her nuanced accounts of Ouyi's own ritual practices (chapter 5) demonstrate how abstract ideas like filial piety and karma become embodied. To requite the debt owed his mother, for example, Ouyi fed her his own flesh and wrote her a letter in his blood. Slicing his tongue to milk the blood, burning his head and arms with incense, Ouyi willingly inflicted pain on himself both to reinforce his conviction that the body is the seat of suffering and to uproot, through self-mortification, the physically embedded forms of his past offenses. Ouyi's self-injury was thus understood by himself and others as a constructive rather than a destructive process. By making an offering of himself, he was turning his ordinary body into the extraordinary body of a bodhisattva.
The enduring appeal of Ouyi Zhixu three and a half centuries after his death may be a testament to the success of that project. Some of the most prominent and respected Chinese Buddhist clerics of the twentieth century—figures like Hongyi (1880–1942) and Shengyan (1930–2009)—looked to Ouyi as a model. Living Karma has now introduced this remarkable and remarkably complex monk to English-speaking audiences. In the process, McGuire has not only deepened our knowledge of Ming-dynasty Buddhism, she has also shown us effective and innovative ways to engage with Chinese religious history and practice.
