It is a fact increasingly acknowledged that although texts are important sources of insight and information, they can only tell part of the story. This is perhaps especially true when it comes to women's religious belief and practice. As Yuhang Li states at the very start of this wonderfully rich and illuminating study, her primary interest is what women “did” rather than what they wrote or, as is more often the case, what has been written about them. While she does not eschew texts entirely, her focus in Becoming Guanyin is on physical activities and material objects—dance, painting, embroidery, and ornamentation—created and used by women of the imperial period for religious purposes.
The Ming-Qing period, as is well known, saw a flourishing of so-called women's culture, aided and abetted by a booming market economy and major growth in publishing and book culture. This new appreciation for female “talent,” however, went hand in hand with a renewed concern for female “virtue” within the boundaries of the domestic sphere. For Li's purposes, this domestic sphere simply means that which is associated with women's activities. It includes the homes of the living as well as the tombs of the dead, and the world of the “proper” gentry woman, but also the world of the courtesan. All of these spaces were, to a lesser or greater extent, subsumed under the larger Confucian framework, within which—as many scholars have noted—Buddhism often provided a means of more personal self-fashioning and self-expression. As the book's title indicates, Buddhism here is represented by the bodhisattva Guanyin, whose gender identity, while always fluid, had become largely feminized by the late imperial period. This allowed women to physically identify with the bodhisattva and, by means of their own artistic and aesthetic skills, to establish relationships with Guanyin that were uniquely and often very intimately their own.
Li approaches her topic by dedicating one chapter to each of the four “modes” that women used to establish relationships with Guanyin: dance, weaving, ornaments, and, perhaps most strikingly, hair. It is difficult to convey the richness of the information and insight (not to mention the wonderful illustrative plates) to be found in each of these chapters, which are grounded in a judicious selection of detailed case studies.
In chapter 1, for example, the focus is on the late Ming courtesan Xu Jinghong 徐警鴻, who was known both for her Buddhist piety and for her performance of the so-called Guanyin dance. One of the important questions raised in this chapter is how a talented but religiously devout courtesan aspired to embody Guanyin through a performative art, the audience for which normally consisted of the same male literati who regarded her as an object of the erotic gaze. While Li must necessarily make use primarily of texts, she reads them “against the grain” and teases out some important differences between how men wrote about this sort of dance (ranging from the lubricious to the laudatory) and how Xu herself did.
In chapter 2, devoted to painting, we meet the remarkable artist Xing Cijing 邢慈静, known for a long handscroll depicting five images of the white-robed Guanyin with a young male child in such a way as to express her gratitude at having finally borne a male child. By the same token, another woman artist, Fang Weiyi 方維儀, painting in the later years of a long chaste widowhood, makes use of minimalistic calligraphic lines that reflect Chan Buddhist ideals of meditative spontaneity. In both cases, however, the artists render a more feminine and compassionate image of the bodhisattva than would be normally found in paintings of Guanyin by male artists.
In chapter 3, Li focuses on the ways in which Buddhist lay women used embroidery, particularly embroidery using their own hair, to establish a uniquely intimate relationship with the bodhisattva Guanyin. There were many different levels and dimensions of this practice. The most obvious of these was the labor-intensive and repetitive nature of embroidery, which contributed to its ritual efficacy. The use of hair took this to an even more extreme level, in that it involved not only labor and dedication, but also the pain involved in plucking out the hair from the root. Li argues that the merit acquired by the making of hair-embroidered images was dedicated to women's own parents rather than to their in-laws. By doing so, she writes, they were able to subtly subvert the traditional Confucian hierarchical order and give expression to their own more personal desires.
In chapter 4, Li asks how a wealthy but pious woman might make use of richly bejeweled hair ornaments embossed with images of the bodhisattva to acquire religious merit in this life but even more importantly, to ensure her own transformative rebirth in the Pureland in the next. Here again, the ultimate goal was to imitate, merge with, and finally “become Guanyin,” something that was possible only because they shared the same feminine form.
Finally, in her concluding chapter, Li offers a fascinating discussion of how, among other things, these artistic objects created by women were regarded and later often exhibited outside of the domestic space. In the final paragraph, she notes that the “material practices of women's religious lives constitute a vast topic” (p. 206). Indeed, it has been difficult to even begin to summarize the wealth of material that Yuhang Li touches upon in this important and insightful study, which she refers to as only preliminary. One can only hope that she and other scholars will continue to make use of these sorts of materials to shed much-needed light on women's lived religious lives and experiences.
