Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism

318 Pages·1998·41.533 MB·English

by  Alan Cole

Mothers and Sons in
Chinese Buddhism
Alan Cole
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
1998
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Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©1998 by the Board ofTrustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University
Printed in the United States of America
CIP data appear at the end of the book
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For B.Z.
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Acknowledgments
Midway through graduate school I began to suspect that Chinese Bud
dhist literature on the family was far more interesting and complex than
had been previously recognized. It seemed to me that Buddhist discus
sions of family matters, which appeared so frequently in medieval texts,
were part of a long-term propaganda effort dedicated toward locking the
family and the Buddhist monasteries into a symbiotic relationship. In
particular, Buddhist authors disseminated unsettling theories of reproduc
tion and death that revolved around new concepts of sin, debt, and female
pollution. This was done, apparently, to convince all that life was doomed
without the buoying beneficence available at the monasteries. Making
sense of these texts and their contexts became my dissertation topic and
led to the writing of this book.
To situate this study, and to own up to a set of ethical dilemmas, I feel
obliged to say that I believe that the writing of this kind of critical history
is, by its very trans-temporal perspective, inherently aggressive. By cre
ating an overarching historical narrative, completely unavailable to the
actors considered and based on the illusory possibility of seeing every
thing-at-once from a God's-eye point of view, the archivist implies a kind
of dominance over his or her subjects. To construct this vision of the past,
with its pretensions to objectivity, the historian also insinuates for her- or
himself a degree of freedom from historical situatedness-even as par
ticular modes of historical situatedness are precisely what is being inves
tigated. The historian is the privileged one who can, with the flip of a
page, leave one century for another and then stand back to judge their dif-
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viii Acknowledgments
ferences. Seeming to play above and beyond the juggernaut of historical
determinism, the historian's project tries to trade the wisdom of the joke
that "time exists so everything doesn't happen at once" for the seductive
claim that "history exists so that everything can be seen at once."
Charged in this way, I would plead guilty on all counts. Grounds for
leniency might be found in considering that for the last hundred and fifty
years Occidental academics have been obsessed with writing critical his
tories and that therefore I am, like my Buddhist counterparts, producing
the documents that the times dictate. This admission, while not par
ticularly uplifting, at least avoids the bad form of denying the larger
nexus of causality behind my own writing moment, a moment shaped by
both institutional and familial imperatives. In my dissertation defense, I
tried to address the irony of paying off my own filial debts by writing
about Chinese sons paying off their filial debts, but no one seemed to
think it was very funny. Perhaps this ki'nd of reflexivity is too close to
home.
Besides this interesting fusion of filial imperatives, I should mention
several other hermeneutical conundrums. Though it goes againsl my ra
ther. ingrained reductionist tendencies, I believe all that I can assert is that
this book presents another way to look at Chinese Buddhism. I some
times have the irrepressible urge to assume that this is the best way to
read Chinese Buddhism, but I have tried to take to heart Brook Ziporyn's
rather sensible if annoying refrain, "Yes, Alan, that's very interesting, but
how can you claim that that is all this text is about?" This question of
depths and levels gets to the heart of the hermeneutical issues. In the fluid
world of metaphor, duplication, and transposition, I agree that we cannot
assume that any particular reading is the bottom line. To say "it's all
about money," or "it's all about sex and power," and so on, is to work
with a rather blunt instrument. Nonetheless, it seems that once the eco
nomic and familial issues documented here are put on the table, we ought
not go back to thinking about basic Buddhist concepts like merit, purity,
and authority without reference to the way these ideas are often couched
in language that is connected to reproductive matters. In essence, then, I
am arguing for a future hermeneutical circle whose circumference regu-
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Acknowledgments ix
larly passes through consideration of the "family romance," as Sigmund
Freud so nicely put it.
It would be disingenuous of me to deny the impact that Freud has had
on this project. I began to read Freud in high school and have yet to tire
of his perspectives, finding in them a style of analysis ·that is provocative
if not always easy to stomach. Admitting this in print risks a loss of face,
but I have been encouraged by scholars like Peter Gay and Lynn Hunt
who have argued for responsible neo-Freudian histories. In particular,
they have shown the value of using Freudian suppositions to make sense
of the way public icons work to fuse personal narratives to larger cultural
programs run by religious or political organizations. Freud, when used
with care, allows us to look carefully at patterns of cathexis offered to
readers of propagandizing documents and public art. This style of inquiry
need not be burdened by Freud's less defendable claims aboutlhe univer
sality of the Oedipus complex or his dubious hydraulic models of desire
and aggression. As many since Michel Foucault have argued, the Oedipus
complex may be less a theory leading to a cure and more a symptom of a
particular Western consciousness caught up in· the webs of power and
practice that define our twentieth century. However this debate develops,
it is my hope that the evidence presented here on the family in Chinese
Buddhism furthers the discussion of the family romance in religion and
politics.
Like all sentient beings, my debts are numerous. I am particularly
grateful to T. Griffith Foulk and Luis 0. Gomez, my advisors at the Uni
versity of Michigan, who seemed to know the right dose of concern and
encouragement to offer me as I worked on the dissertation version of this
study. Zeff Bjerken and Brook Ziporyn were essential friends and unoffi
cial advisors through the cold and grey Ann Arbor winters, and Corinna
Barbara Francis helped in many ways during especially turbulent mo
ments in the early stages of research. For quite some time, Stephen
(Buzzy) Teiser has been an invaluable resource and all-around friend. It
would be no exaggeration to say that I could not have written this without
his help and the careful scholarship he brought to the field with his The
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x Acknowledgments
Ghost Festival in Medieval China. A generous grant from the American
Council of Learned Societies allowed me to spend the fall of 1993 in
Paris perusing Dun Huang documents at the Equipe de Dunhuang, where
I benefited from the patient assistance of Professor Jean-Pierre Drege.
Earlier, I had the good fortune of winning a Rackham graduate fellowship
and a predoctoral writing grant from the University of Michigan.
Since taking a job at Lewis & Clark College I have learned much from
interactions with my students, many of whom have offered trenchant cri
tiques of my writing and methodology. Discussions with colleagues in
history and anthropology have also been fruitful-Susan Glosser and Di
ane Nelson gave me much to think about as I sought to finalize this
manuscript. David Savage, Dean of Arts and Humanities, has been par
ticularly supportive, especially in his decision to procure the Chinese
Buddhist canon for our library. Numerous friends, family members, and
scholars have read versions of this book, and I would like to thank them
for their comments, many of which I incorporated: Zeff Bjerken, Hank
Glassman, Karen Kelsky, John Kieschnick, Elizabeth Morrison, Erin
Odell, Buzzy Teiser, Brook Ziporyn, and my mother, who seems to enjoy
reading my attempts to make sense of mothers and sons. Last, but cer
tainly not least, I would like to thank Victoria Scott for her thoughtful ed
iting, the staff at SUP for their help in bringing this book through the
press, and Jenna Rice for her helpful proofreading.
A.C.
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Contents
..
..
Note on Transliterations and Abbreviations Xlll
Texts Analyzed in This Volume xv
1. Buddhist Propaganda 1
2. Confucian Complexes 14
3. Nascent Buddhist Filial Piety 41
4. Mothers and Sons in the Beginning 56
5. Mothers and Sons in the Ghost Festival 80
6. The Buddhist Elite Talk About Mothers and Sons 103
7. The Sutra on the Profound Kindness ofP arents 132
8. Mu Lian and the Ten Kindnesses of the Mother 159
9. Buddhist Biology 192
10. Bifurcated Mothers and Other Conclusions 226
. 239
Notes
Bibliography 280
293
Character List
295
Index
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Note on Transliterations and
Abbreviations
In this book, though I used the standard pin yin system of transliteration
for Chinese words, I decided not to follow the norm of running characters
together. This is for one simple reason: non-Chinese speakers often are
left without a clue about where to divide a binome. For example, how
would one know that yunan was to be broken after the u or after the first
n? Both are phonetic possibilities, and the reader likely will be left in a
quandary. Writing binomes as a unit is usually defended on the basis that
since characters are paired into binomic units in spoken Chinese, orthog
raphy should follow suit. This argument, while valid for the translitera
tion of prose or dialogue (that is, language in use), does not seem equally
applicable to the transliteration of Chinese characters embedded in Eng
lish text. In the latter, the purpose is simply to identify technical terms in
the clearest manner possible-a purpose best served, in my opinion, by
separating characters.
There are three source abbreviations in this book:
T Taisho shinshu daizokyo. 100 vols. Takakusu Junjiro and Watana
be Kaigyoku, eds. (Tokyo: Daizokyokai, 1924-34}. This modern
Japanese edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon contains sutras,
commentaries, histories, hymns, genealogical charts, and artwork.
I cite it by volume number, page number, folio, and line when ap
propriate. Thus "T.54.328a.5" refers to Taisho vol. 54, p. 328, fol.
a (the first out of three), fifth line from the right. Except for the list
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xiv Transliterations and Abbreviations
of primary sources in the Bibliography, I have not included the
Taisho numbers for texts, as the serial numbering of the texts is not
so helpful for locating passages in the canon.
Pelliot Pelliot collection of Dun Huang texts held in the Bibliotheque Na
tionale, Paris.
Stein Stein collection of Dun Huang texts held in the British Museum,
London.
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