Dr WANG Xingyi, Department of Chinese History and Culture

Lives of Pious Women: Comparing Pure Land Practice in the Song Dynasty and in Modern Times. LUCIP Colloquium Gendering Buddhist Modernism. Department of Philosophy, Leiden University, Netherland, 14 December 2023.

Abstract
What laudable quality makes the life story of a woman worth recording? Is it her extraordinary devotion to the family as a caring mother, chaste wife, and submissive daughter; or her intellectual virtue and martial talent; or alternatively, her faith in Buddhism or Daoism? Liu Xiang’s compilation Biographies of Women (34 BCE) generated a tradition which is perceived as dominating the literary descriptions of ideal womanhood throughout Chinese history. This literary tradition mainly promoted the cultivation of Confucian values in highly formulaic fashion. But outside Confucian tradition, there are cases which stand against the prescribed ideal image of woman. This paper examines rare and precious case of exemplar narratives in Song Pure Land Buddhism, which stand in sharp contrast to Liuxiang’s tradition, providing direct moral critiques to Confucian misogynous notions of woman, reflecting on Buddhist gendered biased scholastic tradition, and eventually praised female lay practitioner as on a bar with Buddhist monastics.