This is the first part of my article on women’s piety towards Buddhism in Song times, a topic barely touched upon until recently. In this portion of my article, I first discuss the “Pious Wives” section of Patricia Ebrey’s widely circulated book, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period, in hopes of clarifying and modifying some of the major points discussed in the section.
As these points represent Ebrey’s pioneering, albeit cursory, discussion of pious wives in Western language, they have already shaped a general image of Song women, particularly women of elite families, and of what they did to show their piety towards Buddhism. A close scrutiny of them results in the finding of some errors arisen from the misreading of original texts and the limited and imbalanced citation of sources. In this article, I outline the twenty examples of Song women’s piety that Ebrey randomly selects from numerous commemorative texts produced in the Song. I point out the insufficiency of these examples and delineate why and how Song elite family women actually practiced Buddhism. I cite 123 commemorative texts to supplement the sixteen examples that Ebrey uses for her discussion, address the extent to which women dedicated themselves to Buddhism, and argue the existence of diverse practices of Buddhism among women in the Northern Song––an important fact that is unheeded in Ebrey's “Pious Wives” section. I also contextualize their religious orientation by looking into religious practices of their natal and spousal families, which Ebrey fails to take note of even though she is supposed to, given “marriage and the lives of women” being the very purpose of her book. My discussion and analysis is built upon the framework of five of the “Six Paramitas or Six Perfections, i.e., bushi (giving; dāna), chijie (morality; śīla), jingjin (vigor; vīrya), chanding (meditation; dhyāna) and zhihui (wisdom; prajñā), which constitute what is known as “the Bodhisattva ideal.” The renru (patience; kṣānti) paramita is set aside with special note because the effort is not exclusively Buddhist but is inherently Confucian and Taoist. This classification leads to the following findings, which take into account some individuals’ embodiment of more than single perfection: of the 123 Northern Song women, 12% were involved in bushi, 18% in chijie, 84% in jingjin, 6% in chanding, and 22% demonstrated zhihui. While this quantitative schema may not accurately represents the variegated colors of Northern Song women’s devotions to Buddhism, it helps to reveal the different levels of religious piety demonstrated by the middle-and upper-class women who were portrayed as pious. On the other hand, my discussion supported by ample evidence further confirms the significant amount of religious autonomy that women from elite families of the Northern Song were able to enjoy, amidst the daunting household chores they took upon themselves to perform.
Key words:
Song women; piety; Buddhism; “Pious Wives”; Six Paramitas; religious autonomy