善女人傳

Shànnǚrén zhuàn 善女人傳

Biographies of Good Women [Buddhists]

written by 彭際清 (Péng Jìqīng / Péng Shàoshēng / Èrlín jūshì 二林居士, 1740–1796, 述)

About the work

A 2-juan compendium of biographies of lay-Buddhist women by the Qīng-period lay-Pure-Land patriarch Péng Jì-qīng 彭際清 (1740–1796), forming the gendered companion to his major prosopographical compendium KR6r0185 Jū-shì zhuàn (1770–1775). The “good women” (shàn-nǚ-rén 善女人) of the title is the canonical Buddhist term (Sanskrit kuladuhitṛ, “daughter of [respectable] family”) used in the sūtra-literature for lay female practitioners of Buddhism — paired with the shàn-nán-zǐ 善男子 (“good men”), and addressed throughout the Mahāyāna sūtras as the standard recipient-class of Buddhist teaching. Péng’s Shàn-nǚ-rén zhuàn extends the Jū-shì zhuàn prosopographical project to the female line, supplying the previously-unrecorded lay-Buddhist women of Chinese history. Compiled in the late 1770s through the 1790s, after the completion of the Jū-shì zhuàn. Self-identified colophon: 菩薩戒優婆塞彭際清述 (“composed by the Bodhisattva-precepts-receiving upāsaka Péng Jì-qīng”). Transmitted in the Xù-zàng-jīng as X1657.

Prefaces

The colophonic zhìyǔ identifies Péng as a Bodhisattva-precept-receiving upāsaka — emphasising his lay-status. The work has no separate authorial preface; its companion-relationship to the larger Jūshì zhuàn is implicit and assumed.

Abstract

The work catalogues approximately 80 lay-Buddhist women drawn from the Eastern Jìn through the early Qīng, with materials drawn from:

• The gāosēng zhuàn and bǐqiūní zhuàn tradition (with the boundary-question of whether nuns or lay women are the subject — Péng explicitly draws only those who remained in lay life, deferring nuns to the separate bǐqiūní zhuàn tradition).
• The dynastic-history liènǚ zhuàn (biographies of women) sections.
• The gǎnyìng / miracle-tale tradition’s biographical-anecdotal materials on female devotees.
• Late-Míng / early-Qīng lay-Buddhist materials drawn from Péng’s own social-network-of-Buddhist-women in late-18th-century Sūzhōu.

The work is the first systematic Chinese-Buddhist compendium of lay-Buddhist women — a previously-undocumented prosopographical category, since neither the Liènǚ zhuàn tradition (which focused on Confucian-moral exemplars) nor the Bǐqiūní zhuàn tradition (which focused on nuns) had supplied a dedicated compendium of lay female practitioners.

The work’s significance is multiple:

1. As prosopography: it documents the previously-undocumented lay female Buddhist tradition of Chinese history, with detailed biographies that supply unique data on identifiable women (especially in the SòngYuánMíngQīng period) whose Buddhist practice would otherwise have left no historical trace.

2. As doctrinal statement: by supplying a parallel female compendium to the male Jūshì zhuàn, Péng implicitly affirms the doctrinal equality of female and male lay practitioners in the Mahāyāna tradition.

3. As proto-feminist document: the work has been recognised by modern scholars (Beata Grant, Wendi Adamek, and others) as an early-modern Chinese document of gendered religious agency, supplying a model for the late-Qīng / Republican Chinese women’s Buddhist revival.

A representative entry: a Sòng-period matron’s account of her sister-in-law network, in which the matron rises early and visits each of her younger sisters-in-law in turn, “as if to take leave of them,” declaring that “I shall now follow [the Buddha]” — i.e., a death-bed ritual that demonstrates the matron’s preparation for Pure-Land rebirth and the inter-female communicative network through which late-imperial Chinese Buddhist women practised.

The dating bracket — 1775 to 1796 — covers the period from the completion of the Jūshì zhuàn to Péng’s death.

Translations and research

• Beata Grant, Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2009) — although focused on nuns rather than lay women, supplies the principal Western-language frame for studying Chinese Buddhist women’s history.
• Wendi Adamek, The Mystique of Transmission (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2007) — broader context of Chinese Buddhist gendered prosopography.
• 王宇, 《明清女居士佛教研究》(Běijīng: Zōng-jiào wén-huà chū-bǎn-shè, 2010) — the principal Chinese-language monograph on late-imperial lay female Buddhism, with extended treatment of the Shàn-nǚ-rén zhuàn.
• 釋見曄, 《彭際清研究》(Táiběi: Fǎ-gǔ wén-huà, 2007) — biographical-textual context.
• Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997) — context for late-Qīng women’s history; uses Péng’s compendium as evidence.
• Beata Grant, “Female Holder of the Lineage: Linji Chan Master Zhiyuan Xinggang (1597–1654),” Late Imperial China 17.2 (1996): 51–76.

Other points of interest

The work’s existence as a separate compendium for female practitioners reflects the late-imperial Chinese Buddhist tradition’s recognition of the lay-Buddhist female stream as a substantial and distinct phenomenon — a recognition that anticipates modern interest in Chinese Buddhist women’s history by approximately two centuries. Péng’s compilation was a major resource for Yáng Wénhuì’s late-Qīng publishing programme and for the early Republican Buddhist women’s revival, and remains the principal reference work on premodern Chinese lay-Buddhist women’s biography.

Links

• CBETA: X88n1657