Two Precious Scroll Narratives of Guanyin and Her ... - Khamkoo

Notes to Pages 21–24 199
78. Cf. P. Steven Sangren, ‘‘Myths, Gods, and Family Relations,’’ in Meir
Shahar and Robert P. Weller, eds., Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996), p. 164: ‘‘conflict results from
Miaoshan’s desire to leave home to be a nun and her father’s desire to use her
to obtain an uxorilocal son-in-law to continue his line.’’
79. A foul-smelling, wasting disease (such as leprosy) as a punishment for
a heinous sin, often of a sexual nature, is also a common motif in medieval
French romance literature.
80. Miaoshan’s act brings together the theme of the bodhisattva donating
his body to aid suffering creatures, which is quite popular in jātaka tales, and
the Chinese belief in the medicinal properties of human flesh, especially the
flesh of close relatives. Miaoshan’s act has often been interpreted as providing
the charter for the practice of gegu in Ming and Qing China (filial sons and filial
daughters-in-law slicing off part of their thigh or liver to feed it to an ailing parent).
See Reiko Ohnuma, ‘‘The Gift of the Body and the Gift of the Dharma,’’
History of Religions 37.4 (1998): 321–359; Chün-fang Yü, ‘‘The Cult of Kuan-yin
in Ming-Ch’ing China: A Case of Confucianization of Buddhism?’’ in Irene
Bloom and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., Meeting of Minds: Intellectual and Religious Interaction
in East Asian Traditions of Thought (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997), pp. 151–165; Yü 2001, pp. 338–347.
81. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
82. Johnson and Price-Williams, 1996, p. 194.
83. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
84. Cole 1998, p. 41.
85. Ibid., p. 177, stresses that the sins of Mulian’s mother that condemn her
to hell are sexual in nature. The sexual nature of the sin of the mother is explicit
in the legend of Chenxiang, which in many ways may be seen as a non-Buddhist
counterpart to the legend of Mulian. Chenxiang’s mother is Third Daughter of
the God of Mt. Hua, who falls in love with a student and forces him to have sex
with her. When her elder brother hears about the affair, he imprisons his younger
sister under the mountain. When Chenxiang, who is raised by his father,
grows up and learns about his mother’s fate, he sets out to learn magical skills,
then defeats his uncle, and finally frees his mother by splitting the mountain
with his axe.
86. Gary Seaman, ‘‘Ethnographic Film from the Field to the Classroom:
Methodological and Practical Considerations in the Collection and Dissemination
of Film Records of Popular Religion in China,’’ Chinoperl Papers 7 (1977):
106–135, takes as his starting point his own ethnographic movie recording of
the performance of this ritual in Taiwan. Also see Gary Seaman, ‘‘The Sexual
Politics of Karmic Retribution,’’ in Emily Martin Ahern and Hill Gates, eds.,
The Anthropology of Taiwan Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981),
pp. 391–396.
87. The earliest fully developed treatments of the legend of Mulian saving
his mother from hell are the various versions of the legend discovered among
the Dunhuang manuscripts and dating from the ninth and tenth centuries. In
later centuries the legend was widely popular in a great variety of performative
genres. This body of literature and its religious meaning have attracted considerable
scholarship from the 1990s onward.