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

Notes to Pages 40–45 205
the Chinese Classics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp.
221–238.
132. A seventeenth-century source, Gu Fu’s Pingsheng zhuangguan (Shanghai:
Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 1962), 8:48b, credits the Songdynasty
painter Li Song (active ca. 1190–1230) with a painting titled ‘‘Kulou yi
che tu’’ (Skeleton pulling a cart).
133. Gan Bao, Soushen ji, coll. and ann. Wang Shaoying (Peking: Zhonghua
shuju, 1979), pp. 231–232. Gan Bao notes that the ballad of the feats of Li
Ji was still current in his time. Gan Bao’s Soushen ji has been translated into
English by Kenneth DeWoskin and J. I. Crump, Jr., as In Search of the Supernatural:
The Written Record (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Their
translation of the tale of Li Ji is found on pp. 230–231.
The widespread veneration of snake gods in Fujian is documented by Xu
Xiaowang in his Fujian minjian xinyang yuanliu (Fuzhou: Fujian jiaoyu chubanshe,
1993), pp. 28–48.
134. In Song times and later, the basic elements of the tale of Li Ji were
also elaborated in the legend of Linshui furen. One of the many themes of that
rich legend too is the subjugation of rampant female sexuality in the shape of a
(white) snake. See Brigitte Berthier, La Dame-du-bord-de-l’eau (Nanterre: Société
d’ethnologie, 1988). The current legend describes the deity as an incarnation
of a drop of blood of the bodhisattva Guanyin. Historically, the process may
well have been the reverse: the female Guanyin, especially the bodhisattva clad
in white, most likely is a transformation of earlier and local Chinese goddesses
who by slaying a snake paradoxically embodied the victory of culture over
nature, of female self-restraint over female self-assertion, of patriarchal power
over competing forms of cohabitation.
Chapter 1: The Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain, Part 1
1. The Upper Tianzhu Monastery in Hangzhou was a Tiantai monastery.
Such monasteries in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries featured a ‘‘hall of penance/repentance’’
or ‘‘hall of contemplation’’ that was dedicated to the practice
of extended ritual penance and samādhi retreats. The Chinese word used here
to refer to such a hall is qitang, which more literally might be translated as
‘‘term hall.’’ See Dan Stevenson, ‘‘The ‘Hall for the Sixteen Contemplations’ as a
Distinctive Institution for Pure Land Practice in Tiantai Monasteries of the
Song (960–1279),’’ in Kalpakam Sankarnarayan, Rabindra Panth, and Ichigo
Ogawa, eds., Buddhism in Global Perspective (Mumbai: Somaiya Publications,
2004), pp. 147–204.
2. The Three Vehicles refer to the way of the śrāvaka (a personal disciple of
the Buddha), the pratyeka-buddha (someone who achieves enlightenment on his
own but does not teach), and the bodhisattva, which are discussed at length in
chapters 2 and 3 of the Lotus Sutra, where they are contrasted to the One [Buddha]
Vehicle preached by that sutra, which is presented as the true and ultimate
teaching. The Sudden and Gradual refer to the way of sudden and gradual approaches
to enlightenment. All are means by which sentient beings may be
‘‘ferried’’ across the sea of suffering to the realm of the deathless.