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

14 Introduction
also omits a detailed description of the panicked reaction of the
nuns when the troops sent by King Miaozhuang surround the convent.
The shorter version of The Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain
has been edited (perhaps by a local monk or nun connected with
the Hangzhou pilgrimage?) 47 for performance on the birthday of
the bodhisattva on the nineteenth of the second month and makes
an effort to emphasize the scriptural authority of the text by including
at its very beginning a long quote from the Lotus Sutra on
Guanyin’s powers. An interesting aspect of the shorter version is
that it includes instructions on how to perform the text (printed in
smaller characters in the woodblock editions, and in italics in this
translation). 48
Female Saint and Female Bodhisattva
Scholars have noted that the legend of Miaoshan draws heavily on
the Lotus Sutra for many names and incidents. As the Lotus Sutra is
a primary canonical source for the veneration of Avalokiteśvara,
this is only to be expected. 49 Scholars have also noted the folktale
motif of the three sisters and the correspondences between the legend
of Miaoshan and the story of King Lear. 50 The Precious Scroll of
Incense Mountain also exhibits many other folktale motifs. To bring
out some until now neglected characteristics of the legend of
Miaoshan as retold in The Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain it
may, however, be especially instructive to compare our text to the
roughly contemporary European genre of the vernacular verse hagiographies
of virgin saints. 51 For practical purposes I shall limit
myself here primarily to a comparison of The Precious Scroll of
Incense Mountain with the texts translated and studied by Brigitte
Cazelles in The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic
Romances of the Thirteenth Century. 52
In the introduction to her translations, Cazelles concludes that
‘‘the saints celebrated in hagiographic romance are the product of
a predominantly male discourse that elaborates an idealized representation
of female greatness.’’ 53 The same holds true, it may be
stressed, for The Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain: while it is conventional
wisdom that women have constituted its main audience,
all people known or believed to have been involved in the production
of the text as author or editor were male. Cazelles also notes
that the medieval French poets, when dealing with female saints,