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

18 Introduction
the shorter version considerably softened Miaoshan’s harsh castigation
of the prioress of the White Sparrow Convent, he apparently
felt no qualms about retaining the full text of the sarcastic putdown
of the officials.
When the massive social pressure of all the appeals to common
sense, all the promises, and all the threats are still not enough to
make Miaoshan give in to her father, action has to follow. ‘‘Suffering,’’
writes Cazelles, ‘‘is presented as a prerequisite for the attainment
of sainthood. Forced exposure, forced enclosure, accusation,
tortures, and death at the stake are integral components of our narratives.’’
63 The Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain exhibits all these
elements. First Miaoshan is locked up in the flower garden behind
the palace. Next, when Miaoshan is allowed to take up residence at
the White Sparrow Convent, she is burdened with the impossible
task of taking care of all the physical needs of the five hundred
nuns in the convent. She does not for a moment shrink from her
duties, and immediately animals and gods come to her rescue.
When the king is informed of these miracles, he decides to have
the convent burned down. This time Miaoshan intervenes with a
miracle of her own: stabbing her palate with a hairpin, she spits
out blood, which turns into a red rain that quenches the fire. The
king, convinced now that his daughter is a witch, condemns her to
death, and orders her execution.
Elizabeth Robertson in her 1991 article ‘‘The Corporeality of
Female Sanctity in The Life of Saint Margaret,’’ 64 treating a medieval
English hagiography, reaches many of the same conclusions as Cazelles.
She places an even stronger emphasis on the centrality of
sexual temptation in the female saint’s experience and is more explicit
in spelling out the sexual symbolism of some of the images in
her text. She notes her author’s ‘‘obsessive interest in the physical
torture of the female saint’’ and argues that his ‘‘interest may be
linked ...to his focus on female sexual temptation.’’ 65 She further
notes that ‘‘the focus on female blood seems to reflect a male fascination
with and horror of female blood.’’ 66 While in other precious
scrolls on devout Buddhist women, for instance the many retellings
of the legend of Woman Huang, the inherent impurity of sexually
active women because of their menstrual bleedings and loss of
blood during childbirth is often stressed, 67 this issue is not explicitly
raised in The Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain. This may well be
because Miaoshan remains a (presumably prepubescent) virgin,