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

Introduction 21
Son of Heaven and an emperor of men, in possession of the
Way, how would you, a father, ever think of entering this
side palace at midnight, in the third watch, 74 and urge your
daughter to marry a husband? How would it look if the
world came to know of this?’’ 75
On the surface the legend of Miaoshan tells a Buddhist moral
romance of filial piety, the tale of a girl who eventually sacrifices
herself for the sake of her father, even to the point of allowing him
to eat her flesh. 76 Underlying The Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain,
however, is the hidden horror story of the patriarchal family,
the tale of the father who tries to impose his will on his daughter.
When Miaoshan’s father appeals to her sense of duty and filial piety
in order to convince her to take a husband who will live with them
in the palace, he is making an extraordinary demand. The normal
behavior of a father as head of the family is to sire a son who as
his heir will continue the ancestral sacrifices, and to allow his
daughters to leave the family so they may bear children to other
patrilines. So when the king fails in his own filial duty to sire a son
(a failure that, according to The Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain,
is a punishment for his inordinate attachment to hunting), he experiences
this as a great sorrow and falls into a deep depression. He
does not immediately conclude that the problem can be solved by
having his daughters marry an in-living son-in-law who will give
him a grandson. As adoption is considered to be unnatural and
therefore fraught with danger, 77 the king has to be persuaded to
pursue this course of action by his officials. But as soon as the king
as father makes this unnatural demand on the bodies of his three
daughters, he is confronted by one daughter who not only wants to
leave the family but, equally unnaturally, wants to do so not in
order to marry into another patriline, but to pursue her own individual
salvation. She refuses to allow her father to dispose of her
person. 78 If the king can be seen to impose an extraordinary and
therefore unnatural degree of control on his daughter, the daughter
displays an equally extraordinary and uncommon desire to free herself
from such familial constraints. As such, both become extremes
of male and female will and desire. While the father goes to the extreme
of symbolic rape (torching the convent) and seduction (the
midnight visit to his daughter’s cell), the daughter counters with
her unnatural auto-defloration. And while her father is unable to