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

Introduction 23
against a female desire to be the sole mistress of her own body. But
while the Christian saint was pitted against a long since displaced
pagan religion, Miaoshan had to deal with a conventional morality
that was very much alive and had the full backing of society and the
state. Further, while the role of the saints was constrained by a centralized
Christian theology, Miaoshan had the room to develop into
a universal savior. In fact, her story also acquired elements that
in the Christian tradition are associated with Christ, such as the
harrowing of hell, the resurrection, and the sacrifice of the body
for the sake of others. While it is tempting to discern signs of
cross-cultural influence, there is no clear evidence of any direct
influence in either direction.
Filial Daughter and Filial Son
The comparison between The Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain
and medieval hagiographies of female saints has helped to highlight
the sexual tension between father and daughter in this text. The romance
of filial piety turned upon closer reading into the horror
story of the patriarchal family. As a story of the sexually loaded tension
between father and daughter we might classify the legend of
Miaoshan as a Chinese representative of a universal family-complex
tale. Recognizing the legend of Miaoshan as an instance of the
family-complex tale would go a long way in filling the almost total
absence of Chinese examples in Oedipus Ubiquitous: The Family
Complex in World Folk Literature by Allen W. Johnson and Douglass
Price-Williams. 81 As the authors claim that the family-complex tales
are universal, the fact that Chinese culture is represented in their
study by a single obscure joke should at least have given them occasion
for thought. 82 While the authors argue that the expression of
the incestuous desires within the family tends to be more hidden
in more complex societies, our examples from both ends of the Eurasian
continent should go a long way to show that in the case of
the father-daughter relationship this euphemistic veneer is very
thin indeed.
We might therefore be tempted to read the legend of Miaoshan
as an ahistorical reflection of the tensions inherent in the patriarchal
family in China. Furthermore, when looking for a Chinese parallel
for the Oedipus tale of incestuous desire between mother and
son, we might be inspired by Alan Cole’s monograph Mothers and