Elevating or Demoting the Women: Female Prior Lives in the Scripture of Original Deeds

The Scripture of Original Deeds is a fifth century Lingbao Daoist text that consists of a series of narratives of the prior lives of the gods of this world, which are heavily indebted to Buddhist jataka tales. In several of these Daoist tales the prior life of the god is that of woman, who wish to shed their female form and transform into male, as indeed occurs at the climactic moment of their apotheosis and appointment to divine rank. While we may see this as a wholesale adoption of Buddhist misogyny and a demotion of the status of women in the Daoist communal tradition, archeological and epigraphic sources from the sixth to the eighth century reveal a more complex response among Daoist women, who saw these tales as inspirational to their own aspirations and practices.