This panel examines representations of women adepts of high spiritual attainment in a variety of medieval Daoist sources (4th through 13th centuries). It brings together three papers that answer the question of how, absent the egalitarian Celestial Master communal organization, could a woman become recognized as a transcendent within the medieval Daoist ethos. The papers show us a fascinating range of answers, from cases that build on the forms of power available to secular women to those where transcendence is only achieved at the price of dispensing with one’s femaleness. All papers, however, underscore the fact that the preconceptions about women’s position in society played an important role in how female transcendents were conceptualized. One central tension that comes through in all of the papers is the one between the view of the exemplary woman as a mother and the newly arisen ideal of "leaving the family."
This paper examines the historical and hagiographical materials pertaining to Wei Huacun (252-334), the purported first matriarch of the Shangqing current of medieval Daoism. The question that it attempts to answer is how Lady Wei came to occupy a place of such prestige within the tradition. It will argue that this was due in no small part to her familial situation. She was a daughter of a powerful minister, a widow, and a mother of two successful officials. All these facts significantly strengthened her position within the community of practitioners where the Shangqing revelations arose. However, it was Wei’s role as a mother in particular that likely played an outsized role in her recognition in the male-dominated early Shangqing milieu. The paper will conclude by discussing how the traditional understanding of motherhood in China provided a source for female empowerment in Daoism more generally.
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.
Hagiographic accounts extoling Daoist female adepts circulated in China from the early medieval period, becoming more systemized in the Tang and Song periods. These hagiographies frequently highlighted their subjects’ religious devotion by underscoring their unattachment to commonplace feminine worldly affairs such as wifehood and motherhood. In contrast to the such depictions, Sun Bu’er (1119–1182), the only woman among the early founders of School of Complete Perfection (Quanzhen), is portrayed as a reluctant and doubting adept. Her hagiography in Orthodox of the Lineage of the Golden Lotus (Jinlian zhengzong ji) underscores her initial distrust of Master Wang Chongyang, the Quanzhen foremost patriarch. It also links her hesitance about becoming an adept to her familial attachments. Maintaining that Sun Bu’er’s hagiography deviated from antecedent depictions of female adepts, this paper suggests that her representation as ultimately devoted, albeit initially reluctant practitioner, offered a more accessible model for Daoist female practitioners.