“Gendered Dilemma”: Medieval Chinese Perspective on Gender and Sexuality in Buddhism

Buddhist practitioners in medieval China were faced with interpretations of sexuality and gender that caused dilemmas for them. These dilemmas were rooted in arising Chinese Buddhist interpretations of sexuality, lust, and objectification, and they affected the real-life experiences between the second and eleventh centuries. We aim to explore these dilemmas in their historical context to interrogate how gender and sexuality have long been and continue to be, some of the most fundamental essences of religious regimes. Recent scholarship has not adequately investigated the shaping process of gender and sexuality within Buddhist knowledge structures. We argue that this shaping process is engulfed with dilemmas, consequently being weaponized to incite and normalize gender-based violence and discrimination. This panel focuses on revealing various shades and dimensions of Chinese Buddhism's “gendered dilemma” from a range of medieval source materials, including archives, sacred texts, literature, archaeological findings, and bodily experience.

By coining the term “gendered dilemma,” the panel aims to engage with gender and sexuality as analytical tools to interrogate suppressed situations where a person faces multiple gender norms and is primed to iron out contradictions and conflicts, consequently forging new sets of power/knowledge regimes. The dilemmas did not present mutually exclusive options for the subordinate to “choose.” Instead, they were a window to amalgamate different alternatives that perplexed as well as reinforced the patriarchal societal structure. For specifics in Chinese Buddhism, Jinhua Jia, Xiaofei Kang, and Ping Yao, in their edited volume, Gendering Chinese Religion (2014), proposed to look at neglected gender symbols and dilemmas of religious life that get intertwined with ideology and politics. Building upon their gender-critical analytic framework, our panel examines different dilemmas concerning gender roles and expectations perpetuated by literate male elites participating in Buddhist practice and writings. The “gendered dilemma” is a rich multivocality in response to the tension and reconciliation emerging from the clash between introducing the Buddhist ideal of gender dynamics and the pre-established sociocultural constructions with expectations of gender roles.

What knowledge has been normalized, and how, in the “gendered dilemma”? Collectively, our panel showcases a spectrum of knowledge production ranging between intellectual and literary discourses, to pragmatic contexts about material culture. The first paper compares two normative cultural assumptions on the problem of lust regarding gender – Confucian classical texts vis-a-vis newly translated Buddhist scriptures – during the beginnings of Buddhism in China. The literate male elites thus faced an initial dilemma between their indigenous classical notions and newly introduced Buddhist ideals on gender. Informed by the underlying societal context, the study argues that these male elites amalgamated these two ideals and eventually produced new knowledge. This third gendered discourse ultimately calcified a normative standard of lust that rationalized gender-based violence in medieval China. Expanding on the continuous adaptation of Chinese Buddhism, the second paper addresses the convertibility of sexual forms in Mahāyāna Buddhist sūtra literature in the fifth century. The study explores conflicts of gender expectations present in two modes of literary narratives: one center on desexualized gender appearance with depictions of sexual transformation, and another concerns the biologically defined sexuality governed by reproductive anatomy. By examining conflict narratives, the study argues that the presence of sexual convertibility was attributed to a coercive compromise with entrenched gender norms during the institutionalization of Buddhism. With the secularization of Chinese Buddhism underway, the third paper uses art historical approaches to analyze a collection of illustrated scriptures found in the eleventh-century tomb of a female Buddhist practitioner from a scholar-official family. The study reveals her active agency in commissioning, owning, and using these illustrated scriptures, thereby confronting the dilemma of dictated vision to carve out her religious devotion and identity within the constrained schemas of visualized knowledge imposed by gender norms.

With assimilation and adaptation across different regions, Buddhist perception towards gender and sexuality gets involved in a perennial dialogue with local ideals that contribute to configuring specific fields of knowledge. Existing scholarships have engaged with gender and sexuality across diverse disciplines. Buddhologists have chiefly investigated doctrinal interpretation entrenched in Indo-Tibetan tradition, including tantric practice and monastic disciplinaries. In Chinese history, scholars narrate the historical development of gender from sociocultural perspectives across various topics, including but not limited to marriage and family, social roles and class, and religious experiences. However, previous studies have considered social roles as a priori whilst pursuing the identification of gender problems, without concerning the processes of how these structurally gendered norms were formed and challenged under specific socio-cultural contexts. Concerning knowledge production, we propose the “gendered dilemma” concept to outline the non-linear and multifaceted historical narratives, rediscovering nuanced multiplicities of temporal and spatial rhetoric engaged by Buddhist devotees living in medieval China.

As long as there is the existence of gender and sexual dichotomy, the way to cope with a “gendered dilemma” would become the locus of concern and normalization of gender-based violence and discrimination across time and regions. Engaging with the three case studies during the transformative period of Buddhism, the panel contributes to our understanding of a continuous historical trajectory that eventually leads to present-day Chinese religious communities and beyond. Examining the premodern scenario in Chinese Buddhist communities, as one of the currents of human religious experience, brings non-Western voices into the ongoing endeavor to examine the tension between soteriological agendas in religious doctrine and social realities of different values and interests. Moreover, this non-Western voice will contribute to the academic field of religious studies, as well as, gender and sexuality studies, providing a novel way to research gender dynamics in the future.