Sex, Marriage and Family in World Religions (77 page)

attention to that line near the end that recommends that women can repay their debt to their mothers by copying and circulating this text, a development that suggests a growing willingness to include women as active participants in this form of Buddhist family values.

Document 5–16

x u e p e n j i n g : t h e b l o o d b o w l s u t r a Once, some time ago, Venerable Mulian was traveling in Yu Zhou looking for Yang Province when he saw a blood bowl/pool hell
(xuepen chi di yu)
that was 84,000 leagues
(yojanas)
wide. In the pool were 120 implements of steel beams, steel pillars, steel yokes, and steel chains. He saw Yama,17 with a pitchfork in 364

his hand, leading many women
(nufen)
by the hair on their heads, which was all asunder. In this hell the ghost in charge of the punishments three times a day takes blood and makes the sinners
(zuifen)
drink it. If the sinners are not willing to submit to him and drink, then he takes his steel rod and beats them as they scream.

When Mulian saw this, he sadly asked the hell warden, “I do not see any men from earth here suffering these torments. [Why] do I only see women here receiving this cruel retribution?” The warder answers him, “Teacher, it is not something that involves
(gan)
men. It only has to do with women who every month leak menses, or release blood in childbirth, which soaks the ground even to the gods’ realm. And, more, they take their filthy garments to the river to wash, thereby polluting the river water. Later, an unsuspecting good man or woman draws some water from the river, boils it for tea and then offers
(gongyang)
it to the holy ones
(zhu sheng),
causing them to be impure. The great general of heaven takes note of this and marks it in his book of good and evil.

After a hundred years when their lives are over, [the sinful women] undergo this retribution of suffering [that you see before you].

When Mulian heard this he was very sad and asked the warden, “How can we repay
(baoda)
our moms
(aniang)
for the kindness of giving birth to us
(chansheng zhi en)
in order that they may leave the blood pool hell?”18 The hell warden answered, “Teacher, you only need to carefully be a filial son or daughter, respect the Three Jewels, and for the sake of your mom, hold Blood Bowl Feasts for three years, including organizing Blood Bowl Victory Meetings
(xuepen shenghui)
for which you invite monks to recite this sutra for a full day and have confessions
(chanhui).
Then there will be a paramita vessel to carry the mother across the river to the other side, and they will see the blood pool turn into a five-colored lotus pond, and the sinners will come out happy and contrite, and they will be able to take rebirth
(chaosheng)
in a Buddha Land [to live] with great bodhisattvas.

Mulian [returned] and began to tell the good sons and daughters of the world to awaken at once, to practice and uphold the great discrimination, and, in the future, not to lose grip of it, as it could mean 10,000 kalpas of hardship.

The Buddha again told women, saying, “As for the
Blood Pool Sutra,
if you, with a believing mind, copy and keep this sutra then you will be causing, as far as possible, the mothers of the three worlds to gain rebirth in heaven, where they will receive pleasures, clothes, and food naturally; their lives will be long, and they will be rich aristocrats.”

Then the nagas of the eight quarters, the humans and nonhumans, etc., were all very happy, believed and accepted the teaching, paid obeisances and left.

The Great Canonical Blood Bowl Sutra Taught by the Buddha [Translated by Alan Cole, based on a version of the text edited and published by Tairyo Makita in his
Gikyo¯ kenkyu¯
(Tokyo: Kyoto daigaku jinbun kagaku kenkyu¯jo, 1976), pp. 79–80]

Buddhism
365

1. In the selections below I have opted not to include examples of this form of Buddhist family rhetoric because of the length of Maha¯ya¯na narratives; interested readers can refer to my
Text as Father: Paternal Seductions in Early Maha¯ya¯na Buddhist Literature
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).

2. Because these genealogical texts are often long and convoluted, I have not included any examples in the following selections; I am currently working on a study of Buddhist patrilines in China, tentatively titled “Patriarchs on Paper: The Gradual Birth of Chinese Buddhas in Tang-Era Literature.”

3. For a discussion of this text in its Chinese reformulation, see my “Homestyle Vinaya and Docile Boys in Medieval China,” in
Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 27–31.

4. See the discussion in Alan Cole,
Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 42–46. A modern edited version of the text can be found in the
Taisho¯ shinshu¯ daizo¯kyo¯,
hereafter referred to as “T,” which is the modern Japanese edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon that is the standard reference for canonical texts. I cite it by volume number, page number, folio, and line, when this is appropriate. Thus T.54.328a.5 refers to Taisho¯ volume 54, page 328, folio “a”

(the first out of three), and the fifth line in from the right.

5. This phrase was used in pre-Buddhist literature to evoke a mother’s selfless compassion.

6. This list of the five Buddhist precepts for the laity is interesting for the way it interjects Confucian values around Buddhist ethics—the most notable addition being filial piety, tucked in rather incongruously after the injunction against drinking.

7. Counting six or seven generations back is the more normal arrangement.

8. This is a traditional pre-Buddhist term for sentient beings.

9. See Cole
Mothers and Sons,
pp. 68–79.

10. See ibid., pp. 142–143.

11. Literally, “spit out the sweet,” which presumably refers to the practice of mothers partially chewing food and then transferring it to the baby’s mouth in order to aid their digestion and to remove spices.

12. My rendering of this passage is tentative.

13. This may refer to the “five constants”
(wuchang)
in Confucian ethics: benevolence, uprightness, propriety, wisdom, and trust.

14. Based on Zong Mi’s citation of this passage, I am switching a radical to read
fu
(wife) for
gui
(return). See T.39.508b.29.

15. The term
wuni
refers to the five most heinous crimes in Buddhism: 1. killing one’s father, 2. killing one’s mother, 3. killing an arhant, 4. drawing the blood of a buddha, 5. disrupting the sangha. The rather exaggerated charge that the younger couple is involved in the most serious of Buddhist crimes is interesting because it suggests that the author wants to link their unfilial conduct, the most heinous of crimes from the Confucian point of view, with charges of equal atrocity from the Buddhist code of ethics; presumably, there is also an implied threat since it was well known that committing any of these five Buddhist sins resulted in direct rebirth in the worst of hells.

16. Repeating this phrase, “nine times out of ten,” from the opening section on 366

mother-son love highlights the disjunction between the time when the infant son received the total attention of his mother and his adult failure to replicate a facsimile of that relationship in caring for his now needy and childlike parents.

17. Yama is the king of death, known throughout Indian mythology.

18. Though the passage does not use the word
we
in phrase, “how can we repay our moms,” I see every reason to translate as I have. First, by using the family term
a
niang
for mother, we know that Mulian is saying, “How can we, those who refer to this woman in the familiar, make this repayment?” The later passages make clear too that this is a repayment to be made by the children of this mother.

Confucianism
is a Western term, not a translation of a Chinese term. The history of the term is closely tied to the efforts of centuries of Christian missionaries to understand the doctrines and beliefs of the Chinese elite and associate them with a founding figure. When used broadly it encompasses the teachings of Confucius, the ancient texts now conventionally called the Confucian Classics, the traditions of commentary and interpretation surrounding those texts, and the learning associated with the political elite in China and tested in the civil service examinations. In China, a term as broad and encompassing as
Confucianism
was not in common usage until the twentieth century, when social critics wanted people to reject Confucian teachings. Early in the twentieth century Chinese reformers, influenced by Western liberal ideologies, decried the deleterious effects of Confucian teachings on Chinese behavior. The New Culture reading of Confucianism was that it sacrificed individuals for the sake of families and fell particularly hard on young people and women, who were given very little autonomy.

Intellectual historians are generally uncomfortable with these broad understandings of Confucianism. They tend to use Confucianism more narrowly to refer to the core ideas of the founders and leading thinkers of Confucianism.

These thinkers would by no means have wanted their ideas to be equated with 368

the conventional ways of thinking of the educated class of their day, which they generally criticized.

Although it is important to keep these wider and narrower understandings of Confucianism in mind, when the issue is teachings on sex, marriage, and the family there is little controversy about what constituted the Confucian position. Confucian authors over the centuries celebrated the patrilineal, patri-archal, patrilocal family system and urged men and women alike to be filial to their parents and elders, serious in their obligations to their ancestors and kin, and willing to put the interests of their family before their personal interests.

The ideas that underlay the daily practice of the Chinese family system can thus with some justice be labeled
Confucian,
even though many of them predated Confucius or were not elaborated until centuries after his death.

The canonical core of Confucian teachings on the family go back to the Han dynasty (202 bce—220 ce), when the Five Classics were completed and texts like the
Analects
in wide circulation. By then the early Zhou period (1045– 256 bce) was identified as the ideal age, and the family system of the aristocracy in the early Zhou period as described in the Classics was the model for all to aspire toward. A central feature of this family system was that descent was patrilineal and a matter of great importance. The connections from ancestor to descendant were maintained through regular performance of ancestral rites, which consisted of offerings of food and wine accompanied by prayers.

Marriage within a patrilineal descent group was forbidden, so marriage served to link descent groups. Since family names were passed down patrilineally, this came to mean in practice that one should marry someone of a different family name. The ritual Classics describe a system in which men of high rank had both a wife and concubines, the higher the man’s rank the larger the number of concubines. Much of the ritual of marriage as described in the Classics thus concerned the ritual elevation of wives over concubines. Marriage was viewed as obligatory for men because of the need to provide heirs to continue the ancestral rites. Part of a man’s obligations to his ancestors was to see to it that wives were found for his sons, and the authority of the family head in decisions about marriage was largely taken for granted.

The most elaborate of the family rituals described in the Classics were the long series of ceremonies associated with death, burial, and mourning. The
Record of Ritual
discusses aspects of them in several chapters and treats them as a matter of utmost seriousness, central to the fulfillment of filial piety. Immediately after the death the survivors called back the soul, washed and dressed the body, and set out a representation of the dead that could receive offerings.

Within a few days they had to perform two laying out ceremonies in which the body is placed in the coffin and the coffin is packed with clothes and shrouds.

At this point the mourners put on mourning garments appropriate to their degree of kinship and began ritualized wailing. They were also expected to send out announcements of the death and receive condolence visits. After preparing
Confucianism
369

the grave they would arrange a procession to the grave. After the burial they would bring back the spirit tablet and perform the first of a long series of post-burial funerary sacrifices. Not until the last was completed would the ancestral tablet be incorporated into the regular ancestral rites more than two years after the death.

The concept of the five grades of mourning governed how each individual performed his obligations to deceased relatives. The grade varied by the coarse-ness of the required garments and how long they were worn (three years, one year, nine months, five months, three months). Within a family, when a man died, his sons owed him three years of mourning wearing “untrimmed” hemp garments; his brothers and unmarried sisters, his sons’s wives, and his daughters owed him one year of trimmed hemp garments; his father’s sisters, his married sisters, his first cousins, and his grandchildren owed him nine months; his brothers’ grandchildren and his second cousins owed him five months; third cousins and his daughter’s husband and children and his mother’s brother’s sons were supposed to wear relatively fine clothes for three months. The mourning grades codified the primacy of patrilineal kinship connections: one owed a heavier degree of mourning to a cousin though one’s father’s brother than through one’s father’s sister or one’s mother’s brother.