Download BUDDHIST FILIAL PIETY: MITIGATING CONFUCIAN DUTY AND

Columbia East Asia Review 1
Buddhist Filial Piety: Mitigating Confucian
Duty and Inherent Female Pollution
Samantha J. Lassoff, Columbia University
When Buddhism first entered China around the first century (A.D.), it was relegated
to a marginal position in society. The Chinese diligently enforced and reinforced the
indigenous Confucian concept of filial obligation to one’s parents. They were thus
taken aback by the Buddhist institution’s emphasis on chujia (出家) or leaving home
in order to join the sangha, the Buddhist clergy. Despite this obstacle to Buddhism’s
acceptance by the Chinese, by the fourth or fifth century C.E., Buddhism had successfully infiltrated Chinese religiosity. Donations to the sangha in hopes of accumulating
merit for ancestors during festivals legitimized the existence of the Buddhist clergy in
China. Chinese Confucianism and Buddhism share a belief in the both physical and
spiritual polluting influence of women. In Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism,
an influential work on the subject of the mother-son dyad in Chinese religious history,
scholar Alan Cole contends that Buddhism transformed filial piety from a patricentric Confucian institution to a more inclusive Buddhistic one. Employing Margery
Wolf ’s “uterine family” concept and the Oedipus complex to analyze the various
versions apocryphal Mu Lian Saves His Mother from Hell narrative prominent in
the medieval period, Cole argues that the tale wholly emphasizes and romanticizes the
mother-son dyad at the expense of the father-son relationship. While Cole is initially
persuasive, his argument is flawed by an erroneous suggestion that the Confucians
were negligent in their consideration of the female with regard to filial piety, as well
as a misperception of the mother-son dyad as being romantic in nature. I suggest that
Cole places far too much weight on a supposed Oedipal tendency in Mu Lian, rather
than acknowledging that Mu Lian’s attempt to save his mother from the Avīcī hell
may be motivated by standard notions of filial duty.
I
n his monograph entitled Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism, scholar
Alan Cole contends that the influence of Buddhism in China transformed
the concept of filial piety from a patricentric Confucian notion to a more
inclusive Buddhist one. Employing Margery Wolf ’s “uterine family” theory and the
Oedipus complex as dual lenses through which to analyze the Mu Lian Saves His
Mother from Hell narrative, Cole argues that this story wholly underscores and romanticizes the mother-son dyad while its treatment of the father-son relationship is
cool at best. Scrutinizing Cole’s framework for textual analysis, however, reveals that
Cole is too concerned with drawing out some kind of Oedipal conclusion from the
mother-son relationship. Mu Lian may simply be trying to fulfill the same unromantic duty to his mother that would normally be expected of a son upon his father’s
death. Furthermore, in order to argue that a more specifically “Buddhist” type of filial
piety emerged in China, Cole characterizes typical Confucian filial piety as negligent
in its consideration of the mother.
2 Lassoff • Buddhist Filial Piety
One trait China’s indigenous Confucianism and Chinese Buddhism share is
an omnipresent belief in the dangerous, polluting influence of women. The obviously
necessary presence of women for the purposes of maintaining a patrilineal lineage
had to be marginalized as dually sinful. As scholar Margery Wolf suggests in her ethnographic tome Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan, the interests of the paternal
side and those of the “uterine,” or maternal, family often were and are in conflict.1
Upon marriage, the bride was expected to promptly shift loyalties from her natal
family to her groom’s family. However, this transfer of loyalties was not always immediately effected, and consequently, in-laws often regarded daughter-in-laws with
suspicion. As indicated by ethnographer Emily Ahern, in some areas of the Chinese
cultural sphere, particularly in Taiwan, fear of vague female loyalties was intensified as
female biology provided women with what was viewed as a dangerous and powerful
weapon: the ability to produce children, who in turn could be employed to manipulate husbands and in-laws.
Confucian-based family ideology was not alone in its wariness of the female.
Buddhism also had qualms about female biology, a characteristic it had inherited
from its Indian predecessors. Buddhist tracts deemed female bodily outflows such
as menstruation and afterbirth to be not only defiling but also preventive of proper
progress on the Buddhist path, especially since these bodily processes were linked
to the cycle of birth and death (samsara) of which Buddhists were seeking to divest
themselves. By relying on a self-created dichotomy of distinct Confucian and Buddhist filial piety systems, Cole fails to address the paradox of a cultural idea that a
mother could be sinful as a woman but worthy of receiving filiality as a mother, which
is something that will be considered in this paper.
Confucian Filial Piety: The Original Doctrine:
Before embarking on a study of the Buddhist version of filial piety, which Cole suggests bolsters the female’s position in the family, it is important to fully explain the
original Confucian virtue of filial piety. Traditionally, the Five “Confucian Classics”
have been relied upon as a primary source for understanding all things related to filiality. Alan Cole, like his predecessors, also depends on these five limited texts to support his thesis that the Confucians had very little concern for females in the context
of filial piety, and focuses on the Confucian Classics’ emphasis on the father in the
filial relationship. One of the Classics Cole cites, specifically, the Classic of Filial Piety
(孝经, Xiao Jing), stresses the son’s responsibility to serve his parents (父母,fumu)
throughout their lives and dedicate himself to their upkeep after death.2 In this regard, a filial son must accomplish five things. He must nourish his parents, endeavor
to please them in every way possible, and seek to make them well should they take ill
1 The Uterine Family is defined by Wolf as consisting of a woman and her children and is marked by the woman,
essentially an outsider in her husband’s home, attempting to produce sons and garner their favor in order to secure her
position in the household. This is discussed on page 15 of Alan Cole’s Mother and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (1998) and
can also be found in her chapter entitled “The Uterine Family” in Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (1972).
2 Alan Cole, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 17.
Columbia East Asia Review 3
while alive. After they have passed away, he must display every demonstration of grief
in mourning and exhibit utmost solemnity when sacrificing to them.3 Yet another of
these Confucian classics, The Book of Rites (礼记, Li Ji) makes this responsibility of the
son to the parents far more apparent, declaring:
The superior man [君子, junzi], going back to his ancient fathers […]
does not forget those to whom he owes his life and therefore he calls
forth all his reverence, gives free vent to his feelings and exhausts his
strength in discharging the above services—as a tribute of gratitude to
his parents he dares not but do his utmost.4
With regard to this passage, Cole attempts to suggest that the Xiao Jing’s use of “ancient fathers” somehow reveals the Confucian canon’s utter disregard for women in its
filial devotion dictates. He further employs a passage from the Analects, yet another
Confucian classic from the Eastern Zhou period, to claim that in Confucian doctrine
the father usurps the mourning rites owed to the mother in repayment of her birthing and nurturing of the son. However, as Chinese Buddhism scholar Chun-fang Yu
explains in her review of Cole’s book, Cole’s reliance on these particular texts only
provides a limited view of Confucian filial piety.5 Furthermore, Cole’s impetus to
support his own contentions requires him to impose meanings upon these texts that
may not actually resonate within their original historical contexts. Indeed, Cole’s use
of the Five Classics confines his understanding of Confucian filial piety and restricts
his analysis of filial piety to its expression in the Spring and Autumn and Warring
States periods:
The Confucians reinvigorated the concept by adapting it to contemporary needs and directing it to the needs of the patriarchal household.
Instead of offering foods to the ancestors, they offered obedience to the
patriarch. Parents were now ritually glorified through the three-year
mourning rites and became “fetishized.”6
Prior to the Warring States period, filial piety was expressed through ancestor rituals.7
Thereafter, as state power diminished, effort was focused on the offering of food and
aid to repay parents’ sacrifice in feeding and raising offspring.8 Moreover, despite
Cole’s desire that Confucian texts be exclusive in their preoccupation with the fatherson dyad, “The Twenty-four Exemplars of Filial Piety,” a Confucian text that circulated in the 10th century, includes fifteen stories which focus upon sons’ relationships
with their mothers.9
3 James Legge, trans. Hsiao King [(Xiao Jing) The Classic of Filial Piety], in Muller, ed., Sacred Books, Vol. 3, 480.
4 James Legge, trans., Li Chi: The Book of Rites, Vol. 2, 222.
5 Chun-Fang Yu, Review of Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 60 :1(2000).
339.
6 Ibid., 339.
7 Yu, Review of Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism,. 339.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 340.
4 Lassoff • Buddhist Filial Piety
Keith Knapp, who is responsible for categorizing Confucianism into these periods, further submits that while Cole is adept at showing the lack of mention of the
care-giving role of the father in indigenous Chinese Buddhist tracts, the Ru (儒) or
popular filial piety tales, which also constitute an important aspect of indigenous Chinese tracts on filial devotion, do not single out the care-debt owed to the mother or the
father, but simultaneously emphasize the care-debt owed to both through the inclusion
of the term fumu, or father and mother, instead of only fu (父, father), as Cole would
have one believe.10
Inherent Notions of Chinese Pollution
Given Cole’s attempt to demonstrate the noteworthy attention paid to females and
femininity in Buddhist apocryphal tales,11 it would be useful to garner a more conclusive knowledge of Chinese notions of female pollution. In Chinese society, there has
seemingly always been a distrust of the “outside,” whether that “outside” is defined as
the Rong and Di barbarians, or as the women patrilines are forced to adopt through
marriage for the sake of the continuation of their agnatic lines of descent. As aforementioned, the Confucians and neo-Confucians, particularly Yuan Cai, were deeply
concerned about competing loyalties of women and the ability such women had to
manipulate their husbands. In some areas of China, this fear of the power of women
was translated into fear of women’s reproductive power. Emily Ahern suggests in “The
Power and Pollution of Chinese Women” that at least in the region she studied, Chitan in Taiwan, bodily effluvia12 are simultaneously associated with birth and death.13
Menstrual fluids contain the potential for life, and the rush of blood associated with
childbirth is commonly described as similar to the slaughtering of an animal; thus, it
is connected to death.14 With regard to a woman’s place in the family, Ahern agrees
that, “a married woman’s loyalties, at least initially, do not lie firmly with her new
husband’s family. As an outsider—in fact, an intruder—she is expected to make her
own way in the family, if need be, by undermining her husband’s authority.”15 To
empower themselves, women had to cement their authority over their uterine family.
Once established within a uterine family, a woman could pose a threat to her husband
and the other members of the household’s authority. There are two manners in which
this feminine threat could be realized. On the one hand, theoretically speaking, a
woman could refuse to bear her husband sons. Margery Topley, in “Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwangtong,” addresses marriage resistance and the refusal of women
to join their husbands in conjugal relations in Guangdong.16 This lack of conjugal
10 Keith Nathaniel Knapp, Selfless Offspring ( Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 132.
11 “Apocryphal” refers to non-canonical texts composed in China after the initial transmission of Buddhism from India
to China.
12 Bodily effluvia are essentially waste produced by the body. This includes afterbirth, menstrual fluid, pus, urine, feces.
Female bodily effluvia refer specifically to menstrual blood and afterbirth.
13 Emily Ahern. “The Power and Pollution of Chinese Women” In Arthur Wolf, ed., Studies in Chinese Society (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1973).
14 Ibid., 196-7.
15 Ibid., 199.
16 Marjorie Topley, “Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwangtung.” in Wolf, Margery, Roxanne Witke and Emily Martin,
Columbia East Asia Review 5
relations effectively limits the power of the patriline as it nullifies the possibility of
future generations. On the other hand, women, by choosing to have children, and by
nurturing their children’s attachment to themselves, ensure that once their children
(mostly sons) become adults and have a say in family decisions, they can indirectly
influence family decisions by manipulating their sons. Thus, young women with reproductive capacity have great potential to disrupt the family. Their power, Ahern
believes, is “analogous to the kind of power inherent in menstrual blood in its twosided potential for both great harm and great good.”17 Moreover, female power is ever
augmented and fortified; after menopause, a woman’s position in the family becomes
less tentative and she assumes the role of household manager. At this point in life,
both wife and husband hope to have filial sons and daughter-in-laws. Additionally, as
a woman ascends to the helm of her own family and is no longer under the dictate of
her mother-in-law, a post-menopausal woman gains agency.
In “The Fangs of Reproduction: An Analysis of Taiwanese Menstrual Pollution
in the Context of Buddhist Philosophy and Practice,” scholar and nun Yeshe Choekyi Lhamo expands upon Ahern’s scholarship, noting, “Authentic Buddhist sutras
do not expressis verbis represent the female body as polluted. Still, many Taiwanese
Buddhists discriminate against women on account of their embodiment.”18 Continuity is of supreme importance to spiritual importance; as such, interrupting women’s
spiritual practice as indicated by Ahern would in effect delay female progress. Lhamo
takes a feminist perspective on this practice, suggesting, “forcing women to refrain
from spiritual practice gives men an advantage in their own spiritual cultivation […]
Women are made to behave according to sexist statements that claim that women
are concerned with nothing but reproduction—a stock argument of (Chinese) Buddhism.19 Lhamo evidences just how central discrimination against female biology is
to Buddhist philosophy. For instance, the central dogma of Buddhism is that life is
suffering. This notion is expanded upon in the First Noble Truth, which states that
the greatest sufferings are birth, old age, sickness, and death.20 The Buddha further
specifies five additional causes of suffering for women: menstruation, pregnancy,
childbirth, having to wait upon a man, and being subjected to in-laws.21
Cole views f�����������������������������������������������������������������
emale biology as further underscoring the filial relationship between mother and son. Many texts discuss the requirement of the son to repay his
mother for the gift of birth and for carrying him in her womb. For example, Fa
Zhao’s Homily relates, “Birth relies (tuo) on the elements (yin) [taking form] inside
the mother’s womb […] All persons, smart or dumb, rich or poor, have the same debt
(en) to the loving mother—there are no two types of debts.”22 However, this requireWomen in Chinese Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975).
17 Ahern, “The Power and Pollution of Chinese Women,” 200.
18 Yeshe Choekyi Lhamo, “The Fangs of Reproduction: An Analysis of Taiwanese Menstrual Pollution in the Context of
Buddhist Philosophy and Practice.” History and Anthropology. 14:2 (2003) 158.
19 Ibid., 164.
20 Ibid, 158.
21 Ibid.
22 Cole, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism, 196.
6 Lassoff • Buddhist Filial Piety
ment placed on the son to repay his mother for caring for him23 is not limited to
Buddhism but is also found in Cole’s own use of the You interchange, during which
it appears a son is asked to mourn his parents based upon the mother’s effort.
Cole further relies on the Blood Bowl Sutra,24 a text held in common by both
Buddhism and Daoism to support his main contention that Buddhism attempted to
resolve female issues more readily than the Confucian tradition. The Blood Bowl Sutra
does indeed ask the son to help his mother ascend out of a woman’s hell in which
women are forced to stand in a pool of menstrual blood up to their mouths and drink
from it three times a day. However, the Blood Bowl concept, while adopted by some
Buddhists and provided in textual form by some temples, was not composed by the
Buddhists, but rather is found initially in the form of a Daoist sutra. The first reference to the “blood bowl” is believed to be found in an almanac of rites from 1194,25
which suggests:
The labor of the mother is hard to repay, [so after her death] be morally
upright (hou de) for three years and spread the Great Vehicle [of Buddhism] by holding five pure feasts that will make good effects full and
complete. The commoners rely on the Dharma feast to express their
confession (chan), humbly wishing that their mother’s transgressions of
one thousand births and her ten evil sins will be wiped away. And [they
hope that] the blood pool will turn into a lotus pool, that the karmic
ocean will turn into a Dharma ocean, and that we [her children] in this
birth and this life will avoid disasters and have lucky stars, and in other
times leave this human realm and return to the Buddha Way.26
As Cole claims, this text sets the precedent for conflating repayment with the mother
for birth, funeral feasts for the Buddhists that affect her purification, the Confucian
dictum to mourn one’s parents for three years, the notion of the sinfulness of all
mothers, the expectation of the mother’s torture in a bloody hell, and the threat that
if actions to help the mother are not performed they too will suffer in the next life.
If one really wanted to be truly accurate, then, one should not attribute attempts
to mitigate female sin and pollution to either the Buddhists or the Confucians, but
rather the Daoists.
The Buddhist Transformation of Filial Piety
When Buddhism first entered China during the first century (A.D.), it was relegated
to a marginal position in society. The Chinese diligently enforced and reinforced the
indigenous Confucian concept of filial obligation to one’s parents. They were thus
taken aback by the Buddhist institution’s emphasis on chujia (出家)or leaving home
23 Referred to in Mandarin as bao en (报恩).
24 This sutra is also referenced as the Blood Pool Sutra, the Blood Tray Sutra, depending on the translation of the Chinese
terms.
25 Yu, Chun-fang. Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokitesvara. New York: Columbia University Press, 335.
26 Cole, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism, 197.
Columbia East Asia Review 7
in order to join the sangha, the Buddhist clergy. Moreover, the historical Buddha,
Sakyamuni, himself was viewed by the Chinese as someone who had not fulfilled
his filial responsibility as he chose to leave his family to pursue his religious aspirations. The Buddhist practices of tonsure and self-immolation furthermore contradicted already-established Chinese notions of filial piety, which held that the body
is a gift of the parents to be protected. Despite these obstacles to becoming accepted
and embraced by the Chinese, by the fourth or fifth century C.E., Buddhism had
relatively successfully infiltrated Chinese religiosity. Donations to the sangha in hopes
of accumulating merit for ancestors during annual ghost festivals made the Buddhist
clergy an integral part of Chinese society, and hence legitimized them in the eyes of
many Chinese. Thus, in order to be accepted by the Chinese, Buddhism had to accommodate the indigenous religious and philosophical practices of ancestor worship
and filial devotion.
Cole quite successfully provides a comprehensive examination of a number
of Buddhist apocryphal sutras and bian wen (变文), mostly regarding the Mu Lian
narrative, which focus their attention upon the mother and her need for salvation.
Some of these practices employed in order to save the mother included partaking in
the Ghost Festival by which “most residents of the city, laypeople with no exclusive
religious affiliation, provided for the salvation of their ancestors by making offerings
to the monastic community (the sangha).”27 By donating gifts to the Buddhist clergy,
it was believed that the donors produced a stock of merit which was then dedicated
to their ancestors.28 As such, the Buddhist clergy’s existence was legitimized and the
family’s filial obligations to both paternal and uterine sides were realized. A whole
series of filial practices arose to deal with female pollution taken on both by sons and
daughters.
One early apocryphal text Cole examines is a short tract entitled The Sutra on
the Difficulty of Repaying the Kindness of Parents, in which the debt of children to their
parents is prominent:
Father and mother have been of immense benefit to their sons by breastfeeding and nurturing them and educating them in accordance with
their development. So when the four elements have become complete
[in the son’s person] then, if he were to carry his father on his right shoulder and his mother on his left shoulder for one thousands years without
any resentment, even while making them comfortable on his back, then
he still would not have done enough to repay the kindness of his father
and mother.29
While the passage uses the term zi (子, son) to describe the actor who must repay a
debt, it actually is referring to monks. As sons, monks are supposed to recognize the
sacrifice of their parents in giving life to them and thus acknowledge the depths of
27 Stephen Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 3.
28 Ibid., 3.
���������
Cole, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism, 43.
8 Lassoff • Buddhist Filial Piety
what they owe to their parents. The term “parents” is generally understood to mean
father and mother. Cole believes that unlike the passage from the Book of Rites, this
text contains no disparity between the origin of debt and the inclusion of both parents in the repayment of bao en (报恩). Sons (monks) are to convert their parents so
that their parents may be ensured proper rebirth.
In his analysis of these sutras, Alan Cole claims that apocryphal Buddhist sutras
throughout time came to place greater emphasis on the mother-son dyad. He claims
that Bao Chang’s version of “Uttara’s Mother” is one of the earliest tales to have a
mother-son focus. Throughout this tale, Uttara appears to be a devote Buddhist. He
performs the six vegetarian offerings, observes the eight precepts, practices benevolence,
etc. Eventually, Uttara garners magical powers and learns of his mother’s sin. Suddenly,
the scene shifts twenty years into the future as Uttara, imitating the Buddha, sits meditating under a tree, training his mind on nirvana. At this point, Uttara’s mother has
been dead for twenty years. With a clear (enlightened) mind, Uttara seeks to discover
his mother’s location in order to repay her for the hefty burden of having birthed and
nurtured him. Soon he ascertains that his mother has become a hungry ghost sent to
the Avīcī hell after having lied to her son about caring for his less-fortunate charges
while he was away. The mother asks Uttara to make an offering that will circle around
the “merit loop and satisfy her,”30 on the basis of her gift of life. While the mother
admits to personal sins that seem to go beyond the act of not acting benevolently towards others, she attempts to gain leverage by insisting that she is entitled to this gift
of Buddhist ritual power as she produced a pure Buddhist figure (Uttara). Throughout
the tale, Uttara and his mother are juxtaposed as representative of purity and filth in
the form of blood and origins. Uttara’s mother is portrayed as a very animalistic figure,
crawling around and staggering while trailing dirt.31 Her son is by contrast untainted as
he has no involvement with sex, money, or food. While the tale “Uttara’s Mother” does
focus on the mother-son dyad, the message that an offering will provide merit to the
deceased is not restricted to women, as Cole seems to want his readers to believe, but
rather may be applied to all ancestors.
In the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, the apocryphal reformulated the mythology, which had established the ritual of making offerings to the Buddhist monasteries on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month. In one such apocryphal
tale, The Sutra on Repaying the Kindness by Making Offerings, Mu Lian is introduced
shortly after attaining the six magical Buddhist powers as he scans the universe looking for his deceased mother and father:
The great Mu Qian Lian, as soon as he attained the six magical powers
wished to liberate his parents in order to repay the kindness they had
shown in breast-feeding him. When he used his ‘eye of the Way’ to scan
the cosmos, he saw that his deceased mother had been reborn in the
hungry-ghost realm where she never saw food: [she was so badly off that]
����������������
Ibid., 58-9.
���������
Ibid.
Columbia East Asia Review 9
her skin hung from her bones.32
Mu Lian appears like Uttara and the Buddha as he, like his predecessors, is moved
to consider his mother while in the midst of performing his own Buddhist activities.
With reference to this particular story, Cole advocates the position that Mu Lian’s
inclusion of both parents in his search is a mere cover for the tale’s true “mother
focus.”33 He points out that the only parental kindness mentioned in the sutra is
breast-feeding, obviously something only a mother could provide and also highlights
the fact that Mu Lian is only shown in the pursuit of his mother. As evident in the
Confucian texts, it is quite possible for the father to be counted amongst those who
need repayment for nourishment when children are young. Moreover, the fact that
Mu Lian does not show concern for his father does not necessarily reflect abandonment of his father. Conversely, the lack of emphasis on the father and his ascendance
to the Heaven of the Thirty-Three may only relate the fact that the father has been
“good” on his own and does not need Mu Lian to interfere on his behalf.
While there are evident places of convergence between The Sutra on Repaying
the Kindness by Making Offerings and Uttara’s Mother, there are some key distinctions
that Cole overemphasizes. He contends that in the former, the son feels an obvious
love for his mother, shown by his distraught attempts to have the Buddha come to
the aid of his mother, which in turn, transforms Mu Lian’s effort to save her from hell
into something far more emotional than a commoditized exchange of repayment.
Rather, Cole’s suggestion of an Oedipal bond between mother and son reveals the
scholar’s overdependence on a modern Freudian psychoanalytic lens, which may not
actually be applicable to the pre-modern period he examines. Despite Cole’s belief
that the son might feel gladdened at the death of his father due to his uterine family
impulse, it is not hard to imagine that a son such as Mu Lian would become forlorn
at either parent’s—male or female—rebirth in the worst of all hells. After all, it is the
son’s (or the monk’s) duty to convert the parents and provide for a happy rebirth. It
may have just been a coincidence that it was Mu Lian’s mother and not his father who
was in poor karmic shape.
Beyond the apocryphal sutras, Cole also investigates the mother-son relationship in two popular bianwen (变文), The Story of Mu Lian (Mu Lian yuan qi,目莲缘
起) and The Illustrated Tale of Mu Lian Saving His Mother from the Netherworld (Da
Mu Jian Lian Ming Jiu Mu Bian Wen, 大目乾连冥间救母变文). In the former, Qingti
(Mu Lian’s mother) retains her name, but Mu Lian has the alias of Luo Bu. As in the
apocryphal sutras, Qingti is portrayed as a rich widow. Her son is generous and caring
towards the orphaned and the poor as well as the monks and all seems well until one
day he has to leave on a trip. He leaves his mother instructions to care for his monks
and the others while he is gone. But rather than following Mu Lian’s guidance,
As soon as he left, [Qingti] cut loose and every morning slaughtered
animals […] She did not think of her son, forget about differentiating
�������������
Ibid., 81.
���������
Ibid.
10 Lassoff • Buddhist Filial Piety
right from wrong! Once when the monks came, she sent the servant boy
to beat them with a stick, and when she saw the orphaned and the old,
she set a dog on them to bite them.34
Upon Mu Lian’s [Luo Bu’s] return, Qingti attempts to conceal her unforgivable behavior. She hangs banners and flowers in display of Buddhist devotion. Yet a neighbor informs Luo Bu that his mother had not done as he had asked. Soon after, Qingti
dies and is reborn into the Avīcī Hell. Luo Bu, characterized as a perfect filial son,
dedicates three years to mourning his mother. He holds weekly funeral feasts and
becomes a monk in order to attempt to repay her kindness (in breast-feeding him).
His dedication to meditation and other Buddhist practices results in immediate attainment of supernatural powers. Upon the attainment of these powers, Luo Bu is renamed Great Mu Lian. With these amazing powers, Mu Lian endeavors to repay the
profound kindness of his parents in birthing and raising him. He discovers his father
is the Heaven of the Thirty-Three and that his mother has been reborn in the Avīcī
Hell. Cole believes that Mu Lian’s inability to see through his mother’s lies reveals Mu
Lian’s unconditional and almost Oedipal love for his mother, and that contrastingly
the lack of interest in his father reveals less of a bond between father and son.
As maintained by Cole, the romantic relationship between mother and son
is even more overt in The Illustrated Tale of Mu Lian Saving His Mother from the
Netherworld. As in the other stories and sutras, the monk commands his mother
to care for the monks in his absence, while she deceives him and is punished with
death. However, in this story, it is announced that both Mu Lian’s parents have been
recently deceased. Upon attaining magical powers, Mu Lian meets his father. While
father and son cordially exchange greetings, Mu Lian is most interested in his mother.
From Cole’s perspective, Mu Lian appears to have no great feelings for his father
and the author spends no time explaining the father and son’s emotional bond. Cole
analyzes the absence of any explication of the father-son relationship to reflect an
overzealous interest in his mother on the part of Mu Lian. However, as mentioned
previously, more can be explained by the fact that as a good son, Mu Lian is simply
interested in whether or not his parents obtain good rebirths, and since his father has
accomplished this on his own, Mu Lian has no further need to worry greatly over his
father. To further emphasize his contention that the relationship between Mu Lian
and his mother takes on a romantic air, Cole sets up a contrast between the Mu Lian’s
father and Mu Lian. Whereas the father coolly mentions that his wife, Mu Lian’s
mother, has “committed a large number of sins and at the end of her days fell into
hell,”35 Mu Lian agonizes over this fact. Cole further concentrates on what he views
as sexual overtones in the story as it is noted that Qingti makes confessions of sins of
pleasure—she admits loving sensuous things like silk and lives only for the moment.
In this way, not only is Qingti shown to have been punished for striking the dogs or
the elderly while her humanitarian son was away in this version, but there are deeper
roots for her punishment. There are only two places where sins in hell are actually
���������������
Ibid., 166.
���������������
Ibid., 168.
Columbia East Asia Review 11
identified: either when they sin against monastic property and make no offerings, or
when they commit sexual licentiousness.36 One of these places is the Avīcī hell, and
in Avīcī, Mu Lian sees men and women nailed to burning beds who have committed the sin of having fornicated on the beds of their parents, teachers or masters. If
Qingti is among these individuals and she too is nailed down on a bed with fortynine spikes, Cole believes she too must have committed sins of sexual deviancy. Despite this, Qingti remains a perfect being, worthy of repayment to the son she bore,
while everyone else criticizes her. While Cole’s reading of the story makes it far more
romantic, his application of the Oedipal complex to describe the Mu Lian-Qingti relationship may be inappropriate. The application of the Oedipal complex obfuscates
the more likely reason Mu Lian would have helped his mother. Every filial son and
daughter had the responsibility to fulfill filial obligations to their parents. There is
nothing in the text which suggests that Mu Lian was doing anything for his mother
that he would not have done for his father had the parent’s roles been reversed. Both
Confucianism and Buddhism suggest that care of both parents in life and after death
is expected of offspring.
Buddhist Filial Piety According to the Miaoshan Legend
As aforementioned, women had to bear a heavy load for simple biological processes
over which they had no control. In a similar vein as those stories relating Mu Lian’s
plight, the story of Miaoshan attempts to mitigate issues of females and filial piety,
although in this case the roles are reversed. Instead of the male “child” trying to repay
his filial debt to the polluted mother, the polluted daughter attempts to escape her
own pollution and simultaneously uphold her filial duties.
According to Chun-fang Yu’s recounting of the legend, Princess Miaoshan
is the youngest daughter of King Miaozhuang of Raised Forest in mythical India.
The King has no sons to continue the lineage; thus, he wants his daughters to marry
uroxilocally and bear him grandsons to whom he can pass his legacy. While her two
elder sisters are eager to marry, Miaoshan stubbornly refuses, insisting instead on
devoting herself to spiritual cultivation. The True Scripture of Kuanyin’s Original Vow
of Universal Salvation reveals Miaoshan’s bitterness towards her father and her deep
understanding of the sins that are specific to women:
Due to the sins I committed in my previous lives, I am now born with a
woman’s body. How sad! I have to listen to my father before I get married. If I get married, I must obey my husband and can have no opinion
of my own. Should the husband die an early death from illness, I must
then guard my chastity and listen to my son. The “three obediences” and
“four virtues” are serious matters, for hell awaits the woman who dares
to ignore them. In this world, only women have to suffer so much for
their sins. Killing animals after giving birth is very sinful. Coming to
���������������
Ibid., 178.
12 Lassoff • Buddhist Filial Piety
the kitchen before a full month’s confinement is over pollutes the stove.
Going to the front hall with an impure body offends the family altar.
Washing and pounding bloodstained clothing in the river is a great sin
against the gods of the watery region. Exposing dirty garments under
the sun angers deities who pass by. Pouring bloody water in open space
pollutes heaven, earth and the three bodies of light [the sun, moon and
stars]. Who keeps track of all these offenses? Lord Yama examines me
most carefully after my death.37
This speech is reflective of belief in the warnings provided by the almanac of 1194,
and furthermore displays an aversion to marriage and accompanying feminine pollution which are thought to foster poor rebirth. In response to Miaoshan’s defiance,
the king forces her to do “hard labor” at the White Sparrow Nunnery. When even the
physical hardships she has to endure as a novice at the White Sparrow Convent fail
to influence Miaoshan’s decision, King Miaozhuang orders her execution.38 However,
miraculously she is saved to pursue religious austerities on Incense Mountain (Xiang
shan, 香山). After some period of time, the King becomes ill. He is informed the only
way he can be cured is through a gift of the body similar to gegu (割骨) or the slicing
off a piece from the thigh or liver and serving it as a medicinal cure for one’s parent;39
in this particular case a gift of limbs and eyes is required. It cannot just be anybody
from whom the King receives such a gift, but rather, the person whose body parts
he receives must be one who has never felt any anger.40 Thus, the only person who
will fit all the requirements is the hermit of Incense Mountain. The king consumes
the body parts and is subsequently cured. When he visits Xiang Shan to express his
gratitude to the hermit, King Miaozhuang discovers that the hermit is none other
than his youngest daughter, Miaoshan. Soon after, Miaoshan experiences apotheosis
—transformation from human to deity status—assuming the form of Guanyin of the
Thousand Arms and Eyes.
In his Personal Salvation and Filial Piety: Two Precious Scroll Narratives of Guanyin
and her Acolytes, Wilt Idema contends that the legend of Miaoshan could only have
emerged once the notion of the sinfulness of female sexuality has been firmly established
by tracts like the Blood Bowl Hell in the twelfth century.41 Idema perceives Miaoshan’s
repeatedly expressed fear of death and of the punishments of hell and her refusal to
marry to be an expression of her fear of her own inherently sinful sexuality.42 Guanyin
specialist Chun-fang Yu defines these as the negative evaluation of sexuality and desire
and the negative evaluation of the married condition itself.43 Indeed, when Miaoshan is
asked to marry, she deflects the notion. The patriarchal family has a dilemma. To ensure
�������
Yu, Kuan-yin, 334.
38 Ibid., 293-4.
���������������
Ibid., 317.
���������������
Ibid., 294.
41 Wilt Idema, Personal Salvation and Filial Piety: Two Precious Scroll Narratives of Guanyin and Her Acolyte.( Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press. 2008) 24-5.
42 Ibid., 25.
43 Ibid., 333.
Columbia East Asia Review 13
its survival it needs fertile women from outside the family, at the same time it fears the
disruptive power posed by female sexuality.44 In order to obtain daughter-in-laws, a
father has to marry off his own daughters, and thus force them into sin. Yet if marriage,
or sex, at least, can be avoided, any given woman’s burden of sin is somehow lightened.
Moreover, if a woman can practice the austerities of Buddhism, and rid herself of her
monthly period, her burden of sin is lessened even more. This also applies to a married
woman who foregoes sex.
Much like the Mu Lian legend, the Miaoshan story developed through a series
of scriptures and bao juan (宝卷) or morality tales. In two particular later versions
of the Miaoshan legend, the Xiang-shan shuo-yao (Synopsis of Xiang-shan,香山说
要) and the You diyü (Tour of Hell, 游地狱), Miaoshan visits the Avīcī hell, which
the Xiang-shan shuo-yao identifies as the nineteenth hell, specifically designated for
the punishment of Mu Lian’s mother. In a similar vein, the You diyü takes particular
pleasure in depicting the downfall of Qingti.45 The similarities of these two critical
legends go far beyond their inclusion of Qingti. For instance, both Mu Lian and
Miaoshan are guided through hell by the Earth Matrix, Ti-tsang (Ksitigarbha). In the
Miaoshan tale, Ti-Tsang sends a dazzling light to break through the gates of hell and
leads the sangha into the hellish city to save the beings. Ti-Tsang likewise assists Mu
Lian as he scans the universe searching for his mother.
Like the Mu Lian story, in which sexuality plays a large role in determining
Qingti’s rebirth as a hungry ghost, the female body also is also prominent in the
Miaoshan tale as it serves as the primary trigger of the Princess’s distress. Princess
Miaoshan wants to end her female form, and thus must avoid sex, marriage and
childbirth. At the same time, she has a filial obligation to her father, and in order to
satisfy her filial devotion to her father the princess has a duty to bear children and as
such sin. At first it seems like there is no way Miaoshan can satisfy both roles—the
good filial daughter and the wholly observant Buddhist lay nun. Yet through giving
her limbs and eyes to her father, it is revealed that Miaoshan can indeed fulfill both
roles. They are not mutually exclusive.
Not only do these two stories both attempt to deal with female pollution, but
their plot lines also parallel to some degree a chronicle of China’s primordial filial son,
the Tale of Son Shun, found at Dun Huang along with the tale of Mu Lian Saves His
Mother. In the Tale of Son Shun, the stepmother is a very important character. While
she is said to abhor Shun, in her husband’s absence, the stepmother tries to seduce
Shun or at least tries to create the impression that he is flirting with her when she asks
him to remove a thorn from her foot. Later she accuses Shun of having attempted
to rape her. Once the stepmother has convinced her husband of Shun’s violation,
she hatches a plot to burn Shun while he is repairing the barn. When that plan fails,
she attempts to kill the future Emperor with stones when he is down in the well.46
Whereas Shun is pursued by his stepmother, Miaoshan must live in fear of her father’s
44 Ibid., 25.
45 Yu, Kuanyin, 328-9.
46 Idema, Personal Salvation and Filial Piety, 26-7.
14 Lassoff • Buddhist Filial Piety
desires. While Shun just escapes the flames from a burning barn, Miaoshan is almost
engulfed by flames when her father torches the nunnery. When Shun is trapped in
the family well, a dragon bores a tunnel for him to the well of a neighbor’s house and
a journey below the surface of the earth follows, which may be read as the equivalent
of Miaoshan’s visit to Yellow Springs. At the end of both stories, the protagonist
retires to the wilds of a mountain where they enjoy the help of animals and achieves
supernatural powers.
Perhaps more significantly, the version of the Shun story that emphasizes the
step-mother’s role in attempting to thwart Shun may not be wholly representative of
the entire history of the legend. As Keith Knapp points out in Selfless Offspring, modifications of the Shun legend stress the importance of the father.47 After the father is
complicit with his second-wife in trying to kill Shun, he is blinded as punishment.
In the meanwhile, Shun secretly hides away in the well. Soon after, while Shun’s
father, who is experiencing financial difficulty, is sleeping one night, he dreams that
a phoenix appears in front of him and feeds him. Shaken by this dream, the father
attempts to divine the meaning of the dream and determines that his descendant
is a worthy one. Shun also divines this dream. From then on, every bushel of rice
Shun’s father bought contained extra coins. He believes this has to be the work of his
absent son, Shun. Thus, the father regrets his actions toward his son and confesses
his sins to Heaven (tian, 天) for three days. Later, the father listens to the voice of the
man from whom he usually acquired groceries and noticed he sounded like Shun.48
Much like Miaoshan’s willingness to commit gegu（割骨）to help her father despite
his horrible mistreatment of her, Shun appears before his father and performs an
act of salvation: he licks his father’s eyes so that his blindness is cured. In all of these
tales—Shun, Miaoshan and Mu Lian, the practices and plot lines are applicable to
both sexes of both generations. Thus, while the Miaoshan pays particular attention to
the daughter’s need to fulfill the roles of good Buddhist and a good daughter to her
father, and Mu Lian presents the son’s salvation of the mother, the act of repayment
of parental debts can also be made to benefit the father, as in the Story of Son Shun.
Since the same actions may be taken on behalf of either parent, the strength of Cole’s
mother-son dyad is reduced.
Lessons
Chinese women have seemingly always been relegated to second-class citizenship in
Chinese society. Each of the primary philosophical and religious schools of thought,
including Buddhism and Confucianism, has provided an array of reasons for why
women are to be considered inferior to men, ranging from their polluting bodily
functions to their ability to divide the family. Dually, Buddhism and Confucianism
attempt to address the debt that is due to the mother and practices by which females
could escape their suffering as shown by Miaoshan’s gegu and Mu Lian’s creation and
utilization of the ghost festival to free his mother from the “Women’s Only” hell.
47 Knapp, Selfless Offspring, 132.
48 Ibid., 80.
Columbia East Asia Review 15
Nonetheless, what becomes obvious is that Alan Cole over-limits the scope of the
texts he scrutinizes in his investigation of filial piety. Had he inquired into a variety
of periods in Confucian history, that is, periods other than the Eastern Zhou, Cole
would have noticed that such a disjuncture between the two, as he contends, is not
appropriate. He overlooks the historical background shared by Confucianism and
Buddhism, which posited that women were pollutants to the family and society,
as evident in degradations of their menstrual characteristics. Confucian notions of
filial piety and Buddhist notions of filial piety cannot be completely bifurcated by
articulating that the former had a father-son focus and the latter a more inclusive
mother-son focus. In fact, Cole’s bifurcation fails at large to understand accurately
the historical syncretism of Buddhism and Confucianism in their relational functions
as cultural forces.
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