The Changing Faces (and Bodies) of Guanyin: Crossing the Boundaries between Religion, Literature, and Performance

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel presents four scenarios of the changing faces (and bodies) of Guanyin from late imperial China to contemporary Sinophone world. Crossing the boundaries between religion, literature, and performance, all four papers demonstrate a keen awareness of the need for interdisciplinary approaches to the study of texts and materials in the lived Buddhist tradition. Careful attention has been paid to situate the sources in the socio-historical complexities of the given period, with efforts to rethink the dynamics between the worshippers and the worshipped. Bridging text and practice, script and performance, the papers show that the prevalent category of “Buddhist cultural practice” deserves scrutiny in terms of both the kind of Buddhist experience fostered and the multifaceted implications of the practice. Yuhang Li probes into a fraught combination of the sacred and the profane in a late Ming courtesan’s embodiment of Guanyin through dance, under her clients’ gazes. Xiaosu Sun contextualizes the theatrical dimension of a Guanyin play hence highlights the significance of “noise and excitement” for worshippers, which has been undervalued by literati connoisseurs. Katherine Alexander examines the configuration of a devout Buddhist laywoman in a popular Qing performance text through overlapping imageries of Guanyin and yaojing, a seductive spirit. Ying Lei reads a Sinophone leftist writer’s fiction to unpack the mutually interrogating, yet mutually invigorating, relationship between canonical teachings and postsecular imaginations about sainthood. The discussants are Chun-fang Yu, the eminent expert on Guanyin, and Beata Grant, whose outstanding work focuses on Buddhism, literature, and gender in premodern China.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Lei Ying, Harvard University

Chair

• Chun-fang Yu, Columbia University

Individual Presentations

• Dancing the Guanyin: The Contradictions of Courtesan Religiosity in Late Imperial China - Yuhang Li, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• The Virtue of Noisy Excitement: Performing the Guanyin Opera - Xiaosu Sun, Harvard University

• Embodying Guanyin, Embodying Yaojing: Devotional Deviance in Liu Xiang Baojuan - Katherine Alexander, University of Chicago

• The Wounded Bodhisattva: Li Yu and Twentieth-Century Reenvisioning of Guanyin - Lei Ying, Harvard University

Discussant

• Beata Grant, Washington University in St. Louis