The goddess Guanyin began in India as the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, originally a male deity. He gradually became indigenized as a female deity in China over the span of nearly a millennium. By the Ming (1358–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods, Guanyin had become the most popular female deity in China. In Becoming Guanyin, Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin.
Li focuses on the power of material things to enable women to access religious experience and transcendence. In particular, she examines how secular Buddhist women expressed mimetic devotion and pursued religious salvation through creative depictions of Guanyin in different media such as painting and embroidery and through bodily portrayals of the deity using jewelry and dance. These material displays expressed a worldview that differed from yet fit within the Confucian patriarchal system. Attending to the fabrication and use of “women’s things” by secular women, Li offers new insight into the relationships between worshipped and worshipper in Buddhist practice. Combining empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies, Becoming Guanyin is a field-changing analysis that reveals the interplay between material culture, religion, and their gendered transformations.
- Table of Contents
- Introduction: No Democracy Without Beef: Ambedkar, Identity, and Nationhood, by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd
- Fool’s Errand: A Note on the Notes to and Selection from Ambedkar’s The Untouchables, by S. Anand and Alex George
- Selections from B.R Ambedkar’s The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables?
- Preface
- Part IV: New theories of the origin of Untouchability.
- Chapter 9: Contempt for Buddhists as the root of Untouchability
- Chapter 10: Beef-eating as the root of Untouchability
- Part V: The new theories and some hard questions
- Chapter 11: Did the Hindus never eat beef?
- Chapter 12: Why did non-Brahmins give up beef-eating?
- Chapter 13: What made the Brahmins become vegetarians?
- Chapter 14: Why should beef-eating make Broken Men Untouchable?
- Part VI: Untouchability and the date of its birth
- Chapter 15: The Impure and the Untouchables
- Chapter 16: When did Broken Men become Untouchables?
- The Broken Men theory: Beginnings of a Reading, by Alex George and S. Anand
- References
- Acknowledgments
- Index
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