Abstract
In his seminal Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category, David Valentine observes that “in both scholarly and activist work the use of transgender as a category of analysis and action restricts the possibilities of explaining gender variance as much as it enables it.”1 During his fieldwork in New York City in the late 1990s, Valentine writes repeatedly of encountering people designated as transgender by social workers and academics who reject the relevance of the label to their persons or, particularly among people of color sex workers, had never even heard the word.2 If this is the case in one of the world’s great metropolises of gender-bending and queer activism, years after the term transgender had entered common circulation, how much more problematic is the retroactive deployment of this term across a broad range of cultures and locales?
I am grateful to Howard Chiang for helping to orient me within the field of transgender studies and to Meghan Fidler for suggesting structural improvements to this piece. Andrea Castiglioni, Douglas Gildow, and Elena Valussi responded generously to an eleventh hour request for feedback. I regret that I was not able to take all their suggestions into account in the present chapter.
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Notes
David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 17.
Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 6.
This obviously entails a risk of overreaching. For an earlier article of similar ambition and perhaps related pitfalls, see Alex Wayman, “Male, Female, and Androgyne: Per Buddhist Tantra, Jacob Boehme, and the Greek and Taoist Mysteries,” in Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R.A. Stein, ed. Michel Strickmann (Brussels: Institut Belge des Hautes Etudes Chinois, 1983).
Charlotte Furth, Review of Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, by Bret Hinsch, Journal of Asian Studies 50, no. 4 (1991): 912.
“Utopistics” is the neologism coined by Immanuel Wallerstein to indicate not “dreams of heaven that could never exist on earth,” but plausible alternative futures. Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics: Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century (New York: The New Press, 1998), 1–2.
Leonard Zwilling, “Homosexuality as Seen in Indian Buddhist Texts,” in Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender, ed. José Ignacio Cabezón (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), 204.
Faure continues: “The same is true for castration, although the condemnation of the latter was in some cases attenuated by its ascetic motivations.” Benard Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 77.
On which see Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 54–55. Charlotte Furth, “Androgynous Males and Deficient Females: Biology and Gender Boundaries in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century China,” Late Imperial China 9 no. 2 (1988) should also be consulted. On Li’s relation to natural history more broadly, see
Carla Nappi, The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
More precisely, Chinese Pure Land practices required that everything—from insects to domestic animals to women—be reborn as men. “Pure Land” is a Chinese neologism retroactively applied to some Mahāyāna beliefs and practices in India; the phrase jingtu itself may be a productive mistranslation: Jan Nattier, “The Realm of Akśobhya: A Missing Piece in the History of Pure Land Buddhism,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 23, no. 1 (2000): 73–74 n. 6.
Leon Hurvitz, trans. Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 199. All translations from the Chinese follow Hurvitz.
Eugene Wang warns of Śāriputra: “By our modern standards, he must have been an obnoxious misogynist or male chauvinist.” See Eugene Wang, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 141.
This jewel is a gender signifier: “Each Nāga princess was believed to carry a priceless jewel on her head which male Nāgas did not possess.” Diana Paul, Women in Buddhism: Images of the Feminine in Mahāyāna Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985 [1979]), 186.
Burton Watson, trans. The Lotus Sutra (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), xix.
The classic study of this legitimization campaign is: Antonio Forte, Political propaganda and ideology in China at the end of the seventh century: inquiry into the nature, authors and function of the Dunhuang document S.6502, followed by an annotated translation (Kyoto: Scuola Italiana di Studi sull’Asia Orientale, 2005).
Miriam Levering, “The Dragon Girl and the Abbes of Mo-Shan,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 5 no. 1 (1982): 22.
Chün-fang Yü, “P’u-t’o Shan: Pilgrimage and the Creation of the Chinese Potalaka,” in Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, ed. Susan Naquin and Yü Chün-fang (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 163.
Michael Loewe, “Shih Ching 詩經,” in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 415.
使民 有父之尊, 有母之親. 如此而后可以為民父母矣. 非至德其孰能如此乎. I am indebted to the discussion of this line in Charles T. Sanft, Rule: A Study of Jia Yi’s Xin shu (Dissertation: Münster University, 2005), 60–64. I slightly alter his translation. Interestingly, the same phrase, “father and master of the people,” continued to be employed in modern Japan, describing the Meiji emperor’s own ideal conception of his role (albeit in stereotyped classical language).
Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 140 and 302.
Discussed in Furth, A Flourishing Yin, 221. For more on this period, see: Furth, “Androgynous Males and Deficient Females,” 1–31. Liang Yannian 梁延年, ed., Shengyu xiang jie 聖諭像解(The Sacred Edict, Illustrated and Explained), 1681, contains two images of lactating men with accompanying anecdotes: j. 2: 19a-20a (nursing his deceased stepmother’s daughters) and j. 2: 21a-b (nursing his deceased brother’s son). Lactating men imply not only gender transgression but a different version of the capabilities of sexed bodies. Compare to Caroline Walker Bynam, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (California: University of California Press, 1984).
Roland Altenburger, “Is It Clothes that Make the Man? Cross-Dressing, Gender, and Sex in Pre-Twentieth-Century Zhu Yingtai Lore,” Asian Folklore Studies 64, no. 2 (2005). For androgyny and late imperial literature see: Zuyan Zhou, Androgyny in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003) and Zhou’s contribution to the present volume.
The phrase is that of Romeyn Taylor, who describes the official religion of the Ming dynasty as “the vocational religion of the literati.” Romeyn Taylor, “Official Religion in the Ming,” in The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, ed. Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote, vol. 8, part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 848.
Quoted in Robert Ford Campany, “Two Religious Thinkers of the Early Eastern Jin: Gan Bao and Ge Hong in Multiple Contexts,” Asia Major 3rd series 18, no. 1 (2005): 179–180.
See also: Robert Ford Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 12–14.
Translation adapted from Kenneth J. DeWoskin and J. I. Crump, In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 76.
Richard Mather, “K’ou Ch’ien-chi and the Taoist Theocracy at the Northern Wei Court,” in Facets of Taoism: Essays in Chinese Religion, ed. Holmes Welch and Anna K. Seidel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 111.
Jacques Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese Society: An Economic History from the Fifth to the Tenth Centuries, trans. Franciscus Verellen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 131, 140, 141, 145, 212, 226, 256, 281, 284, 287, 290, and 304.
Vincent Goossaert, “Quanzhen, What Quanzhen? Late Imperial Taoist Clerical Identities in Lay Perspective,” paper presented at the International Symposium on Quanzhen Daoism in Modern Chinese Society and Culture, University of California, Berkeley, Nov. 2–3, 2007, 2.
Interestingly, in Daodejing verse 15 William Boltz has identified “one of the uncommon cases where we can detect the conscious shifting of meaning away from a sexual image to one apparently perceived as a benign non-sexual one.” The passage in both Mawangdui manuscripts is: nü yi zhong zhi xu sheng 女以重之徐生, “taking a hold of the female and ‘bestirring’ (impregnating) her, she slowly generates life.” In all received versions, “the image of pregnancy has been completely eradicated.” William G. Boltz, “Manuscripts with Transmitted Counterparts,” in New Sources of Early Chinese History: An Introduction to the Reading of Inscriptions and Manuscripts, ed. Edward Shaughnessy (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1997), 279–280.
Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen, Science and Civilisation in China, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Spagyrical Discovery and Invention Part V: Physiological Alchemy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 54.
Clark Hudson, “Spreading the Dao, Managing Mastership, and Performing Salvation: The Life and Alchemical Teachings of Chen Zhixu” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 2007), 258–259.
Schipper objects that “the style, the tone, and the theology are quite different” from that of Celestial Master ecclesia. He speculates that it could date “possibly from as early as the first century A.D.” Kristofer Schipper and Franciscus Verellen, eds., The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 77. Stephen Bokenkamp, who has translated the extant fragment
(Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 78–148) calls the text “authentically early” (59), and notes eight points at which he believes Commandments and Admonitions for the Family of the Dao (Dadaojia lingjie 大道家令戒 DZ 789.12a-19b) reveals a knowledge of the Xiang’er commentary. Commandments and Admonitions contains an internal pronouncement dating itself to a particular day in AD 255. It is one of only a handful of surviving texts from the original Celestial Masters community.
Often in texts claiming to be of the Tang: see Farzeen Baldrian-Hussein, “Inner Alchemy: Notes of the Origin and Use of the Term Neidan” Cahier d’Extreme-Asie 5 (1989): 90. James Robson informs me that he has been able to date some of these texts to the Tang.
Also predating Shangqing are testaments to a latter idea associated with the Inner Alchemical reproduction process, that of “dividing the physical form” (fen xing 分形), which appears in both Ge Hong’s Master Who Embraces Simplicity (Baopuzi; problematically translated by James R Ware, Alchemy, Medicine and Religion in the China of A.D. 320: The Nei P’ien of Ko Hung (Pao-p’u tzu) [Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1966]) and the Traditions of Divine Transcendents (Shenxian zhuan; impressively translated by
Robert Ford Campany, To Live As Long As Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002]).
Kristofer Schipper, “The Inner World of the Lao-Tzu Chung-Ching 老君中經,” in Time and Space in Chinese Culture, eds. Huang Junjie and Erik Zürcher (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 115.
Or “immortals in embryonic state”—see Fabrizio Pregadio, “Early Daoist Meditation and the Origins of Inner Alchemy,” in Daoism in History: Essays in Honour of Liu Ts’un-Yan, ed. Benjamin Penny (New York: Routledge, 2006), 142—ancestors reborn in heaven through the application of dedicated progeny. Inverted, these characters are the “transcendent embryo” (xian tai) of Inner Alchemy.
Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body, trans. Karen Duval (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 122. I have silently amended Wade-Giles to Pinyin throughout this paper.
For example, in Principles of the Innate Disposition and the Lifespan (on which see below) the apotheosis is depicted as both “Flying Ascension” and “Confirmation as Vairocana.” On this text, see Daniel Burton-Rose, “Integrating Inner Alchemy into Late Ming Cultural History: A Contextualization and Annotated Translation of Principles of the Innate Disposition and the Lifespan (Xingming guizhi 性命圭旨) (1615)” (MA thesis, University of Colorado, 2009).
This sexist inequality was only confronted within the Internal Alchemical tradition in the early twentieth century by Chen Yingning, who emphasized differentiation from the atemporal realm rather than a deficiency of yang as the original cause of human mortality. On Chen see Xun Liu, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). For more on female Daoist cultivation practices see:
Elena Valussi, “Men and Women in He Longxiang’s Nüdan hebian” Nan nü: Men, Women & Gender in Early & Imperial China 10, no. 2 (2008): 242–278;
Suping Li 李素平, Nü shen nü dan nü dao 女神女丹女道 (Beijing: Zongjiao wenhua chubanshe, 2004)
and Sara Neswald, “Rhetorical Voices in the Neidan Tradition: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the ‘Nudan Hebian’ (pref 1906) Compiled by He Longxiang (fl 1900–1906).” (PhD dissertation, McGill University, 2007).
Fu Jinquan 傅金銓, Nügong lian ji huandan tu shu 女功煉己還丹圖書, in Nüdan hebian 女丹合編, ed. He Longxiang 賀龍驤 (Chengdu: Er’xian an, 1906), 3a. The last character seems an error for the orthographically similar ban 般.
For more on Gao see Vincent Goossaert, The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), esp. 172–175.
A comparative table is provided in Xun Liu, “Visualizing Perfection: Daoist Paintings of Our Lady, Court Patronage, and Elite Female Piety in the Late Qing,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 64, no. 1 (2004): 67
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Burton-Rose, D. (2012). Gendered Androgyny: Transcendent Ideals and Profane Realities in Buddhism, Classicism, and Daoism. In: Chiang, H. (eds) Transgender China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137082503_3
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