Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China
Beata GrantThe 17thcentury is generally acknowledged as one of the most politically tumultuous but culturally
creative periods of late imperial Chinese history. Scholars have noted the profound effect on, and
literary responses to, the fall of the Ming on the male literati elite. Also of great interest is the
remarkable emergence beginning in the late Ming of educated women as readers and, more
importantly, writers.
Eminent Nuns is an innovative interdisciplinary work that brings together several of these
important seventeenth-century trends. Although Buddhist nuns have been a continuous presence
in Chinese culture since early medieval times and the subject of numerous scholarly studies, this
book is one of the first not only to provide a detailed view of their activities at one particular
moment in time, but also to be based largely on the writings and self-representations of Buddhist
nuns themselves. This perspective is made possible by the preservation of collections of
"discourse records" (yulu) of seven officially designated female Chan masters in a seventeenth-
century printing of the Chinese Buddhist Canon rarely used in English-language scholarship. The
collections contain records of religious sermons and exchanges, letters, prose pieces, and poems,
as well as biographical and autobiographical accounts of various kinds. Supplemental sources by
Chan monks and male literati from the same region and period make a detailed re-creation of the
lives of these eminent nuns possible.
Beata Grant brings to her study background in Chinese literature, Chinese Buddhism, and Chinese
women’s studies. She is able to place the seven women in their historical, religious, and cultural
contexts, while allowing them to speak in their own voices. Together these women offer an
important, but until now virtually unexplored, perspective on 17th-century China, the history of
female monasticism in China,