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PREFACE
A millennium and a half ago there lived in China some
remarkable women who cast aside the fetters of the world to become Buddhist
nuns. Lives of the Nuns preserves the memory of their
lives and deeds and gives us a look into a world that is foreign, exotic, and
now vanished; yet, that world is far less alien than we might first think, for
it is people with men and women who express the same emotions—the same
desires, aspirations, or longings for spiritual enlightenment—as those
found at all times and in all places. Furthermore, the character of these nuns
who lived during dangerous and chaotic times can instruct us who also live in
such times. We need not be Chinese Buddhists of the sixth century to be charmed
by the nun Hui-chan's insouciant bravery (no. 7), or to be moved by
Chih-hsien's fearless integrity (no. 3), or to smile at Ching-ch'eng's clever
ruse (no. 28). And we who have in this generation seen Buddhist monastics offer
their bodies as a sacrifice by fire will feel kinship with the religious and
laity of long ago who, when they learned that T'an-chien (no. 46) had offered
her body by fire to the Buddha, "lamented, their cries reverberating through
the mountains and valleys."
This translation of Lives of the
Nuns, a major revision of an original translation done as part of my
doctoral dissertation for the University of Wisconsin, was prepared with both
the general reader and the scholar in mind in the hope that those who have no
special background in the subject may take up the material and read with
pleasure and understanding, while the scholars in the field may also enjoy the
Lives.
The Translation
Because the biographies are often concise to the
point of obscurity, and because allusions, references, names, and places
familiar to the Chinese reader of nearly fifteen hundred years ago are simply
not going to be clear to the present-day English-speaking reader, the
translator has taken the liberty of adding to the text of the biographies
bracketed phrases or even sentences necessary to provide a smoother narrative.
Any material that cannot be worked into the biography itself is found in the
notes.
To provide a sense of geographic direction,
place-names are supplemented with brief phrases indicating where they were in
China or where they were in relation to the southern capital, which, as the
major city of the southern dynasties, makes an obvious reference point. A map
of China, showing many of the places mentioned in the biographies, is also
included. It should be kept in mind that, whenever a biography mentions the
place where the woman's family came from, it frequently means the place from
which the family had emigrated several generations previously. When a
place-name cannot be located with reasonable certainty, no attempt is made to
locate it.
To clarify relationships or to bring out more clearly
the point of a nun's connection with particular individuals, named persons,
whenever possible, are identified by a brief phrase in the translation.
Additional information, if any, appears in the notes. Those individuals who are
otherwise unknown will not be annotated.
To help readers fix the events in time, dates of
birth and death are given when known and, for emperors, dates of birth,
beginning of reign, and death.
The bibliography of sources, reference works, and
readings describes the books mentioned in the notes, those used as sources and
references for the preparation of the translation, and those that readers might
find of further interest.
Appendix A is a more technical discussion of the
history, sources, and literary prototypes for the text of the Lives.
The romanization system used for transcribing the
Chinese characters is a modification of the Wade-Giles system, chosen because
the English-language references and suggested further readings also use this
system, thereby creating a consistency that the reader might find helpful.
Words of Sanskrit origin are transcribed using the
long marks (macrons) over the vowels but not the retroflex marks under certain
consonants. The letter combination sh represents both
the consonant often transcribed as an s with the acute
accent and the consonant s often transcribed with the
retroflex dot underneath. The letter combination ch
represents what is often written only as the letter c.
The letter n before g, k, or
h represents what is often written as an
m. These differences should be noted when trying to find
in other readings the words or titles of Sanskrit origin used in the
Lives of the Nuns.
The nuns' personal names have been transliterated,
with a translation of the name appearing only in the glosses that begin the
individual biographies. Names of convents and monasteries have been translated
to provide the reader with a respite from the many Chinese names and in some
instances to make clear the point a biography is trying to make concerning the
choice of a name for the convent, as for example, biography 5. Place-names have
been transliterated, except for some names of mountains that can be
straightforwardly translated into English. The names of the two most famous
rivers in China are given in the form familiar to English-speaking
readers—that is, the Yellow and the Yangtze rather than the Ho and the
Chiang.
Thanks are due to the late Arthur E. Link for having
introduced me, many years ago, not only to the Pi-ch'iu-ni
chuan but also to the world of medieval China, to the late Richard H.
Robinson for having supervised my initial work, and to the late Holmes Welch
for having provided opportunities for further study and research.
I must also thank a colleague whom I have never met,
Li Jung-hsi, of the Chinese Buddhist Association in Peking, whose own English
translationof the Pi-ch'iu-ni chuan I reviewed in 1985.
Although I would have preferred speaking with him personally, having his
translation at hand meant that I was able, in a sense, to ask his opinion about
any phrase or sentence in the text. Because we are working with difficult and
often ambiguous material, it is to be expected that we will not always
agree.
A heartfelt thank you I offer to Sharon Yamamoto of
University of Hawaii Press not only for her initial interest but also for her
encouragement and for her well-chosen suggestions for improving the book.
To my husband, Tsai Hsiang-jen, I owe deep and
deserved thanks in recognition of his patient endurance as well as his very
concrete help in more ways than I can count.
To the late Anna Katharina Seidel of the Institut du
Hōbōgirin in Kyoto, for her help, criticism, and especially for her
unfailingly kind generosity, I owe a debt of gratitude that can never be
adequately repaid. Whatever is good in this work is hers, and to her I dedicate
Lives of the Nuns.
Kathryn Ann Tsai
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