Conclusions

Monasticism in China, although originally foreign, was a successful institution for both men and women. Besides being the best place for Chinese Buddhists to live and to practice their newly found religion, it was also a refuge and home in a deeply troubled and perilous time.

Women themselves were also successful, living holy lives—learned lives, lives bound to obligations of their own choice—and dying holy deaths. Their lives and actions demonstrated the truth of the promises in the Buddhist texts. We do not know anything about ordinary Buddhist nuns that would allow us to compare them with our paragons. We could derive a very similar picture of Buddhism in early medieval China from the Kao seng chuan, probably even much more than from the Lives because it is a much longer and detailed document. Nevertheless, without the Lives a very important dimension would have been missing.

Buddhism in China came at a fortunate time when it was needed to help restore meaning to life for many who had been disillusioned and who suffered from political and social troubles. Buddhist thought fit in with an intellectual elite, accustomed to metaphysical talk based especially on Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu and unaccustomed to the loss of their homeland to nomadic barbarians. Buddhist piety attracted both the elite and the commoner.

For women in particular, not only Buddhist thought and piety but also the monastic institution itself was a beneficial import. The religion, seen as not so very different from native Taoism, proved attractive to many levels of society, and even as the differences with Taoism became more and more apparent, Buddhism still continued to grow ever more popular. The religion had enemies, but it had fewer during the Northern and Southern dynasties than it had later in more settled times when the central government could exercise greater jurisdiction and power.

We cannot know whether Pao-ch'ang achieved his purpose of encouraging Buddhists to greater efforts, but the text of the Lives circulated through the south, one of the many Buddhist biographical texts. The Lives provides us with a small but privileged view of the early stages of Buddhist monasticism for women. The sixty-five nuns who are the subject of this work would no doubt be surprised to find that their lives are still edifying readers.