by Brian Griffith
from his upcoming book, CHINESE GODDESSES (Exterminating Angel Press, Spring 2012)
In reading the lives of immortal Chinese women we find broad patterns, like versions of Joseph Campbell’s hero journeys. Each immortal has a kind of life story, which tells her deeds and how she attained goddess-hood. The stages of their journeys often reflect natural phases in women’s lives. In youth and child-bearing years, they are often idealistic rebels with a passion for righting wrongs. Many of them refuse arranged marriages, or defiantly choose their own mates. In maturity they may turn to disciplines of meditation, fasting, or sexual abstinence. In old age they might leave home and devote themselves completely to a spiritual quest. After attaining the Way, they become spiritual teachers (Cahill 1993, 240). Some became founders of multi-generational teaching lineages, like Cao Wenyi’s Purity and Tranquility lineage. Or they might form associations of female teachers, such as the College of Priestesses at Linjin (Blumenberg, 2006, 43). Of course some immortals were child prodigies like Chen Jinggu, who rose through all these phases of inner growth by early adulthood.
These goddesses were usually prodigal daughters, divorced wives, or widowed mothers. Their actions showed strength and independence rather than duty or obedience. They were people with a calling, and if their families could not accept that calling, the goddesses often ran away. So the Han dynasty saint Zheng Wei (Cheng Wei) was abused by her army officer husband, feigned madness, and vanished into a new life as an independent holy woman (Cleary1989, 8–9). The Buddhist saint Miaoshan defied her father’s orders to marry, and let herself be thrown out of the family. When Qi Xiao Yao’s father tried to teach her “rules for women,” she said those were for ordinary people. Her focus on spiritual practice caused trouble, and her parents had difficulty marrying her off. After she got married, her husband’s family couldn’t control her and thought she was possessed by a devil. She ignored them all and became a Daoist immortal. The Holy Mother Dongling studied the Way under Master Liu Gang, and gained amazing powers of self-transformation. But her husband was so jealous of her rising fame that he denounced her to the police for lechery and witchcraft. She was slammed in the jail, but escaped into immortality like a bird through the bars, leaving only her slippers behind. In carving out their roles as shamans, oracles, or realized masters, these women commonly violated the norms of an officially patriarchal age, but they affirmed traditions of even greater antiquity. In one sense, they maintained a semi-“matriarchal” culture of ancient times. In another sense they aimed to be prophets of the future.
In many other cultures of the world, such deviant women were barred from leadership by every means available. In early modern Spain for example, numerous women took religious vocations independent of the church. These were called “beatas,” and they often operated like Mother Teresas in the streets, at a time when the church-sanctioned nunneries were carefully cloistered from the world. The church responded to these women with great care. The beatas were usually summoned to public hearings, where priestly psychologists carefully discredited their delusions of grandeur. For presuming to take religious initiative without God’s authority, many of these women were sentenced to solitary penance for the rest of their lives. But China’s authorities never managed such control over popular religion, at least not until the Maoist Cultural Revolution. Confucian orthodoxy exerted its expectations on women mainly through their families. But if a holy woman could avoid domination by her family, she was usually free to build any career the market would bear. If she ran away from home, she was free to starve or found a new religious sect. The public commonly supported independent holy women; many were able to live on the offerings of their admirers (Gernet 1962, 163–164). If they acquired a reputation and many followers, their leadership was seldom repressed by any civic or religious authority. Under ambiguously “open” conditions, they could teach their own answers to their own questions, with little pressure to fit their teaching to a male-made orthodoxy.
What generalizations can we make about the practices and insights of female saints? Maybe the main thing is that their religions were clearly built from their own experience. For example, in certain Daoist circles the process of inner growth is described as analogous to pregnancy and childbirth. The practice is said to involve the conception and nurture of an “immortal embryo.” So the poems of the Daoist female sage Sun Buer (b. 1124 CE) describe a process which sounds like spiritual insemination from a woman’s point of view. As her teaching is explained by Chen Yingning,
Every morning before sunrise they would still their minds and sit quietly, waiting for the sun in a state of empty openness. Inwardly laying aside ideas and thoughts, outwardly disengaging themselves from objects, all at once they forgot about the universe and broke through space.
Then a point of positive energy, like a drop of dew, like lightning, would spontaneously appear in the great void and enter their bellies, passing into the spine and rising to the center of the brain; there it would turn into sweet rain and shower the inner organs. The sages would then cause this energy to circulate throughout their bodies, cleaning them out and burning away pollution, to change their bodies into masses of pure light. (Cleary, 1989, 43)
If this sounds like Kundalini yoga, the parallel is often drawn. But Chinese practitioners might compare their emerging spiritual powers, not to a rising snake, but to an embryo growing in its mother’s womb. The stages of spiritual development would then be compared to those of pregnancy, childbirth, and nurture of an inner child. As the Daoist mystic Wei Huacun (d. ca. 330 CE) explained in her Gold Pavilion Classic,
How keep body and mind one?
Be like a child.
Be aware of breathing, soft and pliant.
To see the transcendent Dao, have a pure mind …
Don’t say No.
To receive heaven’s blessing,
be empty like a mother’s womb.
Give birth and nurture, then let go. (Saso, 1995, 80–81)
In place of the term “yoga,” Daoists commonly say “alchemy,” or “physiological alchemy.” The practice usually involves controlled breathing, yoga-like physical exercise, and various kinds of meditation or visualization. The journey stages in the Complete Perfection (Quanzhen) school include “external and internal strengthening” exercises—to unblock the body, stimulate the nervous system, and still the mind. When that foundation is built, a “firing process” of deep breathing and meditation incubates the internal energies. As a text called the “Diagram of the Ascent and Descent of Yang and Yin in the Human Body” explains,
Heaven and earth are the great forge, yin and yang are the pivots of transformation, and the unified qi [vital energy] is the great medicine. To refine the elixir, use your inner male and female, yang and yin qi and circulate them all around the inner stars until they form the alchemical vessel. The Metal Mother [the Queen Mother of the West] resides right there, and through wondrous transformations stimulates the qi of life. (Despeux and Kohn, 2003, 187)
These exercises are sometimes called “the dragon and the tiger swirling in the winding river.” The dragon and tiger are terms for the inner male and inner female, and the winding river is the energy path up the backbone. (Of course terms like “inner male,” “inner female,” and “inner child” would have seemed ridiculous to most Westerners a few generations ago, but by now they are almost normal vocabulary, like “visualization.”) When these energies rise up the spine to the heart they are called “The sun and the moon reflecting each other in the Yellow Palace.” When they reach the forehead, they are termed “the union of husband and wife in the bed chamber.” And this is just the beginning. Because then follows an incubation period called “the ten months of pregnancy.” It is said that those who embark on this journey cannot simply stop and turn back. Because next comes “the birth of the immortal child” (which happens through the crown of the head as in Kundalini yoga), “three years of breast-feeding,” and raising the inner soul child to maturity. When its capacities are fully attained, the soul child grows capable of leaving its mother’s body in a kind of soul projection. Ultimately, the old sense of identity is transcended in a merger with the entirety of life (Wong, 1997, 173–176; Despeux and Kohn, 2003, 19–21).
In recent decades, many Christian denominations sought to remove sexist language from their worship services, hymns, and prayers. But it is far more than words that accommodate women in some of these Chinese traditions. These are schools of religious wisdom built largely by women, for women. Their poetry and teachings are created through women’s explorations of their own inner continents. In surveying their evocative words, we have to wonder what was ever gained by excluding female experience from religion.