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Mitigating Confucian Duty and Inherent Female Pollution
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Samantha Lassoff
ABSTRACT
When Buddhism first entered China around the first century A.D., it was relegated to a marginal position in society. The Chinese diligently enforced and reinforced the indigenous Confucian concept of filial obligation to one's parents. They were thus taken aback by the Buddhist institution's emphasis on chujia (出家) or leaving home in order to join the sangha, the Buddhist clergy. Despite this obstacle to Buddhism's acceptance by the Chinese, by the fourth or fifth century C.E., Buddhism had successfully infiltrated Chinese religiosity. Donations to the sangha in hopes of accumulating merit for ancestors during festivals legitimized the existence of the Buddhist clergy in China. Chinese Confucianism and Buddhism share a belief in the both physical and spiritual polluting influence of women. In Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism, an influential work on the subject of the mother-son dyad in Chinese religious history, scholar Alan Cole contends that Buddhism transformed filial piety from a patricentric Confucian institution to a more inclusive Buddhistic one. Employing Margery Wolf's "uterine family" concept and the Oedipus complex to analyze the various versions apocryphal Mu Lian Saves His Mother from Hell narrative prominent in the medieval period, Cole argues that the tale wholly emphasizes and romanticizes the mother-son dyad at the expense of the father-son relationship. While Cole is initially persuasive, his argument is flawed by an erroneous suggestion that the Confucians were negligent in their consideration of the female with regard to filial piety, as well as a misperception of the mother-son dyad as being romantic in nature. I suggest that Cole places far too much weight on a supposed Oedipal tendency in Mu Lian, rather than acknowledging that Mu Lian's attempt to save his mother from the Avīcī hell may be motivated by standard notions of filial duty.
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