Students of Chinese religion have long recognized the importance of baojuan (precious scrolls) as a source for studying moral and religious values found at all levels of society in late imperial China. Written in prose and seven-character rhymed verse, and sometimes including lyrics based on popular tunes, the baojuan genre probably first appeared in the Yuan (1260–1368), and became increasingly popular during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912). As the expression “proclaiming the scroll” (xuanjuan) indicates, this type of literature was usually recited in front of an audience, and a typical audience consisted largely of women. This is also confirmed by the fieldwork conducted by Rostislav Berezkin in present-day China. Yet despite their historical value, few precious scrolls have been translated into English. A notable exception is Wilt Idema's Personal Salvation and Filial Piety: Two Precious Scroll Narratives of Guanyin and Her Acolytes (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). It is therefore most welcome news that Idema and Grant have followed up their earlier collaboration on gender and literature in The Red Brush: Writing Women in Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), with this translation of two more precious scrolls, The Precious Scroll of the Three Lives of Mulian and Woman Huang Recites the Diamond Sutra. The translation is very accessible, with notes and a glossary, and is suitable as a text for courses on Chinese religion and popular literature.
Although both stories have a long history of textual evolution, particularly in the case of Mulian, the earliest exemplars in printed precious scrolls, on which the translation is based, date to 1876 in the case of Mulian, and 1848 in the case of Woman Huang. The translators’ introduction explains the origins and development of the Mulian (pp. 5–11) and Woman Huang (pp. 11–17) legends, and this very useful background information enables the reader to recognize and appreciate the new elements introduced into these precious scrolls. To summarize briefly: both Mulian and Woman Huang are provided with three lives. While Mulian is reborn first as the evil general Huang Zhao and then as a butcher, Woman Huang is first reborn as a man who becomes a high official and then retires to cultivate the Way, which constitutes his third life. Both precious scrolls take great interest in describing in detail the horrific sufferings undergone by sinners in the various hells. While the two texts share the same understanding of the eighteen hells and the courts of the ten kings, there are also some surprising divergences. For instance, the Mulian scroll offers a unique explanation of the Wheel of Six Paths. Instead of the standard Buddhist version, it calls these six the paths of gold, silver, jade, bronze, stone, and water. Depending on which path one is assigned to, the manner of one's birth and one's physical appearance will differ (pp. 94–104). The scroll about Woman Huang, on the other hand, speaks of three highways leading to the world of the living, the world of heaven and the Underworld (p. 174).
While the translators are correct to highlight the sinful nature of women (pp. 17–19), vegetarianism (pp. 21–23), blood pollution (pp. 23–26), and the ritual power of women (pp. 31–34) as shared concerns and dominant themes of both texts, it is not entirely fitting to title the book as an “escape from blood pond hell,” for the blood pond hell appears only in the Mulian scroll but not in the Woman Huang scroll. Furthermore, the Mulian scroll attenuates the link between femaleness and blood pollution by listing two separate blood pond hells, one for women only (pp. 45–46) and the other for both men and women (pp. 78–83). It thus deviates from the Blood Pond Sutra (Xuepen jing), an indigenous Buddhist scripture dated to the late twelfth century, which gave rise to a Daoist counterpart in the first part of the thirteenth century. That sutra taught that women suffer in the blood pond because they “leak menses or in childbirth release blood which seeps down and pollutes the earth gods. And, what is more, they take their filthy garments to the river to wash, thereby polluting the river water. Later, an unsuspecting good man or woman draws some water from the river, boils it for tea, and then offers it to the holy ones, causing them to be impure” (p. 25). The reason why Woman Huang decided to sleep separately from her butcher husband so that she would not bear more children was precisely because she was afraid to cause such pollution. Yet there is no mention of a blood pond hell in the scroll about her. Moreover, while Mulian's mother, Liu Qingti, was saved by the ritual actions of her filial son, Woman Huang achieved salvation through her own efforts, by reciting the Diamond Sutra. In view of these issues, instead of portraying the two scrolls as upholding shared views about women, pollution, and salvation, I wonder whether it might be more useful to highlight their differences. The scroll of Woman Huang is clearly a text advocating the Way of Former Heaven (Xiantian dao), which celebrates lay celibacy, promotes the practice of inner alchemy, is particularly devoted to the worship of Guanyin, and grants women more autonomy. It is thus unsurprising that Woman Huang, unlike Liu Qingti, does not need a son like Mulian to save her.
