Medieval Buddhist of the Day

[Twitter, 6/7/19] The Medieval Buddhists of the Day are a series of patrons from the stele dedicated in 530, at the end of the Northern Wei, by the monk Sengzhi 僧智 and the layman Xue Fenggui 薛鳳規 and a Buddhist charitable society of over 100 other members. It’s Friday, so I’m thinking about names, and in this case the frequency with which the names of Northern Dynasties male donors include the character nu 奴, or “slave.” It seems an odd thing to choose for someone’s name, and when I first saw it I looked into the character, which unlike many others doesn’t have a very wide range of historical meanings. It has pretty much always meant a slave or bondservant, or by extension a self-deprecating epithet (“your servant”). Why put it in a name?

The best I can think is that a deprecating name might have been seen to avert bad luck. Another character, chou 醜, meaning ugly, also occurs regularly in donors’ names, and possibly for a similar reason. But the combination of nu 奴 with additional characters can produce some startling names: on our stele, there’s Lü Mainu 呂買奴 “purchased slave,” Li Heinu 李黑奴 “black slave” (which lacks the racial implications that its translation has today, of course), He Mannu 何蠻奴 “[southern] barbarian slave,” He Fangnu 何方奴 “local slave,” Yang Nu 楊奴 just “slave,” Yang Songnu 楊宋奴 “slave from the [Southern] state of Song,” Ding Yangnu 丁陽奴 “yang slave” (as in yin and yang); but my personal favorite has got to be Yang Ponu 楊婆奴 which I can’t resist translating as “a slave to his old lady.”

Here is a transcription of the full inscriptions on the stele.