Medieval Buddhist of the Day

[Twitter, 8/19/19] Medieval Buddhist of the Night (insomnia edition): the nun Daowai 道外 and her many lay disciples. This is from a stone image dedicated in 571 (the Northern Qi) which survived only as a damaged image base when recorded in 匋齋臧石記卷13, and now only in rubbings IIRC. After a short introduction, the inscription reads: 然正信佛弟子比丘尼道外本造釋迦銅像一軀，但惡緣無幸，為[ ]所盜。今弟子道[ ]追念亡師之[願]，欲繼紹真顏，但[ ]緣不及，乃率邑義等，粵以大齊武平二年九月丙午朔十五日庚申，各竭舍資，敬造釋迦… “Therefore the upright believer and Buddhist disciple, the nun Daowai, originally commissioned a bronze statue of Sakyamuni, but, through evil karma and ill fortune, it was stolen by [?]. Now her disciple Dao[?], recalling the [vow] of the deceased master to perpetuate the True Countenance, which by [evil] karma was not achieved, has led the yi-society members, and [in 571], each has given of his/her wealth, to reverently commission an image of Sakyamuni…”

The inscription is followed by a list of members of the society. The members include both laymen and married women, who identify themselves as 妻, wives; Daowai and the disciple who organized this memorial are the only nuns. This seems like another case where living Buddhists commissioned an image to fulfill the vows of the dead. It’s interesting to note that the material seems, well, immaterial: the vow which resulted in a bronze image, later stolen, can be fulfilled with a stone image, which might have been harder to carry off and/or had less resale value. (Note bronzes were often gilded.)

The goal of the original vow was to ensure the continued existence of the image of the Buddha in the world – hence the vow to “perpetuate the True Countenance” as well as the intro I left off, which mourned the absence of the actual Buddha from the world post-nirvana. Material matters in many contexts for these images, but evidently not here: both bronze and stone images have the same indexical quality, the same ability to render the absent subject present. Other factors must have driven the choice of material in this case. Stone was most notable, among materials, for its permanence, as so many epitaph inscriptions proclaim, and like an epitaph inscription, this one also perpetuates the memory of the lost nun Daowai, through the intervention of her followers.