Medieval Buddhist of the Day

[Twitter, 8/5/19] Medieval Buddhist of the Day: Song Jingfei 宋景妃. In 527 (N. Wei) she dedicated a niche for her deceased parents in the Lianhua Cave at Longmen. Amy McNair wrote about her already in “Donors of Longmen,” but I wanted to feature her because of how she describes herself. Here’s the relevant bit, omitting date and closing: …清信女宋景妃，自惟先因果薄福緣淺漏，生於閻浮受女人形，賴亡父母慈育恩深得長輕軀，是以仰尋勗養之勞無以投報，今且自割釵帶之半，仰為亡考比敬造釋迦像一軀，藉此微功，願令亡考比託生西方妙樂國土，值佛聞法，見彌世勒…

“The pure & faithful daughter Song JIngfei, aware that because her past karma is slight and her fortune meager, she was born into this world in a female form, and relied on the tender upbringing and deep kindness of her deceased parents to sustain her insignificant body, and that therefore their labor to sustain and raise her can never be repaid, now sets aside half of her [funds for] hairpins and sashes, and respectfully commissions one figure of Sakyamuni for her deceased father and mother. With this slight merit, she hopes to cause her deceased father and mother to be reborn in the Western land of miraculous joy, to be worthy to hear the dharma from the Buddha [himself], and to see Maitreya in person.”

There’s so much going on here! Where to start? I’m struck that when she describes the deeds of her parents in life (in raising her), she names them as 父母, the ordinary terms for father and mother, but when she refers to them after death, they are 亡考比[more usually 妣] – using terms specific to a deceased parent. For what it’s worth, this use of 考 and 妣 is another thing I learned about from 19th-century headstones in Hawai’i. But it is in fact quite ancient.

I’m further struck by how she deprecates her incarnation in a female form. It’s modest of her, but few other female patrons spend so much time minimizing their own virtue, especially in the context of what is really an overt and public claim to virtue. The rhetoric of hairpins and sashes is a distinctively female version of similar language from other donors, emphasizing the value of the gift.

Her mention of “this slight merit” is also interesting, as relatively few patrons describe the economics of merit-making so explicitly: sponsor the image, gain the merit, use the merit for someone else’s benefit. That it goes undescribed elsewhere suggests that the basic mechanism was familiar to most people and didn’t need spelling out. Song Jingfei, as a filial daughter, is unusually careful to lay explicit claim both to her own identity as a female lay believer, & to the process by which she hoped her parents would benefit.