Medieval Buddhist of the Day

[Twitter 7/30/19] I should preface this by saying this post involves an inscription that survives only in transcription in a 19th century catalog, in which the editor himself suggests there might be a transcription error (probably because of the ambiguities I’m about to point out). So this whole thing may be an artifact of mistranscription; but it is still good to think with so I want to consider it.

It concerns a person I will provisionally name Jiang Nan 江南, though the name is unclear (it is given in full as 母使江南, which I’m at a loss to explain, but given what follows I’m prepared to understand Jiang Nan as a woman, and somebody’s mother). The inscription is found in 匋齋臧石記卷八, where the annotation suggests there might have been a transcription error (unspecified). Anyway, the interesting part is not the donor, but the beneficiary.

This donor dedicated a figure of Guanyin in 538, during the Eastern Wei. She dedicated the image for the benefit of 女夫劉還遠亡妻車緣支 “Che Yuanzhi, the deceased wife of my son-in-law Liu Huanyuan.” In a monogamous society, the wife of your son-in-law is by definition your daughter (given some degree of historical heteronormativity). But in a polygynous society, your son-in-law might have a wife who is not your daughter.

What’s striking is the thought that there may have been a strong enough relationship between the mother of a daughter and that daughter’s co-wives for the one to commemorate the other. It suggests affective ties between women that go beyond both the conventions of patrilineal inheritance, in which a daughter leaves her parents behind when she marries, and the trope of conflict between wives in a polygynous household. I wish we had more details.