This book by Beata Grant is welcome not only because it is one of the few full-length studies of Buddhist nuns in premodern China, but also because it adds a nuanced dimension to our understanding of literate women's culture in Jiangnan during the Ming-Qing transition. Through a careful reading of seven women Chan masters' “discourse records” (yulu)—including biographical accounts, sermons, letters, and poems—collected in a seventeenth-century Buddhist canon known as the Jiaxing dazang jing, Grant details individual nuns' lives and presents their self-representations as orthodox successors in the Linji lineage.

Troubled by the negative portrayals of nuns in Ming-Qing secular literature, Grant aims to “redress the one-sidedness of the popular perceptions of nuns in premodern Chinese culture” (p. 4). Siding with Jiang Wu's point that the seventeenth century saw “the ‘reinvention’ of Chan Buddhism” (p. 9), she calls attention to the presence of women dharma heirs in...

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