The Lives of Nuns by Kathryn Tsai is a translation of a Buddhist Hagiography of the 6 dynasties period. It was written in around 516CE by Shi Baochang a monk who also had studied Confucian and Taoist texts. The text consists of 65 biographies of nuns. The material in the texts is rarely supernatural, though there are at least 6 instances of nuns burning themselves to death as offerings to the Buddha. The biographies look at who the woman was before she became a nun, how and why she became a nun, and her achievements afterwards. It is a fairly interesting insight into the lives of women, and the issues facing religion at that time.
The nuns did not always face opposition from their families to become nuns. This is quite interesting but also points to the high regard that nuns were frequently held in. The Biographies give examples of women performing rites for Emperors, teaching them and other members of the elite, giving lectures receiving patronage and gifts from the Imperial house. Compared to the lives of lay women nuns were given greater freedom to travel, they were also literate, 53 of the 65 biographies mention that the nun could read and write. The nuns mentioned in the biographies had many disciples and followers, among the sangha and the laity, sometimes in the hundreds. The nuns were praised for the same virtues as the monks, there was no gendered virtue considered here, women were praised for being intelligent, having a great memory, filial, spiritual, moral, self-sacrificing, and learned. While the actual precepts of the nuns clearly put them in a subordinate role to all monks, there was no illustration of that in these biographies. A very interesting glimpse of history.
The lives of nuns is also avialble translated from the Chinese into English by Li Rongxi and Albert A. Dalia, in Lives of the Great Monks and Nuns. Both translations are very interesting, though Tsai gives a longer introduction.
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