Thursday 17th March, 16:30 - 18:00 UK time. 

Zhujun Ma (University of Colorado Boulder)

Practicing Intimacy in the Cult of the Goddess of Mount Tai in Late Imperial China 

The Goddess of Mount Tai has been one of the most popular deities in north China plain in the late imperial period (1368–1912). The Goddess of Mount Tai enjoyed popularity across social class, gender, and geography due to her all-round efficacy and pluralist images. However, because of the Goddess's exceptionally prominent efficacy of fertility and maternal image, previous scholarship largely reduces the gender quality of the social making of her pilgrims and their motivations to be a case of female pilgrims worshipping a mother goddess of fertility. In fact, precious scrolls centering on the Goddess of Mount Tai advocate a variety of practices for devotees to construct a closer deity–human relationship with the Goddess. This paper inquiries into how pilgrims process, produce and reinforce the deity–human relationship with the Goddess of Mount Tai through their very own body as mediator of intimacy in the interactive and mimic practices during the pilgrimage and everyday life. I argue that despite women's socially determined gender responsibilities within the family, they also came to the Goddess to pursue their transcendent quest for social space beyond normative social and spatial constraints. By giving direct preaching and showcasing an ideal pilgrimage of certain pilgrims, precious scrolls offer a wide range of hands-on practices for pilgrims of different gender, social class, literacy, and wealth. Although these practices were not gender exclusive, women did enjoy advantage to some extent for practicing and constructing intimacy with the Goddess of Mount Tai because of their shared gender identity. While religious practices are generally understood through the dimension of efficacy and merit in the largely bureaucratized picture of Chinese religion, this project adds up a gendered reading of religious practices featuring the personal dimension of the deity-human relationship.

Brinda Sarma (Ashoka University) 

The Sophron and the Theri: understanding philosophical reformulation in the Therigatha and the Neopythagorean women's letters and treatises

My paper aims to compare the writings of Buddhist nuns and Neopythagorean women. The Therigatha (orally composed around the 6th century BCE) is a collection of poems by the first Buddhist women anthologised in the 3rd–6th century CE. The 'Neopythagorean women’s writings' (late 4th-2nd century BCE) is a collection of letters and treatises. Both these texts, falling in the purview of ancient literature, offer moral and ethical advice to women taking into account lived experiences of their women authors. In my thesis, I aim to explore how these groups of women placed the body, the spaces they occupied, and their emotional experiences in their writings to remodel philosophical traditions that often privileged the masculine and the abstract.

In Ancient Greek and Indian philosophy women were seen as bodily beings, susceptible to the weakness of their emotions and suited to the household space. However, the Neopythagorean women and the Theris both try and contest these positions. They integrate their bodies, the household space they occupy and their emotions into their philosophical writings by using them as coordinates that construct their philosophical positions in their respective traditions. The Neopythagorean women often write about matters concerning the household and advice on how women, by observing certain behaviours and practices, could maintain harmonia within their households while the Buddhist women's writings place their bodies as an essential tool towards the attainment of nibbana (liberation). Both the groups address the emotional relationships that are formulated by their bodily ties within the spaces they occupy. Thus, they navigate through philosophical doctrines within their traditions and engage them in a play that opens up philosophy to the lived experiences of women.

Both the texts keenly aim at the transformation of the inner self by inculcating certain bodily and behavioural practices within spaces that were not traditionally seen as philosophical. In comparing these two texts I aim to locate how gender functions in reformulating philosophy and how, in turn, these reformulations affected the traditional notions of gender identity within these women’s writings.