Monastic Mobility, Social Embeddedness, and Kinship Networks: Buddhist Clerical Sexuality in Late-Qing Sichuan

• Published in: Late imperial China 2022-06, Vol.43 (1), p.85-126
• Main Author: Chen, Gilbert Z
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Abstinence; Archives & records; Buddhism; Celibacy; Clergy; Community; Everyday life; Interpersonal relations; Kinship networks; Mobility; Monks; Sexual intercourse; Sexuality; Social networks; Social order; Tolerance
• ISSN: 0884-3236; 1086-3257; 1086-3257
• DOI: 10.1353/late.2022.0005

In the late imperial era, lower-level Buddhist monks were frequently accused of transgressing monastic precepts and engaging in sexual relations. This article, based on evidence culled from the Qing-era county archives, investigates locally situated knowledge regarding clerical sexuality. Three factors contributed to the occurrence of clerical sexual involvements at the local level: a high degree of monks' physical mobility in everyday life, deep social embeddedness of monks in the fabric of the local community, and monks' close ties with their families.These factors not only facilitated sexual liaisons between monks and local women, but also resulted in community tolerance for such affairs. Thus in contrast to observing people from an outsider's perspective, this paper shows how people, both monks and their secular neighbors, locally understood their situations and how they were able to maneuver through given social and legal constraints in ways that gave them increased capability to rewrite in their own language the normative systems imposed on them in the dominant discourse.