PDF《Jimmy Y. Yu》

s agency by showing the creation of new types of prominent religious life for twelfth through fifteenth century women saints. However, she admits the ambiguity that in many cases the self-image of the body by these women was negative and lustful by nature―as something to be punished, disciplined, and destroyed. This can also be seen in the poetry and instructions by these women on the suppression of passion and hunger;

see Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 29, 184-185, and 208-216. There are, of course, other ascetics in the West who are more concerned with controlling the delusions of the mind, rather than suppressing sexuality, for example. Nevertheless, there is more textual evidence that supports the blatant fact that Western Christian and pagan ascetics vied with each other in heaping abuse on the body.

4 themselves talked about the body this way, at least to my knowledge. A clear division of body and mind simply cannot be found in premodern sources. Descriptions of how ascetic practices were actually understood appear to be different than how recent scholars have suggested.8 The ascetic body practices that I intend to examine focus on a different set of concerns than suppression and control of the body;

they are more about the construction of sanctity and virtue grounded in what I consider as self-inflicted violence, which has long been constitutive of law, religion, and social norms in Chinese culture. In fact, understood in the discursive context of virtuous practice (dexing 德行), many of ........