Buddhist Agriculture by Tidal Flats: Cultivated Lands of Ayuwang and Tiantong Monastery in the Song, Yuan, and Early Ming Periods

Abstract

This essay examines material engagements on and literary representations of agricultural land at two Chan Buddhist monasteries during the Song, Yuan, and early Ming periods (roughly 10th–14th c.). My exempla are Tiantong Monastery 天童寺 and Ayuwang Monastery 阿育王寺, which were two of the largest landholders in Yin County 鄞縣, Ming Prefecture 明州. I first contextualize these two Chan monasteries in the broader context of medieval Chinese society, and explain my decision to use them as comparable exempla. I then turn to several accounts drawn from local gazetteers that record the acquisition, reclamation, or development of the agricultural estates of these two monasteries. These cultivated estates often bordered littoral zones, as several were located on the coastline southeast of Ningbo. I explore the importance of environmental agents, especially tidal forces, as both sites and subjects that shaped local Buddhist practice at Tiantong and Ayuwang. I then turn to literary representations of these agricultural lands, focusing especially on how cultivated land partially constitutes a Buddhist environmental imaginaire. I highlight how this imaginaire was deployed for social, pedagogical, economic, and karmic ends. I conclude that Buddhist material engagements on and literary representations of cultivated land at Ayuwang and Tiantong reveal a continual negotiation with environmental (tidal) forces that situated and shaped Buddhist forms of agricultural practice and literary thought. I intend for this essay to be in service of a more careful picture of greater multiplicity of specific Buddhists in specific places cultivating fields of many kinds, and of Chinese Buddhist monasticism in the medieval period, more generally.