Poems of Chinese Buddhist Nuns.
Women played major roles in the history of Buddhist China, but given the paucity of the remaining record, their voices have all but faded. In Daughters of Emptiness, Beata Grant renders a great service by recovering and translating the enchanting verse -by turns assertive, observant, devout – of forty-eight nuns from sixteen centuries of imperial China. This selection of poems, along with the brief biographical accounts that accompany them, affords readers a glimpse into the extraordinary diversity and sometimes startling richness of these women’s lives.