The Precious Scroll of Miaoying in the Performative Context of Southern Jiangsu Storytelling

The Precious Scroll of Miaoying (Miaoying Baojuan 妙英寶卷) is still often used in several traditions of ritualized storytelling in southern Jiangsu. This text represents a rare narrative of female self-cultivation, which is related to the worship of the so-called White-Robed Guanyin, a popular form of this Buddhist deity in late imperial China. This subject can be traced to the written vernacular stories of the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries, which demonstrates the persistence of Buddhist topics in the storytelling of the Yangzi Valley region. Despite the prominent place of the Precious Scroll of Miaoying in modern storytelling traditions, there are no detailed studies of this text thus far. The present article endeavors to outline the basic history of this text with the use of its major manuscript and printed variants, as well as to demonstrate its cultural and ritual significance in the modern performative context, with the tradition of “telling scriptures” (jiangjing 講經) in the Changshu area as an example. I have used written sources and materials obtained during fieldwork in Changshu and adjacent areas.