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Beata Grant, Ph.D., had just spent over a week in hot and dusty Beijing visiting several different language-study programs to determine which would be most suitable for Washington University students studying in China. But now, after 11 hours traveling by train and car through the windy roads of China's remote and beautifully mountainous Shanxi Province, she became not a professor but a pilgrim.
With hundreds of visitors from other parts of China, Inner Mongolia and Tibet, she spent four very full days visiting the temples and climbing the terraces of Mount Wutai, considered to be the most sacred of the four Buddhist holy mountains of China.
Hundreds of temples, monasteries and nunneries have arisen on Mount Wutai since early in the first millennium, when Buddhism first entered China from India. Despite its relatively remote location, many of them have managed not only to survive but to flourish as centers of living Buddhism.
"Even as a woman travelling alone, I felt very safe, and certainly never lonely," said Grant, an associate professor of Chinese and new chair of the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures (DANELL) in Arts and Sciences. "After over 20 years of study, I finally feel completely comfortable in the language and the culture. Given my long-standing interest in Buddhism and my deep love for mountain landscapes, I felt right at home."
Grant, whose research focuses on the poetry and other writings of 18th-century Chinese Buddhist nuns, was particularly delighted to find herself welcomed into a thriving Buddhist convent, where she spent a day with its 300 young nuns and their vibrant and energetic abbess, Reverend Miaoyin.
On another day, she met a 10year-old "Living Buddha" from Tibet who, together with his teachers and other family members, was also on pilgrimage to Mount Wutai. The mountain has special significance for Tibetan Buddhists because several Dalai Lamas have spent time there.
According to Buddhist beliefs, explained Grant, what the Chinese call a "Living Buddha" is actually the reincarnation of a deceased religious teacher, who because of high spiritual attainment is able to determine his or her rebirth. The young monk she met was considered to be the reincarnation of a just such a spiritual teacher a fact confirmed by none other than the present Dalai Lama himself.
When the time came to part, he insisted on having his picture taken with her, plopping himself on her lap for the shot.
While some tourists might have found the experience a bit daunting, Grant has always been at ease in multicultural settings. Born in northern New Mexico, she grew up in a series of rural villages that even today might be considered part of Third World America. Her father, a writer and a free spirit, didn't like to stay in one place too long. The family, she recalled, seemed to move to a new village, a different adobe dwelling almost every year.
"Most of my classmates in school were either Spanish American or American Indian, and it was as likely that they would speak Spanish or Tewa as they would English," Grant said. "In addition, my family lived for several years in Mexico and in Central America when I was a child. I suppose this sort of upbringing meant that I have always felt at home in other cultures sometimes even more so than in my own."
Grant planned to major in Spanish and at age 17 took a break from college to spend time in Costa Rica with a family friend, Hilda Chen-Apuy. There, however, her career took a sharp and unexpected turn to the East. As it happens, Chen-Apuy is the daughter of a Costa Rican native and a Chinese immigrant. She also is a noted scholar of India with a wonderful library of books on Asia. Grant, an avid reader, read almost every book on the shelves and left two years later thoroughly hooked on Asia.
Grant returned to the United States and began looking for universities that offered Asian studies. She settled on the University of Arizona because it was close to home and offered a degree in "Oriental Studies," a broad field that would allow her to explore all the cultures of Asia. She also liked the program's strong interdisciplinary approach.
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"It quickly became clear that it was impossible to study the philosophy of China, for example, without also studying its literature and its history," Grant said. Grant earned a bachelor's degree from Arizona in 1976 and headed for Taiwan, where she spent two years mastering the fundamentals of Chinese language. She then enrolled at Stanford University where she earned two degrees in Chinese, a master's in 1981 and a doctorate in 1987.
Always interested in the intersection of religion and literature, she focused her dissertation on the Buddhist writings of a Song dynasty literary giant named Su Shi. Her research, which required two years in Bejing, was eventually published in 1994 as her first book, "Mount Lu Revisited: Buddhism in the Life and Writings of Su Shi (1037-1107)."
Grant had become increasingly interested in the depiction of women in Chinese literature, but she soon discovered that women of Su Shi's era had left behind little in the way of published writings. Searching forward in time, she learned that it was not until the Ming and Qing dynasties, in particular the 17th through 19th centuries, that Chinese women began to display a distinctive literary voice.
Her early research focused on the characterizations of women in religious popular literature, such as ballads and drama. More recently, she has worked to reconstruct the lives and the writing of Chinese Buddhist nuns and laywomen of the period, struggling to bring life back to their letters, poems and sermons. She has since published many scholarly articles, translations and book reviews on this topic and added considerably to our understanding of the women of early China.
"The primary materials are scarce and piecemeal," Grant said, "but there is enough to provide us a glimpse into the world of an extraordinary group of women, some of whom may have unhappily found themselves in convents and monasteries involuntarily, but also others who found in the religious life a physical, intellectual and, yes, spiritual, freedom which at that time they could have found nowhere else."
Since coming to Washington University in 1988, Grant has taught a range of language, literature and poetry courses. Five years ago, she revived a course on "Masterpieces of Asian Literature" and began teaching it with a spiritual twist. Now titled "Introduction to the Religions of Asia," the popular course takes students on a whirlwind tour of the major religious traditions of India, China and Japan. She also has offered a course on Buddhism in the various cultures of Asia.
Robert Hegel, Ph.D., professor of Chinese and a longtime colleague of Grant, credits her with bringing increased attention to the study of Asian religions on campus.
"As an outsider to those traditions, she has been able to present them very clearly," Hegel said. "I think she brings the sensitivity of someone who has studied poetry to her reading of religious texts, and this background gives a special insight to her students."
Last fall, Grant agreed somewhat reluctantly to take over as chair of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures. Despite administrative headaches, she admits some delight in "having a legitimate reason to poke my nose" into the different language sections, which now include Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Persian and Arabic. She looks forward to the introduction this fall of yet another language, Hindi, which she sees as a bridge between the Asian and the Near Eastern sides of the Department.
"I have long felt that the study of India and the other countries of the South Asian subcontinent is very important, not only for the growing population of students of South Asian heritage on campus, but also for students of arts and sciences," Grant said. "Apart from the inherent interest of its long and immensely rich cultural, literary and religious history, today South Asia is also a central player in the fast-paced globalization of international affairs and as such must be taken into full account."
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