At the foot of Hunan Province's Hengshan Mountain, one of the Five Sacred Daoist Mountains, over 200 religious scholars from around the world convened last week for the 7th International Conference on Daoist Studies. This year's discussion focused on a single subject: the role of women in Daoism.

At the conference, scholars expressed different views on women's status according to Daoist beliefs. Themes included the history of women in Daoism, Daoist concepts portrayed by contemporary female artists, the loss and love and lust in the Daoist nunnery, and cultivating and harmonizing sexual energy in the community.

The concept of male-female harmony, or yin and yang, originated in the 6th century BCE by the Daoist scholar Laozi in his classic work Dao De Jing. The work set an important precedent for the respect of women, even though gender roles were later reinterpreted by Confucius.

In the opening speech, Lu Xichen, director of the Research Center of Religious Culture and Moral Construction at Hunan's Central South University, hailed Daoist philosophies as more balanced in regard to the sexes than those of some other mainstream religions.

"In many religions of the world, the female is always ignored or suffers from discrimination," Lu said. "But in Daoism, female [adherents] have dignity and independence."

Wu Chengzhen, the first female abbot in Daoist history, discussed gender equality in the Chinese classic Yi Ching, saying the book's teachings were "the best thing to ever happen in Chinese philosophy."

"In Yi Ching, you find the beauty of balance and the equality of [the concepts of] heaven and earth, father and mother, water and fire... You will never find any [concept] overtaking another," Wu said.

Thomas Michael of Boston University examined some of the ways in which the Zhuangzi, one of the most popular writings in the entire corpus of Chinese history and one of the foundational texts for Daoism, re-examined the place of women in terms of the cosmology of yin and yang.

"In a civilization heavily indebted to Confucian social and religious structures, the Zhuangzi smashes the status quo in which yang is set above yin and men are accorded more authority than women, and thought is valued over emotion," he said.

Robin Wang of Loyola Marymount University went further to say that the spontaneous potency of the Dao is associated with a female body. "In Dao De Jing, the female body is portrayed as a valley, the mysterious gate of life and a source of power," she said.

"This understanding of the Dao and the female body illuminates not just the importance of yin and its generative force but also designates a yin origin that is hidden, implicit or empty," Wang said.

The Hengshan conference, organized by the Hunan Province Taoist Association, was a warm-up for a larger summit scheduled for October.