Transforming the Female Body: Gender Dialectics in Early Buddhism

Introduction

Scholars have long debated gender relations and the ‘position’ of women in Buddhism, in terms of the social spaces and gendered attitudes revealed by texts and traditions. In the opinion of some, Buddhism in its essence does not discriminate between male and female forms. It is the cultural baggage of the practitioners that has led to discriminatory behaviour based on the body. But others have questioned this understanding as being too simplistic and essentializing. They have argued for the need to go beyond what the Buddha said, and to interrogate the practices of the followers who came thereafter, as well as the institutional structure and its transformation in the first and early second millennium ce. In this view, what constituted the essence of Buddhism changed with time—with its practitioners, their beliefs and their practices—and these changes were reflected in their understanding of gender relations, and particularly in the role that women were seen to play in society. An in-depth study of the relationship between women and religious/spiritual life can lead to a better understanding of Indian society and culture in general. With scholars such as Caroline Rhys Davids and Mabel Bode, the textual study of gender relations within Early Indian Buddhism began in the late nineteenth century. Since then, a range of scholars have contributed to this field such as Alan Sponberg, Jose Ignacio Cabezon, Rita M. Gross, Diana Paul, Serenity Young, Elisabeth Anne Benard and Miranda Shaw, to name just a few. While the earliest scholars such as Rhys Davids and I. B. Honer ¹ posited the Buddha as being pro-women, as is reflected by his acceptance of a women’s order, later scholars have gone into more nuanced questions. Many still continue with this approach and try to locate passages against women into the genealogy of later developments. Recently, scholars like Reiko Ohnuma have challenged this view and questioned the motives behind the Buddha’s acceptance of the nun’s order, discussed later in the article. ² Most of the scholars such as B. C. Law, Nancy Falk and Arvind Sharma, till the 1980s, primarily focused on the Pālī literature and early Buddhism. ³ From the 1980s onwards, the interest in the other forms of Buddhism also started to emerge along with a more nuanced study of early Buddhism. Remarkable contributions to the study of Mahāyāna and later forms of Buddhism emerged in the form of Diana Y. Paul’s Women in Buddhism (1985), Rita M. Gross’s Buddhism after Patriarchy (1993), Alan Sponberg’s Attitudes to Women in Early Buddhism (1992), Miranda Shaw’s Passionate Enlightenment (1994) and Liz Wilson’s Charming Cadavers (1996). Each of these works has contributed to making the ‘Buddhism and gender’ debate more nuanced and has brought out not only previously ignored texts but also newer perspectives to look at them. Rita Gross undertook a wide survey of the Buddhist literature from Early Buddhism to Mahāyāna as well as Vajrayāna Buddhism. She analysed texts and concepts to show how the ideas around women have been constructed and what kind of agency had been accorded to them. Miranda Shaw shifted the focus towards Tantric Buddhism and examined the role of women using textual sources. She argued for a greater role accorded to women among the Tantric Buddhists in the absence of any institutionalized structure, and emphasized women’s roles as teachers. On the other hand, Liz Wilson used the hagiographic literature from Early Buddhism to argue for the very limited agency given to women. As suggested by the title of her book itself, she argues that the dead bodies of women were used by male practitioners to meditate upon, and the primary concern in all the discussions is the male subject. The contradictory results of these scholars can be understood by using Alan Sponberg’s four-fold taxonomy of Buddhist literature. These were soteriological inclusiveness, institutional androcentrism, ascetic misogyny and soteriological androgyny. He argues that these contradictory ideas are not just simple cases of inconsistency, but that they represent the concerns and voices of different groups within the monastic order. ⁴ This multivocal character of Buddhist scriptures shows us the internal tensions and disputes as well as the diverse social locations of readers and hearers. Sponberg’s taxonomy also has its problems, for as Alice Collett argues, while institutional androcentrism is evident in the male-centred monastic texts, it must be acknowledged alongside the fact of the establishment of a nuns’ order. ⁵ Hence, it cannot be taken as a category without complications.

Continuing the line of arguments of these scholars, many more works have enriched the debate in the twenty-first century as well, but in most of these works, the emphasis is only on some specific texts. Buddhist texts, especially those from the Mahāyāna tradition, reveal a variety of discourses around the question of gender relations, and particularly about the female body, which provides a window to closely examine these issues. Unfortunately, the Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtras, composed and compiled between first and seventh century ce, have received very little attention among the scholars of Mahāyāna Buddhism. These Sūtras provide us with a unique position on the female body and its capacity. A very unique narrative device of ‘sex transformation’ emerges in many of these Sūtras, and it gives us a framework for a very nuanced debate not only about the female body but about the nature of the human body itself and the role of gender. Nancy Schuster attempted to analyse these Sūtras in her work, ‘Changing the Female Body: Wise Women and the Bodhisattva Career in Some Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtras’, published in 1981. Since then, until now, Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtras still remain largely ignored. On the theme of ‘sex transformation’, Serinity Young has traced a Pāli legend of nun Uppalavaṇṇa in her work ‘Female Mutability and Male Anxiety in an Early Buddhist Legend’. This legend so far represents the earliest instance of ‘sex transformation’. The earliest forms of this legend are found in the oral tradition, and it appears to have acquired a written form only after the fourth century ce. Hence, it is very difficult to trace the proper evolution of this legend and its implications. ⁶

Any study of Mahāyāna literature needs to take some qualifications into account. First, the absence of a precise historical context for the development of Mahāyāna Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent. Most of the texts used to study it have not come to us directly from the early Indian context but via a very convoluted journey. The Sanskrit versions of most of these texts are not extant, and what we have are the later-date translations of these texts into Chinese and Tibetan languages. The translations into these languages must have had their contexts, separate from the context of the ‘original’ texts, and now we can only access these texts via the later-date translations, which adds another layer of distance. Understandably, the social location of the writers and readers of these texts has been extremely varied and, subsequently, the influences of these texts in creating and upholding gender norms and related ideas also vary. In most of the cases, the compilers/writers of these texts appear to be men who seem to be very anxious about the human body, particularly of the female body. ⁷ Second, most of these texts are didactic texts as opposed to the ritual compendiums of later-day Tibetan Buddhism, which implies that we cannot establish a direct correlation between the gender imagery presented in these texts and the lives of women of varied social locations. Hence, it is very important to note the relationship between textual tradition and Buddhist practices. It would be unwise to take the texts at their face value. On the basis of inscriptional data, Gregory Schopen has shown the variation between the textual tradition and practices of Buddhist monks and nuns in his study of ‘The Stupa Cult’ ⁸ and ‘The Image Cult’. ⁹ While the textual tradition tends to portray female practitioners in a lesser light, Schopen has shown that they (at least, some of them) positively had access to private wealth, gave donations and, particularly, contributed to the emergence of the cult of the image within Buddhism that, to say the least, gave a new direction and method of practising Buddhism. ¹⁰ Finally, within the early evolution of Buddhism in early historic North India itself, we can see a very clear debate taking place among the practitioners about women’s potential for enlightenment and, consequently, about their position in the monastic order and the influence of their presence on the male renunciates. In different sources, we find different opinions being discussed. Traces of resistance to the traditional attitude about women are also visible from very early on. Here, it is important to distinguish two kinds of voices: one of the male monks in favour of women practitioners; and the second of women themselves, resisting and recording their own experiences. Another kind of limitation is the indirect access to the primary texts. The modern translations of these texts that we tend to rely on are not without fault. In many cases, the sociopolitical implications of a text either would be lost in translation or would be interpreted from a biased perspective of the translator. As Robert Goldman has argued, in most of the translations, Indologists, whether in the East or West, appear to have imbibed much of the ideology of ahistoricism and do not contribute to a penetrating analysis of gender and power relations in the social history of India. ¹¹ Many times, translations are done keeping certain agendas in mind, which has led people to misinterpret or misrepresent certain sections. Another problem of translation is understanding and translating the context of the primary text. The composition of any text has its own historically specific ideological and cultural values and practices that it is not only representing but also conversing with. Literary works, particularly narratives works, are representations of the shared knowledge between the teller and the audience. Given the distance between the texts and their modern translators, it is inevitable that some of the implied meanings and inferences will remain indeterminate to us. In any case, these texts, more often than not, tend to articulate the worldview of a dominant, literate elite (spiritual) along with their modern translators. They cannot be taken as the views of society at large. For a wholesome understanding, a comparative study of the textual tradition along with inscriptional and archaeological data is required. Here, I will restrict myself to looking only at the textual tradition and developments within it, rather than proffer a broader view of historical contexts. In this article, I will examine the Mahāyāna view of the corporeal body and gendered imagery, specifically looking at the phenomenon of ‘sex transformation’ as it evolved in the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras ¹² and Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtras. These two categories of texts have been looked at together to develop a contextual understanding of the philosophy and narratives being presented. The composition of Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras extends over 1,000 years. Conze divides the development of these Sūtras into four stages: the elaboration of the basic texts (c. 100 bce–100 ce); expansion of the basic texts (c. 100–300 ce); the restatement of the doctrine in short Sūtras and commentaries (300–500 ce); and, lastly, the period of tantric influence (600–1200 ce). ¹³ Among the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras, Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, ¹⁴ Daśasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, ¹⁵ Hṛdaya Sūtra, ¹⁶ and Vajracchedika Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, ¹⁷ along with a commentarial text, Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa, ¹⁸ have been used. Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra and Daśasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra belong to the first two phases (c. first century bce to third century ce) where the basic tenants of Prajñāpāramitā philosophy have been formulated. Hṛdaya Sūtra, Vajracchedika Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra and Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa belong to the third stage of development where the basic ideas were compiled in shorter versions. As I am looking at the contemporaneous development of gender ideas in Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras and Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtras, I have not taken any text from the last category, that is, the period of Tantric influence.

Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtra is a large collection of forty-nine works; originally composed in the Indian subcontinent but later transmitted to Tibet and China where their further translation and evolution took place. The Sanskrit versions of only five of these texts have survived, but the whole collection is a part of both the Chinese Tripiṭaka and the Tibetan Kangyur. The collection in the present Chinese form was translated under the T’ang dynasty by the monk Bodhiruci who arrived in China in 693 ce. The final compilation of the collection was completed by 713 ce which includes the earlier translations of a few texts as well as those translated by Bodhiruci himself. ¹⁹ The composition of some of the texts seem to have taken place as early as first–second century ce. Lokakṣema translated Kāśyapaparivarta into Chinese between c. 147 and 186 ce, which indicates an earlier existence of at least some of the texts that were later included in the Ratnakūṭa collection. Hence, between second century ce and early eighth century ce, all the texts of this collection were compiled. The reason for compiling all these texts into a single collection is still not very clear and requires a more contextual study of all the texts in the collection. From the Mahāratnakūṭasūtra collection, Āryasamantamukha Parivartanāmasūtra, ²⁰ Maitreya Paripṛcchā, ²¹ Sukhāvaṭīvyūha Sūtra, ²² Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra, ²³ Dharmadhātuprakṛtyasambhedanirdeśa ²⁴ and Dārikāvimalaśraddhāparipṛcchā ²⁵ have been looked at here. This article will also try to locate these stories in the broader context of the evolution of Mahāyāna Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent.

Gender in Early Buddhism

Different attitudes towards women’s participation and capabilities can be seen within the canonical literature itself.

From the earliest references, especially the Therigāthā, ²⁶ it is clear that even in the early years of Buddhism, there were two contrary opinions about women’s spiritual quest: that there was nothing that could stop women from practising Buddhism and achieving enlightenment, and that there are some inherent problems with women that obstructed their attainment of enlightenment. ²⁷ Rather than a chronological scale of different attitudes towards women, it is a co-existence of multiple views. Multivocality on this issue in Buddhism cannot be understood as a chronological development, but it was simultaneous. Further, any new text within the tradition needs to be linked to the existing traditions, although as has been pointed out earlier this becomes quite challenging due to issues related to transmission and translation, as in the case of the Mahāyāna literature. In this context, I would confine myself to examining the available Mahāyāna textual narratives, their contexts and the possible ways in which a gendered Buddhist view permeates the understanding of the female body in particular and compares with the earlier Theravāda understanding.

The story of this complexity starts with the Buddha’s acceptance of women’s potential for enlightenment and, yet a very reluctant approval for Mahāprajāpatī to join the saṃgha, underscored by an additional code of conduct for nuns. ²⁸ This is the moment when Buddha as well as Buddhism, for the first time, encounters the ‘issue’. The Buddha gives eight additional rules of conduct for nuns: ²⁹

A nun who has been ordained for a century must do proper homage to a monk ordained but that day. This rule is never to be transgressed in her life.

Mahāprajāpatī readily agrees to all the conditions but raises question about one. After getting ordained, Mahāprajāpatī Gotamī makes one request to Ānanda and asks for respect based on seniority, defying one of the extra rules created for the nuns by the Buddha himself. ³⁰ She says to him,

I, honoured Ānanda, am asking one boon from the Lord: It was well, Lord, if the Lord would allow greeting, standing up for, salutation and the proper duties between monks and nuns according to seniority. ³¹

To which, Buddha replies by saying this was impossible, and then he goes on to cite the reason for it, saying,

This is impossible, Ānanda, it cannot come to pass, that the Truth-finder should allow greeting, standing up for, salutation and the proper duties between monks and nuns according to seniority. Ānanda, these followers of other sects, although liable to poor guardianship, will not carry out greeting, standing up for, salutation and proper duties towards women, so how should the Truth-finder allow greeting…and proper duties towards women? ³²

Then the Lord, on this occasion, having given a reasoned talk, addressed the monks, saying: ‘Monks, one should not carry out greeting, rising for salutation and proper duties towards women. Whoever should carry out (one of these), there is an offence of wrongdoing’. ³³

While Buddha justified the adding of this seniority rule for the nuns, it is very evident that the purpose of these rules was simply to decide the hierarchy between monks and nuns. A nun was always subjected to scrutiny from both the orders, possibly more so from the monks’ order. Despite accepting women’s soteriological potential, via these rules, the institutional hierarchy of gender was being entrenched in the Buddhist saṃgha. Furthermore, it has been argued that by placing these rules, Buddha himself provided a framework in which Buddhahood became impossible for women to achieve since they could never teach men. ³⁴ Interestingly, in some of the early Buddhist texts, we find the mention of women practitioners who became arhat or who achieved liberation. ³⁵

It is very clear that the earliest idea about women in Buddhism had at least two important aspects. On the one hand, it was acknowledged that one’s sex, just like one’s caste, presented no barrier to attaining liberation from suffering. Both caste and gender were soteriologically insignificant, and they constituted at most a distraction from the true goal of liberation. ³⁶ But at the same time, the broader precepts about gender roles were not only acknowledged but also somewhat upheld. The equality and common humanity of women and men was not the Buddha’s major perception about gender, even after his enlightenment. Differences between women and men, and the tensions that arise from their proximity seem to have been much more evident to him. ³⁷ Adelheid Herrmann-Pfandt argues that within certain limits, the order of the nuns had the right to organize and administer itself. Regarding their affairs, the nuns were to a large extent independent of the monks. ³⁸ This relative freedom found its end whenever there was an interaction between the order of the nuns and the monks. Nun’s rules, where relations between the two orders were involved, were formed according to the worldly structure of the relationship between men and women. ³⁹

For men, to take up this lifestyle was already a somewhat common, if not always appreciated, option by the Buddha’s time; for women, to leave domesticity was radically unconventional. This was especially given the Brahmanical context where a women’s existence was primarily seen in the context of marriage and household, and the Buddha, it appears, was not a social reformer seeking to correct social injustices and inequities. Buddhism was not a socially revolutionary movement seeking to create a reformed society, but a path of individual self-removal from conventional society. Overcoming androcentric consciousness and patriarchal gender arrangements were not his concern; ⁴⁰ nevertheless, we should not underwrite the revolutionary breakthrough that even this more limited notion of inclusiveness represented at that time.

This particular moment has been celebrated among modern scholars as an acknowledgement of equality. Reiko Ohnuma draws our attention to the convoluted manner of this acceptance of the nun’s saṃgha. ⁴¹ In Ānanda’s request to let Mahāprajāpatī become a nun; he presented two arguments. First, he argued for women’s ability to attain enlightenment, and second, he argued for the debt that Buddha owed to Mahāprajāpatī for nurturing him after the death of his mother. ⁴² Ohnuma traces the evolution of the ‘debt to the mother’ argument in the various versions of the Mahāprajāpatī ordination story found in multiple Pālī Vinaya literature, suggesting the strengthening of this argument in the later literature instead of an acceptance of the idea of ‘women’s capability’. ⁴³ With this study, she brings our attention to the scholarly blind spot created by overlooking this aspect of Ānanda’s argument and only focusing on the ‘women’s capability’ aspect of the story. She concludes that instead of the equal capabilities of men and women, it was the debt owed by Buddha that was repaid by letting Mahāprajāpatī receive ordination, and this debt and repayment calculation should also be emphasized to understand the formation of the women’s saṃgha. If we consider her arguments, this puts the Buddha’s belief in women’s enlightenment capacity under scrutiny. This gets further substantiated by the presence of varying attitudes towards the question in the early Pālī literature itself. The role of the evolution of Buddhism as an institutionalized religion must be considered. This story in its full-fledged form is found in the Cullavagga, part of the Vinaya Piṭaka, which was composed years after the Buddha’s time and, hence, should be read as representing the voices of the monks of the later order rather than the Buddha’s views per se. By this time, Buddhism had become an institutionalized religion, which seems to have given birth to a perceived threat to the integrity of the monastic institution as it existed within the broader social community due to the presence of female renunciates. The extra rules for nuns are very clearly the attempt to keep female renunciates within a very carefully regulated institutional structure that preserved and reinforced the conventionally accepted social standards of male authority and female subordination. ⁴⁴

Over time, among different sects and from various texts, we get to see some of these approaches to women’s enlightenment by following the Buddhist path getting solidified. For example, with greater institutionalization of the order, the anxieties over the proximity of men and women also got institutionalized. In the Aṅguttara Nikāya, ⁴⁵ a text that can be dated to c. fourth–third century bce, while explaining the nature of various things, Buddha says the following about the nature of women,

Mendicants, females die without getting enough of two things. What two? Sexual intercourse and giving birth. Females die without getting enough of these two things. ⁴⁶

Mendicants, there are these five drawbacks of a black snake. What five? It’s filthy, stinking, cowardly, frightening, and treacherous. These are the five dangers of a black snake. In the same way, there are five drawbacks of a female. What five? She’s filthy, stinking, cowardly, frightening, and treacherous. These are the five drawbacks of a female. ⁴⁷

Mendicants, there are these five drawbacks of a black snake. What five? It’s irritable, hostile, venomous, fork-tongued, and treacherous. These are the five dangers of a black snake. In the same way, there are five drawbacks of a female. What five? She’s irritable, hostile, venomous, fork-tongued, and treacherous. This is a female’s venom: usually, she’s very lustful. This is a female’s forked tongue: usually, she speaks divisively. This is a female’s treachery: usually, she’s an adulteress. These are the five drawbacks of a female. ⁴⁸

These verses are in stark opposition to Buddha’s acknowledgement of women’s potential for liberation from suffering in Cullavagga and elsewhere. Given the chronology of these texts and the radical difference between the earlier approach and the one in the Aṅguttara Nikāya, it is very evident that many of these views are interpolations made by the monks of later times who seemed more concerned with maintaining the monastic order within a given social order and its repute rather than focusing on liberation from suffering, that is, enlightenment. Moreover, these verses very clearly stem from a fear of the female body and fear specifically of its power to undermine male celibacy. ⁴⁹ Although, one must not forget Buddha’s remarks in Cullavagga after the admittance of Mahāprajāpati in the Saṃgha, he goes on to compare women with various diseases and says that their presence in the house (Saṃgha) makes it easy prey for the robbers. ⁵⁰ This contradiction in Buddha’s view is never explained in the text. Based on her reading of Pāli texts, Kathryn Blackstone argues that there is a general disgust and disapproval for the body, ⁵¹ but it was the female body particularly that was seen as the source of metaphysical contamination. While a nun’s sexual encounter with the male body would lead to her expulsion from the order but not metaphysical contamination, a monk’s sexual encounter with a female body would lead him to enter into asaddhamma (which is not dhamma or false dhamma) and his metaphysical contamination. ⁵² Diana Paul locates this Buddhist attitude within the mythological context that Buddhism inherited from Brahmanism in the Indian subcontinent and continues to argue that along with the context, this image of women as ‘lustful’ and ‘temptresses’ should also be seen as tenacious masculine resentment in early monastic Buddhism. ⁵³ With their concern with renunciation, withdrawal from social life and avoidance of sensual life, women (particularly, in the form of wives or lovers) were seen as the symbol for everything worldly, of saṃsāra, and, hence, as an obstacle to the goal of liberation.

Despite these attitudes, when we move beyond the realm of texts, we do find the presence of a great number of nuns and many in an influential position. Gregory Schopen undertook a study of the emergence of the cult of the image in Buddhism and examined a wide range of inscriptions found from many early monastic sites. He concluded that many of the donors of images were nuns as well as laywomen who contributed to the emergence of a new trend in Buddhism, and, hence, they could not be taken as ‘non-existent’ or ‘without agency’ as a whole. ⁵⁴ Additionally, he argued, during the period from the beginning of the common era to fourth/fifth century, the donative activities suggest that the nuns during this period had equal and sometimes more access to private wealth. Many of the Vinaya texts also seem to be suggesting that nuns had financial means just like monks, lay-brothers and lay-sisters. ⁵⁵ The presence of these narratives could be read differently as well, in his opinion. The existence of such rules and attitudes could also suggest the presence of an order of nuns that was of considerable consequence, if not an actual powerful and potentially competitive rival in the world that the compilers of these texts were trying to construct. ⁵⁶

Mahāyāna Developments

The emergence of the Mahāyāna school brought an array of changes in the practice as well as the philosophy of Buddhism. ⁵⁷ Many scholars have celebrated Mahāyāna for broadening the space for women within Buddhism and recognizing their enlightenment potential. Sponberg calls it ‘a dramatic revalorization of the feminine’, ⁵⁸ that allowed for a reassessment of the soteriological relevance not just of the feminine, in fact, but of socially defined gender characterization in general, and a re-evaluation of all those qualities and expectations culturally ascribed to males and females. ⁵⁹ The new ideal of dialectic androgyny finds its fullest expression after the sixth century ce. This aspect of gender imagery that we find in the early literature of the Mahāyāna is reflected further, in a significant shift in terminology that gradually took place within that branch of the tradition. Wisdom and compassion had always been linked in Buddhist thought, and one of the central themes of the Mahāyāna branch was the assertion that there could be no truly liberating wisdom that was not inherently compassionate. As non-dualistic androgyny began to emerge as the new ideal, the older pair of terms were supplemented, indeed virtually superseded, by an equivalent pair: wisdom (prajñā) and skilful means (upāya) ⁶⁰ —symbolisms that have been discussed extensively by scholars. ⁶¹ Jose Ignacio Cabezon argues that Tibetan texts refer to three aspects of the mother in the Mahāyāna tradition: her manifestation as the scripture, as the path and as the result (enlightenment itself). ⁶² Here, prajñā (wisdom) and upāya (means) are compared with mother and father, and it is argued that just as the mother is one of the principal causes of a child, so too wisdom is one of the two chief causes of enlightenment. The other is, of course, the method, which has been compared with the father, and further, it is argued that while only a mother can carry a child, in the end, it is the father by whom the lineage of the child is decided. In the same way, prajñā can take us in any direction, but we cannot achieve enlightenment until the right means (upāya) have been applied. If we consider this metaphor, we cannot overlook that at the root of the metaphor is an implicit assumption that demeans the status of women, namely, that the lineage of children is not determined through their mothers, and that a child’s descent depends on the father. ⁶³

The questions of feminine representation in religious imagery of later Buddhists, particularly of the Mahāyāna tradition, have been discussed in relation to the status of women and also the general notion of gender and culturally constructed concepts of masculinity and femininity. All the scholars studying these aspects identify gender and sexuality as variables and not as something static.

Diana Paul, like Sponberg whose views have been discussed earlier, tries to argue against the generalization about the egalitarian status of women in the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition. In her study, she largely deals with the Mahāyāna literature from India and China, composed and translated between the second century bce and the sixth/seventh century ce. She looks at two contrasting images of women in the literature. On the one hand, women were regarded as a potential and actual danger to men’s welfare, and on the other hand, they were also seen as creative, nurturing and supportive. The author pays special attention to the sexual ambiguity that can be seen in all the major Mahāyāna texts. Sexual ambiguity reflects the idea that one is neither male nor female or, conversely, that one is both male and female. The Sūtras refer to this as sexual transformation, that is, the capacity to transcend differences based upon sexual and gender distinctions by somehow becoming the other sex. Shaw argues that the literature portrays women as capable of achieving enlightenment in two ways. The first is by waiting for another life and the second, in the meantime, praying to be born as a male in their next birth. Some other texts do not ask women to wait for another lifetime but give them the option of achieving Bodhisattvahood in this lifetime only. But even in that case, women must change their sexuality and become male ‘mentally’. According to this philosophy, sexuality is not only the biological state of a person but also the mental state. So, while physically she would still be a woman, mentally she must become a man to achieve Bodhisattvahood. ⁶⁴

Conclusion

Among early Mahāyāna texts, we can very clearly mark two different questions regarding women. The first can be read as anxieties about sexuality. In many texts, the biggest flaw of a female body is its ‘sexual character’, which can lead the male monks to deviate from the doctrine of emptiness. The second question is about the ability of a female body to achieve Buddhahood. The first question emerges in very indirect ways in the Pālī Vinaya literature, and it can be seen in the attempt to degrade or remove the female body itself from the physical as well as philosophical spaces. On the other hand, the second question, as we have seen, has been very explicitly and extensively dealt with in the early Mahāyāna literature, especially in the Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtras and Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras. With the narrative of ‘sex transformation’ in the Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtras as well as in other works, the debate got more intensified. Each of the instances of ‘sex transformation’ also carried a long debate about the emptiness of the body before the transition, and this transition was always accomplished to demonstrate the power of the female practitioner and the insignificance of bodily associations to the person who had initially objected. The notion of sexual transformation in itself carried a sense of misogyny. This theme stereotypes the female body as biologically and psychologically limited in ways the male body was not, especially in the absence of any reverse sex transformation (i.e., from male to female) to show the power of the practitioner.

Apart from bringing complexity to the gender distinction and its relevance, these narratives were also creating the philosophical justification for the emergence of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The context in which these stories were being told suggests a clear attempt to demarcate, and in fact emphasize, the difference between the older Theravāda tradition and the newly emerging Mahāyāna tradition, while at the same time seeking to establish Mahāyāna as a more advanced stage of Buddhism. The position given to Ānanda or Śāriputra in these narratives sends out the message of Mahāyāna being a more complex and developed philosophy than Abhidhamma, and that even the greatest of the Abhidhamma scholars cannot understand this so easily. Nevertheless, it would be unwise to see Theravāda and Mahāyāna developments as two compartmentalized developments. The presence of Uppalavaṇṇa story in the Pālī tradition and its evolution between third bce and sixth ce, the period of composition of Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtras, points towards a more fluid and interacting presence, albeit a competing one, of different schools of Buddhism, which had implications for the addressing of gender issues in the tradition.