Birth in Buddhism ― The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom

Recent decades have seen a groundswell in the Buddhist world, a transnational agitation for better opportunities for Buddhist women.

This book describes the basic features of the Buddhist discourse of the female body, held more or less in common across sectarian lines. The textual focus of the study is an early-first-millennium Sanskrit Buddhist work,"Descent into the Womb scripture" or Garbhavakranti-sutra. Drawing out the implications of this text, the author offers innovative arguments about the significance of childbirth and fertility in Buddhism, namely that birth is a master metaphor in Indian Buddhism; that Buddhist gender constructions are centrally shaped by Buddhist birth discourse; and that, surprisingly, the Buddhist construction of an inauspicious, chronically impure, and disgusting femininity constituted a portal to a new "liberated" feminine life for Buddhist monastic women. Thus, this study of the Buddhist discourse of birth is also a genealogy of gender in middle period Indian Buddhism.

This book will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience, including reserachers in the field of Buddhism, South Asian history and religion, gender and religion, theory and method in the study of religion, and Buddhist medicine.

Amy Paris Langenberg is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Eckerd College, US.