Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature 0226900533, 9780226900537

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Women in Culture and Society A series edited by Catharine R. Stimpson

CHARMING CADAVE S --~-HORRIFIC FIGURATIONS OF THE FEMININE IN INDIAN BUDDHIST HAGIOGRAPHIC LITERATURE

Liz Wilson

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

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Foreword, by Catharine R. Stimpson Preface Note on Terminology

Liz Wilson is assistant professor of religion at Miami University (Ohio).

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London ©1996 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1996 Printed in the United States of America OS 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 1 2 3 4 5

Introduction Encountering Death 1 Object Lessons 3 Was the Buddha a Feminist? 5 Seeing Through the Gendered "I"

ISBN: 0-226-90053-3 (cloth) 0-226-90054-1 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilson, Liz. Charming cadavers : horrific figurations of the feminine in Indian Buddhist hagiographic literature I Liz Wilson. p. em.- (Women in culture and society) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Woman (Buddhism) 2. Women in Buddhism. I. Title. II. Series. BQ4570.W6W55 1996 294.3'378344-dc20

Contents

95-52000 CIP

€3 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39 .48-1984.

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Celibacy and the Social World Shock Therapy 15 Horrific Figurations of the Feminine 17 Celibacy in the Life of the Sangha 19 Early Records of the Celibate Life 20 Sex and the Social World 24 Householder's Hell 27 The Buddha as a Family Man 29 Father Knows Best 32 Mara and His Minions versus the Sons and Daughters of the Buddha 33 Who's Mraid of Mara's Daughters? 37

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"Like a Boil with Nine Openings": Buddhist Constructions of the Body and Their South Asian Milieu 41 The Ambiguous Status of Cremation-Ground Meditation 41 Aversion and Liberation 43 Ways to Discern the Body's Foulness 46

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Anatomy and Impurity in Brahminical Thought 48 A Brahminicized Buddhism? 50 Desire and Loathing Strangely Mixed 57 Bliss and Bondage in the Harem 63 Samsiira as a Mantrap 70 Marooned on Vampire Island 71 False Advertising Exposed: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Pili Hagiography 77 Horrific Transformations in Bedroom Settings 77 Horrific Transformations Set in Cremation Grounds 82 Cremation as Horrific Transformation 90 The D}lplicity of the Female Body 93 Punishment as Horrific Transformation 95 Horrific Figurations of the Masculine? 105 Womanly Wiles and the Cunning of the Buddha 109 4

Lead Us Now into Temptation: Countering Samsaric Duplicity with Dharmic Deceptions 111 Salvation for Sick Minds 111 Do the Buddhas Lie? 115 Salvific Stratagems 117 Illusions That Bespeak Reality 122 The Womanly Wiles of the Buddhas 124 Outfoxing the Great Deceiver: The Binding of Mara with Magic 126 "He Who Feeds on Death That Feeds on Men Possesses Life" 130 Not a Magician but an X-Ray Technician 136

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Seeing Through the Gendered "I": The Nun's Story 141 Separate but Equal Paths? 141

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Ordination as Subordination: The Status of Women in the Sangha 143 Women's Ordination as a Process of Mortification 148 Female Phantasms as Aids to Women's SelfObjectification 157 Making a Spectacle of Oneself: Self-Denigrating and Self-Disfiguring Practices in the Life of the Bhikkhuni Sangha 164 The Heroics of Virginity 169 The Heroics of Virginity versus the Heroics of Pedagogy 174 Conclusion Appendix: The Post-Asokan Milieu Notes Selected Bibliography Index

181 185 195 245

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Foreword "This book," Liz Wilson writes of Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations if the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature, "is my attempt to describe what I find so repugnant about making women into [revolting] things ... , things to be looked at rather than persons with whom to converse" (p. xiv).

Writing for both general and scholarly audiences, Wilson has succeeded brilliantly, pungently, and engrossingly in her effort. The specific "horrific figurations of the feminine" that she anatomizes appear in exemplary narratives of the Buddha and Buddhist saints, the "awakened ones." Although composed over a millennium ago in India and Buddhist South Asia (about ten to twelve centuries after the time of the Buddha), these stories still circulate in the Buddhist world. They are a vital part of a pan-Buddhist, global religious and literary genre. They have some parallels to Christian hagiographies. Both genres, for example, feature women who mutilate themselves in order to deter sexual assault and rape. However, the Buddhist narratives have their unique themes and functions. One of the functions is to dramatize and encourage a key Buddhist practice-that of contemplating the foulness of the body as a means of cultivating celibacy and detachment from the social world. Wilson argues that narratives dramatizing this practice are enmeshed in gender. In them, women represent transience and death. They personifY the corrupt, corrupting social order that seekers of liberation must renounce. The more revolting the women seem to be, the more revolting the social order that is metaphorically linked to them becomes. To be sure, some women are lovely without, but even the loveliest are vile,

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foul, and putref)ring within. They reek of impermanence, disease, suffering, and sexual folly, be the aim of sexuality the production of heirs or the gratification of lust. To see through the specious charms of women is to achieve insight into the essence of the human predicament. Freedom from the yearning for sensual gratification and from suffering and death are possible for those who learn to see all women as walking corpses. Many hagiographies feature the Buddha or male meditators who move from being an eye that observes women to an enlightened "I" that abjures them. Women play a subordinate role in these tales, serving mainly as mute, anonymous objects of the male gaze. When a woman is the subject of the story, the narrative strategy blocks her from attaining authentic subjectivity. Adapting the insights of feminist film theory into how female spectators adopt the "male gaze," Wilson argues that Buddhist hagiographies showcase female subjects who have learned to imitate male conventions oflooking. Such women internalize the male gaze through the instructions of male teachers, learning to see themselves as objects. Wilson clearly respects the grand achievements of Buddhism. Respect, however, is no bar to pointed questions. Often witty and ironic, this student of hagiography is no hagiographer. What, she wonders, determines which characters are permitted agency, consciousness, and speech? Why are they more often male than female? Why are women conscious, not of themselves as agents, but of men's consciousness to them? Not surprisingly, given her boldness, learning, and intellectual energy, Wilson has entered the debate, now a century old, about women and Buddhism. Has Buddhism, in all its complexity, with all its developments, helped to liberate women? To oppress them? Or both? Wilson suggests that a broad cross-section of Buddhist literature "encourages men to see women (and women to see themselves) through the gendered 'I' of a subject position that is clearly marked as masculine" (p. 193). Even the achievements of the celebrated Buddhist nuns whom she studies are minimized not only by their institutional subordination but by the literary conventions through which their words and deeds have been represented. Given her conclusions, it is hard for Wilson to support a conventional history of Indian Buddhism that emphasizes a gradual decline in "androcentric thinking" in the millennium after the

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death of the Buddha and "a gradual movement from gender-based discrimination to a mode of apprehension in which gender becomes irrelevant" (p. 193). Charming Cadavers has life and dash. I encourage thoughtful people to converse with it now. Catharine R. Stimpson

Preface

This book may not be suitable for younger or more sensitive readers. It may shock you, and if it does, it will have its intended effect. Spread out before you in the pages that follow are graphic literary images of dead and dying women-images created by Buddhist authors to teach stark lessons about the nature of the body and the folly of lust. I find these images revolting, just as their authors intended. But there is, in my revulsion, a feminist dimension beyond what those who composed these grisly stories may have intended me to feel. I can recall very vividly the day about five years ago when I read in a commentary on the Dhammapada (an immensely popular compendium of the Buddhist path) a disturbing story that made me begin to call myself a feminist. This tale that woke me from my prefeminist slumber was a description of a man named Yas a whose life story mirrors that of the Buddhas ("awakened ones"): he was born to wealth, luxury, and sensual pleasure but, at a decisive watershed moment in his life, gave it all up. Yasa literally ran away from home one night when he saw that he could no longer enjoy himself in the women's apartments of his palatial home. The lassitude he saw in the bodies of women asleep in the harem disgusted him; the harem suddenly seemed like a charnel field strewn with bodies frozen in rigor mortis. Yasa, as it turns out, saw the women of his harem in this way because of his past-life conditioning: in a previous life he had recoiled in horror while cremating a pregnant woman's dead body. This man's story disturbed me, when I first read it. I did not know why it bothered me so much; I only knew that there was something creepy

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it that called for further attention. Soon I found that Yasa's story was m. no way an aberration. It was rather typical, in fact, of a genre of stones composed ten to twelve centuries after the time of the Buddha that reproduce in literary form the experience of Buddhist meditators who achieve liberation through the contemplation of revolting things. My disgust at reading Yasa's story differed from the disgust that set Yasa free from his delusional attachment to a life of luxury because it was mediated through my growing awareness that all the revolting thi~gs I ha~ encountered in my perusal of this genre were female things. This book IS my attempt to describe what I find so repugnant about making women into things of this sort, things to be looked at rather than persons with whom to converse. My work poses questions that have rarely been asked of Buddhist literature, questions like: • In representing people as objects of meditation, in what ways do Buddhist authors endow these representations with subjectivity? • Are the people thus represented depicted as conscious agents with access to speech? • Are they constituted as subjects who think, act, and speak only under certain conditions (and what are those conditions)? • If their consciousness is, as Sartre would say, consciousness of themselves as perceived by others, will their voices and their actions also be c?nstrained by this awareness of self-as-constituted-by-other? What kind of agency results from this derivative form of subjectivity? I have written this book for the general reader, and with that audience in mind I have tried to let the stories I tell speak for themselves as much as possible. There is, of course, an editorial overvoice that is mine, j~st as there are editorial overvoices that have shaped the particular verswns of the stories I tell in this book. But I have taken care to delegate quotations from the original languages of my sources, technical discussions, and surveys of scholarly literature to notes at the end of the .te~t. I have also delegated material on the dating and sectarian affihatwns of my sources and their place within the history of Indian Buddhism to an appendix. Manr people helped me with the difficult task of shaping this book so that it would speak to both scholars and nonscholars. Special thanks go to