Table Of ContentCHARMING
Women in Culture and Society
A series edited by Catharine R. Stimpson CADAVE S
--~--
HORRIFIC FIGURATIONS OF
THE FEMININE IN INDIAN
BUDDHIST HAGIOGRAPHIC
LITERATURE
Liz Wilson
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
J Contents
Liz Wilson is assistant professor of religion at Miami University (Ohio). Foreword, by Catharine R. Stimpson 1X
Preface X111
Note on Terminology xvu
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
©1996 by The University of Chicago Introduction 1
All rights reserved. Published 1996 Encountering Death 1
Printed in the United States of America Object Lessons 3
OS 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 1 2 3 4 5 Was the Buddha a Feminist? 5
Seeing Through the Gendered "I" 12
ISBN: 0-226-90053-3 (cloth)
0-226-90054-1 (paper)
Celibacy and the Social World 15
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shock Therapy 15
Wilson, Liz. Horrific Figurations of the Feminine 17
Charming cadavers : horrific figurations of the feminine in Indian Celibacy in the Life of the Sangha 19
Buddhist hagiographic literature I Liz Wilson. Early Records of the Celibate Life 20
p. em.- (Women in culture and society)
Sex and the Social World 24
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Householder's Hell 27
1. Woman (Buddhism) 2. Women in Buddhism. I. Title.
II. Series. The Buddha as a Family Man 29
BQ4570.W6W55 1996 Father Knows Best 32
294.3'378344-dc20 95-52000 Mara and His Minions versus the Sons and
CIP Daughters of the Buddha 33
Who's Mraid of Mara's Daughters? 37
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. "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
vi CONTENTS CONTENTS Vll
Anatomy and Impurity in Brahminical Ordination as Subordination: The Status of
Thought 48 Women in the Sangha 143
A Brahminicized Buddhism? 50 Women's Ordination as a Process of
Desire and Loathing Strangely Mixed 57 Mortification 148
Bliss and Bondage in the Harem 63 Female Phantasms as Aids to Women's Self
Samsiira as a Mantrap 70 Objectification 157
Making a Spectacle of Oneself: Self-Denigrating
Marooned on Vampire Island 71
and Self-Disfiguring Practices in the Life of
the Bhikkhuni Sangha 164
False Advertising Exposed: Horrific Figurations
The Heroics of Virginity 169
of the Feminine in Pili Hagiography 77
The Heroics of Virginity versus the Heroics of
Horrific Transformations in Bedroom
Pedagogy 174
Settings 77
Horrific Transformations Set in Cremation
Conclusion 181
Grounds 82
Appendix: The Post-Asokan Milieu 185
Cremation as Horrific Transformation 90
Notes 195
The D}lplicity of the Female Body 93
Selected Bibliography 245
Punishment as Horrific Transformation 95
255
Index
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
5 Seeing Through the Gendered "I": The Nun's
Story 141
Separate but Equal Paths? 141
Foreword
"This book," Liz Wilson writes of Charming Cadavers: Horrific
if
Figurations the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Lit
erature, "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 femi
nine" 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 paral
lels 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 detach
ment from the social world. Wilson argues that narra
tives dramatizing this practice are enmeshed in gender. In
them, women represent transience and death. They person
ifY the corrupt, corrupting social order that seekers of lib
eration 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,
FOREWORD X!
X FOREWORD
death of the Buddha and "a gradual movement from gender-based dis
foul, and putref)ring within. They reek of impermanence, disease, suf
crimination to a mode of apprehension in which gender becomes irrele
fering, and sexual folly, be the aim of sexuality the production of heirs
vant" (p. 193).
or the gratification of lust. To see through the specious charms of
Charming Cadavers has life and dash. I encourage thoughtful people
women is to achieve insight into the essence of the human predicament.
to converse with it now.
Freedom from the yearning for sensual gratification and from suffering
and death are possible for those who learn to see all women as walking
Catharine R. Stimpson
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 them
selves as objects.
Wilson clearly respects the grand achievements of Buddhism. Re
spect, 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 en
ergy, Wilson has entered the debate, now a century old, about women
and Buddhism. Has Buddhism, in all its complexity, with all its devel
opments, helped to liberate women? To oppress them? Or both? Wil
son suggests that a broad cross-section of Buddhist literature "encour
ages 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
Preface
This book may not be suitable for younger or more sensi
tive 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 dimen
sion 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 im
mensely popular compendium of the Buddhist path) a dis
turbing 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 Y as a whose life story mirrors
that of the Buddhas ("awakened ones"): he was born to
wealth, luxury, and sensual pleasure but, at a decisive wa
tershed 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 pa
latial 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. Y asa, 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
PREFACE XV
XIV PREFACE
apt Indian and European parallels and reminded me at every turn of
abo~t it that called for further attention. Soon I found that Yasa's story
the wider Indo-European context in which my materials are situated.
was m. no way an aberration. It was rather typical, in fact, of a genre
Frank Reynolds helped me to see the richness of the Buddhological
of stones composed ten to twelve centuries after the time of the Buddha
tropes at work in the stories I tell here and directed the dissertation
that reproduce in literary form the experience of Buddhist meditators
out of which this book developed. David Gitomer's work on Sanskrit
who achieve liberation through the contemplation of revolting things.
literary theory and recommended readings were crucial for the framing
My disgust at reading Yasa's story differed from the disgust that set
of the project, as were Larry Sullivan's writings and class lectures at
Yasa free from his delusional attachment to a life of luxury because it
the University of Chicago Divinity School. The late loan Culianu
was mediated through my growing awareness that all the revolting
helped me to develop a feminist method for interpreting my materials.
thi~gs I ha~ encountered in my perusal of this genre were female things.
Without his mentoring and his work in the history of fashion and
This book IS my attempt to describe what I find so repugnant about
bodily adornment, I could not have written this book.
making women into things of this sort, things to be looked at rather
I am grateful to Clair Carty, Lee Horvitz, and Lisa Sommer for their
than persons with whom to converse. My work poses questions that
wisdom and friendship, to James Lynn for his help in preparing the
have rarely been asked of Buddhist literature, questions like:
manuscript for publication, and to Miami University for providing me
• In representing people as objects of meditation, in what ways do with a research appointment that enabled me to revise chapter 5.
Buddhist authors endow these representations with subjectivity? Earlier versions of portions of this book have appeared in the journal
• Are the people thus represented depicted as conscious agents with of Feminist Studies in Religion 11, no. 1 (1995): 41-80; Union Seminary
access to speech? Quarterly 48, nos. 3-4 (1994); and Religious Reflections on the Human
• Are they constituted as subjects who think, act, and speak only under Body, edited by Jane Marie Law (Indiana University Press, 1995), and
certain conditions (and what are those conditions)? are reprinted with permission.
• If their consciousness is, as Sartre would say, consciousness of them It is common for many Buddhists to dedicate any merit they may
selves as perceived by others, will their voices and their actions also be receive from ritual performances to the well-being of the dead. If there
c?nstrained by this awareness of self-as-constituted-by-other? What be any merit to what I have done here, I would like to dedicate it to
kind of agency results from this derivative form of subjectivity? my mother, Jane Wilson (1934-1990), and loan Culianu (1950-1991).
I have written this book for the general reader, and with that audi
ence 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 particu
lar 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 <?har~ie Hallis:y and Lee Siegel, who read the manuscript for
the Umversity of Chicago Press and offered crucial advice on how to
frame the project for a dual audience. Wendy Doniger plied me with
Note on Terminology
Many of the terms used in this work exist in both Pali and
Sanskrit forms. Some of these terms are best left untrans
lated because there is no satisfactory English equivalent. In
the interest of stylistic consistency and avoiding unneces
sary confusion for the nonspecialist reader, it was necessary
to choose between the Pali and the Sanskrit when using
these terms without translation. I have given preference to
the Sanskritic forms of such terms (even though this work
deals extensively with Pali texts) since many of the most
untranslatable Buddhist terms have become well known to
English speakers in their Sanskrit forms (such as the term
" m.r vana ") .
Introduction
Encountering Death
Biographies of the Buddha place a vivid realization of the
inevitability of old age and death at a crucial moment in
the life of the founder. Living the pampered life of a prince
intentionally shielded by his father from the realities oflife,
Gotama reportedly took a series of chariot rides that led
him away from the sheltered environment of the palace.
He saw during these outings a wizened old man, a sick
man panting and shaking with fever, and a dead man.
Learning from the charioteer that old age, sickness, and
death are intrinsic to the human condition, Gotama was
filled with agitation. One biography suggests that the
prince was physically overcome with faintness when he saw
the dead man and had to support himself by leaning against
the pole of the chariot in which he was riding.1
Alarmed at these signs of the inevitable decay that be
gins with birth and ends in death, the prince marveled that
people can enjoy themselves knowing the inevitability of
death. That these are the rather naive words of one who
has just had the scales fall from his eyes is clear. At some
level we all know that death is, in the words of Gerard
Manley Hopkins, "the blight man was born for," but that
hardly stops us from savoring the pleasures of life.2 In his
later career as a teacher, the Buddha recognized the extent
of human sanguineness with regard to old age and death
and found ingenious ways to impart a vivid sense of realism
and a concomitant sense of urgency to people oblivious of
the blight they were born for.
Confrontation with death and decay looms large in the
history of Buddhism.3 While acknowledgment of the fact
of death and reflection on the transformative mysteries of
2 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION 3
death figure prominently in other Indian religious traditions like Hin the false form assumed by a demonic man-eater, the outer form of
duism, Buddhism distinguishes itself among Indian traditions in the dress, ornaments, and cosmetics covering a woman's body constitutes
extent to which meditation on death and the transience of the human a false facade that is as perilous to a man as the human guise of an
condition is linked with spiritual progress.4 One of the lessons that the ogress. Failure to see through the specious charms of human women,
Buddha is said to have taught again and again in his capacity as head these cautionary tales suggest, is comparable to perishing at the hands
of the monastic order (sangha) is the utter perversity of pursuing sexual of a terrible ogress or other demonic feminine being.
gratification when the human body, in its natural state, emits substances With such a strong sense of men's vulnerability to women's charms,
as foul as those emitted by putrefYing corpses.5 That living bodies are it is not surprising that representations of the Buddha show him having
comparable to walking corpses was a lesson that Gotama learned with grave reservations about allowing women to take ordination as nuns.
his own eyes in the harem just before he renounced the world. Waking He finally did so, we are told, on the condition that women accept a
up in the women's apartments in the middle of the night, one version set of special rules that subordinate women to men within the monastic
of the Buddha's story explains, Gotama noticed the saliva dripping from assembly.7 Nuns were, for example, asked to show respect for monks
half-opened mouths and the rigor-mortis-like postures of the sleepers by bowing to them, although the only gesture of deference required of
and suddenly had a vision of the harem as a charnel field strewn with men in the sangha is that a junior monk should bow to his seniors.
corpses. This vision of beautiful women ravaged by death so agitated "Any nun," Nancy Falk explains, "no matter how long she had been
Gotama that he left home immediately to seek a path that leads beyond in the sangha, must treat any monk, even the rudest novice, as if he
birth and death. were her senior."8 Falk has argued that it is no surprise that the order
In his later career as teacher and head of the male monastic order, of nuns should have eventually disappeared from many Buddhist coun
the Buddha helped those monks troubled by sexual desire to see the tries by the end of the first millennium. Subordinated to men from the
perversity of yearning for bodies that are riddled with corruption. There beginning by special rules, women had few opportunities for leadership
were special places in ancient Indian cremation grounds where the bod within the sangha, less prestige than monks because of their circum
ies of paupers and executed criminals were left to rot; it was to those scribed leadership roles, and therefore less support from the lay com
charnel fields, Buddhist hagiographies report, that members of the early munity. When hard times came, the order of nuns was more susceptible
sangha were sent by the Buddha so that they could contemplate the to economic deprivation and eventually died out for lack of support.
foulness of the body.6 The Buddha reportedly urged his monks to visit
charnel fields in order to contemplate the various kinds of disfiguration
Object Lessons
to which rotting corpses are subject. On one occasion, when a monk
found that even in the charnel field he was troubled by lust, it is said This book argues that the subordination of women to men within Bud
that the Buddha went with that monk to the cremation ground and dhism as it developed in India and South Asia during the first millen
conjured up an attractive young female body for the man to feast his nium of the Common Era has a larger dimension that has not been
eyes upon. The Buddha then used his psychic powers to turn that allur articulated by scholars. My analysis ofliterary conventions used in Bud
ing body into a worm-infested corpse. dhist ha iographic literature shows worn:en:t~~
The Buddha reportedly told love-smitten monks cautionary tales ~~itation whose sole function in the narratives in ~
that explicitly compare attractive women to flesh-eating ogresses and t]ley appear is to lead to th~ edification of the male subjects who obserye
other demonic beings who take on human forms in order to seduce ~In a broad cross-section ofhagiograplilcTiterature, male protago
and devour men. These tales suggest that monks would do well to view nists become Arhats, or "worthy ones," through viewing dead, dying,
feminine charms as deceptive appearances covering corrupt, decay or disfigured female bodies. By viewing women as object lessons on
ridden bodies. When an ogress wants to devour a man, she presents a the folly of desire, the men in these narratives thereby achieve the state
deceptively attractive human facade that fools the unwary victim. Like of spiritual liberation that is characterized by the eradication of desire
