Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Religions of Indic & Oriental origin > Buddhism
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Birth in Buddhism - The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R4,143
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Birth in Buddhism - The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom (Hardcover)
Series: Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Recent decades have seen a groundswell in the Buddhist world, a
transnational agitation for better opportunities for Buddhist
women. Many of the main players in the transnational nuns movement
self-identify as feminists but other participants in this movement
may not know or use the language of feminism. In fact, many
ordained Buddhist women say they seek higher ordination so that
they might be better Buddhist practitioners, not for the sake of
gender equality. Eschewing the backward projection of secular
liberal feminist categories, this book describes the basic features
of the Buddhist discourse of the female body, held more or less in
common across sectarian lines, and still pertinent to ordained
Buddhist women today. 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, by undermining the religious importance
of female fertility, 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. Offering a
new critical perspective on the issues of gender, bodies and
suffering, this book will be of interest to an interdisciplinary
audience, including researchers in the field of Buddhism, South
Asian history and religion, gender and religion, theory and method
in the study of religion, and Buddhist medicine.
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