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Ties That Bind - Maternal Imagery and Discourse in Indian Buddhism (Paperback)
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Ties That Bind - Maternal Imagery and Discourse in Indian Buddhism (Paperback)
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Reiko Ohnuma offers a wide-ranging exploration of maternal imagery
and discourse in pre-modern South Asian Buddhism, drawing on
textual sources preserved in Pali and Sanskrit. She demonstrates
that Buddhism in India had a complex and ambivalent relationship
with mothers and motherhood-symbolically, affectively, and
institutionally. Symbolically, motherhood was a double-edged sword,
sometimes extolled as the most appropriate symbol for buddhahood
itself, and sometimes denigrated as the most paradigmatic
manifestation possible of attachment and suffering. On an affective
level, too, motherhood was viewed with the same ambivalence: in
Buddhist literature, warm feelings of love and gratitude for the
mother's nurturance and care frequently mingle with submerged
feelings of hostility and resentment for the unbreakable
obligations thus created, and positive images of self-sacrificing
mothers are counterbalanced by horrific depictions of mothers who
kill and devour. Institutionally, the formal definition of the
Buddhist renunciant as one who has severed all familial ties seems
to co-exist uneasily with an abundance of historical evidence
demonstrating monks' and nuns' continuing concern for their
mothers, as well as other familial entanglements. Ohnuma's study
provides critical insight into Buddhist depictions of maternal love
and maternal grief, the role played by the Buddha's own mothers,
Maya and Mahaprajapati, the use of pregnancy and gestation as
metaphors for the attainment of enlightenment, the use of
breastfeeding as a metaphor for the compassionate deeds of buddhas
and bodhisattvas, and the relationship between Buddhism and
motherhood as it actually existed in day-to-day life.
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