Dragon-Girl, Maidenflower, Buddha: The Transformation of a Waka Topos, "The Five Obstructions"

Kamens, Edward

doi:10.2307/2719454

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Quite common is the list of the Lotus Sūtra (T 262 35c10-11, as at Majjhimanikāya III 65-6) that says that one who is currently female cannot be a: 1) Brahmā, 2) Śakra devendra, 3) Māra, 4) Cakravartin Sovereign of the world, 5) Buddha. For further details, see Kamens 1993, 394-440. 31.…”

Section: A the Authenticity Of The Gurudharmasmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gurudharmas in Buddhist Nunneries of Mainland China

Chiu¹,

Heirman²

2015

BSRV

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According to tradition, when the Buddha's aunt and stepmother Mahaprajapati was allowed to join the Buddhist monastic community, she accepted eight 'fundamental rules' (gurudharmas) that made the nuns' order dependent upon the monks' order. This story has given rise to much debate, in the past as well as in the present, and this is no less the case in Mainland China, where nunneries have started to re-emerge in recent decades. This article first presents new insight into Mainland Chinese monastic practitioners' common perspectives and voices regarding the gurudharmas, which are rarely touched upon in scholarly work. Next, each of the rules is discussed in detail, allowing us to analyse various issues, until now understudied, regarding the applicability of the gurudharmas in Mainland Chinese contexts. This research thus provides a detailed overview of nuns' perceptions of how traditional vinaya rules and procedures can be applied in contemporary Mainland Chinese monastic communities based on a cross-regional empirical study

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Section: A the Authenticity Of The Gurudharmasmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gurudharmas in Buddhist Nunneries of Mainland China

Chiu¹,

Heirman²

2015

BSRV

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Rethinking the politics of gender and agency: an encounter with the ‘otherness’ of medieval Japan

Pandey

2018

Japan Forum

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This article engages with recent debates within feminism itself to rethink women, gender, body, and agency as conceptual categories for reading medieval Japanese literary/Buddhist texts. It questions the unreflexive transposition of contemporary understandings of concepts to the past, on the grounds that this produces anachronistic readings of the worlds we seek to understand. It argues that in medieval Japanese texts gender did not function as a 'social' category posited against the 'natural' fact of sex, and that gender was a kind of script and that it was the specificity of the gendered performance, rather than the sexual attributes and reproductive functions of the body, that gave substance to the categories 'male' and 'female.' The article also offers a critique of contemporary uses of the term agency in analyses of women and Buddhism in medieval Japan, arguing that agency here is defined as something possessed by autonomous individuals with free will, whose natural inclination is to strive to resist against the oppressive conditions of their lives. This modern liberal conception of agency, which is secular in nature, grants agency to humans alone. This anthropocentric view of the world necessitates the evisceration of the agency of gods, buddhas, dreams and material objects, all of whom are central actors in the cosmological/social world of medieval Japan. Rethinking the politics of gender and agency: an encounter with the 'otherness' of medieval Japan The last few decades have seen a veritable explosion of academic writings that seek to analyze how gender and power operated in the historical, religious, and literary texts of medieval Japan. Scholars have become increasingly attentive to the workings of power and politics, and to the ideological underpinnings of even the most refined of courtly narratives and poetic compositions. Gender is a category that allows for an analysis of how one comes to occupy one's place in the social world as a man and woman. However, it is woman, the unprivileged and marked term of the man-woman binary that, for the most part, has taken centre-stage in research on gender in medieval Japan. Scholars have sought to reveal how the sex/gender system operated in the production of knowledge across a wide range of disciplines, and how it privileged the lives and activities of men, and systematically neglected or denigrated women and their roles in society. Medieval Japanese Studies, for the most part, has taken its cue from the work undertaken by sixties and seventies feminism, making its primary task the reinstatement of women into the historical, religious and literary narratives from which they have been written out, and in so doing radically questioning the androcentric biases of scholarly writings in the field. A four-2 volume collection published in Japanese in 1989, under the title Shîrizu: josei to bukkyô (Women and Buddhism Series) and an edited volume in English, entitled Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan, which followed in 2002, for example, heralded...

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Animals in Japanese Buddhism: The Third Path of Existence

Ambros

2014

Religion Compass

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Buddhism is often romanticized for promoting great kindness toward nonhuman animals, but while the tradition grants animals a degree of subjecthood and does not categorically deny them reason, morality, or the potential for salvation, there are also ambiguities and contradictions, even outright anthropocentrism. This overview of recent research on animals in premodern Japanese Buddhism demonstrates that animals shared with humans their status as sentient, living beings and were often attributed with superhuman, if not divine, powers; and yet as beasts, they also had a subhuman status. Because of their simultaneous kinship with and persistent otherness from humans, nonhuman animals were anthropomorphized for didactic purposes, delineating unwholesome and meritorious human conduct and its karmic effects and expressing tensions between competing ritual and religious systems. As spiritually hindered and potentially volatile beings, animals received ritual attention, but the objectives of such rituals often did not consist of bettering the lives of animals in the here and now. Instead, these rituals were often motivated by propitiatory and soteriological concerns and sometimes even served to condone violence against animals despite the persistent antisacrificial rhetoric in Buddhist discourse.

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Dragon-Girl, Maidenflower, Buddha: The Transformation of a Waka Topos, "The Five Obstructions"

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

The Gurudharmas in Buddhist Nunneries of Mainland China

The Gurudharmas in Buddhist Nunneries of Mainland China

Rethinking the politics of gender and agency: an encounter with the ‘otherness’ of medieval Japan

Animals in Japanese Buddhism: The Third Path of Existence

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