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CAROL1NE. WALKER BYNUM, in her analysis of the place of the body in late medieval women's religious experience, has noted:

... we do well to begin by recognizing the essential strangeness of medieval religious experience. The recent outpouring of work on the history of the body, especially the female body, has largely equated body with sexuality and understood discipline or control of the body as the rejection of sex or of woman. We must wipe away such assumptions before we come to medieval material. Medieval images of the body have less to do with sexuality than with fertility and decay. (162)

Bynum's observation, mutatis mutandis, provides a useful stating point for an examination of the role of the body in Theravāda Buddhist practice, particularly as it relates to the issue of gender, a topic which has not yet received sufficient attention.¹

Over the past several decades, feminist scholars have brought, to light the fundamental significance of gender for uncovering previously ignored historical data, and for constructing new interpretive categories for understanding religious experience. As a flood of recent publications indicates, the category of the body constitutes an especially fruitful focus in this continuing effort to extend our understanding of religion.² The value of this category, as one element in a broader contemporary analysis of religious experience, derives from the way in which it: marks the intersection of two basic components of human experience. On the

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1 - For a recent overview of early Buddhist perspectives on women and the category of the feminine, see Sponberg. On the subject of the body in the Theravada tradition, see Collins (forthcoming).
2 - See, for example, the three-volume collection of essays in which Bynum's article, cited above, appears, Lawrence Sullivan reviews this work and other recent scholarship on the body. See also McGuire.

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one hand, the human body constitutes the locus of sensory experience and serves to define a significant, boundary between the external world and the interiority of the human person. On the other hand, it represents a category central to the social construction of the person, particularly in the signification of gender.³ As Bynum's work has demonstrated, a study of the role of the body in the religious experience of men and women in the European middle ages, when analyzed on the basis of gender, reveals that women and men experienced their bodies in markedly different ways. What also becomes quite evident in her study is the fact that medieval people thought about and experienced their bodies in ways that are profoundly alien to modern readers. Despite Bynum's striking success in rendering these medieval religious practices intelligible, some of the behavior that she has documented retains, for this reader at least, a quality of irreducible otherness.⁴

A quality of otherness attaches, as well, to the account of the Buddhist nun Subhā, the focus of the present. study, whose exemplification of the Buddhist ideal of nonattachment takes an extraordinary form: she gouges out her eyeball and offers it to a man enamored of its beauty. The account is found in verses (gāthā) that the Theravada tradition has connected with a female arahant by die name of Subhā of Jivaka's Mango Grove,⁵ a woman whom the tradition reveres as a disciple of the founder of the women's monastic order, Mahāpajāpatī, the Buddha's aunt. Subhā's verse is among 73 utterances attributed to nuns who were, according to tradition, roughly contemporaneous with the Buddha (Norman 1971 :xxviii). While her verse clearly should not be regarded as fully representing the rich complexity of the Therīgāthā collection, which is most revealing examined in relation to the collection of monks' verses (Theragāthā) it provides a useful focus for exploring attitudes toward the body and femaleness characteristic of the larger verse collection, and of the broader Theragāthā tradition.

Subhā's verse, and the Therīgāthā as a whole, must be approached cautiously as sources for reconstructing the experience of actual women in early Buddhism. It is likely that the Therīgāthā were collected over a

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3 - It should be recognized, however, that this distinction between the "personal" and the "social" is itself a cultural construction that varies significantly from one cultural milieu to another.
4 - Such actions, no doubt, signified a particular kind of otherness for the European medieval audience, as well, since such behavior served to mark the individual’s membership in the community of the saints, a group set apart by virtue of its extraordinary manifestations of holiness. On the complex relation between the perception of uniqueness and the need for social validation in sacred biography, see Keyes.
5 -There is another Subhā to whom other verses have been attributed; see Therīgāthā, vss, 338-365.

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lengthy period of lime (from the late sixth to the late third centuries BCE), and thus the connection between any particular verse and an historical woman is uncertain. Moreover, the verses were part of an oral tradition preserved and interpreted by the community of monks.⁶ Nevertheless, at least some verses have an historical connection with the early community of the Buddha, and some were in fact composed by women, even if not by the specific women to whom they have been attributed.⁷ Irrespective of the actual sex of the Therīgāthā 's composers, Theravādā tradition has regarded these verses as the historical utterances of women who gained perfect, enlightenment. The verses can therefore tell us something about the dominant tradition's understanding of the highest religious ideal to which Buddhist women could aspire.⁸

Before turning to Subhā 's verse, it might be helpful to sketch very briefly the basic options that Indian women apparently faced in the period during which the community of Buddhist nuns took shape. As Paula Richman and Michael Fisher have noted in their illuminating survey of sources for the study of women in India, the status of Indian women has been the subject of considerable controversy among scholars. Depicted by some writers as subject to utter degradation, and by others as the very embodiment of the feminine ideal, the voices of historical Indian women have seldom been heard.

Outside of the Therīgāthā, which stand quite apart in ancient Indian literature as a substantial collection of compositions attributed to women,⁹ one must turn to the voluminous body of Vedic and Hindu

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6 - The standard edition of the Therīgāthā is that of H. Oldenberg and R. Pischel. K.R. Norman's translation (1971) is very literal and reliable, even if fails to suggest the poetic character of the original Pāli, and he includes extensive notes on variant readings in the Pāli manuscripts. Quotations below follow the Pischel/Oldenherg edition, with some emendations based on Norman's notes. For a more poetic translation that includes translated portions of Dhammapāla's sixth-century CE commentary, see C.A.F. Rhys Davids (1909). The Pāli Text Society has recently issued the two translations in a single volume, entitled Poems of Early Buddhist Nuns (Davids 1989). Susan Murcott has recently published a new translation of most of the Therīgāthā, along with selections from the commentaries, which is aimed at making the verses accessible to a border contemporary audience (Murcott). On the composition of the Therīgāthā, see Norman (197l:xiv-xxxi). It is generally accepted that the Theravāda canon was first committed to writing in Sri Lanka during the first century BCE.
7 - This is the conclusion, for example, of K.R. Norman (1983: 76) and Maurice Winternitz (991.). Karen Lang argues that the nuns' verses have a distinctive character that distinguishes them from the men's verses. A recent graduate thesis by Kathryn Rennie goes well beyond Lang's analysis to argue for the female authorship of the Therīgāthā on the basis of its imagery.
8 -The Majjhima-nikāya (Trenckner 1888, I: 490) cites the Buddha to the effect that at the time of his speaking more than five hundred nuns had gained arahantship.
9 -A small number of Vedic hymns are attributed by tradition to female seers (see Rgveda 1.179;
V.28; V111.91; IX.81; X.J9, 40, 145, 159). In addition, the Brhadāranyaka Upanisad(111.6; 111.8) includes a dialogue between a female interlocutor named G ārgī V ācaknavī and the brahmin Yaj ñavalkya, this dialogue is discussed by Findly. On the whole, the early Buddhist tradition appeal's to have afforded women a wider sphere of activity than did the Brahmanic tradition, perhaps in part owing to the greatly diminished role that ritual purity plays in Buddhist religious practice.

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religious texts for insight into ancient Indian cultural models for the construction of gender. These range in character from mythological accounts to religiously sanctioned social legislation. The latter category of texts include such works as the Mānavd-dharmaśāstra and the Arthaśāstra. While these were probably composed later than the period in which the Buddhist tradition had its origins, they provide some perspective on the social norms for women in early Indian society.¹⁰ Based on this evidence, scholars generally agree that the options available to women were sharply curtailed by male authority. This comes through quite clearly in a frequently cited passage from the Mānavd-dharmaśāstra:

She should do nothing independently
even in her own house.
In childhood subject to her father,
in youth to her husband,
and when her husband is dead to her sons,
she should never enjoy independence. . . .
In season and out of season
her lord, who wed her with sacred rites,
ever gives happiness to his wife,
both here and in the other world.
Though he be uncouth and prone to pleasure,
though lie have no good points at all,
the virtuous wife should ever
worship her lord as a god.
(V.147-8, 15.3-4; tr. by Basham:180)

While women apparently were able to own some personal property, such as clothes and jewelry (though husbands retained some control over its disposition under certain circumstances), they were under the supervision of a succession of men from youth until death (Bashain:177-178). Moreover, 1iterary depictions of women reveal a deep ambivalence toward the female gender. Idealized portrayals of feminine beauty and

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10 - As Richrnan and Fisher (129-131) stress, the ideals expressed in the brahmin-dominated Sanskritic tradition represented in the śāstras cannot be taken as determinative for all parts of the Indian subcontinent and all periods of Indian history. The term "Hinduism" is applied rather misleadingly to a rich and heterogeneous complex of religious beliefs and practices. There is evidence that non-Brahmanic traditions, given expression in various vernaculars, provided more opportunities for the active participation of women in religious life.

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attractiveness go hand in hand with depictions of women as sexually uncontrolled, inherently duplicitous, and naturally less intelligent than men. As Diana Paul lias observed, women are often identified in Buddhist texts as the embodiment of .sams āra, the endless cycle of birth and death into which all beings are trapped by their ignorance, hatred, and desire (3-4). More concretely, women often figure as sources of temptation leading to the downfall of male renunciants. The Anguttara-nikāya of the Pāli Buddhist canon vividly displays this misogynist theme:

Even a woman, O monks, who is departing remains dominating a man's mind; whether standing, seated, lying down, laughing, speaking, singing, weeping, stricken, or dead, she remains dominating a man's mind. If, O monks, one could rightly call something "wholly the snare of Māra," surely one could rightly call womankind "wholly the snare of Māra." (Morris 1895, 111:68)¹¹

Dramatizing the threat that women are perceived to pose to celibate male renunciants, the passage concludes:

Talk with a man who has sword in hand,
talk with a ravenous demon (pisāca),
draw near a serpent whose bite none survives,
but never talk with a single woman by yourself.
(Morris 1895, I1I:69)¹²

Even if, as the broader context of this passage suggests, the monk's desire is the fundamental problem from the perspective of religious practice, women as a group are identified as inherently dangerous for the male renunciant.¹³

When women portrayed are in noble terms, they are linked to men

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11 - Itthi bhikkhave gacchanti pi purisassa cit[t]am pariyādāya titthati, thitā nisinnā pi sayānā pi hasanti pi bhananti pi gāyati pi rodanti pi ugghātitā pi matā pi purisassa cittam pariyādāya titthati. Yam hi tam bhikkhave sammā vadamāmo vadeyya ‘samantapāso Mārassā’ ti mātugāmam yeva sammā vadamāno vadeyya ‘samantapāso Mārassā’ ti. This and all subsequent translations from Pāli are my own.
12 - Sallape asihatthena pisācena pi sallape/ āsivisam pi āsaide yena dattho na jivati,/ na tveva eko ekāya mātugāmena sallape. An even more dramatic comparison occurs in the Vinaya (Oldenbcrg 1881, III: 19) where the Buddha is said lo have told a monk that he would be better off putting his penis into the mouth of a poisonous serpent than into a woman. The reasoning here is that while a serpent may cause one to suffer and die, the desire for sexual gratification may have even more disastrous long-range consequences, i.e., rebirth as an animal or in one of the various Buddhist hells.
13 -Lang (69), perhaps following Hare's misleading translation (111: 56: "a woman, even when going along, will stop to ensnare the heart of a man"), cites this passage as an example of Buddhist texts that portray women as willfully seductive, and Sponberg (20) draws a similar conclusion. While there are canonical passages that portray women as active seducers of monks, this passage does not appear to be one of them; instead, the locus here is on the psychology of the monk who is attracted to the female form. It is interesting to note that the Buddha's comment is elicited by a case of incest between a mother and son, both of whom had entered the sangha, the implication apparently being that sexual desire has the power to overcome not only monastic vows, but even such fundamental social taboos as the prohibition against incest.

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in relationships of subservience. However, two female roles in certain respects pushed beyond these boundaries of male dominance: those of the prostitute and the renunciant.

A.L. Basham has drawn attention to the positive portrayal in Buddhist texts of Ambap ālī, a prostitute of the city of Vaiśālī whom the tradition remembers as a great patron of Buddhism (183-186). Ambapālī was the companion of princes, and her great wealth was considered a major contribution to the city's economy.¹⁴ As Basham notes, prostitutes hired by the well-born were expected to be skilled in music, dancing, singing, and poetry, as well as the arts of love. They are portrayed as having a freedom of movement and association quite unlike that of most women in ancient Indian society. No doubt Ambapālī's positive portrayal in the early Buddhist tradition has to do with her exemplification of the ideal upāsikā, the female lay-disciple. Yet the tradition also clearly regarded the source of her wealth with. ambivalence. She is remembered as one who finally renounced the life of a courtesan, the very embodiment of sensual desire, and who succeeded in gaining enlightenment. The Therīgāthā include verses attributed to Ambapālī that place in stark contrast the physical perfection that she displayed in her youth with the state of her body as an old woman, a vivid meditation on the Buddhist teaching of the transience of all things.

Dhammapāla's commentary on these verses records the tradition that Ambapālī's birth as a courtesan was the karmic fruit of an act of impiety in a previous life. According to this tradition, she was a novice under the Buddha Sikhi in a previous age and was in the midst of a procession of nuns offering homage to a cetiya. A female arahant walking in the procession ahead of her spat in the courtyard of the cetiya and the young novice, seeing the spittle and not realizing its source, remarked, "What whore has spit in this place?" For this reason she herself was reborn as a prostitute before gaining ultimate liberation (Dhammapāla:206-207). Whatever positive associations the tradition has preserved regarding Ambapāli's generosity toward the saṅgha and later attainment of arahantship, it is clear that the role of prostitute did not, in itself, represent a Buddhist ideal.
The other alternative, that of the renunciant, is clearly put forth in

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14 - The Vinaya (Oldenberg 1879, I: 268) records that Ambapāli's part in the prosperity of Vaiśālī was so great that a group of prominent men from the neighboring city of Rājagrha, after visiting Vaiśālī, approached their own king about the possibility of establishing a courtesan in Rājagrha.

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the Buddhist texts as the highest religious ideal. Yet even this ideal, translated into the concrete form of a community of nuns, was hemmed in by male authority. Buddhist tradition records that the Buddha only grudgingly admitted women into the sangha, and only then with the stipulation that the members of the order accept a set of eight rules that rendered the women's community institutionally subservient to the men's community and fundamentally dependent upon it. While the Buddhist religious ideal of renunciation held out for women, as well as men, a promise of absolute liberation, the sociological manifestation of that ideal reflected the social norms of the wider community in which women lived under male authority.¹⁵ Moreover, as the elder nun Sumedhā's verses attest (vss. 448-522), women were not necessarily at liberty to renounce the world. It is only after Sumedhā threatens to starve herself to death, and subsequently receives the permission of her bethrothed and her parents, that she is able to join the sangha. It is in this broader social context that the verses attributed to the nun Subhā of Jivaka's Mango Grove arc appropriately understood.

Subhā's verse, one of the longest in the Therīgāthā, reveals a good deal of literary self-consciousness. Set in the form of a dialogue, the interaction of Subhā and the rogue who accosts her on the path to Jivaka's mango grove is expressed in a kind of literary fugue, with the voices of the two characters following a common theme: an exploration of the nature of the human body. Yet while the two voices share a common subject, they issue forth from two fundamentally discordant views of reality, and it is only at the conclusion of the composition that some sort of harmony is achieved.

The action of the story is quite simple. Subhā is walking alone along the path to the mango grove when an unnamed rogue physically blocks her way. A threat of physical coercion seems implicit, in the rogue's action, given the seclusion in which the incident takes place and in light of his audacity in physically obstructing her.¹⁶ She asks the reason for his action, noting, "It is not right, sir, for a man to touch a woman who

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15 - Sponberg (24-28) identifies four basic attitudes toward women and "the feminine" in early Buddhism: soteriological inclusiveness, institutional androcentrism, ascetic misogyny, and soteriological androgyny. The first three orientations, he suggests, developed alongside one another in tire first several centuries alter (he Buddha's death; the fourth, which reflects ihc ascription of positive soteriological characteristics to the category of femaleness (e.g., the association of wisdom and femaleness), is evident in Buddhist texts that developed after the rise of the Mahayana
16 - The Vinaya (Oldenberg 1881, III: 35) cites the case of the nun Uppalavannā who was raped by a brahmin youth. The corruption of forest-dwelling nuns by rogues is elsewhere cited as the rationale for prohibiting nuns from forest dwelling (Oldenberg: II, 278).

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has gone forth" (vs. 367), a reference to her status as a renundanr, signalled by her shaved head and nun's robes. He then proposes that they go off into the forest to enjoy physical intimacy, seeking at first to convince her through a sensuous evocation of nature.¹⁷ He tries to entice her, saying: "Trees, laden with I lowers, sweetly scent the air all around;/ Spring's advent is a happy season; come, let us find pleasure in the blossoming grove./ Blossom-crested trees, stirred by breezes, sigh out;/ What pleasure shall you have if you enter the grove alone?" (vss. 371-372).¹⁸ He then attempts to frighten her by describing the dangers of the forest, "frequented by herds of savage beasts and disturbed by elephants in heat" (373).¹⁹ Finally, he promises to clothe her in beautiful silks and install her in his home with servant women to attend upon her. At first he vows, "I would be subject to you, if we dwelt within the grove," but a verse later he says: "If you do my bidding, [you'll be] happy; come, dwell in a home" (vss. 375-376).²⁰ We should note the significance of the rogue's offers in a specifically Buddhist idiom. Each of his enticements stands in sharp contrast to the fundamental aims of the Buddhist rcnunciant's path. Appealing first to sensual desire, then to fear, he evokes emotions that renunciation is explicitly intended to overcome. In addition, his promise of a life of luxury, with other women serving her, would bring her back into an environment that, by its very nature, would intensify her attachments to transient things, the fundamental cause of suffering and rebirth from the Buddhist perspective. While he might indeed be "subject to her" for the duration of their sexual encounter, a return to society would inevitably entail her subjugation to male authority for the remainder of her life. It is also noteworthy that many of the things he promises her, beautiful clothing, jewels, cosmetics, a luxurious bed (vss. 377-378), are things that Buddhist monks and nuns specifically renounce when they "go forth" into homelessness as members of the sangha.

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17 - Siegfried Lienhard has drawn attention to the striking use (if nature imagery in the Theragāthā and Therīgāthā, and concluded, on the basis of a detailed literary analysis, that the composers of these verses drew upon the tradition of erotic secular poetry and turned it to a distinctively Buddhist purpose, Kathryn Rennie (93-121) argues that. the Theragāthā employ nature imagery more extensively and in more positive terms than do the Therīgāthā, characteristics which may reflect the fact that nuns were prohibited from forest dwelling, while monks were encouraged to seek the solitude of the forest.
18 - Madhurañ ca pavanti sabbaso kusumarajena samuddhatā dumā/ pathamavasanto sukho utu ehi ramāmase pupphite vane./ kusumitasikharā ca pādapā abhigajjanti va māluteritā/ kā tuyham rati bhavissati yadi ekā vanam ogāhissasi.
19 - Vālamigasanghasevitam kuñjaramattakarenulolitam.
20 - Aham tava vasāmugo siyam yadi viharemasi kānanantare; yadi me vacanam karissasi sukhitā ehi agāram āvasa.

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Subhā's response to his blandishments reveals the stark contrast in their respective views of the body: "What you, infatuated, see here in the body and regard as excellent,/ is subject to destruction and fit to be tossed in a cemetary filled with corpses" (vs. 380).²¹⁰ While this verse may strike the modern reader as a grotesque or even perverse response, it evokes, in its Buddhist context, a genre of meditation texts that focus on (he transient character of the body through the use of a succession of increasingly decomposed corpses.²² I shall return to the significance of this association below.

Subhā's response fails to end the rogue's advances. His flattery turns next to her beautiful eyes, which he compares to the eyes of a kinnarī, a celestial being with a horse's head and thus possessed of large, deep brown, glistening eyes. His attraction to Subhā's eyes introduces the central metaphor of the poem, with its complex associations of aesthetic beauty and spiritual insight. One might say that Subbhā's verses provide a Theravāda Buddhist representation of what it means to see something, viewed first through the eyes of sensuous desire, and then through the eyes of Buddhist insight. The rogue concludes his praise: "Though far distant, 1 shall remember [you], O long-lashed one of the pure gaze,/ for no eyes are dearer to me than yours, O kinnarī-eyed one" (vs. 383).²³

Subhā responds with more images connected with seeing. She declares her utter freedom from passion (rāgo), saying that she doesn't know what could conceivably evoke desire within her. She proclaims:
"It has been cast away, like [a spark] from a pit of glowing embers; [it is] regarded like a cup of poison./ I don't even see what sort it could be; it is cut off at its root by the Path" (386).²⁴ She goes on to describe what the human body looks like to her, having attained the complete detachment of enlightenment. The image that she uses plays off the rogue's promise that he will dress her in bright silk and give her rouge to paint her face. She says: "For I have seen well-painted puppets, dolls,/ bound up with strings and sticks, made to dance every which way;/ when these strings and sticks are removed, loosed, damaged, scattered,/

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21 -kin te idha sārasammatam kunapapūramhi susānavaddhane/ bhedanadhamme kalevare yam disvā vimano udikkhasi.
22 - The meditation on the nine stages or a decomposing corpse occurs in the Satipatthāna-sutta, the "Discourse on the Setting-up of Mindfulness" (Trenckner:1, 55-63), one of the most influential meditation texts in the Theravāda tradition. Buddhaghosa also provides a detailed commentary on this practice in his highly influential filth-century CE text, the Visuddhimgga (1950).
23 - api dūragatā saremhase āyarapamhe visuddhadassane/ na hi m’ atthi tayā piyatarā nayanā kinnarimandalocane.
24 - Ingālakhuyā va ujjhito visapatto-r-iva aggato kato/ na pi nam passāmi kiriso atha maggena hato samūlako.

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not to be found, broken into pieces, where should one attach the mind there?" (vss. 390-391).²⁵ This image evokes a rich assortment of associations, some explicitly gendered and others not. The well-painted doll or puppet, bound with strings and pulled this way and that, suggests the constricting androcentric social roles available to women in ancient India, and, more specifically, indicates the subservient role that Subhā would play as the rogue's consort. At the same time, the image evokes a non-gendered set of categories drawn from the Buddhist analysis of the person, understood to be devoid of any enduring and unchanging self, and pulled every which way by the forces of desire and attachment. The connection of this latter association with the earlier reference to the body as "fit to be tossed in a cemetary filled with corpses" (vs. 380), comes out more clearly in line 395. Here Subhā, in stark contrast to the imagery employed by the rogue to communicate his attraction to her eyes, describes her eye with an analytical detachment worthy of an anatomy textbook: "[The eye] is like a ball set in a hollow, with a bubble in the center and tears;/ eye secretions are produced there, like various kinds of eyes collected together."²⁶ Having uttered these words, Subhā gouges out her eye and offers it to the man. The poem tells us that "at once his passion ceased"; he begs her forgiveness and promises that he will never do such a tiling again. He concludes:
"Seizing such a person is like embracing a blazing lire,/ as if I had grabbed a poisonous serpent; be well; forgive me" (vs. 398).²⁷

The concluding verse of the poem (399) introduces a final variation on the theme of vision: "And then that nun, liberated, went before the excellent Buddha;/ having seen the one with the marks of excellent merit, [her] eye was restored."²⁸ The use of the adjective muttā "liberated," suggest a double meaning: Subhā has demonstrated her utter liberation from attachment and desire, and, as a result of that liberation, she has gained her freedom from the menacing rogue.²⁹ What is partic-

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25 - ditthā mayā sucittitā sombhā dārukapillakām/ tantihi ca khilakehi ca vinibaddhā vividham panaccitā./ tamh’ uddhate tantikhilake visatthe vikale paripakkate/ avinde khandaso kate kimhi tattha manam nivesaye.
26 - vattani-r-iva kotar’ ohitā majjhebubbulakā saassukā/ pilikolikā c’ ettha jāyati vividhā cakkhuvidhā ‘va pinditā.
27 - āhaniya edisam janam aggim pajjalitam va lingiya/ ganhissam āsīvisam viya api nu sotthi siyā khamehi no.
28 - muttā ca tato sā bhikkhuni agami buddhavarassa santikam/ passiya varapuññalakkjanam cakkhu āsi yathāpurānakan ti.
29 - The commentary (Dhammapala:246) states that Suhhā, at the time that she met the rogue, had gained the fruition of a "non-returner" (anāgāmiphale patitthāsi), one who will attain nibbāna without having to be reborn again in the human realm, it is only after she later sees the Buddha and receives instruction from him that she gains arahantship and utters her verses.

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ularly striking here is the dramatic shift in somatic imagery. In contrast to the fundamentally negative characterization of the human body that has dominated the poem's discourse, this verse credits the extraordinary physical appearance of the Buddha's body with the healing of Subhā's eye. The commentary explains that the "marks of excellent merit" signify the physical manifestations of the Buddha's status as a "great man," a mahāpurisa (Dhammapāla:260),³⁰ a category attributed both to Buddhas and to universal monarchs (cakkavattis) .³¹ In accordance with the Buddhist principle of karmic retribution, the attainment of this status results from merit accumulated through the performance of countless good actions in previous lives. One who has been reborn as a mahāpuris manifests a series of 32 major and 80 minor physical marks, and this is a status that is by definition limited to males.³² Thus the Buddha's extraordinary physical appearance provides the means through which Subhā's eye is restored, and we find the poem's rich symbolism of vision, understood both physically and spiritually, brought to completion.

While the restoration of Subhā's eye through seeing the Buddha might at first appear simply to round out the narrative structure by restoring to her what she has lost, a closer examination reveals that a whole complex of associations has been introduced in the closing verse. The religious significance of "seeing" the Buddha is a topic that has only recently begun to receive scholarly attention. I have argued elsewhere that the practices of relic and image veneration represent aspects of a broader theme in the Theravāda Buddhist tradition centered on the positive religious significance of seeing the physical form of the Buddha.³³ In this context, the composer of Subhā's verse appears to present a contrast between a negatively valued use of the eyes in the service of gratifying sensual desire and a positive use of sight, when properly directed to the physical form of the Buddha, in the service of enlightenment. While the rogue's eyes, enflamed with passionate longing, lead him astray, Subhā's eyes, filled with a vision of the Buddha's peerless form, serve to restore her physical sight. In this instance, the Buddha's male form,

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30 - Passiya varapuññalakkhanan ti uttamehi puññasambhārehi nibbattamahāpurisalakkhanam disvā.
31 - This tradition has canonical attestation. See the Lakkhana-suttanta (Davids and Carprnter:III, 142-178).
32 - Included in the series of 32 major marks is the specification that the mahāpurisa's genitals are covered by a sheath. The notion of the mahāpurisa appears to be pre-Buddhistic. The Anguttaranikāya explicitly states that a woman cannot become a Buddha (Morris:I, 27) Diana Paul discusses the question of female Buddhas in the Mahāyāna tradition (281-301).
33 - discuss this theme in the context of relic veneration in "The Relics of the Buddha" (186-260). See also Gregory Schopen (195).

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while potentially an object of sexual attraction for the nun, is represented as transcending any gender associations that might give rise to sensual desire.³⁴

How then are we to interpret this poem as a whole, and assess the attitudes that it reveals toward women and the human body? Is this an account of a woman who engages in an act of self-mutilation in order to save herself from a male aggressor's sexual advances, or, read somewhat differently, the compassionate act of a woman on behalf of a man, accomplished at the expense of her own bodily integrity? Or looked at from another angle, does this story reflect a misogynist hatred of women's bodies?
Based on an analysis of the way in which women's bodies are depicted in the Theragāthā, the parallel collection of monks' verses preserved in the Theravāda scriptural canon, Karen Lang has concluded that the monks' verses reveal a fear of both sexuality and death that is expressed through images of women's bodies as objects of impurity. She notes a common element of disgust running throughout this somatic imagery, and concludes: "attention properly focused on a woman's body—live or dead—will lead a man to develop an aversion to the profane world" (73). In contrast, she sees less emphasis on the theme of the impurity of the female body in the nun's verses, and detects a distinctive note of compassionate regard for the folly of men and women alike. She concludes: "These women demonstrate their understanding of the interrelatedness of the human condition; and they act on this concern by alerting their male seducers to the dangers of sensual pleasures" (78).

Lang is surely correct, in discerning a misogynist distrust of women in some portrayals of women in Buddhist canonical sources. The additional eight rules that rendered the women's monastic community institutionally dependent upon the community of male monastics ironically forced the monks to interact with nuns on a regular basis, and it is apparent that this regular involvement with the community of nuns was perceived to pose a challenge to the ideal of monastic celibacy. It is less certain, however, how the passages describing the impurity of women's bodies should be interpreted.³⁵ This question of what such meditations

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34 - Pāli Buhhhist literature also includes passages that describe analogous visual encounters between monks and tthe Buddha. See, for example, traditions associated with the monks Sāriputta (H.C. Norman:I, 104-115; Buddhaghosa:II, 549-554) and Vakkali (H.C. Norman:IV, 116-119), These are discussed in Trainor (195-221).
35 - In support of her conclusion, Lang notes that there are no references in the Therīgāthā to nuns seeking out cemeteries in order to meditate on male corpses (78). I.B. Horner (258) states that nuns were prohibited from going to cemeteries to engage in meditation on decomposing corpses, but she provides no textual support for this statement, and I have not been able to find any passage in the Vinaya that confirms it. Calling into question Horner's assertion are passages in Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga that explicitly prohibit nuns from meditating upon the decomposing bodies of men, but which take for granted that women are engaging in the practice of cemetery meditation (1950, Vl:14; 42). This text addresses to monks an analogous caution against meditating upon female corpses, though the testimony of the Therīgāthā would suggest that monks did meditate upon the bodies of dead women (see vss. 315, 393). While none of the Therīgāthā refers explicitly to the practice of meditating upon decomposing corpses, the commentary to Abhayā's verses (35-36) states that she has gone to the Sitavana in order to view an object of impurity. The Buddha, seated in his chamber, causes such an object of impurity to appear before her. Seeing this, she experiences samvega, a powerful feeling of dread before the transiency of conditioned phenomena, and then the Buddha manifests himself before her, teaching the verses that she later repeats after gaining arahantship (Dhammapāla:4.1). While the Therīgāthā do not explicitly refer to women engaging in the cemetery meditations, there are passages that emphasize the impurity of the female body, for example Sumedhā's verses (especially vss. 466-471), Regarding Lang's contention that the Therīgāthā place less emphasis on the impurity of the body than do the Theragāthā, Kathryn Rennie notes that while the male composers of the Theragāthā tend to emphasize the foulness of women's bodies, the female composers of the Therīgāthā focus upon the foulness of their own bodies (65-92).

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"mean" cannot be separated from the broader problem of defining an appropriate interpretive context lor reading the Therīgāthā. It is precisely this question of interpretation that is posed most tellingly by a feminist analysis. If we recognize that the vast majority of Theravāda Buddhist texts that have come down to us have been composed and preserved by the male members of the sangha, on what basis can we assume that this so-called normative tradition reflects the religious experience of female members of the community? It is this very question that makes the Therīgāthā so significant as a potential source of information about the religious experience of Buddhist nuns. Yet even if we conclude that the Therīgāthā are actually the work of women, we must still decide if they are to be read in the light of the broader Theravāda tradition, which has been overwhelmingly dominated by male leadership and male categories of experience. Finally, recognizing that the experience of Theravāda monks and nuns has been shaped in significant ways by gender differences, we must work through the interpretive implications of the tradition's unambiguous affirmation that the state of one who has reached the goal of arahantship by definition transcends the category of gender.
In an effort to clarify some of these issues, let us return to the practice of the cemetery meditations and their place in the Theravāda tradition. The practice of meditating upon decomposing corpses is portrayed in the Pāli literature as inculcating in the meditator an awareness of two related, but distinct, characteristics of somatic existence. First, the texts

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describe the various components of the human corpse in equisite detail, sending home the message that the body, far from being an appropriate object of desire and attachment, is in fact impure and disgusting. For example, the Satipiatthāna-sutta, the preeminent canonical meditation text in the Theravāda tradition, characterizes the body as follows:

And again, O monks, a monk contemplates this very body, from the soles of the feet up and from the top of the hair down, bounded by skin and full of various impurities, thinking: "There is in this body hair of the head, hair of the body, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, tendons, bones, marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, pleura, spleen, lungs, intestines, mesentery, stomach, feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, solid fat, tears, liquid fat, saliva, mucous, synovic fluid, and urine." (Trenckner:I, 57)

As Steven Collins (forthcoming) points out, this theme of impurity should be read in the context of the South Asian concern with purity and pollution, and their relationship to social status. While the Buddhist tradition has placed significantly less emphasis on ritual purity and issues of caste than did the Brahmanical tradition, these notions have nonetheless continued to influence Buddhist communities in South Asia.³⁶ These texts and the meditational practice that they recommend are thus intended to evoke strong feelings of revulsion through the technique of cataloguing the great array of polluting substances that reside within the human body. Moreover, it is in die context of a social hierarchy linked with categories of purity and impurity that the graphic evocations of female impurity gain their symbolic force for the community of monks.

Related to the characteristic of somatic impurity, though dearly distinct from it, is the quality of transience, which constitutes one of the three distinctive characteristics of all phenomena (along with unsatisfactoriness and absence of a permanent self), according to the Buddhist worldview. That the human body exhibits tills quality of transience is revealed dramatically through the cemetery meditations, as suggested by the detailed description in the Satipatthāna-sutta of nine distinct stages in the decomposition of a human corpse. While the meditator is directed to feel disgust, in the beginning of the practice when the corpse is still recognizably human, as the practice, proceeds, the body increasingly reveals its composite nature, until finally the meditator focuses upon a pile of disconnected bones crumbling into dust, and the fundamental

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36 - For an examination of the prominence of purity/impurity symbolism in contemporary Sri Lankan Buddhism, see Carrithcrs

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principle that all compounded things are subject to change and utterly devoid of a permanent self becomes vividly revealed before the meditator's eyes. One can thus trace a distinct emotional trajectory here, beginning with revulsion and ending with utter dispassion and detachment. According to the Satipatthāna-sutta, one who practices this meditation recognizes: "This body [of mine], too, has the same nature, will in the future, be like that, has not got past the condition of that." Such a person, realizing this, "dwells unattached and clings to nothing in the world" (Trenckner:I, 59).

It is precisely this sort of detached analysis that is represented in Subhā's description of her eye in verse 395, which immediately precedes her act of removing it and handing it to the man who has expressed his attachment to it, described in his statement in verse 382: "When I see your eyes in your golden, blemishless face,/ comparable to a lotus bud, my sensuality grows stronger still." Subhā's detachment takes the very dramatic form of literally detaching her eye, thus demonstrating that the physical object that he so desires is something with which she is quite willing to part. Echoing Bynum's observation with which we began this inquiry, the message here has less to do with misogyny and the rejection of sexuality than with an abiding awareness of physical decay. From the perspective of the normative Theravāda tradition, we have moved beyond the relevance of categories of gender to a universalized perception of the composite and transient nature of all phenomena.

The Samyutta-nikāya recounts a story about the nun Soma that suggests a significant degree of self-consciousness about this issue. When Soma is confronted by Māra, the Buddhist tradition's equivalent of the Tempter or Devil, who attempts to call into question her religious attainments on the grounds that women possess only a "two-finger intelligence,"³⁷ she responds:

What difference should the female condition make when the mind is well-composed,
When one, rightly seeing Dhamma, possesses insight [into the Path of the arahant]?

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37 - dvangulapaññāya (Feer:I, 29); the commentarial tradition provides alternative interpretations of this expression Dhammapāla, commenting on the expression in the Therīgāthā, takes it as a reference to the housewife's practice of testing whether rice is fully cooked by squeezing a grain of rice between two fingers (67). The association of domestic crafts, here clearly identified with women, with a lesser degree of intelligence, provides a striking example of status subordination on the basis of gender.

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One who would ask thus: "Am I a woman, or a man,
Or what now am I?" that one Māra should address.
  (Feeri, 129)³⁸

Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga describes a somewhat analogous incident, this time attributed to a monk.  A certain elder named Mahātissa one day encountered a woman on the road from Anurā that the woman, "well adorned and ornamented like a celestial maiden," had just left home after a quarrel with her husband and was on her way to visit her relatives.  When she sees the monk, "having a corrupted heart," she laughs and the monk looks up to see what has caused the noise (implicit here is the notion that a good monk, maintaining restraint of the eyes, would not under normal circumstances even notice the woman). When he sees the woman's teeth, he immediately perceives the impurity of the human body, and with this as the. basis of his mental concentration, he gains arahantship (asubhāsaññhham patilabhitvā arahattam pāpuni).  The account goes on to relate that the monk soon encounters the woman's husband following behind.  When the monk is asked if he has seen the man's wife, he responds:

Whether a woman or a man went by
I did not recognize;
instead [I thought],
"This is a heap of bones going along the high road."
(I.55)³⁹

This passage indicates very clearly the decidedly mixed message about women that emerges from some of the Theravāda literature. On the one hand, women are portrayed as inherently threatening to men because of their gendered association with sensuality and procreation. One need not look hard to see. a misogynist caricature in the account of the "corrupt-minded" woman, alluringly attired, who laughs when she encounters a monk along the road. At the same time, the tradition testifies that the condition of the monk who has attained arahantship is one of utter detachment from such perceptions. As we have seen from Subhā's verses, this condition of utter detachment is one that can be realized by women as well as men, and Subhā's action of removing her

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38 - Itthibhāvo kim kayirā. / cittamhi susamāhite // ñānamhi vattamānamhi / sammādhammam vipassato // yassa nūna siyā evaṃ / itthāhaṃ puriso ti vā // kiñci vā pana asmiti / tam Māro vattum arahatiti. A parallel, though somewhat different, version, also attributed to Somā, is found in vss. 60-62 of the Therigāthā.
39 - Nābhijānāmi itthi vā puriso vā ito gato, / api ca aṭṭhisanghāṭo gacchat esa mahāpathe ti.

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eye vividly demonstrates a perception of the body that would appear to transcend categories of gender, as well as fundamental notions of somatic, integrity.

Subhā's act of pulling out her eye is appropriately read, I would suggest, in the light of another account of eye-giving, this one, however, attributed to the Buddha in one of his past lives. According to the Jātaka tale of King Sivi, the Buddha was born as a great king who was, known for his extraordinary generosity (dāna, the preeminent virtue of a Buddhist layperson). Having lavished extraordinary riches upon all who came to him for alms, he grows dissatisfied with making material gifts and vows to give up a part of his body. The great deity Sakka, king of the gods, decides to test his resolve. He takes the form of an aged, blind brahmin and appears before the king, requesting the gift of one of his eyes. The king is delighted, and vows to give him both eyes. After the attempts of his ministers and his surgeon to dissuade him have proven futile, the king instructs the surgeon to extract the eye. The story emphasizes the pain that the king experiences as the eye is gradually removed through the use of potions. As the pain increases, so does the king's joy. Finally, the surgeon removes both eyes and places them in the empty eye sockets of the blind brahmin, who then departs. At the end of the story, the king gets back his eyes alter he performs a truth-rite (saccakiryā) in accordance, with Sakka's instructions. By the power of the king's merit from his countless gifts of generosity, he receives new eyes, though with a difference. In place of his human eyes, he receives divine eyes that allow him to see through solid objects for hundreds of miles. As King Sivi proclaims: "Generosity is without peer / in the realm of mortals here; / for the human eye that I surrendered / an eye divine was in turn rendered" (Fausboll: lV, 412).⁴⁰

Yet despite the obvious similarities here, i.e., the giving of eyes, the ideal of generosity and self-sacrifice, and the restoration of sight, a feminist analysis highlights significant differences in the two accounts. Clearly the situation of a king who chooses to have his eyes removed by his court surgeon in order to aid a blind brahmin is not completely analogous to that of a nun who removes her eye when her way is obstructed by a threatening male along a desolate path in the forest. A feminist analysis, highlighting the close interrelationship between gender and social status, points to the significant differences in status and power that distinguish the king's act of noblesse oblige from the response

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40 - Na cāgamattā param atthi kiñci / maccānaṃ idha jivite / datvāna mānusaṃ cakkhuṃ / laddhaṃ [me] cakkhuṃ amānusaṃ.

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of a female renunciant to a male aggressor. At the same time it is clear that both actions can be read in terms of a traditional Buddhist discourse couched in the vocubulary of nonattachment and self-abnegation.

A feminist analysis also helps to illuminate the causes for the respective fates of the orders of Buddhist nuns and monks. As Nancy Falk has demonstrated, the inferior social and religious status of the female saṅgha very likely contributed to the disappearance of the women's monastic order in South Asia.⁴¹ As the Vinaya makes clear, the monastic order early on made significant concessions to the dominant political and social order as a means of ensuring the community's preservation.⁴² The saṅgha, as a social entity related to and dependent upon a larger society, doubtless reflected the broader cultural norms of that society, and, as we have seen, those cultural norms cast women in roles highly circumscribed by male authority.

As the verses of the Therīgāthā and Theragāthā attest, the lives of the nuns and monks who pursued the goal of liberation differed in striking ways in accordance with their respective genders. In keeping with the very different social conditions that characterized the lives of women and men in ancient India, the motivations and concrete circumstances that gave rise to an individual's decision to renounce the world were undoubtedly shaped by the gender of the individual renunciant. Moreover, the character of an individual's life in the saṅgha continued to reflect significant differences on the basis of that person's gender, as Subhā's encounter with the rogue suggests.⁴³ Life in the Buddhist saṅgha represented membership in an alternative society, not the utter rejection of society per se, despite the positive imagery of solitude that one finds repeatedly evoked in the Theravāda literature.⁴⁴

At the same rime, the dominant: Theravāda tradition, in consonance with the foundational metaphor of the Buddhist path leading to religious transformation, has emphasized the fundamental distinction between

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41 - See Falk. On the modern resurgence of female renunciants in Sri Lanka, see Gombrich and Obeyesekere (274-298), Nissan, Bloss, and Bartholomeusz.
42 - For example, slaves, debtors, and those owing military service were prohibited from entering the saṅgha; see the Vinaya (Oldenberg: I, 73-76).
43 - On the basis of a comparison between the Therīgāthā and Theragāthā. Kathryn Rennie notes evidence of the greater importance of continued relationships among the female elders in contrast to the male elders (60-61).
44 - On the theme of solitude and its relationship to life in the saṅgha, see Wijayaratna (109-136). Steven Collins identifies some significant points of similarity and divergence in Buddhist and Christian ideals of monasticism (1988). He notes that in contrast to a number of Christian images of the monastic life, the Buddhist saṅgha does not take on a utopian character In the Theravāda literature (I988:114-120).

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the experience of those striving for the goal of enlightenment, and the condition of those who have realized it. For the former group, categories of gender would appear to have broad applicability within the traditional discourse. Regarding the status of arahants, however, the tradition has maintained that such gender categories have no relevance. Both of these discourses are evident in the Therīgāthā and, in particular, in Subhā's verse, whose act of compassionate detachment in the giving of her eye recalls the actions of the Buddha, the Theravāda Buddhist tradition's supreme embodiment of insight and compassion. Thus even as the elders of the Therīgāthā proclaim their utter freedom, one can hear in their voices testimony to the lives that they left behind. In the words of one liberated nun:

I am well-freed, truly freed,
by my freedom from crookedness of three kinds:
of mortar, pestle
and hunchbacked husband.
I am freed from birth and death;
the cause of becoming has been rooted out.
(Therīgāthā, vs. 11) ^{45 46}

REFERENCES

45 - sumuttā sādhu mutta' mhi tīhi khujjehi muttiyā/ udukkhalena musalena patinā khujjakena ca/ mutta' mhi jātimaraṇā bhavanetti samūhatā.

46 Several people have read and commented upon earlier versions of this article.  I would like to thank in particular Anne Clark, Kathryn Rennie, Roxanne Lin, and Steven Collins.

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