1. Ties That Bind: Maternal Imagery and Discourse in Indian Buddhism. By Reiko Ohnuma. Oxford University Press, 2012. 262 pages. $99.00. 2. Nirmala S. Salgado, Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
摘要
Reiko Ohnuma's book is based on the premise that Buddhism, though rejecting the “cult of the mother,” considered motherhood a “lingering tie that simply could not be broken” (5). It attempts a creative exploration into the meaning of maternal imagery in what is broadly referred to as “premodern South Asian Buddhism” (6). Ohnuma focuses on select Pali and Sanskrit sources, with some reference to Tibetan and Chinese texts (in translation) to help “in uncovering and trying to understand a general ‘Indian Buddhist discursive world’” (6). She seeks to interpret motifs such as “Mother-Love,” and “Mothers in Grief,” compares and contrasts the idea of Māyā as the “good mother” with that of Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī as the “problematic mother,” and investigates images of metaphorical pregnancy and gestation in order to argue that the male monastic authors of Buddhist texts produced an “elite” and “patriarchal” religion that aimed to address the sense of “guilt,” “indebtedness,” and “anxiety” that they endured in relation to their own mothers (111, 132, 185).
Chapter 1 highlights distinctions between Buddhist depictions of “mother-love” and “father-love” as well as “son-love.” This chapter argues that the Buddhist view of mother-love is ambiguous. Narratives convey that although a mother's “particular” love for her only child can be seen (because of its intensity) as a fitting metaphor of the Buddha's love, it can also point to a samsaric attachment that is incompatible with the compassion of the Buddha and the detachment of the arhat (likened to “father-love”). Ohnuma proposes that depictions of the cultivation of loving-kindness (mettā) and indeed of all the other “immeasurables”—compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity—underline the argument that mother-love is selfish. Her analysis of “a random scattering of textual passages” (22) suggests that mother-love is ambivalent since it is idealized as both self-sacrificial and higher than father-love and …
