Author Affiliations: Department of of Asian Languages and Cultures, The University of California Los Angeles
關鍵詞
Mahāyāna Buddhist Sūtras; Medieval China=中世紀中國; Gender=性別; Sexual Transformation=性轉變; Dharmarakṣa=竺法護; 大乘佛教
摘要
The article puts forth a complete, annotated translation of the Foshuo wugou xiannü jing 佛說無垢賢女經 (The Sūtra of the Unsullied Worthy Girl as Spoken by the Buddha), a short Mahāyāna sūtra translated into Chinese in the 3rd or 4th century. The protagonist and namesake of the sūtra is a female bodhisattva (nü pusa 女菩薩) who teaches the Mahāyāna doctrine of the emptiness of all phenomena by using her female form to confront the discriminatory attitudes expressed by members of the Buddha’s assembly. In so doing, she argues that “in the law of the Great Vehicle there is neither male nor female.” The Translator’s Introduction situates the text within a larger corpus of Mahāyāna texts that discuss the female body as well as the contentious issue of changing the female body to a male body on the path toward buddhahood.
