Reiko Ohnuma is Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College and is affiliated with the Asian & Middle Eastern Studies Program and the Women’s & Gender Studies Program. She is a specialist in the Buddhist traditions of South Asia, with a particular interest in Indian Buddhist narrative literature, hagiography, and the role and imagery of women.
關鍵詞
South Asian Buddhism; motherhood; maternal imagery; maternal love; maternal grief; Māyā; Mahāprajāpatī; pregnancy; gestation; breastfeeding
摘要
This book is an exploration of maternal imagery and discourse in premodern South Asian Buddhism, drawing primarily on textual sources preserved in Pali and Sanskrit. It argues 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. Some of the topics covered in the book are Buddhist depictions of maternal love and maternal grief, the role played by the Buddha’s own mothers, Māyā and Mahāprajāpatī, 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 “on the ground.”
目次
List of Illustrations Conventions Acknowledgments
Introduction 1 “A Mother’s Heart Is Tender”: Buddhist Depictions of Mother-Love 2 “Whose Heart Was Maddened by the Loss of Her Child”: Mothers in Grief 3 “Whose Womb Shall I Enter Today?”: Māyā as Idealized Birth-Giver 4 “Who Breastfed the Blessed One after His Mother Had Died”: Nurturance, Guilt, and Debt in the Traditions Surrounding Mahāprajāpatī 5 “Short-Lived” versus “Long-Standing”: Māyā and Mahāprajāpatī Compared 6 “She Is the Mother and Begetter of the Conquerors”: Pregnancy, Gestation, and Enlightenment 7 “Just as a Mother’s Milk Flows from Her Breasts”: Breastfeeding and Compassionate Deeds 8 “What Here Is the Merit, May That Be for My Parents”: Motherhood on the Ground Conclusion
