| Abstrakt: |
This study interprets three little-known Mahāyāna sūtra s preserved in Chinese that all contain remarkable teachings on the buddhahood of women and the practice of sex transformation along the path to buddhahood. Showing that these three sūtra s are part of a larger and more complicated subgenre of texts regarding Mahāyāna notions of emptiness circulating in early medieval China, the study demonstrates the relationship between these texts and the better-known Lotus and Vimalakīrti-nirdeṣa Sūtra s, even as it challenges the ability of those more dominant texts to provide a clear doctrinal statement on a very important question: the salvation of women. Finally, the study argues that researching texts like such as the three surveyed here is an act of feminist scholarship; bringing to light this little-known material, the study suggests that its very absence from scholarly discussion is a by-product of the rise of sectarian Buddhist lineages in the East Asian cultural sphere, which have influenced the ways in which we, as scholars, relate to text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
