Disappearing and Disappeared Daughters in Medieval Chinese Buddhism: Sūtras on Sex Transformation and an Intervention into Their Transmission History

Abstract

This study interprets three little-known Mahāyāna sūtras 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 sūtras 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 Sūtras, 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.