Video: Peering Around the Archival Bulge: Health and Hygiene in a Monastic Code for Buddhist Nuns

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. 

SPEAKER 2: Peering around the archival bulge. Health and hygiene in a monastic code for Buddhist nuns. October 29, 2025. 

JANET GYATSO: So thank you very much. I'm delighted to have been asked-- thank you for asking me to introduce my esteemed colleague, Amy Langenberg, who teaches at Eckerd College and is here for the year. And, in fact, we've known each other for quite some time. Our work overlaps to a certain extent. And we actually are going to teach a course together in the spring, which I'm really looking forward to. 

Amy Langenberg's work straddles two spheres. One, she is a historian of Buddhist Sanskrit materials. And has especially looked at the Vinaya, but looking at the status of women in Buddhist monastic of other cultural kind of information that can be gleaned from those sources. And I believe that's going to be the perspective that she's going to take today. 

Her first book was called Birth in Buddhism, the Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom, which encapsulation of some of the problems from a feminist perspective of the way that birth is pictured-- birth and the entire period of pregnancy is pictured in early Buddhist works. 

But Amy also has very much of a presentist approach. She has been involved in a lot of projects and writing, trying to deal with the contemporary sexual abuse issues in the Buddhist world. And she is due to come out with a collaborative book with Professor Ann Gleig. Publisher still not exactly determined because it's somewhat of a controversial book, dealing with a pretty hot and heavy topic, but very much to be admired for that. 

And she's one of the few people who I know of who does both very well grounded philological, historical, textual work, and at the same time engages with contemporary issues very much from a feminist perspective, I would dare say. So I really look forward to hearing her talk. And I think you should all listen carefully and see what she has to say. So thank you so much, Amy, for being here. 

[APPLAUSE] 

AMY LANGENBERG: All right. Thank you, Ann, and thank you, Janet, for that wonderful introduction. Yeah, the abuse book is a whole other story. And we actually did have a contract. We went in writing the book with a contract, but now there's some question about whether it will be published with that publisher because they are afraid of libel. So if you ever want to hear that story in the hallway, I won't be telling it today, but that's the story there. 

Anyway, thank you so much for coming and for joining today to hear about this new research. This has roots in a lot of things I've done before, but this is a new project. And I'm really excited and honored to share it with you. And I'm looking forward to your comments and your feedback. Really eager to hear that. 

So my talk today is one chapter, probably from a larger book project that is very much in process, in which I employ a feminist historiographical method to tell a story of Buddhist renunciant women during the late ancient period in India and South Asia. Although the topic, or focus, today is a Buddhist disciplinary text and what it has to say about the health and hygiene of nuns, my deeper aim today is to engage you around the problematic of how you illuminate a history when the archive you are dealing with is so fragmented. 

So I picked this image for the poster and the kind of head slide of this talk intentionally. This is a third century image from Gandhara that belongs actually to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It depicts uppalavanna. So you'll see, obviously, there's the Buddha, the big figure on the top. And he's flanked by Brahma and Chakra Indra. And he is actually descending from the heaven of the Thirty-Three where he had gone to teach his mother, Maya Devi, Abhidharma philosophy. 

And he's returning back, and Uthpala Varna, who is understood to be-- known to be an extraordinary nun, she's known for her extraordinary spiritual powers, and she is there right at the bottom of the stairs to be the first to greet him and venerate him. 

And somehow, for me, this image-- although, actually, my research isn't really, I have to admit, not centered in Gandhara per se, but this image, which is kind of repeated in Buddhist art in India and South Asia, captures something that I really hope to bring alive for you at this talk. A Buddhist monastic woman in the looming shadows of male power authority, but nonetheless very clearly pictured and playing a distinctive role, and in placed at the center of the story through her own actions. 

The feminist historiography of early Christianity Blossom Stefaniw very bluntly characterizes masculinist histories as, quote, "There to stage a long parade of great men through time, great men move through time with feminized and racialized others as stepping stones." 

She argues-- and this is where I'm drawing this idea of the archival bulge, from some of her work. She argues, "It is not the case that the archive correctly reflects the doings of those persons who were important and valuable in the past, and those persons were for entirely innocent reasons of culture and custom, almost all men. 

The archive bulges with writings by, about, and for men. When we work with archival gaps, we have to retrain ourselves to deal with traces and fragments with loss and erasure. Feminist history writing projects look critically at and around what Stefaniw describes as this archival bulge disproportionate and distorted, swollen with elite voices. 

As Stefaniw also points out at one point, "Women's healing traditions are historically a significant site of creativity and leadership. It follows then-- many have pointed this out, it follows that texts on health and healing in the nuns Vinaya are potentially a significant point of entry for the Buddhist feminist historiographer, and that is how I am identifying." 

This work attempts to get a look at Buddhist monastic women from late ancient South Asia who were attempting to rid themselves or others of their troubles through acts of healing and self and other care, and in doing so, enacting what we might call authority or autonomy or leadership. 

So, before we get into the examples that I brought to give you, to put before you, I'm going to give a little bit of background about the text which is at the center of this project, and also more generally about the Vinaya genre, just especially for people in the room who maybe might not be so familiar. 

So the text that I am especially focused on in this project is the Mahāsāṅghika Lokottaravāda Bhikṣuṇī Vinaya. I won't ask any of you to say that. You can translate that loosely as the nuns monastic code of the great assembly professing world transcendence. I'll just refer to it as the bhikshuni Vinaya or our bhikshuni Vinaya. 

This text, it's a really interesting text. There's only one manuscript so far, at least, that exists of this text. It was a single manuscript found in Tibet by Rahula Sankrtyayana on his travels in Tibet. He was collecting manuscripts, he found one and he brought it back to India, to Patna, and he created a critical edition of the text in 1970. 

The manuscript that he found, it's a palm leaf manuscript. Probably dates to the 11th or 12th century. He thinks, and other scholars think, possibly copied at Vikramashila, which was a large monastic University in current day Bihar, Eastern part of Bihar. But the tradition that it records would have been much older. It would have come into existence much earlier, obviously, than the 11th or 12th century. 

So, what is the Vinaya and why this video? Why is it this Vinaya which I am kind of choosing as a focus for this project? So in general, the Vinaya genre is a canonical genre of text. It's a highly structured set of guidelines and legal procedures for Buddhist monastics, both men and women. 

Scholars often-- not often, but scholars also read the Vinaya texts as a kind of historical archive because Vinaya texts do tend to include, you could say, kind of anthropological or sociological information, at least they seem to detailed information about the day to day of monastics. 

Vinaya texts are also very rich in narrative, but some more than others. So without going into it too much, there's a number of sectarian Vinayas that exist from different lineages of Buddhism in various languages. So there isn't just one Vinaya. There's several. 

Not all of those lineages survive, so not all of the sectarian Vinayas are currently being actively used by Buddhist communities. Three of them are. This one, the one that I am working with is not currently being used, so there is no Mahāsāṅghika Lokottaravāda Bhikṣuṇī Vinaya community as far as I know that uses this text. 

Anyway, so these are rich narrative texts also. And the reason for that is because every time a rule is promulgated, there is almost always a narrative, a kind of situation, a vignette which explains what the impulse was for the promulgation of this rule. Some of the lineage traditions are incredibly rich in terms of narrative. So the Mahāsāṅghika Lokottaravāda Bhikṣuṇī Vinaya is one of them. The one that I'm working on is not as effusive. It's not as baroque as that one, but it has stories. They tend to be more compact. 

So why this Vinaya? The reason that this bhikshuni Vinaya really got my attention is because it appears to have been edited as a standalone Vinaya. It seems like it was edited to serve the nuns community, so it does not have the same structure as the bhikshuni Vinaya parts that belong to other lineages. It kind of has this structure which creates a standalone text, which has led some scholars to think that it was actually handed down independently from the monks code and deliberately edited so that it would have maximum utility for the nuns community. 

So it kind of invites a sort of feminist historiographical approach. And I also feel that this text-- without proving it today, right now, I also feel that it is a bit more sympathetic to the nuns community in the way that it addresses various issues, problems that come up in histories. 

Some other things to know about the Vinaya genre is that this is a textual-- this is a historically layered and multi-vocal tradition. It reflects a process of development over-- took time over several centuries, and that this is not the way the text presents itself. So the text presents itself as being promulgated by the Buddha himself. So every Vinaya passage is put in the mouth of the Buddha. This represents a desire to affirm the Buddha's authority. I would say not an actual historic occurrence, at least not in every case. 

OK, so that's just for those of you who are not familiar with this genre. So the question that's really front and center today is-- although we're going to be talking about health and hygiene as a way to get at this question, the underlying question today is the question of authorship and authority. So the party line, I would say, in most scholarship on this genre of text on Vinaya is that it was male authored. 

And so I have a bunch of quotes under the party line by-- it's by a particular scholar. I'm not interested in critiquing or calling out that scholar, but I just pulled out these quotes to show you the way that the Vinaya authorship typically gets talked about. Nuns themselves appear not to have redacted or transmitted their own literatures. There is at least no clear evidence of that. Vinaya authors or compilers were almost all certainly male, or presumably all male. 

So this is something I think bears examination. I don't think these statements have been examined, at least I haven't seen them examined. I would like to examine them. There's a lot of questions in here. Like, what exactly are we talking about? When you talk about redacting and transmitting, are you talking about actual textual transmission, copying of texts, or are we talking about the handing down of traditions orally or in some other way, knee to knee? There's lots of ways that something can be transmitted. 

Authorship also is not really a self-evident category. If you're quoting someone verbatim, something that someone said, but you're the one that wrote it down, is that person also-- do they also have authorship? Can they claim authorship? So there's a lot of questions that I think haven't been really looked at. And I don't think we really know that nuns have not been involved in the redaction, transmission, authorship, or compilation of their own literature. 

Anne Blackburn uses the term textual community in her work, defined as those who participate in shared practices of reading, writing, listening, interpretation, and performance, with reference to the same body of texts, perhaps but not necessarily a formal curriculum. 

I am inspired by Blackburn's insights about the ways in which texts are also practices. Blackburn's idea is productive if rather than regarding the bhiksuni Vinaya, this bhikshuni Vinaya is merely the text around which a textual community may have formed, we see it as reflective of and the product of a textual community also. That is of a group of nuns-- and probably monks as well-- who creatively interacted with and performed a shared body of disciplinary texts, whether these were orally transmitted, transmitted through shared habitus or by way of written documents. 

Reading this particular unique bhikshuni Vinaya as inevitably the artifact of a historical community of monastic women negotiating with each other, lay patrons, the monks community, and the broader social political environment in which they lived, foregrounds the hermeneutic principle of agency and resists a reading that assumes a priori renunciant women were intellectually passive, socially submissive, rule followers, not rule makers, and always under the supervision of monks and always assuming a receptive posture. 

OK, so I'm going-- I'd like this idea of textual community. That's the way I think about this text, as a phenomenon, as a dynamic. I have a couple-- I have two slides here where I basically give you the argument. And I'm doing that because I don't want you to get lost in the weeds when we start talking about the examples. They're pretty evocative examples but/and I want you to pay attention to the examples and enjoy them. 

But the underlying question is this, the underlying argument this is-- this is where I'm heading. So what I'm arguing is, so why the focus on texts regarding women's health, especially reproductive health? Why is this a good place to start? Why is this a good place to go to address this issue of female participation in structuring their own community life? 

For the very reason that they often do not usually connect to major institutional concerns such as ritual orthodoxy, leadership structures, but mostly pertain to matters of little procedural significance, except to the women themselves. These texts about women's health may allow us to peer around the archival bulge of elite male concerns and interests to glimpse the accomplishment and placement, authority, and leadership of ancient monastic women. OK, that's the argument. 

I argue that the text discussed here, many of which concern disciplinary guidelines on topics that may have been embarrassing to or simply outside of the experience of male lawmakers, constitute evidence of women creating their own guidelines, caring for their own communities, and being their own elders. 

So, now you're going to get a bunch of examples or a bunch of texts which show, I think, this activity of nuns, this leadership activity of nuns. The bhikshuni Vinaya is similar to the bhikshu Vinaya. The nun's Vinaya is similar to the monk's Vinaya in that exceptions to rules are regularly given in the case of illness. 

So, for instance, if a nun is ill, she is permitted to ride on various vehicles rather than walking, wear sandals, use a sunshade, not carry all of her robes with her when she leaves the nunnery, use garlic on her skin as a treatment, declined to participate in rituals. Have a massage, beg for medicinal foods, bind her waist with a cloth or wear an ornament, these are all things that are discouraged or forbidden for healthy nuns. 

However, this bhikshuni Vinaya-- bhikshuni Vinaya is in general-- diverge from the male tradition in their sensitivity to the ways in which illness can make female monastics especially vulnerable to other dangers, such as coercion or assault. The narrative context for a rule forbidding bhikshunis nuns to travel without a companion includes situations in which illness leaves a bhikshuni stranded alone and vulnerable. 

In one case, the bhiksuni rastra is summoned by her uterine sister who has fallen ill. Unfortunately, the sister dies before rastra arrives, at which time the widower husband requests rastra to stay and care for his now motherless child and to keep his house. Rastra flees, returning to the other nuns where she confesses that she worries she may have abandoned her sexual purity. 

She is questioned in detail by the Buddha who does not reprimand her, but only promulgates the rule that a nun may not travel alone on the roads. He then makes a specific exception in cases where a nun falls ill while traveling and must separate from her companions to rest in a village. In such a case there is no wrongdoing because the reason for breaking the guideline is illness. The text specifies that illness includes weakness due to disease or old age. 

In such exceptional cases, traveling or staying alone is not an offense, but clearly still a vulnerability. The same section of the text concerning guidelines against nuns traveling alone relates how a young and beautiful nun has turned off the path to sit for a moment by herself, seemingly to catch her breath. It's really interesting, the text just says she breathes in, she breathes out, she breathes in, she breathes out. Seems like she has shortness of breath. 

A merchant approaches her, and she is suddenly surrounded by men. Then for as long-- as they surround her and carry her along, and during that time, the nun is compelled to go from one village to another in this group of men. And, obviously, without the company of another nun, she got caught by herself. She later worried that she has done wrong, but she is cleared of any transgression because she acted unwillingly. 

The special vulnerability posed by the eventuality of sickness or needing medicine is referenced clearly in another passage. Here a rule forbids nuns from receiving improper gifts from an impassioned man, a man who might take advantage, make advances. Robes, bowls, food, and drink are mentioned, as is importantly, medicinal foods. If she knows the man to be a threat to her, she must not accept medicinal foods from him, even presumably if she really needs them. 

Another passage also addresses this issue, advising that a noble lady that owns fine ornaments should discard those adornments before going forth as a nun. The text articulates actually a specific reason as to why some women may hesitate to do so and would rather store their finery away for an eventuality. 

Knowing that women obtain fewer arms and fearing being at risk should a famine occur or should she be weakened by age or sickness, she might want to put her adornment-- her adornments to one side, her jewelry to one side before entering the religious life, presumably that she can use them later for currency in such a situation. 

A couple of comments about these passages. One is that you may recall from the earlier slide that nuns are specifically permitted to ask for medicine. In general, monastics on alms rounds are not supposed to ask for specific things, but they are allowed to ask for medicine if they need it. But, again, not if it puts that nun in a specific danger with an untrustworthy layman. 

The other thing I wanted to mention about these passages is-- and we were talking about this on Monday, my colleague Sarah brought this up that if in general, in these kinds of texts, if there's a rule against doing it, like you cannot-- you should not set your jewelry aside and keep it after you ordain, it means that a lot of people were doing it. And logically so, it makes sense that a woman would keep that-- would keep those kind of emergency funds, so to speak. 

The Mahāsāṅghika Lokottaravāda Bhikṣuṇī Vinaya also demonstrates a sensitivity to the life cycle of women and its consequences for monastic life and its rules. So I just put this slide in here again for whoever's here that maybe is not so familiar with these traditions, but there is-- in the nuns Vinaya, there is the story of the founding of the women's order, the women's order. 

It was founded when Mahapajapati Gautami, who was the head of the women's order in the Vinaya-- in these Vinaya texts-- especially in this one-- requested to the Buddha that he allow for women to go forth as bhiksunis. And he was very hesitant and then he finally agreed. And one of his conditions was that the eight guru-- so-called guru dharmas, or great precepts be established. And this group of guidelines for the nuns community, essentially, it subordinates the nuns community to the monks community kind of structurally, creates this kind of gender hierarchy that's baked in. 

So, one of the most interesting and touching examples of a disciplinary exception made for older nuns is attached to the first gurudharma. Ordaining the bhikshuni, should pay obeisance to bhikshis by bending to touch head to feet. According to the pada Vinaya and another Vinaya tradition, not the main focus here-- but this is unique to the pada Vinaya-- this mandate was the only gurudharma to which mahapajapati is said to have raised an objection, as it applies to bhikshuni and bhikshus of any relative age. 

So the rudest, young, snot-nosed monk-- not to put too fine a point of it-- is entitled to the veneration of even the most senior and venerable bhikshuni. So it establishes a social system, an institutional system where gender trumps the rule of seniority by age absolutely. However, a small exception is made for physically fragile elderly bhikshunis who only need bend as far as they are able. And if they can't even manage this, they may pay obeisance verbally. 

So you can imagine this sort of negotiation. OK, we will do this but we need to care for these elderly nuns. This is going to be very difficult for them. OK. Moving on to the topic of menstrual hygiene. Menstrual hygiene is a topic that is unique to bhikshuni Vinaya. Monks disciplinary texts obviously do not include rules about menstruation. 

All of the bhikshuni lineage traditions include rules providing for menstrual needs of nuns, including allowances for nuns to use and share hygiene aids, and rules about washing menstrual cloths in a manner that will not offend laypeople. One text from our Vinaya references a situation in which menstruating women, nuns, were ruining the bedding and the seating. 

The Buddha recommends a menstrual hygiene aid called an anicolaka, which seems to be a rolled up cylinder of cloth. Given the reference to its shape and a warning included in the text not to push it in too far, I interpret this device to be a roll up of fabric worn like a modern-day tampon. 

Immediately following this passage are three further passages giving advice about how nuns are to launder menstrual cloths without creating any tensions within the lay community around menstrual contamination. This is a whole rabbit hole we could go down about menstrual contamination in the South Asian context, but that is a very intense topic and an intense fear. 

Rather than washing their menstrual cloths at public washing areas for men, women, or professional launderers, the nuns are advised to wash them in a basin, a pot, an earthen bowl, or a water bucket. If an outside water source, but not public-- I think this means a water source within the nunnery compound-- is available, the nuns should do their laundry right where the water drains. 

Bhiksuni Vinaya also contains a text allowing nuns to wash their genital areas which, quote, "smell bad." Like the menstrual text about the anicolaka, this text is accompanied with cautions that nuns should not insert their fingers too far inside themselves when they are attending to their personal hygiene. 

The unanxious pragmatism, combined with attention to matters of Buddhist discipline expressed in these texts is typical, I have found, on Vinaya-- of Vinaya texts on female hygiene, and I think more suggestive of an experienced female authority engaged in day-to-day problem solving than a male priestly voice concerned about dangerous female blood or disgusted by female bodies. 

Someone was paying attention to such concerns and introducing appropriate guidelines into the discipline. I speculate that senior women were far more likely to offer practical advice about, for instance, menstrual hygiene than their male superiors. And similarly, I would say, more likely to take special care with their elderly colleagues who could not, without difficulty, touch the feet of visiting monks. 

OK. Despite the centrality of celibacy and homelessness in the Buddhist monastic path, in order to qualify for ordination, women must be free of reproductive health problems and physically cisgendered. While a bhikshuni will, at least in theory, leave the sexual and reproductive expectations that burden a wife behind in joining a Buddhist order, she is still expected to attest to her own basic reproductive condition before being admitted. 

In particular, she must menstruate normally and regularly. She must not be intersex or in any way sexually ambiguous. During the ordination procedure, the candidate for ordination is asked about the specifics of her sexual health by her female preceptor. However, when it is the bhikshuni turn to examine the female candidates for ordination, this part of questioning is excluded. Examination of the candidate's reproductive and sexual health is the purview of senior bhikshunis. 

Our bhikshuni Vinaya mentions ailments as well, ailments of or injury to the genital region of bhikshunis in other contexts. For instance, the text specifies guidelines for nuns that need to have an infection or a lesion in the genital region lanced. She must first formally request permission from the order to have the procedure done. She should then ask a trustworthy woman or close Dharma sister to lance the abscess for her. 

Should she need to request a man to perform the procedure-- perhaps a professional surgeon, for instance-- the text doesn't specify who the man would be but that's what I'm assuming-- another nun should definitely be present. The text also recounts a scenario in which a bhikshuni is sitting on her monastic robe, doing some sewing when a bamboo splinter pierces her vagina, causing her to bleed. 

The Lord Buddha ordains that bhikshuni should not sit on the robes anymore, but rather in a proper room, or on a smooth, raked maybe area, or on a raised platform or stool. So we see both reparative and preventative care taken with respect specifically to female reproductive anatomy. 

So our bhikshuni Vinaya-- so these are some now some texts in which bhikshunis appeared to be acting as healers or even as midwife adjacent people. Our bhikshuni Vinaya includes a direct reference to a knowledgeable woman, that is a medical woman living within the early bhikshuni community. Known as Chandaka Mata, she was an expert in pharmaceutical cures and a regular in the inner household of the King of Kaushambi. She is described as running a women's hospital in that city. 

When the Lord Buddha hears of her work, he rules that she and other nuns should henceforth not make a living by practicing or teaching medicine. And, again, I'm just going to remind you that that probably means they were doing it. The work of Gregory Schopen, Diana Finnegan, Charles Hallisey who's here, and Mari Jyvasjarvi has illustrated the ways in which female monasticism in ancient South Asia was not the mirror image of its male counterpart. It was responsive to gendered social conditions. 

For example, Buddhist nuns likely did not receive the same level of financial support as monks, so they may have needed to enter into mutually beneficial relationships with lay women of the sort illustrated in this Chandaka Mata text. Also, they would have been aware of and themselves subject to social expectations regarding female virtue and propriety, making them likely to respect their female patrons need for privacy in certain respects, in certain situations. 

A greater need to secure patronage through various means and a willingness to work together with lay women, could have contributed to nun's greater involvement in the so-called worldly arts, including medicine. Other passages from the bhikshuni Vinaya or bhiksuni Vinaya demonstrate a coming together of the categories of accomplished woman or midwife, knowledgeable woman, and monastic woman in somewhat a more indirect way than what we saw with the Chandaka Mata text. 

So our Vinaya includes a passage depicting a lay woman in reproductive crisis, requesting a bhikshuni who has visiting her house for alms to discreetly perform one of the functions of a midwife by taking away her dead fetus in a beggin bowl-- in her begging bowl. 

This nun's name is Sthulananda She's kind of infamous or famous, depending on who you ask. She leaves the house, her bowl covered to conceal what is within. She encounters by chance the elder Mahakashyapa who requests to see her bowl, asks her to open her bowl and cover it because he wants to share his alms with her. He's taken a vow to do that. Upon seeing the contents, he reports Sthulananda's behavior to the Buddha who ordains that-- I almost want you to guess what he ordains. 

It is not that nun should not take away fetal remains in their begging bowls. That is not what he ordains. What he ordains is that nuns must cover their balls and alms rounds, and then uncover them if they are requested to do so by monks. OK. A contiguous passage prescribes nuns from building or using closed toilets because these had become depositories of aborted and miscarried fetuses. This is the text. I'm not going to read it, but this is the text. 

These images-- the begging bowl, the latrine containing the remains of a miscarriage or an abortion may strike us, they may be striking you right now as grisly and squalid, however, I would put before you that there are many reasons a wife in her childbearing years living within a family system in which her autonomy is circumscribed and her reproductive capacity is highly valued, perhaps above all else. Sounds familiar, right? May wish for her own security and safety to conceal a miscarried or aborted fetus from her husband and in-laws. 

Doing so may allow her to maintain her status in the family or prevent disapproval, blame, or even punishment. From this point of view, the role of bhikshunis who, like midwives, traveled from house to house and were admitted to intimate female spaces, could play a vital role in keeping lay women's reproductive secrets and helping them to negotiate domestic power dynamics. 

The fact that Vinaya law attempts to foreclose situations that allow for bhikshunis to play a role in concealing a miscarriage or abortion-- covered begging bowls, closed toilets-- may point to a conflict or a power clash with patriarchal authority. Family heads would not be happy for bhikshuni to play such a role, I guess, and Vinaya lawyers prohibitions may reflect the pressure Sangha leaders were under to control such collusions. 

OK, so I'm not sure if these texts are jumping out at you in the way that I want them to jump out at you. I want you to pay attention to the way in which these texts really reflect a kind of pragmatism, a kind of problem solving and caretaking within the community. 

So in order to highlight that or backlight that tone to these texts, this problem solving tone, I'm going to actually take a little diversion and talk to you a little bit about the contrast class of texts, of Buddhist texts. The themes of parturition, embryology, and the female reproductive body are commonly discussed in a range of Buddhist textual genres. Notably-- and Janet had mentioned my first book in her introduction-- notably in at length in certain Mahayana sutras and scholastic commentaries, more compactly in canonical poly collections to collections, and also, of course, in Buddhist storytelling. 

So, yes, I did write a book on this topic in-- published in 2017. So if that interests you, it's like a full discussion of that topic. But to summarize and synthesize, birth that is conception, embryological development within and physical birth from the body of a woman is a major Buddhist theme because both sexual desire and karma are foundational components of classical Buddhist understandings of ethics and the path to liberation. And, obviously, it's sexual desire and karma are very much implicated in the process of birth or-- and vice versa. 

Descriptions of rebirth via the womb and vagina of a woman are major sites for Buddhist theorizing on gender, especially the moral inferiority of the female embodiment. So I'm sorry if you're eating lunch. Excuse me. Deep apologies. So this is the garb of the Garbhavakranti-Sutra, which is the kind of core text of my 2017 book. And it very much critiques the body and the karmically-driven embodiment process. 

It kind of merges these images of-- or this information, this embryological information, with traditions of ashuba bhavana meditating on the impure. So very evocative rhetoric in which the affect of disgust is very much evoked. OK. Great. So generating the specter of a uterine hellscape, a cramped malodorous swamp-like place brimming with impurities, that is a site of torture for the developing fetus. 

Intermittent misogyny enters into most Buddhist canonical texts, even bhikshuni Vinaya texts, especially in relationship to women's sexual and reproductive bodies. Vinaya texts, which are as a genre historically layered and multi-vocal, fail to take a consistent approach with respect to gender or women. The uneven discourse of bhikshuni Vinaya texts ranges from the pragmatic, informed, compassionate problem solving kind of tone-- which I'm asking you to pay attention to-- to a discourse of suspicion, fantasy, even anatomical ignorance. And, yes, even our bhikshuni text does this. Even our bhikshuni Vinaya text does this. 

So there is a passage from a text that-- about not hiding the faults of other community members, which is about a nun, a student of the nun, Koli-- a young nun-- a student of the nun Koli who becomes sexually entangled with lay patrons of the community and other renouncers and finally becomes pregnant. So it's not a happy story. But the sequence of events is explained by this blanket statement that women as a class are intensely lustful. That's the cause. 

This bhikshuni Vinaya also includes an occasional lapses into dark imaginings about the horrible possibilities that come with the female embodiment. So in one really amazing passage that we talked about quite a bit in our discussions on Monday with my cohort, there is a nun who was sitting cross-legged late at night meditating, and a serpent, a snake, enters her vagina. 

The Buddha instructs mahapajapati to administer medicine, causing the serpent to come out. He doesn't want it to die in there, so he gives this advice about giving her medicine so that the serpent comes out. And then he establishes a guideline that nuns should meditate with just one leg crossed, covering the opening to their vaginas with the other heel. Obviously there's a lot to unpack there. Another time. 

One also finds, in certain passages of this bhikshuni Vinaya, intimations of basic ignorance about anatomy on the part of some Vinaya authorities. Kind of a bold statement, but I stand by it. For instance, in the parajika, one section, really important, crucial section of the Vinaya which prohibits-- it's the one that makes the law about-- against sexuality, makes it-- lays down the rules for celibacy, the word for vagina in that passage is-- which is one of the three possible orifices that can be penetrated to count as a sexual infraction-- is a word in Sanskrit, pres-- it's going to be hard to say-- prasravamarga. 

Which literally means the path for urine in which more properly indicates the urethra, rather than the more anatomically accurate word which pops up in later parts of the other parts of the text, which is vranamukha. Literally means wound opening, but is a general term for orifice. And that, as I said, that vranamukha, which is more accurate I would say, is used in other places, and namely in the text on menstrual hygiene that came up earlier, that we looked at earlier. 

So tracking this trope through roughly contemporaneous Buddhist or non-Buddhist but historically adjacent texts suggests that there does seem to be some confusion, kind of persistent confusion about the difference between the urethra and the vagina on the part of some male monastic authorities. 

OK, so we can't simply ignore suspicious, fantastical, anatomically incorrect moments in the text. This is an uneven text. It reflects multiple authorial voices. Nonetheless, I think the data I have assembled here presents a compelling, if somewhat fragmentary, picture of systems and practices within early female Buddhist monastic communities for compassionately tending to and safeguarding the health needs of monastic women, including menstrual hygiene, genital abscesses, monastic women special vulnerability around illness and frailty, and more. 

In contrast to semantically laden, highly symbolic passages, or biologically inaccurate passages about female bodies, the pragmatic, reality-based compassionate caretaking of women's health, especially their reproductive health that is in evidence in this bhikshuni Vinaya is noteworthy.

Several decades ago, Alan Schoenberg ascribed passages such as the one quoted earlier from the Garbhavakranti-Sutra to the ascetic misogynist, an elite monastic figure invested in the male celibate Buddhist project. The contrasting, low key, rhetorically understated practical texts on matters of women's reproductive bodies, hygiene, and health discussed here can be read as evidence of a second figure standing behind the perhaps more glamorous, ascetic misogynist that sponberg identified. 

This second figure is what Martha Selby has called in her work, in a kind of very influential article about Ayurvedic medical texts, she-- a figure that she called the accomplished woman, the upadishthi, knowledgeable and experienced in matters of women's health whom I interpret as instantiating unofficial forms of female authority sometimes, but not always, in tension with formal male monastic authority. 

So, conclusion. Returning to the question of feminist historiography in late-- of late ancient and medieval South Asia, South Asian Buddhism. In some ways, the multiple excellent studies of monastic women that have focused on the eight heavies-- the eight guru dharmas, and matters of ritual authority and ordination-- have inadvertently accentuated the distortions caused by an archival bulge that gluts the record with the concerns of elite monks. 

As they focus on topics about which male monastic lawyers had much to say, the authoritative voice working within elite conventions of remembering and recording would almost certainly have partially or largely overridden contributions from even senior women-- especially on the topics of ordination, community structure-- as they often do today. I mean, I think there's a kind of contemporary parallel to that in-- for Buddhist monastic women and their relationship to authority structures in Buddhism. 

But perhaps for the very reason that they do not connect to major institutional concerns-- circling back-- such as ritual, orthodoxy and leadership structures, and mostly pertain to matters of little procedural significance-- except to the women themselves-- these Buddhist accounts of pre-modern tampons, genital lesions, accidental injuries to the private parts, period laundry, and the difficulty of making an older body bend submissively, allow us to peer around the archival bulge to glimpse the accomplishment and placement, authority and leadership of ancient monastic women. 

If we accept then the notion of female authority in matters of women's health and hygiene, then we have veritable proof that women, in fact, contributed to traditions of monastic discipline and community formation, and must have been co-collaborators on remembering and recording such traditions. 

In other words, senior monastic women with practical knowledge of and sensitivity to women's health and hygiene needs contributed to Buddhist law making. I intend for my relatively modest claims regarding women's leadership around health and hygiene in late ancient and early medieval times in South Asia to have far reaching methodological applications. 

I believe that the argument presented here raises the question of whether such subtle indications of female authoritative presence can form a critical basis for arguing that women may also have had authority in other areas that are perhaps not as detectable in the surviving textual record, because elite authors were more motivated to control the process of remembering and recording those areas of monastic life. In this way, this work provides a rationale for a general questioning of complacent reading practices that pay too little attention to the diversity of stakeholders represented in the text, regardless if their presence is muted or cloaked. Thank you so much. 

[APPLAUSE] 

SPEAKER 2: Sponsored by Women's Studies and Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. 

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2025. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.