On Reading Buddhist Vinaya
Feminist History, Hermeneutics, and Translating Women’s Bodies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8202799 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Amy Paris Langenberg (0000-0003-2477-4441, Religious Studies, Eckerd College, Letters Collegium, St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 88 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1121-1153 |
| Publication date | 2020-12-31 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-7189 • E-ISSN: 1477-4585 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jaarel/lfaa049 |
| OpenAlex | W3110782141 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 20 |
Buddhist monastic law codes (vinaya) are rich sources for writing the history of the early nuns’ community. If we hope to encounter these ascetic women of long ago as full real people, however, we must apply an intentional, transparent, critically informed, and sometimes interstitial reading strategy, not a theoretically naïve historiography cloaked in philological rigor. Confronting head on the issue of what the vinaya actually can tell us about the early nuns’ community, this essay offers a survey of hermeneutical approaches in vinaya studies. It articulates a revised approach based on accepted strategies within vinaya studies enhanced by innovations in the fields of religious studies, gender studies, historical linguistics, comparative law, and dharmaśāstra studies. It also analyzes several vinaya passages based on this revised approach, including a text legislating the nuns’ use of what appears to be an ancient tampon when they are menstruating. Finally, it offers observations about the possible relationship between nuns’ vinayas as texts and the realia of the early nuns’ community. These observations include the possibility that the ancient Buddhist nunnery was a place where monastic women exercised certain types of agency as practitioners, interpreters, and even authors of monastic discipline, despite their oft-mentioned subordination to the male community
Agency (philosophy) · Art · Asceticism · Buddhism · Dharma · Epistemology · Feminism · Hermeneutics · Historiography · Linguistics · Literature · Philology · Precept · Reading (process) · Sociology · Theology · Classics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
Genres and Jurisdictions
Buddhist Manuscript Cultures
Buddhism and Law
Looking into water-pots and over a Buddhist scribe's shoulder – On the deposition and the use of manuscripts in early Buddhism
The learned monk as a comic figure
Monks Who Have Sex
Dharma??stra, Custom, ?Real Law? and ?Apocryphal? Smrtis
On Incompetent Monks and Able Urbane Nuns in a Buddhist Monastic Code
The Story of Dharmadinnā
Sociolinguistic Remarks on the Indo-Iranian *-ka-Suffix
On Emptying Chamber Pots Without Looking and the Urban Location of Buddhist Nunneries in Early India Again
Buddhist Blood Taboo
A Robed Revolution
Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of Indian Buddhism
Śaikṣa-Dharmas Revisited
On the Character, Content, and Authorship of Itmām Tatimmat Ṣiwān al-ḥikma and the Identity of the Author of Muntakhab Ṣiwān al-ḥikma
Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,67 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2024 (2) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |