But currently, she has two major public, the first priority in political life in the northern A.C. 360 sports.
Where is the second project analyses the Palin's emotional state of transformation?
There is not an endless tests within the context of the content of this issue in early April Typekit.
But. Communities.
And here in Sydney, we've got here and energy heroes.
You don't seem to be muted, but we're not hearing anything. With your microphones not bolted down?
Can you hear me now? Yeah, that's right. Thank you. OK, perfect, perfect.
OK. Great. Sorry about that, one of those technical difficulties we all fear right now.
So I had just said thank you to the organisers for putting this together.
I really appreciate the opportunity to participate from from Los Angeles.
And it's been a rich and wonderful conference even. I mean, definitely worth getting up very early in the morning to to be here.
So this morning I'm. Let me just give a little disclaimer, which is that I find the kind of Zoom interface personally kind of difficult.
So I'm going to try to be unscripted and speak kind of as lively as I can.
So please forgive me any mistakes I make as I kind of talk through this material really kind of might feel a bit wild or rough and ready, let's say.
OK, so we're going to talk about the future of the Unsullied worthy girl.
And if you're interested in in the future, beyond my talk today, I've got a translation of it in the most recent version.
The most recent journal of Chinese Buddhist studies, which Dr. Heller edited guest edited for us so you can follow up.
And I've also asked that in the chat, there's a link to a Dropbox that has my all, my citations in it because I'm going to go through some stuff.
And so if you want to follow up with my specific citations, please go check that Dropbox link and you can find the translation link in there.
OK. So let's start with the suture.
The on solid where the girl because I love the suture and I think it deserves a lot more attention for a whole bunch of reasons.
And so I'm going to go through this suture with you guys,
and then I'm going to kind of read around the suture and talk about why I think it's so interesting beyond what it actually says and where it
fits into the social worlds of of mediaeval China and kind of try to create some open ended generative kind of conversation from this suture.
OK, so let's start with the suture of the the where the girl so she who is she?
What's the text about? That's what we're going to start with. So I'm going to kind of explain the narrative to you here.
So basically, the text begins like, like many my a text and this big audience where the butt is about to preach,
there's a pregnant woman in the audience, and there's also lots of other women in the audience.
There's lots of wives, there's lots of learnt women.
There's all kinds of women in this audience, but particularly the pregnant woman is the one that we need to pay attention to.
So then what happens is that any reader who is in the in the assembly and who is known for his Abel,
seeing his ability to see things he is able to see into the womb of this pregnant woman.
And he sees a little girl sitting in the womb and she's sitting with her hands clasped, her feet crossed, and she's listening to the Buddha.
OK, so then this whole image really kind of makes him very happy, I guess.
And he smiles, and the Buddha asks him why.
And so he tells the Assembly what it is that he's able to see and and how that has filled him with such joy.
And the Buddha basically says, like, Oh great, it's wonderful that you can see that now the the vision of the Buddha is even way better than that,
and everybody in the audience is kind of dubious and doesn't really believe him.
So then what the Buddha does is kind of shines this great light across the assembly so that everybody can see everything.
So everybody in the assembly is able to see into all of the different worlds,
and the text says that it's like looking into a mirror so they can see across into different kinds of worlds everybody can.
So when when everybody in the assembly is looking with this vision of the Buddha that they have now attained, what they see is that in fact,
in all of these rooms of all different kinds of beings all over our world and in other worlds,
there's all kinds of babies sitting with their arms crossed in all kinds of different wombs.
So that's the kind of discussion of this in the text is quite quite cute.
Actually, we have like cows with calves in their rooms who are sitting with their bare feet kind of cooked listening to the Buddha.
And we have like snakes whose bodies are kind of curled into bowls inside the wombs with their heads up listening to the Buddha.
So it's all pretty. It's all pretty fun, I think.
And then what happens is the Aniruddha is like, really overcome with all of this.
And he asks why all of these beings are listening to the Buddha from their rooms.
And what happens is very strange. All of the beings in the wombs, actually,
it says all of the girls in the womb say that they've come to listen to the sutra to help those who are lost,
basically to encourage the Buddhist teaching to learn the Buddhist teaching assumedly so that these two can teach it.
And I think it's interesting here that it's all the girls in the wombs that answer this question because
it kind of presupposes what's going to come later about the gendered conversation in this text.
And it also reminds me there's a small little place in the Perry Nirvana intro where there's a group of women.
In the audience who is said, we're chose to be born in women's bodies because they're more effective vehicles for teaching.
OK, so any ruder than is kind of overcome by the miracle of these babies who are committed to spreading the Buddhist teaching.
And he he proclaims that his sort of learning to that point is deficient and
that he vows to be born into the house in order to kind of follow their model,
but to save help beings. And that this would be a far superior life to that of the are hot at this point.
The Unsullied, where the girl is then born from the side of her mother, just like a Buddha.
So it presupposes or or shows you the kind of being that she is.
She is a highly attained bodhisattva in this text she's referred to as the female body sat
throughout the whole text the earthquakes and shakes like it does at the birth of the Buddha.
And a sort of kind of another Buddha related theme is that all of the other babies
from all of the other rooms are born in a kind of succession that follows her birth.
So this kind of reminds me a bit of the birth of the Buddha and the birth of the condoles that Reiko Numa has discussed in her work.
So we have this setup that she's clearly a very advanced being. So then what happens is there's a bunch of discussion about her body.
So she's born, she's newly born, but she takes on the body of about a two year old or something like that.
And and she's naked, of course, because she's nearly born.
And then Indra comes into the scene, and Indra is very uncomfortable with the fact that she's naked and and tries to put clothes on her,
tries to get her some clothes, and also gets clothes for everybody else who was newly born in the assembly.
But she has a sort of longish back and forth with Indra, in which she rejects not only the clothing but the entire idea of clothing,
and says that there's, you know, there's nothing wrong with her body and that from the perspective of the Mahayana, there's no male and female.
OK, so this this is also related to and he really comes back into this discussion here,
and he can't understand why this really learn a teacher has taken on a female body.
Now, she says she says this that in the lot of the great vehicle, there's neither male or female.
The Buddha comes in at this point and supports her and tells everybody.
Her backstory says that she is from another brutal land, that she studied Buddhism for countless aeons and that she is a highly attained being.
And he actually kind of lectures Indra here, and he says to Indra that if Indra had the kind of advanced vision of a Buddha or a bodhisattva,
what he would see when he looked at her body would be the body of the body, not the naked body of a female.
So then eventually, it's kind of back and forth the where the girl does, except clothing that comes down from the heavens and she comes down,
she's kind of on a lotus throne that generates spontaneously out of the ground as she worships the feet of the Buddha.
And then all of the mothers in the assembly moved by this whole miracle declare their intention for salvation.
They all venerate the Buddha. And then in a kind of interesting part of the text,
all of these women who have come to venerate the Buddha all stand in front of the Buddha, and they all take on male bodies.
So our girl, however, our protagonist, remains female, and the Buddha likens her to a target, and he speaks.
The Sutra says the name of it, everyone's happy. That's the end of the text.
OK, so it's like you're kind of 10 minute narrative set up.
I love this text so much because I think that the scene that it puts out is just so remarkable.
All these babies being born, all these different kinds of babies being born,
a kind of all over the place in this really explicit discussion about birth and bodies and what that looks like in our Buddha land.
OK, so this this is what the text brings a question that I want to talk about for the rest of my my time,
which is whether or not one needs to change the body if one is born as a female or indeed a non-human or an animal.
Does one need to change the body in order to become a Buddha?
And the reason why I want to talk about this is because it seems to me in looking at the kind of development of the Mahayana tradition in East Asia.
This is an important question. Know people are constantly asking about this question.
There are a lot of texts written trying to interpret this question.
And I would say just as a as a B side, I guess that as a scholar who works on this question, I get a lot of questions emailed to me about this.
So it's still an active question. People still want to know the answer about whether or not they need to change the female body.
Okay, so the answer in our text is really it depends. We've got one suture with two possibilities, essentially.
We've got the Unsullied worthy girl in the suture who doesn't change her sex.
She stays female. The whole text at the end of the text.
In the last line of the text, she's still referred to as a female boy. Now, all of the other women in the text change into a take on male bodies.
And not only that, also all of the animals in the text take on human bodies and kind of goes down the line.
So there's this kind of like transformation on the karmic radiation that goes sort of all
the way down the line for all of these beings that have just been born in this assembly.
So here we get this kind of instability. In the tradition, we've got two possibilities in one sutra that seem to be somewhat at odds with each other.
And so where do we go from here? How do we sort of interpret this difference?
So I would say in reading through this text and reading around text that kind of are in communication with this text.
One of the explanations is that different bootlegs have different conditions,
or maybe where you're where you're born predicts where you go or something like that.
So in this text, we're told that the Unsullied, where the girl comes from a different Buddha land, what that borderland is is is uncertain.
But she's not from here. Everyone else is born here.
And so I think how the text tries to talk about this is they're bound by the laws of our brutal land.
We're checking the names. But now I'm kind of inspired by the work of Paul Harrison on the cover.
Dear Amitabh is pure land and also of John Nazir, who's worked on Abbey Road to Yorkshire purulent and have discussed how gender
operates differently in different lands or different woodlands in particular,
and Abbey Arati, where visual acuity also hails the women.
There's no the women there don't suffer the same kinds of problems associated with womanhood in art our world.
So womanhood is known totally differently in Abbey Rati and notably the molecular tea comes from erotic.
Come and listen to the different Buddhas in the different Buddha lands,
and that's very much like what the Unsullied worthy girl does here in our text.
So we've got kind of two possibilities based on where you're born and what, what's your sort of practise of the Mahayana?
It's actually throughout these texts. So but we aren't the only ones who are confused.
I mean, reading through this textual material is is confusing, and this is just like this text I've given you is just like one bit of that confusion.
So the text you've just been reading is in the title kind of number five sixty two.
So sixty five sixty two. So we know that she's a female body type, but till the very end.
But there's all of this transformation of other beings in the text.
This text to five sixty two has another translation in the title canon to five sixty three, which is the suture hurt by the girl in the womb.
It's basically narratively the same set up the same story. It's less.
It as an alternate translation of the same text in mediaeval catalogues,
although there's a number of texts that when you study them, are probably not all the same text.
Now, the big difference between five sixty two and two five sixty three is that A. five sixty three the word the girl does change your sex,
and she does so in a very weird spot in the sutra. So basically, we've gone through all of the same narrative material.
And then in the penultimate sentence, so the sentence just before the suture is named and everyone's happy kind of stock sentence,
there's just a one line sentence that says, and then the the word the girl changed her sex and became a man.
So you have this kind of weird add on, which feels to me a bit like translator interpretation into the text, what it does, whatever it is doing there.
It points to confusion and kind of instability in this textual tradition.
And I'll just very quickly say that both five sixty two and five sixty three are fairly early translations in China.
So probably early, probably fourth century translations, although the attribution is very contested.
So T five sixty two is attributed to Dharma Raksha A. five sixty three is attributed to Dharma Sharma.
However, scholarship by highest year to Maduro has shown that probably those attributions are not correct,
although these texts probably come out of the Western gine context that that's a miracle would have been working on.
So the probably contemporaneous but we don't know that they're actually from those, those translators.
OK, so the point is there's confusion in this textual narrative.
So how do we how do we understand as historians, as scholars into the muhanna where this confusion comes from,
how it surfaces and how it sort of progresses throughout the development of the tradition?
That's kind of my second question. In the talk. So in order to kind of broach this, let's go to the lotus suture because it has the most,
I guess, the most well known discussion of this of this problem.
So you probably all know very well the story of the daughter of the Dragon King from the
Lotus Sutra here depicted in this beautiful frontispiece to the David -.TO chapter,
which is where the story falls.
So what we have here is a depiction of the daughter of the Dragon King presenting a jewel to the Buddha in the story, of course, she, you know,
she's kind of being gossiped about people don't think that she could possibly be ready for Buddha Hood because she's not only a female,
but she is a dragon and a child. So how could that body be a body that's sort of equated with widowhood?
Is the question at stake? And she's here.
We hear the discussion of the famous five obstacles.
So the five things that a woman cannot be according to, but is teaching one of those things being a Buddha.
Right. And so what happens, though, is she comes onto the scene and she says,
completes all of the practises toward Buddha Hood, and she does change your sex.
She becomes male.
So the question, I think that's always remained out of this text and that I get a lot of questions about is what does this text about?
Is this text about the need to change the female body, female body in order to become a Buddha?
Or is the text about the fact that a child female non-human has become a Buddha and then has taken on the body as an expression of that ability?
So is maleness a precondition or an expression of Buddha?
Hood is kind of the question that's at stake here and has been interpreted in a lot of different ways throughout history.
So we're to talk a little bit about that. Now it's worth mentioning just for a second to further point to this instability in the tradition
that this chapter is absent from an earlier translation in the Chinese records at the Lotus Sutra.
So in the miraculous Lotus Sutra,
we don't have this chapter and therefore we don't have the story of the of the sexual transformation of the daughter of the Dragon King.
It it is in the standard Lotus Sutra, which is to MacGyver's translation,
but scholarship has suggested that that chapter may also not have been by of his hand.
It may come into the text later. So instability, that's what I want you to take away from this.
This talk today is kind of instability within tradition. OK, so but let's return to the question of how do we understand this?
Because it's important to our project of the suture of the Unsullied, where the girl.
So basically, we want to understand something about the lotus suture. A good place to look is ji.
So the tintype patriarch who obviously commented on the Lotus teacher and had a lot to say.
So in his commentary to this section, this is what he says.
He says exactly when her karmic link to our land was fading, she guided living beings.
That was all made possible by her rich power of expedient means by which she attained one Buddha body,
all Buddha bodies, and the summary of manifesting all physical bodies.
So she's pretty clear here that her transformation is an expression,
it's an expedient means also of teaching and of convincing her audience that doubt her,
that she is able to achieve to achieve good in the body that she has taken on.
Right? OK. Well, he also says, is that a whole bunch of other beings, including women Mara, Obama, India, without abandoning their bodies,
without taking up other bodies and in their apparent curved bodies, they're capable of attaining widowhood.
So he says that in his commentary about what what he's doing is citing in his commentary another text which he calls the womb, such our tightening.
You know, the woman said there's no text in the title called the woman's uterus.
So we have to do a little bit of digging to figure out what exactly it is that he's citing.
And when I was going through this,
my first thought was the text I just mentioned to five sixty three because it is about bodies and there are some statements about bodies in that text,
though none of them really match what she has to say.
In further digging where we're going, it's actually to this text, which is a kind of a newer text to me,
which is the vast suture on the descent of the bodies that was consciousness from tissue the heavens into his mother's womb.
So when you read this text, the text refers to itself internally as the the suture of the story.
The structure of the body sat there in the womb. And that's what we abbreviate to womb, suture or tiding.
And it's worth mentioning that Jey cites the suture in a number of places in his commentary to the lotus suture.
So not just here. Now what's kind of fascinating about this particular text?
If we want to talk about the development of the Muhanna in East Asia and we want to talk about these unstable traditions,
is that T 384 Michael Ravich has worked on somewhat because its trend it's attributed to Dharma Raksha,
which he's worked on a lot, and radish suggests alongside others that T 384 is probably actually written by Dharma Raksha he uses.
If you don't know Raj his work, he uses a digital tools to kind of analyse how people write and how they compose.
And probably this is from Dharma fractious hand as far as that scholarship can tell us.
Now the the problem, though, is that it's probably not a translation.
It's probably a Chinese text so written first in Chinese that probably draws from another a bunch of other suchas in translation,
but is not itself a full suture in translation.
And we know that Dharma Russia was involved in this kind of work sort of towards the end of his career.
So we have an unstable tradition. We have an open question about whether or not we change the body and then we
have this very powerful learnt patriarch whose writings are still influential,
citing what is likely a Chinese indigenous but a sutra.
In order to back up his interpretation that a woman can become a woman or monster
or a devil or any kind of being can become a Buddha in their current bodies.
OK, so that text does say very clearly it goes gives you many examples of different kinds of beings that they don't have to exchange their bodies.
They don't have to give up their current body. They don't have to receive a new body.
In order to become a Buddha, they can just become Buddhas. So it's very clear in that text in all kinds of different examples.
And so it's clearly what Ji is drawing on in his interpretation of the Lotus.
Now again, I was trying to unpack the instability of the question.
The problem that is also embedded in this text is that what does the Buddha?
Right? So the text tells us also quite clearly that indeed, all beings don't have to give up their bodies.
There's no kind of karmic ripening or karmic exchange that needs to happen by the taking on of a karmically superior body, a male body or human body.
However, once they become a Buddha, they will take on the marks of the great man.
Their body that will be the expression of their Buddha hood is that their body will convert to the body of the great man,
which is the body of the Buddha. So again, we have a lot of questions remaining right for Chile.
It's very clear that this is what's going on. Based on his reading in text, it's very clear that you know its expression of Buddha head.
But what we still have is a situation where women are changing their bodies and female bodies.
Non humans are changing their bodies into human bodies in order to progress toward Buddha Hood in some way.
So it's all very muddy, I guess.
So I want to like read between the lines a little bit and discuss kind of the larger context of where these texts fall.
And my I kind of want to pick out some, some pieces of these days in my honour that maybe we.
Talk about during the rest of this conference. So what are these talks really about?
You know, I started reading these texts originally because I'm interested in women's history,
and so there's lots of female protagonists in these texts,
and that's how they stood out to me, and there's many more than than the ones I've suggested.
But when you read them, you know, they are about women in some way. They're about bodies.
They're about pollution. They're about spiritual inferiority mapped on to the body, the physical body.
They're about karmic ripening, the body of the Buddha. So they are about female bodies in some sense.
But I want to suggest a shift of thinking is that they're not about women, they're about even women.
And this seems like a small point to make.
But it was a point that was sort of suggested to to me by Professor Shoppin, who said, you know, who suggested to me that.
Although we must we must find out. I think you may have hit something and it kind of went funny.
So it's sort of like just adjust it in mind. I'll tell you, I mean, when he's not yet.
No, nothing yet. Last time, I think you unplugged something from the back end that seem to work.
That again, sounds like you back my back. Yeah, you're back.
It looks like I'm having trouble with my my microphone. I'm sorry.
OK, so I was talking about even women that these texts are about a kind of Mahayana frame in which even women,
even all sorts of other beings, are able to be saved. And so that puts us very clearly in the Chinese context anyways, in the obvious question.
And what these text reference internally to themselves is that these texts are about what's known as the great vehicle,
at least in the East Asian context. They constantly say that they are great vehicle texts.
They constantly say things like from the perspective of the great vehicle or with
the vision of the great vehicle or with the knowledge of the great vehicle. You know, this is what's at stake.
And so I just wanted to to take a little to go here for a second and just suggest a few things about the Mahayana in China,
which is that the muhanna in early mediaeval China is quite concerned or salvation
there is that that component to a lot of the texts that are not just translated,
but popularised and circulated a lot of questions about [INAUDIBLE] and rebirth and those kinds of things.
So there's that. But what I also wanted us to pay attention to is that in the East Asian context, these texts are unstable, as I've shown.
So how does that instability become part of what we know is the Mahayana in East Asia is, I think,
a question that we need to pay a lot more attention to what are the unstable questions and how do they get interpreted over time?
And I think like an approach that focuses in on that kind of instability potentially has a lot to offer.
So let me just show you a little bit about what I think. Maybe it has to offer in some cases.
So the the story of T five, sixty two and T five sixty three doesn't end with T five sixty three.
There's another text, 564. And all of these texts are sort of thought to be distributed to the Kamasutra.
This is conjectural, and there's two other text that are also said to be have this name,
but they're all very different, and this is a hope of giving reference that these are part of that textual family.
So I showed this slide a lot. You may have seen me show the slide in previous times.
You don't have to memorise the side or anything like that. It's not all that important.
What's important is that T five sixty four is is a pastiche text.
I've argued. So it it doesn't. It's not T five, sixty two and fifty five sixty three.
What it does is it takes the the narrative set up the baby in the womb,
all the magic and takes it from there and then adds a large a kind of debate section from
five sixty five and five sixty six that come together and make this this much larger text.
Five sixty four to five sixty four is long and it integrates all of this different material from different texts.
And what I also kind of want to point out here is that all of these texts are known in all of these other names in early mediaeval catalogues,
and perhaps this is also another version of this, another name for this.
So it's all very confusing and I think speaks to this instability and instability that's both ideological,
but also in terms of translation tactics and who's translating what and how texts are
known then circulated now T five 64 is important because it becomes very popular,
y, you know, so in later Chinese history, this text kind of becomes a very dominant text in there.
For example, in the CCR we have I shouldn't I shouldn't pair the CTA as Chinese history,
but it kind of in the East Asian history, it circulates widely.
So in the future, we have an empress dowager circulating this text and tens of thousands of copies.
It's popular in Japan and liturgy for the four deceased women and things of that sort.
So what accounts for this instability and this transmission of this text?
What I want to say here is that in five sixty two, there's no sex change, she 562.
There's a sex change in T five 64. The text, which becomes ultimately the most successful of this progression.
What there is is actually there is a sex change, but it's not talked about in terms of sort of karmic ripening and the necessity of a female body.
It's in fact talked about as a gender change.
So we have this kind of protagonist who has this conversation about why she has to change her female body and the conversation about gender.
So the idea being that life as a woman is really hard and prevents you from practising Buddhism as a woman,
you're subject to verbal abuse, physical abuse. You're not individually free, you don't have any autonomy.
All of those reasons are sort of part of T five sixty four, and they're not in any of the other in these other texts.
So what accounts for this? I think that, and this is where my work is going in the future, is that women themselves account.
For a part of this interesting part of this instability, because I believe that women constituted a an audience,
a context for some of the discussion of the sex and created some demand within
the ways in which early mediaeval texts were translated and were circulated.
So I'm I'm doing the work now of trying to connect actual historical women to groups
of translators that were involved in the discussion and the creation of these texts.
So I think, you know, when we when we zero in on these places of instability, we get an opportunity to ask,
who are the the agents of this instability and learn about the development of the tradition through their eyes.
And I'll just finish up by showing you this.
This is yet another development of this textual progression, and I'm sorry that the the picture is so bad.
It's like a cell phone picture of a scan of a document held in Tokyo in the National Library.
And this is a further development of this textual tradition that's probably written in Japan.
A Japanese scholar named Michiko Junco has written on this text and argues that it's the Japanese apocrypha.
And, you know, so it shows that the instability of the question goes beyond China.
OK, so I'm going to stop here. There's many, many more texts.
This is like a little picture for studying this topic. There's so many more texts on this topic within early mediaeval catalogues.
And you know, my work will go through some, but there's there's way more than I can possibly do.
So just to suggest that this is a big question as early as the fourth century,
and that remains a big question today and I think points to some important pieces of the Mahayana in East Asia.
OK, so I'm going to stop now, and I'm very sorry about my technological difficulties.
It looks like I need a new microphone and I hope I can take some questions.