Buddhist Blood Taboo: Mary Douglas, Female Impurity, and Classical Indian Buddhism

Buddhist Blood Taboo: MaryDouglas, Female Impurity, andClassical Indian BuddhismAmy Paris Langenberg*

Mary Douglas is a prominent figure in the pantheon of religious studies,but the relevance of Douglas’s influential theories about ritual pollutionfor Classical Indian Buddhism, a literate tradition that is sometimes criti-cal of ritual and often explicitly distances itself from physicalized inter-pretations of bodily impurity, is not obvious. In fact, students ofClassical Indian Buddhism have often argued that ideas about ritual im-purity, including blood taboos, hold no place of importance in that tradi-tion. This article brings together materials from the Indian Buddhisttradition and Douglas’s theories of pollution in society to fulfill the dualpurpose of testing Douglas’s theory in a new arena and better articulatingand explaining Indian Buddhist notions of female impurity.

MARY DOUGLAS’S INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHER, RichardFardon, observed that “system-building has been the proper reserve ofdour men rather than witty women” (1999: 209). A witty woman,

*Amy Paris Langenberg, Eckerd College, Religious Studies, 4200 54th Avenue South,St. Petersburg, FL 33711, USA. E-mail: [email protected]. Several colleagues greatly contributedto the execution of this study. I would especially like to thank Lori Meeks for inspiring me to tacklethis topic with her invitation to participate in the 2012 “Gender and Ideologies of Blood PollutionWorkshop” at the University of Southern California, Anālayo for his support of my research onmenstrual law in Buddhist Vinaya, Natalie Gummer for reading an early draft, Matthew Bagger formany edifying conversations regarding Mary Douglas and for reading and commenting on thisarticle not once but twice, and my anonymous reviewers at the JAAR for their very constructivecomments.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, pp. 1–35doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfv059© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy ofReligion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

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Douglas was nonetheless a system-builder. She has long been a promi-nent figure in the pantheon of religious studies. Her great topics—ritual,purity, the body—have occupied an equally significant position in its cur-ricula. Douglas’s core premise, inspired by Émile Durkheim, is that our apriori intuitions about the natural world, couched in the idiom of reli-gion, are compelled by the exigencies of human social existence. Her ex-plorations of the body as a symbol of society and analysis of pollution as amediator of social boundaries, both built on this core Durkheimianinsight, have been pivotal in scholarly interpretations of ancient Israelitereligion, Brahmanism, African religions, and many other religious tradi-tions. The relevance of Douglas’s theories for classical Indian Buddhism,a literate tradition that includes no pollution-based dietary laws, some-times explicitly asserts purity to be a feature of the mind (not the body),and is occasionally critical of religious ritual, is not obvious.1 In particu-lar, it has not been obvious to students of classical Indian Buddhism thatideas regarding female impurity, “Buddhist blood taboos” as I dub themmetaphorically in my title, hold any place of importance there at all.Applying Douglas’s theories of pollution to the Indian Buddhist exampleilluminates notions of female impurity that have been alternativelyignored, denied, or misattributed. Explaining Buddhist purity discourse isa desideratum, as the status of female bodies, to which this discourse iscentral, is a topic of both importance and puzzlement in contemporaryscholarly discussions of gender in Buddhism.

Mary Douglas’s work has been subject to a range of critiques over herlong career. Here, I do not attempt to catalogue all of these, but focus ontwo challenges of particular relevance to Indian Buddhist purity discourse.First, Douglas has been criticized for overestimating the meaningful coher-ence of religious cultures in her theory making. In short, her system-build-ing is judged to be too systematic. The Indian Buddhist example containswithin itself sufficient complexity to provide a good testing ground for hertheory’s explanatory power in cases of internal contradiction and segmen-tation. Second, in its special focus on female impurity, a topic that Douglasherself never took up with much enthusiasm, this study indexes a particu-lar body of data her interpretive framework may systematically occlude:namely, the society-making efforts of subordinated or excluded groupssuch as women. This study examines both of these salient critiques in lightof a body of data to which Douglas’s theories have not been applied in athorough-going manner, and that Douglas herself did not examine in any

1For one of the few (and now quite old) available studies of the concept of purity in South AsianBuddhism, see Tambiah (1985).

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depth. Douglas’s seminal theory of purity and pollution brings neededclarity to the obscure topic of female impurity in Indian Buddhism. TheIndian Buddhist case offers, in turn, an opportunity to consider afresh thevalue and the limits of Douglas’s work.

DOUGLAS ON FEMALE IMPURITY

Douglas’s most famous monograph, Purity and Danger: An Analysisof the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, was published in 1966. In it, sheargues that “religious beliefs express society’s awareness of itself”(Douglas 1966: 101). Religious beliefs and symbols have psychologicalforce; however, religious systems draw on emotionally powerful ideas andimages selectively in order to express not the idiosyncratic concerns of in-dividuals but the vital concerns of the social group as a whole. For theearly Douglas, the body is the paradigmatic source of such viscerally reso-nant symbols. Her slogan is “talk about the body is talk about society.”For instance, bodily fluids, like menstrual blood, saliva, and semen, passin and out of the body, symbolizing the breaches of the social body atpoints of vulnerability and exchange. Douglas observes, “It seems thatour deepest fears and desires take expression with a kind of witty aptness.To understand body pollution we should try to argue back from theknown dangers of society to the known selection of body themes and tryto recognize what appositeness is there” (1966: 121).

A key component of Douglas’s pollution theory concerns the notionof anomaly. For Douglas, impurity is always connected to classificationsystems. Matthew Bagger, who has applied Douglas’s theories to the topicof religious paradox in mysticism, explains the basis for this connectionas follows: “The practical necessity of rendering a society stable and thepsychological satisfaction of achieving consonance tend in conjunction toproduce a correspondence between the society’s formal pattern of socialrelations and the seams of its constructed universe” (2007: 41). ForDouglas, impure things are usually anomalies that do not conform to ac-cepted notions of cosmological and social order. Ultimately, pollutionbeliefs derive their power not only from deeply held cosmological beliefs,but also because they continuously express and sustain social structures,flagging transgressions and guarding points of entry especially whenother political and social sanctions are not very strong, direct, or complete(Douglas 1966: 132). Thus, pollution practice “arises from the desire tokeep straight the internal lines of the social system,” tapping into strongemotions like horror and disgust in order to accomplish this work(Douglas 1966: 140). The impurity of menstrual blood fits with these con-cerns, as this blood crosses the body’s envelope when it should not. This

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is because menses indicates the absence of pregnancy, which in most pa-triarchal societies is the ideal state for a married woman in her fertileyears.

Douglas addresses the ritual functions of female blood at severalpoints in Purity and Danger. She hypothesizes that it is a source of pollu-tion in societies in which the approved relationship between men andwomen affords women access to certain kinds of power despite clear ide-ologies of male superiority (Douglas 1966: 140–158). In these situations,even though the social rules may be clearly defined and legally enforced,the community complains of and flags (but does not fully resolve) its in-ternal gender dissonance through ideas of sexual pollution.2 Minorfemale rebellions are quelled every time purity rules remind them of theirsocial location. In Purity and Danger, Douglas also contrasts religioussystems in which unclean things such as menstrual blood are alwaysabominated and “composting religions” in which they are viewed as dan-gerous but also paradoxically revered as sacred (1966: 167). In compost-ing religions, unclean things are viewed ambivalently as a source ofdanger and a potential source of tremendous power. These more com-plete religions recognize that the disintegration and lack of order inherentin impurity is also redolent with regrowth and renewal. Just as rottingwaste breaks down in the compost pile, loses its foulness, and becomes arichly nutritious source of new life in time, in composting religions whatis ordinarily scrupulously avoided is faced, honored, and even consumedunder special ritual conditions. Thus, “that which is rejected is ploughedback for a renewal of life” (Douglas 1966: 167). In a composting religion,female blood is likely to be respected as a source of life, even while it isfeared as contaminating.

In a 1972 lecture given at University College London entitled “Self-ev-idence,” Douglas takes the powerful but sometimes half-formed theses re-garding pollution and society found in Purity and Danger to a furtherstage of development (1975: 276–318).3 Here, she argues that in societiesin which outsiders such as exogamous wives, converts, or slaves are regu-larly incorporated into their core institutions, taboo things are treated

2In an essay published two years after Purity and Danger entitled “Couvade and Menstruation,”Douglas again addresses the topic of female blood taboos, restating that they are frequently deployedto manipulate interpersonal relationships and arguing that, when displayed in public rituals, they canbe read as statements about normative social structure, especially the relationship between men andwomen (1975: 61).

3My reading of Douglas has been greatly influenced by Bagger’s application of Douglas’s theoriesto the religious uses of paradox in his monograph The Uses of Paradox: Religion, Self-Transformation,and the Absurd. For an exceptionally clear discussion of “Self-evidence” in relationship to varieties ofmystical practice, see Bagger (2007: 40–47).




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positively, though with caution, as symbols that mediate between humansociety and the gods, or other manifestations of the divine. When venerat-ed as sacred mediators, taboo things provide access to power. In societiesthat must guard their gates against intruders and are regularly threatenedby outsiders, taboo things are consistently abominated and deemedimpure. They are not tolerated as mediating symbols. All social systemsexist somewhere on this continuum, with one end representing total xe-nophobia accompanied by the abomination of anomalous or impurethings, the other free and open borders accompanied by a veneration ofthe same (Douglas 1975: 281). Here Douglas’s theory predicts that femaleblood would likely be regarded as a filthy abomination in an endogamoussociety, and as dangerous but powerful in an exogamous society. In thisnew theoretical development, which links the sacralization of the impureto social concerns more closely, Douglas is able to incorporate her earlierobservations that female blood is the object of religious respect in com-posting religions but also often a tool of social control into one theory.

In Natural Symbols, published four years after Purity and Danger,Douglas further elaborates her analysis of symbol systems in relationshipto social structure. There, she distinguishes between “group,” the outerboundary of a community, and “grid,” the structural divisions within thecommunity. Some societies are high group/high grid; that is, they empha-size boundaries between themselves and others and also internal hierar-chical structures. Others are high group/low grid, and so forth. Thus,societies structure themselves variously, sometimes in an internallycomplex manner. In this early work, Douglas often takes note of the reli-gious rituals and symbols that mark relationships between insiders andoutsiders, or between those with more or less power within the group.She does not, however, consider cases in which distinguishable social sub-environments operating side-by-side in one complex society mutuallyproduce a religion.4 For the early Douglas, the interests and perspectivesof whatever group is dominant always take priority in the ritual and sym-bolic expressions of the group as a whole. In Douglas’s examples fromPurity and Danger, Natural Symbols, and “Self-evidence,” women are typ-ically objects of social exchange, not agents of social action. It follows thatmenstruating women are likely to be the objects of religious belief andpractice, but not its agents.

4Bagger notes that “In [Douglas’s] more recent work . . . she has tended to focus on institutionsand/or groups with rival social visions, rather than whole societies. . . . Her thesis that attitudestoward exchange condition response to anomaly need not apply only to full-scale societies and theirmarriage practices. Attitudes towards exchange exert their influence at every scale” (2007: 44).




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In the introduction to their 1988 edited volume on the anthropologyof menstruation, Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb critique Douglas’semphasis on the dominant and formal structures that are upheld by malepower, arguing that she does not seriously consider the implications anyparallel structures women create and perpetuate amongst themselvesmight have for her overall theories of pollution. Buckley and Gottlieb areparticularly concerned with the ways in which Douglas’s totalizing theorymakes the alternative or supplementary pollution beliefs and practices ofwomen invisible (1988: 30–31). They are certainly correct in their assess-ment of Douglas’s neglect of the symbolic and ritual world-building ca-pacity of “women, serfs, and slaves” in her early work (1970: 84). InNatural Symbols, for instance, Douglas calls the structures of women’s so-cieties “delicate,” their significance “less than the significance of men’s re-lations with one another in the public role system” (1970: 84). She doesacknowledge the possession cults that sometimes characterize female reli-giosity in highly gender-differentiated religious cultures, the best-knownexample being the zar cults observed among the Muslim peoples ofEastern Africa (Lewis [1969] 1971; Boddy 1988). Like I. M. Lewis,Douglas calls such cults “effervescent,” however, and attributes their sup-posedly chaotic and unstable nature to the low grid/low group nature offemale social organization (1970: 80–82). In short, the early Douglas doesnot recognize the symbolic or ritual complexities of women’s religion thatscholars have since discovered. The Buddhist sources to be consideredhere represent an elite, male frame of reference.5 In fact, if my sourcesmore strongly expressed the agency of subordinates or outsiders, such aswomen and heterodox practitioners, the usefulness of Douglas’s classicearly theory, which accounts only for the dominant view, might be under-cut.6 Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that ancient womenmay have generated supplementary or alternative pollution beliefs thatare not readily accessed in classical Buddhist texts and may be evenfurther occluded through the application of Douglas’s theory.

Douglas returned often to the topic of purity, notably in her studies ofIsraelite religion. Douglas’s original chapter in Purity and Danger onLeviticus interprets the lists of clean and unclean animals found inchapter eleven using the idea of anomaly. That which falls outside of

5Although I would contend that the female voice can sometimes be heard in the case of Vinayasources, I will not make that argument here. The Therīgāthā, a collection of verses attributed to theearly nuns’ community, is another example of an early Buddhist text that many scholars believerecord a female perspective.

6Of course, nothing in Douglas’s view would preclude it from being applied to a social group inwhich women were the dominant social actors, men the objects of exchange.




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ideal categories of divine creation—for instance, a cloven footed animalthat does not chew its cud—is anomalous with respect to those ideal cate-gories and therefore impure. Douglas’s study of Leviticus revolutionizedthe way biblical scholars read that text and was the starting point for avibrant conversation on purity and ritual law within the field. After initi-ating this conversation in 1966, Douglas jumped disciplinary boundariesto join it in earnest during the early 1990s. Most relevant to this article isher Leviticus as Literature, published in 1999.7 In discussing Leviticus 12and 15, Douglas returns to the topic of female blood. Leviticus 12 saysthat a woman will be unclean for a period of time after birthing a malechild and must seek atonement. Leviticus 15 concerns the uncleannessthat ensues after the discharge of semen or womb blood.8 In her discus-sions of Leviticus 12 and 15, Douglas abandons completely her early em-phasis on the body as a universal symbol of society and her attendantanalysis of bodily fluids as posing ritually significant breaches of the phys-ical envelope. In fact, she flatly states that ritual purity in Leviticus has“nothing to do with regular inflows and outflows of the functionarybody” (Douglas 1999: 179). In this new analysis, the discourse of purityin Leviticus is uniquely tied to the ritual symbolism of the tabernacle, notto the body as a symbol of society.

For our purposes, the most important contribution from Leviticus asLiterature is not its particular interpretation of Leviticus, but rather thecritical view it affords of Douglas’s earlier work. This view is all the morearresting in that it is provided to us reflexively by the author herself.Leviticus as Literature makes us aware that whereas the game-changingtheories of Purity and Danger regarding body, society, and ritual pollu-tion are not to be ignored or forgotten, there are also reasons not to tarry

7Like the Douglas of Purity and Danger, this one still prefers holistic explanations. Here Douglas’sinterpretive framework takes as its whole the literary world of Leviticus in relationship to otherbiblical texts rather than ritual systems in general. Moreover, she comes to regard the priestly lawfound in the Pentateuch as unique and exceptional. In the preface to Leviticus as Literature, Douglasexplicitly states that “general pollution theory still stands, but its application to the Bible is limited”(1999: viii; see also Klawans 2003: 96; Lemos 2009: 242). Some reviewers have been critical ofDouglas’s biblical exceptionalism, charging her with joining too many other biblical scholars inapologetically asserting the “revolutionary nature of Israelite monotheism, which contrasted with thepaganistic worldview of not only all other ancient religions but all religions not ultimately derivingfrom Judaism, that unique and incomparable faith” (Lemos 2009: 236; see also Klawans 2003).

8In this new work, Douglas argues that the charges of uncleanness and abomination requireseparate ritual responses in Leviticus, and should not be collapsed into one. Uncleanness, as fromchildbirth, is contagious and requires atonement so that the tabernacle may be approached. Contactwith what is abominated calls for no particular ritual response, though it is against God’scompassionate concern for the fecundity of the earth. These distinctions are developed from studyingthe specifics of biblical language and symbolism, and are therefore particular to the Levitical textualenvironment.




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indefinitely in that broad comparative moment but to dial in to theunique particularities of one system. Douglas’s close examination of theliterary world of Leviticus reveals how things can slip out of the place youassigned them, or fail to conform to an expected pattern at close range.The close view does not, however, entirely invalidate the view fromfarther out. In the first pages of Leviticus as Literature, Douglas is stillwilling to admit that “where lines of abominability are drawn, heavystakes are at issue. The classification of the universe is part and parcel ofsocial organization,” and to grant that the standard pollution theory“works well enough . . . for the cult of the tabernacle, and the dignity ofthe priesthood” (1999: vii). At the same time, she finds herself forced tomake substantial adjustments to the standard theory to accommodate thepeculiarities of the material in question, particularly the logic governingthe list of unclean animals of Leviticus 11 that began the whole discussionof Levitical purity laws in the first place.

The interpretation of Buddhist materials offered here is more affirma-tive than critical of the overall value of Douglas’s body of work on purity.It demonstrates Douglas’s usefulness in interpreting a corpus of linkedand inter-communicating religious texts as historically complex as, for in-stance, the biblical corpus. I do not follow the later Douglas in claimingfor this tradition, or any particular text in this tradition, any kind ofunique status, although some other scholars of Buddhism might wish todo just that. Rather, here I take the view that, at least for now, more is tobe gained from viewing Buddhist impurity as a total system normative forsocial reality and comparable to ritual impurity systems in other religionsthan in focusing on how it is unique and specific. Obviously, the classicalIndian Buddhist case is unique and specific, as is any religious system at aparticular point in time, but here the close view gives way temporarily tothe wide view of Purity and Danger and “Self-evidence” in order to estab-lish the relevance and importance of ritual impurity in scholarly dis-course on Buddhism at a basic level. In its maturity with respect to thequestion of purity, Buddhist Studies is closer to Biblical Studies pre-1966,the moment Douglas’s revolutionary comparative reading of Levitical lawmade its entrance, than Biblical Studies in 1999, when she dialed in to amore historically careful reading of the Levitical purity laws. It is time,then, to subject the Indian Buddhist example to the strong light ofDouglas’s theory.

BEYOND SPONBERG’S TYPOLOGY

A dominant thread of Buddhist thought removes notions of purityfrom the realm of ritual practice and reestablishes it as a feature of the




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mind. According to the Dhammapada, a digest of wise sayings located inthe Pāli Buddhist canon, for instance:

By oneself is wrong done, by oneself is one defiled.By oneself wrong is not done, by oneself, surely, is one cleansed.One cannot purify another,Purity and impurity are in oneself [alone].9

Mahāyāna literature advises the developing bodhisattva on variousmethods of ethical and cognitive self-purification. These passages refer tocleansing mind, body, and speech of desire, hatred, and ignorance intheir various forms. Though moral perfection is imagined to result in abeautiful and perfumed physical form, it cannot be obtained throughritual bathing or other pseudo-levitical observances. This Buddhist spiri-tualization of purity has encouraged the assumption that more physical-ized references to the uncleanness of women’s bodies and reproductivefluids must be alien to the Buddhist tradition proper. In addition, theanalogy of Christianity has been readily available, especially to earliergenerations of scholars. Just as the cleansing revelations of the NewTestament were supposed to have rendered the old Israelite holiness lawsirrelevant, the Buddha’s insights into the truths of suffering and causalitywere supposed to have superceded the old purity laws.

In fact, classical Indian Buddhism offers a diversity of views regardingfemale blood, some that spiritualize the notion of purity, and others thatdo not. In certain early discourses attributed to the Buddha, the signifi-cance of female embodiment, with its womb and its blood, is apparentlydownplayed, and women are declared capable of achieving all the spiritu-al fruits of monastic life, including the highest fruit of arhatship.10 In themonastic legal tradition of the Vinaya, female blood is not afforded sym-bolic importance, although it is often said in passing to be the product ofmoral taint. A series of careful rules legislate its practical management. Bycontrast, certain Mahāyāna masters employ very intense rhetoric regard-ing the blood-filled female body, likening it to an outhouse, cesspool, orrotting cadaver, and blaming the female womb for human impurity ingeneral. Lastly, Vedic Brahman legal texts, which describe ritual traditions

9Dhammapada 165, translated in Carter and Palihawadana (2000: 31). See also Gutschow (2004:200).

10The Buddha’s assertion that women can indeed achieve all four fruits of the monastic life(stream-winning, once-returning, nonreturning, and arhatship) is in the story of the founding of thenuns’ order at Anguttara-nikāya 4.277 and in the Chinese translation of Madhyama-āgama 116.Another example of this attitude can be found at vagga 1, samyutta 5, section 2 of the Samyutta-nikāya, in which the nun Somā is described as expressing disdain regarding the relevance of herfemale sex in spiritual matters.




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likely to have influenced Buddhist lay householding, describe femaleblood as something life-giving but dangerous.

Alan Sponberg’s oft-cited roundup of early Buddhist attitudes towardthe feminine (1992) offers one account of this diversity that still ringstrue for many scholars. Sponberg contends that the original and most au-thentic Buddhist attitude toward women is that of “soteriological inclu-siveness,” the view that men and women are identical in their capacity forignorance and suffering and have access to the same enlightened state. Heand many other scholars of Buddhism attribute this view to the Buddhahimself, or at least to the very earliest community. According toSponberg’s scheme, as Buddhist orders established themselves during theseveral centuries after the Buddha’s death, built monasteries, increased innumbers, accumulated wealth, and ceased to wander, nuns were subjectedto “institutional androcentrism,” exemplified by the eight “rules to be re-spected” (gurudharma/garudhamma) that subordinate the female to themale community.11 This, according to Sponberg, was the product ofBuddhist sensitivity to public opinion. Dependence on patronage re-quired the Buddhist monastic community to entomb their spiritual egali-tarianism inside the androcentric structures of ancient Indian society.Simultaneously, says Sponberg, the psychological pressures of male celi-bacy gave rise to “ascetic misogyny,” including scatological rants againstwomen and their filthy bodies. To Sponberg, this view is even less sup-portable in Buddhist contexts than institutional androcentrism, sinceclinging to sex distinction is a mark of ignorance, at least according to thecertain Mahāyāna strains of Buddhist thought (1992: 22–23). Sponberg’sis a narrative of decline in which a radical and idealistic movement gradu-ally succumbs to conservative social pressures and misogynistic habits ofmind.12 But his narrative does not explain why statements pertaining tofemale impurity are present in early layers of the sutta/āgama tradition,coexisting with ideas about spiritual egalitarianism from the beginning,nor does it allow for the fact that the Vinaya tradition is actually inclusiveof women (Finnegan 2009; Jyväsjärvi 2011; Langenberg 2013a, 2013b,2014). This is evident in the mildness of its impurity rhetoric and creativeattempts to legislate menstruation effectively.

11The eight rules include recommendations that nuns pay respect to monks no matter how junior,that they conduct disciplinary hearings in front of both assemblies, that they never challenge monksverbally, etc. They are generally understood to ritually and legally subordinate nuns as a group tomonks as a group. Exact lists of rules vary somewhat in different traditions.

12In Sponberg’s estimation, the emergence of Tantric schools of thought that tie liberative gnosisto the integration of male and female, a vision of freedom he dubs “soteriological androgyny,”represents a reaffirmation of the “noble aspirations” of Buddhism to allow a place for women(1992: 28).




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Mary Douglas’s sophisticated explanation of purity belief offers schol-ars of gender and Buddhism the potential to build upon Sponberg’s ty-pology but move beyond his narrative of decline. Douglas’s theory linkingsocial porousness to the presence or absence of sacred mediating symbolsis an excellent fit for the ancient Indian Buddhist material when thesocial “others” who must be incorporated or repelled are taken to bewomen as a class. Her correlation of the presence or absence of sacredmediating symbols with social systems of varying degrees of sociopoliticalopenness provide a neat gradient upon which to situate three basic atti-tudes toward female impurity present in or contiguous to the classicalIndian Buddhist tradition. Brahmanic treatises on dharma, in which theimpurity of women is viewed ambivalently as both dangerous and auspi-cious, reflect a social context in which women are taken into the veryheart of male elite society, where they play a vital role. Lay supporters ofBuddhist monasteries would have displayed, to greater or lesser degrees,the attitudes toward female blood found in such texts. Buddhist Vinayatexts, on the other hand, reflect a social context in which women are ad-mitted into the community yet kept carefully separate from elite males ina parallel and legally subordinate subinstitution. There, they perform novital function for the male community. Buddhist lawgivers’ blasé attitudestoward menstrual blood reflect, in accordance with Douglas’s scheme,their acceptance of women’s well-circumscribed participation in monasticinstitutions. At the far end of the spectrum, certain Mahāyāna sūtras andscholastic treatises advocate stricter asceticism and even austere forest-dwelling, or tout a new pure land theology or vision of the bodhisattvapath that banishes women from the upper reaches of attainment (Ray1994; Schopen 2004; Boucher 2008). In these, the female reproductivebody is often abominated and treated not as a source of life but as a filthything that leads only to death and disorder. Each of these three cases—Brahmanical law, Buddhist monastic law for women, and male ascetic re-ligious discourse—express distinct views on female impurity, and arebroadly linked to a distinct socio-moral vision. Each represents a particu-lar point on Douglas’s spectrum of pollution belief and practice rangingfrom the veneration to the abomination of female blood.

In my analysis, I push Douglas’s anthropology to its limits by consid-ering in-dwelling socio-ethical worldviews, and not only live communi-ties, to be “social environments.” This allows for several “socialenvironments” existing within the same physical environment, as when acloistered ascetic shares monastic space with a forward-thinking monasticadministrator. In his application of Douglas to the social attitudes of indi-vidual mystics, Bagger makes a similar interpretive move, noting that “at-titudes towards [social] exchange exert their influence at every scale.




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Whole societies, institutions within society, and even relatively solitarythinkers feel the pressures to ground their social preoccupations in natureand reason” (2007: 44). Here I take Bagger’s point yet further by propos-ing that several social subenvironments, each with their own analysis of“nature and reason,” can coexist even within the same individual. For in-stance, the same monastic scholar might vest the topic of female bloodwith minimal emotional energy when redacting the Vinaya in themorning, but compose emotional odes to female foulness when writingsūtra commentaries in the afternoon. Similarly, a Brahman boy raised toview the female reproductive body as sacred but dangerous might learn toabominate it when he later becomes a forest monk. In fact, social environ-ments are rarely as monolithic, hegemonic, or absolute as the earlyDouglas tends to assume. Most people pass between social subenviron-ments routinely in the course of a day, as when they travel from work tohome, or from a single sex to a mixed sex grouping. The Buddhist socialsubenvironments explored here are more a matter of moral–socialoutlook than physical location. Each productive of a distinct view offemale impurity, they are segmentations of the larger Buddhist socialenvironment.

BRAHMANS ON FEMALE IMPURITY

It is common for practitioners and scholars of South and SoutheastAsian Buddhism to deny the authenticity of ideas about female impurityfound in Buddhist texts or contemporary practice or to attribute them tothe influence of the purity-obsessed Brahman tradition (Sponberg 1992:24; Hamilton 1995: 59–60; Gutschow 2004: 207; Young 2004: 179–185;Tuladhar 2008: 69–74). Anyone who compares Brahman and Buddhistdiscussions of female purity from the classical period (Maurya to Guptadynasties, 321 BCE to 550 CE), as is done here, will, however, begin todoubt that Indian Buddhist views on female impurity can be dismissed asinauthentic or simply laid at the feet of Brahmanism. Brahman legaltexts: (1) attribute female impurity to the god Indra’s wrongdoing, notthe sins of women; (2) deal with female menstrual and birth impurity astemporary and washable; and (3) often declare women to be inherentlypure. In Buddhist contexts, on the other hand, the impurity of women ispresented as: (1) a symptom of women’s past moral errors; (2) the sourceof human impurity in general; and (3) a life-long state. These differencesrender the attribution of Buddhist notions of female impurity to the earlyinfluence of Brahman ritual traditions untenable, especially given theways in which early Buddhists criticized and self-consciously rejectedother features of Brahman ritual tradition.




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According to multiple Brahman sources, menstruation in women isthe result of the god Indra’s ancient brahmanicide.13 After killing theBrahman son of the divine engineer Tvastr, the creatures of the worldblame him and call him a Brahman-killer. Indra is desperate to ridhimself of this great sin and runs to the women, who collectively agree totake over one-third of his moral burden in exchange for the boons of fer-tility and sexual pleasure.14 Thus, according to the dharmasūtra ofVasistha, a Brahman text on dharma (religious duty),15 “Every month,the sin of killing a learned Brahman becomes manifest. For that reason,one should not eat the food of a menstruating woman. She has taken onthe mark (rūpa) of Brahman-killing itself.”16 Menstruation, which, inBuddhist sources is generally taken as evidence of moral misconduct andignorance, is here the result of the violent act of a male god. Women takeon this sin knowingly and voluntarily, after receiving in return two boonsof their own choosing: the ability to bear children and the capacity to ex-perience sexual pleasure. Vasistha makes clear that the sin responsible forthe impure nature of menstruation is of an adventitious quality and notintrinsic to women. Furthermore, while this mark of sin temporarily pre-vents the menstruating woman from participating in family and religiouslife, at the end of her period of impurity, she sheds not only this borrowedguilt but her own sins as well.17

Brahman manuals provide specific instructions for coping with theimpurity that accompanies monthly bleeding.18 These texts are con-cerned primarily with the ritual status of the high-caste male, and withthe reproductive necessity of taking maximum advantage of female fertili-ty, believed to be at its peak during the days following monthly bleeding.The menstruating wife is instructed to wear a stained garment(malavadvāsas) for three nights and to refrain from bathing, anointing

13This well-known story appears in the Taittirīya-samhitā and is retold in various texts includingtheMahābhārata and the Bhāgavata Purāna.

14The Buddhist Pāli discourses know of this exchange, but present the women’s choice asspiritually damning. See Anguttara-nikāya 2.6.10. “Monks, womenfolk end their life unsated andunreplete with two things. What two? Sexual intercourse and child-birth. These are the two things”(Woodward 1979: 72, mentioned in Candrakīrti 2003: 83).

15Grhyasūtras, Śrautasūtras, and Dharmasūtras all fell under the classification of Kalpasūtra, lateVedic ritual expositions supplementary to the Vedas themselves. Olivelle’s editions of the Mānava-Dharmaśāstra and the Dharmasūtras (2003; 2005) are my primary sources for this section.

16Vasistha Dharmasūtra 5.6–10. Olivelle loosely dates Vasistha to the two-hundred-year periodbetween 100 BCE and 100 CE (2003: 4–10, 375).

17Vasistha 5.5, 28.4 (Olivelle 2003: 374–375, 456–457).18According to Hüsken, the Vaikhānagrhyasūtra and the Baudhāyanagrhyasūtra (1.722–1.735)

give the most detailed information about menstrual practices, but the Āpastambagrhyasūtra, theHiranyakeśigrhyasūtra, and the Vasisthadharmasūtra also list some observances for menstruatingwomen (2001: 91).




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herself with oils or perfumes, touching the fire, laughing, and householdwork. On the fourth day, she bathes and shampoos her hair, brushes herteeth, and replaces the stained garment with a clean one. These actionssignal to her husband that her period of impurity is at an end, and thatshe is once again sexually available (Hüsken 2001: 89–92).19 In fact, theperiod of three days (during which the wife performs a mild sort ofpenance) and the ritual bath at the end of the three-day period remove alltrace of Indra’s sin, even, according to some lawgivers, if the blood hasnot actually ceased to flow.

While undeniably paternalistic and androcentric, these Brahman tra-ditions place a value on female sexuality and fertility. A menstruatingwoman’s capacity to pollute the high caste male is feared, and yet femalebleeding is viewed with some ambivalence. Women, for instance, are de-clared pure not despite monthly bleeding, but because of monthly bleed-ing. The lawgiver Baudhāyana is not alone in commenting on themenstrual flow’s efficacy in periodically washing away women’s sins sothat women “never become sullied,” even in the case of rape, abduction,or adultery.20 During sex, legitimate wives are pure by definition, except ifthey are menstruating or have just given birth.21 In fact, the auspiciouswife, who is purified by her marriage ceremony and periodically cleansedby her monthly flow, appears to represent to these authors a feminineapotheosis of purity. Baudhāyana and Vasistha cite the same poetic ac-counting of the durable blessings girls receive at marriage as a result oftheir ritual union with three gods: “The Moon granted them purification;Gandharva, a sweet voice; and Fire, the capacity to eat anything. Women,therefore, are free from taint.”22 Vasistha even suggests that a woman’spurity surpasses that of the back of a cow and the feet of a Brahman andthat she is “pure all over.”23 Such statements are made with the goal ofperpetuating the ritual ascendency and robust thriving of upper-castepatrilineages, not with the intention of uplifting women. They also havethe effect, however, of assigning a positive value to the female reproduc-tive body, contrasting sharply with Indian Buddhist treatments of femalesexuality and fertility. In Brahman law, female impurity is both fearedand respected, reflecting Brahman society’s acknowledgment of theimmense good generated by the outsiders in its midst. Here menstrual

19Of the dharmasūtra authors, only Vasistha 5.6–5.7 includes any detailed instructions formenstruating women.

20Baudhāyana 2.4.4. Vasistha 5.5, 28.4. Manu 5.108.21Vasistha 28.8. Baudhāyana 1.9.2.22Vasistha 28.6. Baudhāyana 2.4.5.23medhyā sarvatah. medhya also means “fit for sacrifice.” Vasistha 28.9.




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blood is a “positive mediator” (Douglas 1975: 289). A boundary-crossingfluid redolent with the symbolism of divine power and fecundity, it hasreceived the imprint of a social vision in which exchanges with an outsidegroup, in this case women, are regarded as fruitful and necessary,however risky.

FEMALE IMPURITY IN THE VINAYAS

Brahman legal texts express awe mingled with fear in legislating andtheorizing female impurity. Brahman lawgivers are composters of thepotent pollutions associated with female reproductive functions, isolatingthem, managing them, folding them back in, and then harvesting the richfruits they bring. They do not abominate female pollutants in symbolicacts of rejection. Like the Brahman household, the Buddhist monastery isalso a place where women are incorporated, yet controlled. One might,then, expect to find evidence of the veneration of female blood inBuddhist law. Buddhist lawgivers, however, display neither fear norrespect in legislating the female body. According to Douglas’s scheme,this is so because, while Buddhist law includes and contains women asdoes Brahmanic law, in its legal constructions, women are admitted onlyinto a peripheral and parallel institution where they do not perform anyfunction vital to male interests. In Buddhist Vinaya texts, female blood isneither abominated nor venerated, but treated as a thing of practical con-sequence but no real symbolic importance.

All of the sectarian Buddhist Vinayas, or monastic law collections,contain at least one of the following: (1) a rule requiring nuns to weara menstrual cloth, with specifications about how this is to be done;(2) a rule forbidding nuns to keep communally owned menstrualcloths beyond a certain period of time; (3) rules about how these areto be washed; and (4) rules barring women from the community whomenstruate either too much or not at all24 (Horner 1949; Roth 1970;Hirakawa 1982; Kabilsingh 1988; Tsomo 1996; Heirmann 2002;Langenberg 2016). A Mūlasarvāstivāda rule, for instance, says that “Whena nun does not keep a special cloth to conceal her menstrual flow,” it isan offense requiring expiation.25 Given the immense importance assigned

24This section focuses primarily on passages found in the Mūlasarvāstivāda, Pāli, andMahāsān ghika-lokottaravādin Vinayas, the three sectarian Vinayas that appear to have survived intheir entirety outside of the Chinese Canon.

25Prāyaścittika 144. Derge ‘dul wa (Volume 9) Ta 20.a5. All Kanjur references are to chos kyi‘byung gnas, bka’ ‘gyur (sde dge par phud), TBRC W22084, 103 vols. (Delhi, India: Delhi KarmapaeChodhey Gyalwae Sungrab Partun Khang, 1976–79).




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to female effluvia both in Brahman legal tradition and in nonlegalBuddhist texts, the matter-of-fact tone and technical specificity withwhich Buddhist Vinaya sources treat the matter of menstruation itselfinvites comment. If the Buddha himself, to whom Vinaya texts are attrib-uted, is being made to advise women on the practical dimensions of men-strual hygiene in the manner of a middle school health teacher, onewishes to understand why.

Tibetan translators have rendered the technical term for the specialcloth26 worn by menstruating nuns sme gab, literally, “a cover for sorrow.”The canonical commentary for the Mūlasarvāstivāda rule requiringwomen to wear the special cloth provides a fuller context for this require-ment, a possible clue about the reasons for the Tibetan translators’ choiceof sme gab for the special cloth, and more information regarding theintent behind the legislation of menstruation in the Vinaya. It reads:

For women, every month blood trickles out due to the degenerativeforce of previous karma. Because of this, the lord advised (nuns) to weara special cloth (sme gab) for concealing the menstrual flow. At the timehe said to “keep a special cloth” [the Lord knew] it was sure to fall if [anun] put it on and walked, so, at the same time he instructed [nuns to]“keep a special cloth,” he [also] said to “attach it with a string.” Becausenobody stopped her, Sthūlanandā went out to beg for alms with bloodtrickling down onto her calf. Brahmans and householders, seeing her,asked, “Venerable lady, why is there blood on your calf?” She answered,“If you don’t know, ask your mother! Ask your sister! Ask your daugh-ter!” “You insult all of our homes!” they complained, muttering and re-criminating. At that time, the nuns told the lord, and the lord . . .established a further precept: “If nuns don’t keep a special cloth, it is anoffense.” Even then, Sthūlanandā said, “What is called a ‘special cloth’(sme gab) is a cover for the unhappiness of women. What if I don’t wearone?” [The lord said,] “If you don’t acquire one, ‘it is an offense,’ asstated before.”27

Here, Sthūlanandā (“Fat Nandā”), a feisty and coarse woman whoappears often in the Vinaya to exemplify how nuns should not behave,fails to wear her menstrual cloth when she goes into the town of Śrāvastī

26A passage from Gunaprabha’s (1982) Vinayasūtra, an important Vinaya digest from theMūlasarvāstivāda tradition, gives us the Sanskrit term for this special cloth, rajaścoda, which means“that which conceals the menstrual flow.” Vinayasūtra 2.2343. http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/vinsutrc.txt (accessed July 23, 2015). In the Bhiksunī-prakīrnaka ofthe Mahāsānghika-Lokkotttaravādin School, the lord permits nuns rather to keep an ānicolaka (Pāli:ānīcolaka) or “thigh-cloth” (Roth 1970: 309).

27Derge ‘dul wa (Volume 9) Ta 299a7–299b.6.




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http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/vinsutrc.txt








to beg alms.28 She is menstruating, and blood runs freely down her legs,attracting the attention of Brahmans and householders. When they askher about the blood, she crassly suggests they ask their female relatives. Indoing so, Sthūlanandā creates a public disturbance, forcing the Buddha toissue a further precept absolutely requiring all nuns to keep a menstrualcloth. Even then, rebellious Sthūlanandā objects, saying that the clothmerely conceals the sorrow of women, something which she apparentlywould prefer to put on display.29

This story makes it clear that avoiding public opprobrium is one im-portant reason for the legislation of nuns’ menstruation. The medievalVinaya commentator Gunaprabha says very little about the requirementthat nuns wear the menstrual cloth, but he does cluster it with severalother rules. Nuns, he says, must keep a special garment for concealing themenstrual flow, and tie it on with a string. They must wash and dye itfrom time to time. They must also keep a bathing robe (udakaśatikā).They may not have their soiled clothing washed by a washerman (butmust do it themselves). He then identifies this grouping of rules in a re-vealing way as pertaining to concealing or guarding the bhaga, or femalesexual organ (Jyväsjärvi 2011: 603).30 Gunaprabha’s mention of a legalcategory called “guarded female sexual organs” (guptibhahga) suggeststhat these rules are an expression of concern about managing the monas-tic bhaga, which, along with all of its products and functions, must beconcealed, contained, and protected to the satisfaction of public opinionin order for the monastic community to function. Any hint that monasticbhagas might be uncontrolled would make maintaining harmonious lay/monastic relations more difficult. As part of this task of rendering innoc-uous the monastic bhaga, monastic lawgivers instituted laws for the man-agement of nuns’menstrual blood.

In her comparative study of a rule from the Pāli Vinaya and Brahmanhousehold ritual, Ute Hüsken provides further clues for interpretingmenstrual rules in Vinaya sources. Pācittiya 4731 says, “When a nun usesthe household cloth without relinquishing it, it is an offense requiring

28See Ohnuma (2013) and Schopen (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010) for further examples and analysis ofSthūlanandā’s transgressions.

29Other rules concerning the string used to tie the cloth and the illegality of hoarding communallyowned menstrual cloths are discussed at: Derge ‘dul wa (Volume 11) Da 153a.7–153b5; Derge ‘dul wa(Volume 9) Ta 20b.7; and Derge ‘dul wa (Volume 9) Ta 299b.6–300a.6. See Cullavagga x.16 forcomparison.

30Vinayasūtra 2.2343–2.2348.31A pācittiya is a minor type of offense requiring just expiation. The Mūlasarvāstivāda rule

discussed above, prāyaścittika 144, is from the same class of rules.




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expiation.”32 Hüsken suggests that the “household cloth” is a communallykept menstrual garment to be used by visiting nuns for three nights andthen washed on the fourth and relinquished to another nun (2001: 86–87).33 Hüsken proposes that the household cloth is, at least in the contextof this rule, a nod to the Brahman practice that requires the menstruatingwife to use a “stained garment” (malavadvāsas) for three days and wash iton the fourth, signaling to her husband the return of her sexual availabili-ty (2001: 89–90). She further argues that the original function of thehousehold cloth was ceremonial rather than practical, designed to set theminds of ritually observant lay hosts at ease when potentially menstruat-ing nuns came to stay (Hüsken 2001: 95). The “household cloth” mighthave fulfilled a further function beyond communicating nuns’ ritual ap-propriateness to high-caste hosts. The Brahman “stained cloth” signalssexual unavailability of the wife. Similarly, the presence of the householdcloth, guarding monastic bhagas, as it were, may signal nuns’ sexual un-availability, especially in a public setting.34

A requirement for nuns’ admission into the order is normal menstrua-tion. The Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya contains two passages in which thecommunity is forbidden to initiate women who either menstruate too muchor not at all.35 The woman who continuously menstruates is forbiddenbecause her lower garment is always soiled and attracts flies. The woman

32Āvasathacīvara is the Pāli term translated here as “household cloth.” For similar rules in otherVinaya traditions, see Tsomo (1996: 115) and Kabilsingh (1988: 314).

33In the commentary of this rule, it is, yet again, Thullanandā (Sanskrit: Sthūlanandā) who annoysher fellow nuns when she fails to relinquish the communally owned “household cloth” after theprescribed three days. See Vinaya iv.303.20–iv.303.25 (Horner 1949, 3: 198).

34Certain types of women were sexually unavailable in ancient India. One category of sexuallyunavailable women comprised those “guarded” (raksitā, guptā) by another man, whether father,husband, or son. According to traditions like the Kāmasūtra, female ascetics were to be categorizedwith sexually available women. Sanskrit dramas also portray female ascetics as morally suspect(Jyväsjärvi). Though the many Vinaya prescriptions that place the nuns’ community under theguardianship and control of the monks’ community indicate that Buddhist monks regardedthemselves, however unwillingly, as guardians of monastic women, it is likely that many in theancient context thought of Buddhist nuns as “unguarded,” or at least as insufficiently guarded. If anun could be provided the legal standing of a menstruating woman, however, her sexualunavailability would be significantly bolstered. In fact, as Hüsken points out, many of the scriptedbehaviors of nuns resemble those of menstruating householder women (2001: 95–96). They are notpermitted to spin thread, go to the forest, sleep in the daytime, run, or busy themselves withhousehold affairs. They do not make fires or cook for men, and they do not eat throughout the day.They do not comb or braid their hair, anoint themselves, or bathe outside of the prescribed times.They do not serve water or fan their menfolk, or sit together with them in intimate settings. Creatingthe vague, perhaps unconsciously recognized, outward impression of potential menstrual impurity,and guarding the monastic bhaga with a Buddhist version of a Brahman wife’s “stained cloth,” mayhave been helpful in protecting these socially marginal women against the very real possibility ofsexual assault.

35Derge ‘dul wa (Volume 11) Da 152b.3–153a.2.




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who has no menstrual blood at all is also forbidden because her conditionencourages her to take on airs and behave arrogantly toward her elders andbetters. These and several other Vinaya texts assume a link between amen-orrhea and spiritual attainment.36 Cessation with respect to menstruationcorresponds to cessation of desire. An ordinary unenlightened woman whofails to menstruate is therefore in a position to claim spiritual attainmentsshe does not possess, or to tease older more accomplished nuns who stillmenstruate. She is therefore barred from the nuns’ community.Furthermore, either condition—lack of menstruation or excessive menstrua-tion—would feed the public perception that monastic bhagas might be ab-normal, thereby alienating monastic women even further than they alreadyare from commonly accepted lay understandings of female virtue. This,again, might potentially disrupt lay support for monastic communities.

Vinaya texts deal with menstruation in a practical manner with littlein the way of broad theorizing about female impurity, though a recurrenttheme does occur, at least in the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya, in whichmenstruation is linked to past sin. The practical procedures prescribed bythe monastic law books reflect the monastic community’s desire to main-tain positive and fruitful interactions with the laity. In particular,Buddhist Vinaya laws on menstruation evidence lawmakers’ sensitivity tothe difficult position of female monastics, who must project womanlyvirtue, proper decorum, and sexual unavailability when making theiralms rounds among the laity. Crafting rules regarding menstrual protec-tion that enabled monastic women to comply outwardly to certain ac-cepted standards of behavior are only apparently restrictive. In practice,they would have aided the spiritual efforts of ancient monastic women.37

Although Buddhist menstrual law is responsive to the outward struc-tures of Brahman menstrual law, it fails to adopt core aspects of Brahmantheory about the nature of menstrual blood, namely its dangerousness, itsassociation with auspicious female traits, its washability, its associationwith Indra’s sin (not that of women), and its purifying effect. Buddhistmenstrual law is constructive for Buddhist communities in that it formal-izes menstrual behavior in a manner designed to harmonize relationsbetween female monastics and lay patrons. Formalizing menstrual proce-dures also clarifies and strengthens relations between the male and female

36“In Śrāvastī, because of not being without passion, as a result of past bad actions, from time totime nuns bled from their genitals.” Derge ‘dul wa (Volume 11) Da 153a.7. “Not being free of allpassion, the nuns sometimes bled.” Derge ‘dul wa (Volume 9) Ta 299a7. “For women, because ofdegenerate past karma, every month blood trickles out.” Derge ‘dul wa (Volume 9) Ta 299.a7–299b.1.

37I make a fuller argument that Buddhist lawmakers were responsive to common and widelyaccepted mores for female behavior in their attempts to carve out a viable social position for Buddhistnuns in Langenberg (2013a).




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communities because regulating the behavior of monastic women safe-guards male monastic communities, who can be blamed for nuns’ offens-es, from public opprobrium. In Vinaya law, female blood is not, however,symbolically important. It is neither respected nor venerated. Accordingto Douglas’s view, its relatively unmarked symbolic status reflects thelegally controlled and carefully regulated incorporation of women notinto the heart of male monastic society, but into its margins. The attitudethey display regarding female impurity indicates that monastic lawgiversregarded monastic women’s presence as adequately circumscribed, theirsocial significance modest, requiring no special additional managementvia blood taboo.

FEMALE IMPURITY IN MAHĀYĀNA SŪTRAS ANDSCHOLASTIC TREATISES

It is not possible to generalize from Vinaya texts regarding the ritualand symbolic status of female blood in classical Indian Buddhism. Othersorts of Buddhist texts contain quite different attitudes toward the femalebody and its impurities than those displayed in Vinaya texts. Manysuttas/āgamas (texts putatively recording the Buddha’s teachings) fromthe early canon causally connect the reproductive functions of the femalebody to the impurity of samsāric existence in a much more thorough-going fashion than the legal texts, which mention this idea only inpassing. This sort of thinking is then elaborated and intensified in certainMahāyāna sūtras and scholastic treatises. Many (though certainly not all)Buddhist Mahāyāna sūtras and scholastic treatises express deeply negativeviews of the female body and its products, abominating rather than vener-ating, or merely managing, female reproductive blood. Douglas’s theorypredicts that such views would emerge from social environments whoseboundaries must be safeguarded from female penetration, not a terribledescription for the sorts of elite male monastic or forest hermitage envi-ronments that many scholars think produced Indian scholastic treatisesand Mahāyāna sūtras (Harrison 1987; Ray 1994; Silk 2002; Schopen2004; Boucher 2008).

The collection of textual passages that follows is by no means repre-sentative of the vast and highly diverse body of religious literature I amgrouping together under the laughably broad rubric “Mahāyāna sūtrasand scholastic texts.” I am reading selectively from among sources,cutting across a vast swath of highly diverse Buddhist texts, ignoring his-torical context, sectarian affiliation, philosophical point-of-view, andmany other vital features. The analytic structure afforded by Douglas’spollution theory renders this act of selective reading both sensible and




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defensible, for now. The thematic thread I pull out and display here iscentral to Buddhist notions of female impurity and closely pegged to aparticular Buddhist social environment: elite, insular, male monasticism,either of the forest hermitage variety or the monastic university variety.

Before continuing with this section, one additional caveat bears ex-plicit acknowledgment. The texts considered here tend not to focus onuterine blood specifically, but refer in broader terms to the impure wombor impure female fluids. These texts also do not concern rituals or specificmenstrual practices, so the anthropological concept of “blood taboo”must be interpreted liberally if it is too be useful. “Blood” must be under-stood metonymically to connote the female reproductive body in general,and “taboo” must be taken to refer to emotional attitudes and cognitiveacts, rather than concrete ritual acts or behaviors. I do not consider theseadjustments to represent a misapplication of Douglas’s theory sinceDouglas herself fully recognizes the cognitive dimensions of ritual actionsand the deep structural correspondence between categories of things.

In the Aggañña-sutta (“Discourse on Knowing the Beginning”), a dis-course from the PāliDīgha-nikāya, the Buddha questions the purity of any-one born from the human womb and suckled at the human breast. Hegoes on to illustrate through a story of human origins how the processesand procedures of biological reproduction, including sex differentiationand sexual behavior, first came to be as a result of the ever-increasingcoarseness and moral impurity of our remote ancestors. Eating coarsefood led to sexual differentiation, which led to sexual behavior, which ledto the building of individual dwellings, which led to domesticity and pre-sumably (though it is not specifically mentioned) childbearing (Gethin2008: 120–123). In rehearsing this story of origins, the Buddha disclosesthe innate impurity at the core of “what is today [mistakenly] consideredproper practice,” namely ordinary socially sanctioned human procreativesex (Gethin 2008: 123). Pāli texts also contain a four-fold classification ofbirth modes, of which spontaneous birth (opapātikā) without recourse toegg, womb, or liquid medium is regarded as the best. In praising thevirtues of the remarkable nun Nandā, for instance, the Buddha notes thatshe will be reborn in the manner of a goddess (opapātikā), and there, inher new heavenly home, will finally gain freedom (Gethin 2008: 52, 277).The long-ago fall into the coarseness and impurity of sexually differenti-ated embodied existence can, in other words, be reversed through theremoval of moral taint.

The association of reproductive processes (which are often meto-nymically conflated with female bodies) and spiritual blight, lightlysketched in the canonical texts of the Pāli tradition, appears to build mo-mentum and crystallize around certain tropes during the classical period




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of Indian Buddhism, when the major Mahāyāna sūtras and certain im-portant works of abhidharma were produced. The cosmological impli-cations of the belief that the womb and the sexual fluids depositedthere indelibly soil the body are played out directly and indirectly in avariety of narrative and scholastic contexts. Scholastic literature such asVasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāsya (“Commentary on the Treasury ofMetaphysics”) and mainstream discourses such as the Sarvāstivāda Loka-upapatti-sūtra (“Sūtra on the Arising of the World”) articulate the cos-mological superiority of divine realms in terms of special types of birthing(Teiser 2006a; 2006b: 94–95). In these realms, infantile gods appear spon-taneously on the knees of their parents, eschewing intimate contact withthe mother’s body. A new Mahāyāna Buddhist cosmology in which mul-tiple Buddhas occupy multiple Buddha fields, each with its own enlight-ening qualities, allows for yet other ways to imagine and express belief inthe three-way coincidence of womb, sin, and filth. With the exception ofthe Buddha Aksobhya’s realm, Abhirati, the pure lands that make up theMahāyāna cosmos are free of female inhabitants, which eliminates anydanger of impurity from women altogether (Harrison 1987: 78).38 InAbhirati itself, the children are born without pain, and the women do notmenstruate (Harrison 1987: 78).

Additional articulations of the link between human impurity, sin, andtheir origins in the female womb appear in scholastic texts. The early me-dieval philosopher Candrakīrti’s commentary on the philosopherĀryadeva’s Catuhśataka (“Four Hundred Verses”) is a representativeexample of this developing rhetoric.39 He comments satirically upon thecaste pretensions of Brahmans, born from the filthy womb just like anyleather worker or latrine sweeper:

Someone before he was born lived inside his mother’s womb—which islike an outhouse—between her intestines and stomach. Like a dungworm, he was nourished by the fluid of her waste products. It is onlyfrom ignorance that he thinks “I am pure.” (Candrakīrti 2003: 180)

Candrakīrti dispels the false idea that the body can exist in a pure state.Bodies are impure not because of what people do or do not do with them,

38The longer Sukhāvativyūha, while not specifically describing Amitābha’s realm as free ofwomen, records the great bodhisattva’s vow that, upon reaching enlightenment, any women who hearhis name will “despise their female nature” and not assume another female body (Cowell 1969: 19).The Lotus Sūtra also endorses this view (Hurvitz 2009: 146, 269).

39Compare Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra 8.60: “Is it that you do not like a dirty worm born in filthbecause it’s only tiny? It must be that you desire a body, likewise born in filth, because it is formedfrom such a large amount!” (Śāntideva 1996: 93).




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but by their very nature. In particular, bodies are rendered indeliblyimpure by the fluid-filled crucible in which they are formed. In short, allhuman impurity can be blamed on the womb.40

In a variety of Buddhist texts from the classical and early medievalperiods, the sense of revulsion and moral terror that is to be associatedparticularly with female parts and fluids is punched up several notches bymeans of baroquely disgusting description (Wilson 1996). This poetry ofthe foul appears to be a stylistic innovation of Buddhist literature fromthis time, appearing in both mainstream and Mahāyāna literature. TheGarbhāvakrānti-sūtra (“Descent into the Womb Sūtra”), an early first-millennium embryological text that survives in both Mahāyāna andmainstream contexts, describes the female womb, source of all suffering,as: “a dark hole, very disgusting like a toilet, foul smelling, heaped upwith filth, home of many thousands of types of worms, always dripping,continually in need of being cleaned, vile, always putrid with semen,blood, filth, and pus.”41 Similarly, in his Śiksā-samuccaya (“Compendiumof Teachings”), Śāntideva quotes a text42 in which the Lord Buddha at-tempts to dissuade the king from indulging his lust, marveling at the be-sotted fools who, by uniting with woman’s body, “have the same sort ofenjoyment as a worm on a dunghill. [The female body is] like a paintedpot of worms wheresoever it be seen, full of urine and ordure, or a skininflated with wind. . . . Unsavoury as ordure are women!” the Buddha de-clares. “Who penetrates a body which is but a receptacle for impurity, re-ceives like fruit to that which he does” (Śāntideva 1981: 85–86).43 Asmentioned above, in these types of passages, specific reference to men-strual blood or the blood of childbirth is replaced by a more generalizedtreatment of female filth. We encounter the idea that the womb or thefemale body (womb and woman are sometimes conflated through synec-doche) is full of feces, urine, vomit, and pus, in addition to blood. I inter-pret this language to be the product of poetic license rather thansomething of technical import. The basic message about the primordialimpurity of the female reproductive body is the same.44

40Although his discussion details physical filth, moral filthiness is also implied, and Candrakīrtidraws no significant distinction between the two, as is typical of classical Buddhist ethical thought. Aswork on somatized conceptions of virtue in Indian Buddhism (what Susanne Mrozik has called“physio-morality”) has illustrated, Candrakīrti’s close linking of physical features and moral status istraditional (Mrozik 2007; Powers 2009).

41Tog Palace ‘Dul ba (Volume 9) Ta 207b.6–208a.1.42Udayanavatsarāja-pariprcchā.43See also Paul (1985: 25–59).44Sometimes, however, the equation made between moral taint, general bodily ooze, and female

blood is quite explicit, as in Candrakīrti’s comparison of the vagina to an outhouse entrance: “Even




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Denigrating live women is not itself the focus of this distinctiveBuddhist discourse of female impurity. One might argue that no womenactually appear in them, only a strange phantasm of the female that oper-ates as a powerful symbol of ignorance and sin.45 The moral state of themale practitioner is always the real concern in Mahāyāna sūtras and scho-lastic treatises. From the perspective of the Mahāyāna soteriology, the sin-fulness of women with their loathsome wombs and filthy blood isimportant mainly in that contact with impure female parts results fromand leads to the same sort of immorality that brought about their lowfemale embodiment. It also leads inevitably to yet further harmfulcontact with the benighted female body during the process of rebirth. Toquote a literary text from the eleventh century on the same topic, “Thoseattached to the yoni (female genitals) are reborn in the yoni!”46 Whilenone of these statements are made in the context of ritual practice, themetaphor of blood taboo seems apt, nonetheless. After all, in this view,mere contact with reproductive female bodies, whose profound impurityis contagious, leads to spiritual danger. While men’s bodies and sexualfluids are also described as impure, female impurity is viewed as both ab-original and intractable, the ultimate source of all impurity, whether maleor female. This view is reflected in the Mahāyāna opinion that rebirthinto a male body is necessary for Buddhahood.

The Mahāyāna and scholastic texts cited here would have been pro-duced within elite male ascetic communities of some description, probablyestablished monasteries with libraries, or possibly in forest hermitage set-tings. The monks who wrote the Vinayas also lived in monasteries andcould also have read or even written these more androcentric types of texts.The Garbhāvakrānti-sūtra, for instance, was definitely known to Vinayacompilers, as one of its redactions is found in the MūlasarvāstivādaVinaya. The transition from the Vinaya view to the sūtra view couldreflect the contrast between urban monasteries with connections to nuns’communities and forest practice. This type of physical difference in loca-tion is not necessary, however, to explain these contrasting rhetorics. Thedifference in rhetoric could also reflect two physically contiguous or eveninterpenetrating social spaces: a liberal environment in which monasticwomen are accommodated and a more gender-exclusive, ascetic

worse are sores inside her body that were acquired through past karmic action and cannot be healed”(2003: 166, 254). This passage is then followed by a reference to female monthly bleeding.

45Still, Buddhist autobiography and ethnographic work conducted in South and Southeast AsianBuddhist countries shows that women’s status and self-understanding has suffered collateral damageas a result of this type of authoritative discourse on female impurity (see Gutschow 2004: 259–284;Schaeffer 2004; Prapapornpipat 2008: 203).

46Avadānakalpalatā 10.78a (in Ksemendra 1988: 331).




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environment in which they are to be rigorously excluded. One social envi-ronment would have called for the mild, pragmatic, even protective atti-tude we encounter in Vinaya texts, another for a fiercely suspicious anddefensive attitude toward women. Rapid migration between social suben-vironments, which is more a temporary change of social worldview thanof physical location, is not hard to credit. People would have made suchjourneys every day in the ancient world, traveling from bedroom to mar-ketplace, or from monastic lecture hall to alms rounds, as they do todaywhen journeying from professional conference to child’s birthday partyor from church to pool hall.

The discourse of female impurity found in Mahāyāna sūtras andscholastic treatises not only reflects male Buddhist ascetic community butalso participates in its construction. In fact, this discourse may have beenindispensible for summoning up cognitive boundaries when physical sep-aration from women was not as absolute as many male ascetics wished.The rhetoric of female impurity defines the goals of male asceticism overand against the physical presence of women. In contrast to the Vinayatexts, which reflect a desire to accommodate nuns in parallel institutions,Mahāyāna sūtra and scholastic commentarial texts reflect a perceivedneed to patrol the boundaries of existence, guarding against female intru-sions even on the level of cognition. The texts cited here can only be de-scribed as abominating the female reproductive body, blood and all, apurity discourse that mirrors a social subenvironment that rigorously ex-cludes the female other. This is just as Douglas’s theory predicts.

CONCLUSIONS

Brahman legal texts, in which the impurity of women is viewed am-bivalently as both dangerous and auspicious, are part of a social contextin which women were taken into the very heart of male elite society.Brahman priests depended on their wives to produce sons, maintain thepurity of the household, and assist in certain ritual observances, all vitaland central concerns. This situation stands in sharp contrast to monasticcommunities in which, from the point of view of male legal scholars,women played no vital role. As Douglas’s theory predicts, Brahman pollu-tion belief and practice, in which menstrual blood simultaneously purifiesand pollutes, composts rather than shuns female dirt. The Brahmancontext also resembles Douglas’s description of societies in which malesuperiority is potentially undercut by female power. The highly articulat-ed pollution ideology and elaborate ritual practices that characterizeBrahman religious life serve to ride herd on women, whose female sub-stances and processes are simultaneously feared and valued.




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Buddhist Vinaya texts, on the other hand, reflect a social context inwhich women are admitted to the larger group but are not considerednecessary to the functioning of that group. They are kept carefully sepa-rated from elite males in a parallel and legally subordinate subinstitution.Buddhist lawgivers’ condescending but still tolerant attitudes towardmenstrual blood are only mildly negative, reflecting, in accordance withDouglas’ scheme, their acceptance of women’s participation in monasticinstitutions. Although male superiority is undisputed in Buddhist monas-tic contexts, male control of women is not as relentless, personally over-bearing, or physically encroaching as it would be in a Brahmanhousehold, as women are always kept at arm’s length, giving rise to fewerdaily disputes and less need for intricate pollution practices as a tool ofsocial negotiation. According to Douglas’s theories, such a situationshould result in minimal concern about menstrual pollution since nodaily conflict between male privilege and female access to power exists.Indeed, such is the case. Female impurity is not regarded with ambivalentawe, as fertility is neither coveted nor admired by monastic legislators. InVinaya texts, menstrual blood is matter-of-factly acknowledged and dulymanaged; it is treated neither as an abomination nor as a sacred mediat-ing symbol.

The abomination of the female body found in Mahāyāna sūtra andcommentarial literature represent the antithesis of the “composting reli-gion” practiced by Brahmans. In Mahāyāna texts in particular, many ofwhich advocate renewed ascetic discipline and austere forest-dwelling, thefemale reproductive body is abominated and treated not as a source of lifebut as a thing that leads only to death and disorder. Such texts reflect anelite ascetic environment in which male celibacy is rigorously defendedon every level. In this environment, women are regarded as a threat to thehighest spiritual aspirations of the community. Here, Douglas’s theorypredicts a strong tendency to flag this tension between the authority ofthe male ascetic tradition and the demonic female power to distract andderail through an intense and unambivalent rhetoric of female pollution.The doctrine of the foul blood-filled womb, source of all human impurity,is just such a flag.

These three social subenvironments, reflected and maintained by therange of purity beliefs in classical Indian Buddhism, were contiguous andinterpenetrating. Monastics lived alongside householders, who were theirneighbors, friends, and patrons. Liberal monks with a great interest in thenuns’ community would have shared monastic space with monks holdinga negative view of female embodiment. In some cases, these social suben-vironments may have corresponded to distinct physical spaces. A foresthermitage would have been no place, for instance, for a Brahman-style




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ritualist or monastic administrator, but would have been the naturalhome of a rigorous male ascetic. In other cases, a single individual mighthave passed in and out of these three social subenvironments in a singleday, enacting different purity beliefs in each. It is not hard to imagine amonk sharing in an observation regarding the impurity of the femalebody with a colleague, advising the nuns on where to wash their clothes,and blessing a young wife wishing for a son, all in one day (Langenberg2013b).

It turns out that elite monastics were not the passive mouthpieces ofhegemonic Brahman purity obsessions, but developed their own uniquelyBuddhist “blood taboos.” Rather than constituting one monolithic ideacirculating automatically among elite groups of men, ancient Indiannotions of female impurity were dynamic and context-specific. ApplyingDouglas’s insights about the connection between pollution belief, reli-gious categorizations of the world, and social exigencies makes it all theclearer that, rather than being survivals of Brahmanism, Indian Buddhistnotions of female impurity were constructive of Buddhist communityand reflect the variety of social and institutional circumstances thatexisted in Buddhist India. In some contexts, ideas of impurity were de-ployed with a very light touch, primarily to the purpose of regulating theexternal boundaries of Buddhist monastic communities. In other con-texts, they inscribed indelible divisions into the community, separatingcelibate men from fertile women at the level of ontology.

Douglas herself rarely made use of Buddhist examples, which she ap-peared to reject as too complex for her theorizing.47 Douglas’s early theorystands up, however, to the complexity of classical Indian Buddhism, ifone’s notion of society or community is expanded to include abutting andinterpenetrating social subenvironments as is done here. Douglas’s thesisthat “attitudes towards exchange condition response to anomaly” allows usto move beyond piecemeal interpretations, elucidating the broad structuresof classical Indian Buddhist pollution belief (Bagger 2007: 44). Her useful-ness for explaining Buddhist purity beliefs, which have long gone unex-plained or inadequately explained, shows that, while she herself may haveshied away from complex or disjointed cases in which “symbols anomalousto one subsystem within a culture could find a securely structured placewithin an alternate subsystem,” her theory of pollution does accommodatecomplexity, if put to the task (Buckley and Gottlieb 1988: 30–31). In the

47In “Self-Evidence,” she mentions Thai animal classification systems, but ultimately leaves Thaivillagers, whose “Buddhism involves them in importations and transactions with other cultures,” outof her discussion in favor of the more bounded, small-scale societies of the ancient Israelites, theKaram, and the Lele (Douglas 1975: 306).




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Indian Buddhist example, one vast, sophisticated but more or less unifiedtradition houses a variety of social subenvironments that exist side by side,sometimes in the same monastery complex or village, nuns next to monks,ascetics next to monastic bureaucrats, monastics next to noncelibate laysupporters (Schopen 2004). Individual Buddhists may also have routinelymigrated between social subenvironments. Various modalities of Buddhistpollution discourse were available for making manifest the social vision ofeach subenvironment when necessary.

Some of Douglas’s critics have charged her with sacrificing the partic-ularities and context-specific meanings of religious systems on the altar ofsystem-building (Kirk 1980: 54; Buckley and Gottlieb 1988: 30–31;Reinhart 1990: 21; Fardon 1999: 209; Klawans 2003: 95). Her usefulnessin illuminating basic features of the purity discourse of Classical IndianBuddhism provides in itself a sort of rebuttal to this charge. A functionalisttheory such as Douglas’s must always be re-evaluated in light of the localfractures and fissures in religious life. It must be pegged as rigorously aspossible to details, lest it levitate to the status of mythical narrative. It is onething, however, to be suspicious of system building when the system hasalready been built but may need to be refined, readjusted, partially disas-sembled, or re-examined in higher focus. It is another thing to reject a sys-tematic view in principle in favor of the bits and the pieces. In the IndianBuddhist case, knowledge of the bits and the pieces with little sense of howto assemble them into a larger pattern has led scholars to make claimsabout female impurity in Buddhism that truly are broad, unsubstantiated,and disconnected from the data. The most common of these claimsBuddhist views on female impurity to be external to Buddhism itself, theproduct of cultural contamination from the surrounding Brahman milieu.In contrast, Sponberg’s typology of Buddhist attitudes toward women andthe feminine provide the basis for a more grounded and comprehensiveunderstanding of the modalities of gender in Indian Buddhism, includingbeliefs about female impurity. Unfortunately, Sponberg also forces thesemodalities of gender into a narrative of decline that collapses under exami-nation. In helping to elucidate how the various views on the impure femaleembodiment available to ancient Indian Buddhists fit together into awhole, and how they relate to the range of ancient Buddhist social suben-vironments, Douglas’s seminal theories about pollution, society, and thebody advance our understanding of gender in ancient Buddhism pastSponberg’s typology.

The Indian Buddhist example given here does little, however, toaddress the worries of Buckley and Gottlieb regarding the occlusion of al-ternative or minority religious world-building in Douglas’s early seminalwork. The specter of the blood-filled womb, or the promise of Buddhist




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monastic pragmatism, may well lead us to wonder about the particularsof how Buddhist nuns and female householders themselves interactedwith these intersecting discourses of female impurity. It is difficult toknow exactly how Buddhist menstrual beliefs were received and per-formed by Buddhist women in the ancient period. One can imagine nunsreveling in the freedom of the merely practical menstrual injunctionsfound in monastic texts, at least within the four walls of their nunneries.It also seems likely that a keen awareness of the inferiority and impurityof the female embodiment was internalized by Buddhist women of theancient period, as it sometimes is by Buddhist women today. A group weknow even less about, but may enjoy imagining, are the Sthūlanandās ofthe past, the women who rebelled against the very idea of female inferiori-ty and sin. In her study of nuns in medieval Japan, which is based onmore complete historical information than is available in the Indian case,Loris Meeks (2011) was able to demonstrate how women often ignore,“talk past,” work around, or differently interpret androcentric ideas aboutfemale impurity. The frame of reference of the elite and androcentricIndian Buddhist materials discussed here reveals little, however, about gy-nocentric perspectives. The classical Indian Buddhist example does notreally challenge, in the end, the early Douglas’s occlusion of the supple-mentary or alternative worldviews of nondominate groups, although itgives us chance to contemplate where that dark area begins and ends.

Despite this disappointment, the union of Mary Douglas’s rich bodyof work and classical Indian Buddhism’s vast corpus can still be wel-comed as a fruitful marriage of equals. Douglas’s early theoretical frame-work elucidates the various approaches to female impurity in classicalIndian Buddhism, providing a compelling view of their relationship tocomplex Buddhist social structures. Additionally, the detailed applicationof Douglas’s ideas on pollution establishes beyond doubt that Buddhistsin India thought independently and in a uniquely Buddhist mannerabout female impurity. From its own side, the Indian Buddhist exampleputs Douglas’s theories of ritual impurity, especially those found inPurity and Danger and “Self-evidence,” to the test, ultimately provingtheir ability to accommodate and explain the pollution beliefs of nestedand interrelated social subenvironments. In ancient Buddhist India, threesocial subenvironments—brahman-inflected householding, male celibatepractice, and gender-inclusive monasticism—coexisted and engaged inexchanges moderated internally and externally by pollution beliefs andpractices. Neither anticipated by Douglas’s analysis nor easily resolvedusing Indian Buddhist materials, questions about female agency and al-ternative female interpretations of impurity in classical India are sugges-tively raised by the stubborn figure of Sthūlanandā. Sthūlanandā, who is




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best understood as a literary figure, not a historical person, challengesscholars of Buddhism to understand her role in Buddhist discourse andimplications for Buddhist history. In her inimitable way, she also chal-lenges Douglas herself across centuries and cultures, one witty woman toanother, raising the question of how (and if ) her Durkheimian positionon the social roots of religion can be adapted so that it might better locateand illuminate the alternative religious worldviews of the socially weak.

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Buddhist Blood Taboo: Mary Douglas, Female Impurity, and Classical Indian Buddhism

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