ABSTRACT
Recent decades have seen a groundswell in the Buddhist world, a transnational movement pushing towards better opportunities for Buddhist women. Middle period Indian Buddhists had a habit of conceptualizing suffering in terms of, and liberation in contradistinction to, the vivid experiences associated with human reproduction. Buddhist canonical scriptures remind people time and time again that birth is fundamentally unsatisfactory, a precursor to disease and death. Ultimately, ancient Buddhists' efforts to make use of the contours of the human birth process to understand human life, death, and freedom were acts of world-building and world-peopling. The significance of the Garbhavakranti becomes more obvious, however, once the centrality of the birth metaphor to Indian Buddhist constructions of gender and freedom is acknowledged. Thus, a particular instance of what Michel Foucault calls a "discourse", a multiform of knowledge that is generated by and perpetuates a certain human environment, emerges around the topic of birth in the Indian Buddhist context.
