ABSTRACT
The Buddhist attitude to the status of women was by no means monolithic and unchanging. The early Indian Buddhist texts are marked by 'a tension between certain attitudes that seem unusually positive in their assessment of women and the feminine, on the one hand, and attitudes that are much more blatantly negative, on the other. Kankyo no Tomo does not enter this debate directly, nor does it engage in theological argument in order either to assert the possibility of women attaining enlightenment within their female bodies, or to insist that sexual transformation is a prerequisite for their enlightenment. There is a tension between the moral of the tale that strains to declare that relationships between lovers are at once 'pitiable and shamelessly unmindful of the Buddha's Dharma' and the bulk of the narrative, which is a moving evocation of a world from the past in which lovers express through poetry the pain of the loss of loved ones.
