ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the quasi-medical and richly descriptive Garbhavakranti-sutra, which takes physical birth as its special focus, in the larger middle period Indian Buddhist context, where the metaphorical use of birth to conceptualize suffering and liberation is pervasive. It explains the ways in which the metaphor "birth is suffering" sets the terms for conceptualizing femaleness in Indian Buddhism. The experience of being a human body moving through space and time provide many of the rudimentary concepts clearly delineated enough to themselves act as referents for metaphor. In the canonical discourses, birth appears at the head of a conventional list of experiences that define the un-satisfactoriness of human existence. The Garbhavakranti-sutra builds up its thickly layered conceptualization of suffering through a combination of "emergent experiences" and sub-metaphors that resonate with the wider symbolic world of Indian Buddhism and ancient South Asia.
