ABSTRACT
Birth, along with sickness, old age, and death, define human suffering, which itself constitutes the most basic truth of human experience in classical Indian Buddhism. The Garbhavakranti-sutra is devoted to a phenomenological account of the rebirth process. The Buddhist discourse of birth and the linked formulations of gender are read mainly as potentialities and possibilities, ways of being offered in Buddhist texts that Buddhists would have manifested in their lives in a variety of ways. Although classical Indian Buddhism upholds gender as a basic organizing principle, it hollows out formations of maleness and femaleness and rebuilds them from the inside. Logical links between non-virtuous action and the female body drawn in avadana and jataka literature mark women as indelibly impure, over and above the cyclical or situational impurity associated with menstruation and childbirth in ancient South Asia. A Buddhist poetry of disgust transforms the beautiful sexualized and fertile female form into something ugly and repugnant.
