Bodies and technologies of reproduction

This roundtable brings together scholars working on a wide range of materials, cultures and periods to discuss the body and technologies of reproduction. The reproductive body is the site and technology of much religious and spiritual practice in East and South Asia. Narratives of embryology—whether physiological and saṃsāric or spiritual and transcendent—inform and explain such practices. Bodily practices are often understood in relation to reproduction and may directly impact procreation. This roundtable focuses on how the reproductive capacity of the body informs religious practice and narratives of bodily procreation. The goal of much such practice is not to produce progeny but to invert reproductive logic to spiritual ends. What are the reproductive understandings of the body, cosmos and time? What technologies interact with the reproductive body—whether self-directed bodily techniques or medical interventions, and whether deployed to halt conception or promote spiritual embryology? What accounts of sexuality and the sexed body (such as one sex or two sexes) emerge? And what narratives of maternity/paternity or pro- or anti-natal stances predominate? The panel features contributions on the placenta as the source of mortality in Shangqing Daoism, embryogenesis narratives in Epic and Purāṇic literature, the Daoist body as a self-contained site of asexual reproduction, the Indian alchemical *Rasaratnākara* on embryo development and procreation, spiritual embryology in *haṭha* yoga, embryology and cosmology in Chinese female alchemy, and childlessness and ontogenesis in Bengali (Baul) songs of *sādhanā*. A paper on ‘the placenta as the source of mortality in Medieval Daoist self-cultivation rituals’ concentrates on the self-cultivation ritual of ‘untying the knots of death’ in Shangqing Daoist texts (roughly 4-9th centuries). It demonstrates how the deathly knots were conceptualized as a physical manifestation of the placenta inside the bodies of the practitioners, which, although physically disconnected from the body at birth, was thought to continue to exert influence on the person’s health and longevity in adult life. It argues that the notion of the placental binding is a synthesis of the early Chinese medical and embryological conceptions with the common beliefs in magical connection of the placenta to the child and in the polluting nature of the female reproductive substances. Our second contribution analyses narratives of the embryo development in medieval Sanskrit Epic and Purāṇic literature, that describe, from fertilization to birth, the production of a man. These narratives share the same structure and invariably appear in a wider context of teaching Sāṃkhya philosophy. They provide access to representations of the embryo conceived within the framework of the temporal circularity of *saṃsāra*, and the medical, theological and philosophical issues of embryogenesis in ancient and medieval Hinduism. We then consider Daoist views of the body as microcosms with generative faculties. Since individual practitioners hold in their bodies all the elements necessary for their own reproduction, certain meditation techniques harness those elements in order to self-generate or asexually produce a new spiritually perfected being. These same principles govern the reproduction of mushrooms, which, for that very reason, benefit from a divine standing in Daoist traditions. We will examine the ways in which Daoist reproductive visualizations and mushroom-based practices inform each other. A contribution on Indian alchemy (*rasaśāstra*) introduces the *Rasaratnākara* and chapters in the *Rasendrakhaṇḍa* section on women's diseases, including the significance of the day of the week menstruation begins, development of the embryo, recipes to prevent śūla during pregnancy, and procreation. Turning to the early *haṭha* yoga corpus (11th – 15th centuries) the reproductive body is foundational to some accounts of the body and yoga practice. The sources set up a distinction between saṃsāric procreation and a yogic interiorisation of embryology. Some sources describe this process as at least initially involving sex and others as entirely celibate and internal. All sources relocate the ‘spiritual embryology’ to within the body of the practitioner. This paradigm of the yogic process points to a generic single-sex model of the body for both male and female practitioners. The paper ‘Embryology and cosmology in female alchemy’ shows how in Daoism, cosmogonic ideas make sense of what happens in the moment of conception, and *neidan* texts discuss the formation of an immortal embryo inside the body of the practitioner. However, even when talking about embryo formation, the standard *neidan* discourse remains highly symbolical. Further, even though the metaphor of the embryo is obviously related to a process that can only happen in the female body, there are no mentions of specific gender differences in the early medieval *neidan* texts. Whereas in earlier Daoist sources embryogenesis was described as a meditative process creating an immortal embryo, in female alchemy sources embryology is very close to that of medical sources. At the same time, female alchemy texts also make intense use of the cosmological language of gender difference, intercalating the discussion of physical differences and the use of the trigrams and hexagrams in Yijing theory, as well as yin/yang theory. In female alchemy, the cosmological changes are changes in the female body. Finally, we have a presentation on ‘Masters of Conception and Contraception: Childlessness and ontogenesis in Bengali (Baul) songs of *sādhanā*’. Bāul, Fakir and Vaishnava gurus, male and female, in rural Bengal often have a thriving career as masters of conception and contraception. This presentation combines oral-literary sources with ethnography to discuss discourses and practices around procreation, as well as birth control. Practitioners who take vows of joint renunciation live as a sexually active heterosexual couple but cannot bear children; their renunciation prevents them from engaging in reproductive labour. The paper first discusses the system of knowledge and the techniques of the sexual, reproductive body within these lineages before arguing that the practices have tremendous implications in the social spheres of family planning, reproductive health, and non-normative sexuality.