‘Many Women in Hell’: Problem of Lust in Early Chinese Buddhist Text

Notwithstanding that the Buddha supposedly proclaimed Buddhahood was attainable to all genders, Buddhism functioned primarily as patriarchal religious traditions interspersed with misogynism, which is a well-known fact. Bernard Faure pointed out the existence of a “rhetoric of equality” proclaimed by Buddhism, but such a claim never became a socio-historical reality. With the spread of Buddhism from the Indian subcontinent into the Sinitic region, perceptions of women rooted in Indian sociocultural reality became transplanted onto a new cultural fabric.  

I investigate the problem of lust embedded within a few of the earliest renditions of Buddhist scriptures translated from second to third-century China. A notable example is the Sutra on the Oral Explanation of the Twelve Causal Links in the Agamas (Ahan koujie shier yinyuan jing 阿含口解十二因緣經) translated by An Shigao 安世高, that ascribed sexual pleasure as a problematic feature unique to the female gender. By comparing these Buddhist scriptures with Confucian classics such as the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經), Zuo Tradition/Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu Zuozhuan 春秋左傳), and early biographies of women, such as Traditions of Distinguished Women (Lienü zhuan 列女傳), the result was two different sets of assumptions regarding the male and female gender’s natural inclinations towards sexual pleasure. 

Paul Goldin summarized this specific Confucian gendered assumption in his work, The Culture of Sex in Ancient China, where he pointedly noted that presupposition towards the female gender’s lust only became fully solidified by the Song period in the eleventh century. Goldin notes that the notion of females as a lustful human was attested to as early as in Han Fei’s discussion of palace women, but the discourse in earlier Chinese classical texts generally holds the male gender more accountable for their natural inclination to lust. Lo Yuet Keung in his recent article, Conversion to Chastity: A Buddhist Catalyst in Early Imperial China which delineates Buddhist concept of the “pure body” became fully assimilated into the indigenous Chinese notion of female “rectitude” and the notion of female chastity. Based on Lo’s framework, I argue that there is a shift in the liability of lust from the female to the male gender due to the catalyst of Buddhism’s introduction into China.

The early translated Buddhist texts in China introduced a new discourse that ascribed bodily lust as the female gender’s natural inclination. It is important to note that the literate elites did not see both discourses as mutually exclusive ideals. Nonetheless, the initial period when the Buddhist discourse was introduced must have presented a dilemma for the elites to reconcile similar and different gendered notions with the existing ones by the indigenous Confucian classical discourse. Therefore, the result was a new rhetoric that firmly amalgamated both sets of ideals and redefined the problem of lust expressed by the male and female genders. The consequences of this dilemma would set a new basis for future literati interpretations of gender relations in medieval China.