Gender and Sexuality in this World and the Next: Human/Non-Human Relationships in Preta Narratives

This paper considers the Buddhist production of gendered bodies from the perspective of non-human beings. It takes as its starting point Sonam Kachru’s challenge to consider cosmology as a source for philosophical reflection. In his analysis of Vasubandhu’s Treatise in Twenty Verses, Kachru argues that not only did Buddhists seriously think about the existence of non-human beings in relation to human experience, but scholars also need to consider non-humans in their own investigations (2021, 2). This paper extends Kachru’s analysis to different experiences of embodiment, using cosmological narrative literature of non-human pretas to consider examine gender metaphysics from the perspective of the non-human realm.

Stories about pretas operate within several tensions between Brahmanical gender norms, the patriarchal householder society, the norms of the celibate sangha, and the everyday gendered realities of men and women who may resist norms of behaviour. Preta narratives attempt to shape householders ethically and physically into virile, filial, and generous male householders and virtuous mother-wives who act as good hostesses by portraying individuals who fail to fulfil their ritual and social responsibilities and, in a subsequent lifetime, become stripped of the gendered marks of beauty and civility through their nakedness, hirsute and deformed bodies, and unkempt hair. Their moral, physical, and social abjection operates not only in terms of species/being but also gender—in terms of both the gendered way that this abjection operates, and the ways that some pretas continue to transgress norms of gender and sexuality.

This paper focuses particularly on humans reborn as semi-divine pretas, and particularly those who engage in cross-species sexual relationships in the preta realm. Although semi-divine pretas may experience periodic torments, their relative mobility allows them to utilize their supernatural powers in different ways, including in pursuit of romantic partners. These narratives illustrate the dangers of attachment while balancing the norms of the patriarchal householder system with a celibate monastic institution that guarded itself against sensual desires, therefore playing to broader assumptions about proper expressions of sexuality based on one’s gender while also working against them.

While there is much to be said about the construction of masculinity within these stories, particularly in the way these stories attempt to regulate male sexual aggression, in this paper I focus on women’s sexuality. I examine fivenarratives of preta-human relationships from the Petavatthu (Tales of the Departed). In three of them, men reborn as semi-divine pretas pursue women and bring them back to their celestial mansions by either kidnapping their partner or paying a bride price to her family. Once brought to the preta realm, each woman engages in a sexual relationship with the preta. The other two stories feature women are reborn as semi-divine pretīs, one due to adultery, who lure men to the preta realm. Both tales depict women who are emotionally vulnerable, experience loneliness and grief, and actively pursue relationships for the sake of companionship, rather than procreation. While these stories show agentive female sexuality, one of the narratives shows some disease about women’s sexual appetites, illustrated in the cyclical destruction of the adulteress pretī’s body.

In many ways, these narratives align with literary tropes observed by other scholars that use non-human demonesses, deities, and pretīs to represent of the dangers of women’s sexual appetites (Lang 1986; Richman 1998; Wilson 1996). The dynamic of passive woman brought to the preta realm contrasted to the sexually voracious pretīsimilarly aligns with a broader pattern that Amy Langenberg has observed in texts that waver between portraying women as passive sexual agents or with amplified sexual appetites. Although she acknowledges that there are limitations to “direct readings of canonical and scholastic androcentric Buddhist texts” when it comes to “let[ting] us into the sexual lives of actual Buddhist women,” she advocates that scholars employ a feminist hermeneutic that would enable them to attend to alternate viewpoints that illuminate “the shadow world of agentive, creative, non-instrumental, sometimes vulnerable female sexuality” (2019, 730, 733). To do so, I examine these stories with an eye to the tension that they maintain between the androcentric framing and the glimpses they provide toward women’s sexual agency, intelligence, and emotional vulnerability.

Much as Madadh Richey observes in her study of the goddess Lamaštu, preta tales attempt to relegate gender transgression to the realm of the nonhuman by juxtaposing non-humans to human “female domesticity and appearance” (2021, 153). But Richey urges scholars examining stories of monstrous women to go further than show that sex and gender “are constructed, contingent, and repressive.” Instead, she challenges us to uncover how monsters (demons, ghosts) could help fashion a transformative space “that simultaneously contests patriarchal, cisgender, and heteronormative imperatives” (2021, 153–154). Richey asks us to consider how the relegation of gender and sexual transgression to the non-human Other does not simply reinforce gender norms. Instead, it helps fashion transformative spaces for other kinds of gendered and sexual existences.

It is here that taking seriously pretas as living beings helps us think about the expansion of Buddhist gender norms. Rather than reduce pretas to a symbol of human sexual transgressions, what happens if we read these narratives for what they portray about the human/non-human sexual relationship? In these stories, humans though sent to the pretarealm due to gender transgressions continue to act in similar ways once in the preta world. And human women travel to the preta realm as a site for non-reproductive sex outside of the bounds of human societal and economic structures. As a result, the preta world, as a realm of distinctly unregulated female sexuality, operates in tension with the text’s own normative frameworks. In this sense, tales of women engaging in sex for pleasure, without reproductive potential, and outside socio-economic marriage bonds, contest patriarchal heteronormative norms by rejecting the Brahmanical patriarchal imperative to give continue the patriline.