The metaphor and notion of womb have been the focus of inquiry and theorization in many cosmological and philosophical systems. The Chinese classic Daodejing frequently alludes to the metaphor of the womb/vagina as the generative force of the cosmos (mother of all things), e.g., the spirit of the valley and the gate of the obscure she-best. The Arabic term for compassion/mercy raḥama comes from the root raḥm (womb). The Buddhist term for universal Buddha-nature, tathāgatagarbha, is literally the womb (garbha) of the thus-gone/come-one. The three presentations in this co-sponsored panel invite scholars and philosophers to join a cross-cultural conversation about different womb cosmologies, their relations to love ethics, as well as their promises in bringing forth a friendlier future.
This paper examines an unexpected resonance between Daoist cosmology and European continental philosophy by examining the womb motif as a challenge to phallocentric metaphysics. Bringing Jacques Derrida’s reading of Martin Heidegger into conversation with the Daoist notion of the “gate of the obscure she-beast” (玄牝之门) in the Daodejing, it asks how womb cosmology might reopen the question of sexual difference beyond metaphysical opposition. The paper revisits Derrida’s critique of Heidegger’s concept of Geschlecht, which seeks a primordial unity underlying sexual differentiation yet risks neutralizing difference within a phallocentric framework. Derrida’s reading of khōra in Plato’s Timaeus introduces a “third genos,” an impersonal spacing beyond paternal and maternal figures, though this abstraction remains tied to metaphysical neutrality. By contrast, the Daodejing presents the obscure femininity as a generative threshold where masculine and feminine function as shifting polarities rather than fixed oppositions, offering a dynamic model of generativity that destabilizes phallocentric mastery.
In the Indic scene, we find many cosmological images that reflect the overall Feminine Principle as an all-pervasive generative power that is at once full and empty. The Great Goddess contains the seed syllables of creation that spontaneously arise from the Void energy that a practitioner can experience in deep samadhi. This principle is imagined in female forms precisely because it is not a remote deity but is intimately entangled in the world, and it captures a paradox in which materiality and transcendence dance together. This paper will explore a couple of select Tantric texts to contend that such gynocentric cosmological articulations present a thealogy that is not about a fixed belief system but a continuous presenting of life’s magical manifestations that can be experienced within the body itself.
Jaina birth narratives distinguish themselves among other Āyurvedic texts for their emphasis on reproduction as an impure, but necessary, process that especially implicates the “womb trio” of women, embryo-fetus, and nonhuman beings. Descriptions of pregnancy and birth found in the Jaina Tandula-veyāliya and Kalyāṇa-kāraka describe women’s reproductive capacity as generative, but also defiled. In this cosmological labor, women are not alone but joined through communal interactions with the embryo-fetus and nonhuman beings to co-create an immanent space of necessary life through food, bi-directional affects of the double-heart (dvai-hṛdaya), maternal emotions and cravings (dohada), as well as the transformation of consumed nonhuman living beings into the physical body of the fetus. Beyond a simple account of gender/species subordination, the mutual impurity and solidarity of the womb-trio invites fresh ethical reflections upon the metaphysical indebtedness to those who jointly the karmic cost for providing existential opportunities for other’s birth and advancement.