by Harsha Gautam
Brides of the Buddha: Nuns’ Stories from the Avadānaśataka. By KAREN MULDOON-HULES. New York: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. xii + 227. $100.
In her intriguing title, Brides of the Buddha, Karen Muldoon-Hules invites attention to the female disciples of the Buddha, and through a nuanced examination of the understudied eighth varga (chapter) of the Avadānaśataka (henceforth, Avś), which comprises ten stories about women who became disciples of the Buddha, presents an excellent case for how to contextualize and study Buddhist women in the classical period. The theme of ‘marriage’- the cornerstone of this book and of the “Vedic ritual system” (p.24), provides substance to Muldoon-Hules’ investigation of the Buddhist female renunciation in relation to and against the Brahmanical and other non-Buddhist traditions. She studies the classical or “middle” period of Indian Buddhism, roughly, the first five to six centuries CE (p.5). In her advocacy for a whole range of sources to build a conjecture for the women in early India, one finds the historian in Muldoon-Hules, who intends to synthesize a careful intertextual reading of Classical Indian texts with the available material evidence.
In her first chapter, she makes an emphatic case for the regional influence on the monastic practices, reflected through the Buddhist texts, thereby challenging the once popular notion of the Pāli texts being a set of “pan-Indic” Buddhist texts and representing what would have been “original Buddhism” (p.5). With her work set along this investigation of the ‘regional influence’, Muldoon-Hules joins the league of recent scholarship in Buddhist studies, that not only challenges the hegemony of the Pāli Canon as the earliest source for the history of early Buddhism but goes one step further to undertake a comparative study of early Buddhist sources, primarily the Northern Sanskrit sources and the Southern Pāli texts, to register the differences, suggesting an evident influence of the contemporary regional traditions on these schools, thereby successfully localizing the sources of their study. For Muldoon-Hules, the source is the eighth chapter of the Avś, a Buddhist Sanskrit compendium of stories, organized into a total of ten chapters, argued to be compiled between the second and the fifth centuries, CE (p.8) and which appears to have originated and circulated in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent.
Muldoon-Hules goes on to explore the notion and meaning of “marriage” in the textual traditions of Brahmanism and Buddhism, in her second and third chapters respectively. Though the anachronistic use of ‘Hinduism’ without any explanation leads to a disconcerted arbitrary distinction between ‘Vedic ritual tradition’ (which goes back and forth between Vedic and Late Vedic in her chapter) and ‘Classical Hinduism’, her astute examination of both the primary and secondary sources, convincingly establishes the transition from the early Vedic period when “women had the option to study and teach the Vedas, philosophy, and grammar” (p.35) to the period that Muldoon-Hules deems as that of ‘Classical Hinduism’ (early centuries of the Common Era) “when marriage became the sole, all-encompassing (social, ritual and soteriological) vocation for women” (p.35). This transition is predicated upon the reconfiguration of the āśrama system as argued by Patrick Olivelle, which was “originally meant for a select group of Brahmin males, to becoming a nearly obligatory sequence of life stages for all men in the top three varṇas (classes)” (p.35). In this system, “the householder or gṛhastha acted as the linchpin” (p.26) and the significance of marriage grew remarkably since the male needed a wife as his ritual partner in order to perform sacrificial rites. Muldoon-Hules’ assessment can be read in tandem with Nathan McGovern’s proposition in his The Snake and the Mongoose: The Emergence of Identity in Early Indian Religion (2019) about the śramaṇic traditions participating in the development of ‘Neo-Brahmanism’ (comparable to ‘Classical Hinduism’ in Muldoon-Hules terms), whose proponents argued that “only the householder lifestyle (made possible by increasing urbanization) is consistent with the dharma, effectively rejecting the ascetic (śramaṇic) lifestyle.” This background makes it clear why “religious praxis for women was a contested space between ‘Hinduism’ and the renouncer religions that allowed women to become celibate religious professionals” (p.36), an aspect that Muldoon-Hules explores in the remaining chapters by closely examining the stories from the Avś.
She groups the ten stories into five pairs and divides them into two categories, studying the first categorization in chapters four and five and the second in chapter six. She deploys the methodologies of intertextual historical-contextual analysis and Indology, while also corroborating them with the inscriptional and art-historical evidence whenever possible. Through her impeccable analysis, she shows how the stories reflect similar societal concerns such as the anxiety of the fathers to marry their daughters at the right age, or his fear of the rejected suitors’ enmity, and so on, as seen from the Brahmanical sources in chapters two and three. Since the same societal concerns seem to be shared in various religious traditions, it might be difficult to attribute them to a single religious tradition. Muldoon-Hules’ recurrent use of ‘Hindu’ rituals and practices suggests that there were ‘Buddhist’ rituals for the rites of passage, but, in chapter three, she herself shows how the Buddhists with some nuances, such as using different terminologies (p.55), were more or less following the norms of cultures where they lived (p.41). Thus, defining and elaborating on what she means by these academically produced categories of religion could have benefited Muldoon-Hules’ fine observations and analysis. Similarly, the emphasis on the ‘female agency’- a recurrent motif in her discussions of the stories, could have benefitted from a definition of how she comprehends the widely used but variedly understood notion of ‘female agency’, and the consequent theoretical engagement with the related and relevant scholarship, such as that of Judith Butler and/or Saba Mahmood.
Nonetheless, her pairing of stories is ingenious and commendable, as she is able to highlight the shared themes, while meticulously pointing out and contextualizing the differences as well. For instance, in the pairing of Muktā (Avś 77) and Kṣemā (Avś 79), Muldoon-Hules is able to show that though in these stories, marriage was a mutually beneficial inter-familial alliance, female renunciation did not undermine that alliance, since Muktā renounces with her betrothed and Kṣemā is able to go forth with everyone’s consent after displaying supernatural powers. The avadānas of Supriyā and Śuklā (Avś 72 and 73) feature “precocious spirituality and model parental acceptance of youthful female renunciation, one in a Buddhist household and the other in a non-Buddhist household” (p.160). Some of her pairings highlight the differences more than the commonalities, for instance, “the avadānas of Somā and Kacaṅgalā (Avś 74 and 78) contrast great learning with great ignorance” while also highlighting the difference in their socio-economic statuses (p.160). Another contrasting pair is of the alluring dancer Kuvalayā (Avś 75) with the hideous princess Virūpā (Avś 80), whose father could marry her off only in semi-darkness. Through her skilful mode of analysis, Muldoon-Hules convincingly argues that the redactors of the Avś chose their stories carefully, paying close attention to the arrangement.
With regard to the audience, Muldoon-Hules claims that the book attempts to reach out to two different audiences, the scholars of Buddhism and India and a more general audience. Although, the scholars might experience some dissatisfaction with her reluctance to engage with theoretical concepts, specifically with regard to religious identity formation. And also in the matter of the academically constructed boundaries between the religious traditions in ancient South Asia, which get subjectivized as they are contextualized in different periods, societies and the frameworks of analysis. Further, her brilliant second half suffers from the decision to not include her translation of the eighth chapter (available online in the Journal of Asian Literature and Translation), making it difficult for readers unfamiliar with the text and tradition to comprehend the arguments made. Muldoon-Hules derives the title Brides of the Buddha based on one of her five pairings- the avadāna stories of Suprabhā and Kāśisundarī (Avś 71 and 76), both of whom “mount on (their bridegroom’s) chariots, flying an ochre banner- the colour of the robes worn by Buddhist monks and nuns- and carrying a picture of the Buddha drawn on cloth, communicating their religious choice through the medium of svayaṃvara…” (p.97), and thereby declaring through “a visual statement that their ‘weddings’ have already happened” (p.98). This is an example of Muldoon-Hules’ intellectual ingenuity to rhetorically equate marriage with renunciation and to also register the ritual and symbolic significance of this imagery of mounting a chariot in a woman’s life, as she enters a new phase leaving behind the ‘protection’ of her father. Muldoon-Hules also proposes a possibility of the ‘influence’ from the well-known “bride of Christ” metaphor, applied to early Christian nuns on this wedding imagery in the Indian Buddhist sources. It is an interesting parallel and can prove to be an excellent case for interreligious studies using the comparative framework, but the aspect of ‘influence’ needs to be substantiated with more persuasive evidence.
Summarizing her assessment of the stories in her remarkable conclusion, Muldoon-Hules also manages to draw out several significant distinctions in the stories and the characters of the Avś from the stories about women in the Pāli texts, strengthening her bid to localize the Avś to North and North-west India. Her work can provide a basis for future studies attempting to unpack these differences through intertextual analysis, by examining other themes. And with regard to the study of women in early India in general and of exploring female religious agency in particular, Brides of the Buddha has certainly made a valuable contribution.
About the Author:
Karen Muldoon-Hules is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at UCLA in Asian Languages and Cultures and the Study of Religion Program. Her work compares often undervalued north Indian narrative literature related to the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya to Pāli and other Buddhist sources, as well as Hindu law codes and texts, to tease out possible regional differences in nun hagiographies. Her first book, Brides of the Buddha: Nun stories from the Avadānaśataka, was published by Lexington Books in June 2017.
About the Reviewer:
Harsha Gautam is a Ph.D. student in the Religions in History track in the Department of Religious Studies at UT Austin. She specializes in the study of premodern South Asia, early Buddhism, Sanskrit and Pāli literature and South Asian Art. Her research interests also include religious identity formation, power relations, comparison and intellectual history.
