Like Worms Falling From A Foul-smelling Sore : The Buddhist Rhetoric Of Childbirth In An Early Mahayana Sutra

The subject of this study, the Entering the Womb Sutra (Garbhavakrantisutra), is an extended Buddhist teaching on the suffering of birth. Unlike most earlyBuddhist discussions of birth suffering, which are generally abstract, this text describes the experiences and processes of childbirth itself, using graphic language borrowed from medicine and cemetery meditation traditions. While birth is normatively categorized by ordinary householders as an impure but auspicious event, this particular ascetic text renders birth both impure and inauspicious. This implies a subtle, perhaps covert, monastic rejection of fecundity as a worthy human aim. This sutra's unusually candid message about the true nature of fertility and childbirth can be explained by the worldliness and ritual success of Buddhist monastics in early first millennium Buddhist India. It is an example of ascetic pamphleteering against incursions of lay values into the monastery.