Brides of the Buddha: Nuns' Stories from the Avadanasataka.

AuthorLangenberg, Amy Paris
PositionBook review

Brides of the Buddha: Nuns' Stories from the Avadanasataka. By KAREN MULDOON-HULES. New York: LEXINGTON BOOKS, 2017. Pp. xii + 227. $100.

Karen Muldoon-Hules's Brides of the Buddha is an examination of the neglected eighth chapter (varga) of the Avadanasataka (Avs), a cycle of ten stories about female disciples of the Buddha from the classical period. Besides bringing attention to an important but understudied textual source for the study of religious women in premodern South Asia, its most significant contribution is a new focus on the theme of marriage in Buddhist narratives about female renunciation. Muldoon-Hules reads her text against dharmasastra and other contemporaneous Buddhist and non-Buddhist sources to explore questions such as the existence of Buddhist (as opposed to Hindu) forms of marriage and her text's potential as historical evidence for learning about the early nuns' community. She is particularly interested in marriage (which she calls the "cornerstone of the Vedic ritual system") (p. 24) as a trope used by avadanists to simultaneously position female Buddhist monasticism as a going social concern and express anxiety about its continuing viability. In Muldoon-Hules's reading, female religious praxis is a "contested space between Hinduism and the renouncer religions" that produces rhetorics of female renunciation distinct from those of male renunciation (p. 36). Marriage (which is inherently linked to sexuality and fertility) is a major arena where that contestation takes place. Though Muldoon-Hules is concerned only with the premodern period, her idea that premodern Buddhist literary texts reflect or construct a female Buddhist religiosity in which renunciation and marriage are pitted against one another will also provide useful historical background to contemporary ethnographies of female Buddhist monasticism, in which similar themes are often present.

Muldoon-Hules employs an Indological methodology, sourcing broadly from the Indic textual record in a disciplined, precise, and intertextual manner, while also consulting the material record for corroborating evidence. Her most significant methodological intervention to the study of women in ancient Buddhist South Asia in this volume is her insistence that scholars cease to make pan-Indic generalizations based only on the more familiar Pali sources. Though she doesn't reference methodologically similar scholarship explicitly, Muldoon-Hules' emphasis on the desirability of...

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