Portraits of Buddhist Women: Stories from the Saddharmaratnavaliya.

• Author: Schaeffer, Kurtis R.
• Position: Book Review

Portraits of Buddhist Women: Stories from the Saddharmaratnavaliya. By RANJINI OBEYESEKERE. SUNY series in Buddhist Studies. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2001. Pp. 231. $54.50 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

Ranjini Obeyesekere's Portraits of Buddhist Women contains translations of thirty tales from the Saddharmaratnavaliya, a popular Sinhala Buddhist narrative anthology said to hail from the thirteenth century. This book follows upon her earlier work, Jewels of the Doctrine: Stories of the Saddharma Ratnavaliya (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), which contained fifteen tales from the same work. Together these forty-five stories constitute the first translations into English of the Saddharmaratnavaliya--only an eighth of the three hundred sixty stories found in the lengthy Sinhala original. The Saddharmaratnavaliya is held by tradition to be an adaptation by the thirteenth-century Sri Lankan scholar Dharmasena of a circa fifth-century Pali work, the Dhammapadatthakatha. According to Obeyesekere, the work has been held in great popular esteem; indeed her interests in it go back to childhood encounters with her grandfather in central Sri Lanka.

In her earlier work, Obeyesekere translated the first fifteen stories in sequence, allowing interested readers to compare the way in which the earlier Pali work and the later Sinhala work comment on the first section of the Dhammapada. In Portraits of Buddhist Women, she chooses chapters featuring female protagonists, admitting freely that such selectivity stems from her own feminist interest (p. 20) in the stories' ability to "not only illuminate the position of women in the early-medieval Buddhist world of India and Sri Lanka but also provide insights into shifting stances over time on issues of sexuality and gender" (p. 1). Despite this suggestion that the tales of the Saddharmaratnavaliya are relevant to a cultural history of women in premodern South Asia, if the introduction can be used to judge, Obeyesekere's interests are literary, not historical or philological. Readers who recognize this will enjoy the comfortable English renderings of these narratives and benefit from her brief discussion of Buddhist narrative literature. Readers who do not or will not accept the self-imposed limits of Obeyesekere's project will be frustrated by the lack of historical context provided in the introductory material and the absence of critical apparatus or philological detail. There is...