Mothers of the Buddhas: The Sutra on Transforming Women into Buddhas (Bussetsu Tennyo Jōbutsu Kyō)

“Every woman’s body: these are all the mothers of the buddhas of the three times. Like the great sea or the great earth, for example, a woman’s body is the matrix of the thus-come ones.” These lines appear in a sutra that was not included in the Buddhist canon and that was almost certainly written neither in India nor in China, but rather in ninth-century Japan. Despite its lack of a conventionally canonical pedigree, literate elites accepted this text, the Sutra on Transforming Women into Buddhas (Bussetsu tennyo jōbutsu kyō 仏説転女成仏経), as an authoritative Buddhist scripture during the Heian period. In this respect, the sutra calls our attention to the creative, open-ended quality of scriptural culture. Indeed, it intentionally reframes discourse on the relationship between women’s sexed bodies and enlightenment by making unusual, and in some ways radical, changes to Buddhist conceptualizations of women’s religious status.¹ Many Mahayana Buddhist scriptures assert that women are morally and socially inferior to men; some illustrate a character’s progress toward enlightenment with miraculous episodes of female-to-male sex change, which is often referred to as the “transformation of women” (tennyo 転女).² By incorporating this phrase, both the title and the text of the Sutra on Transforming Women into Buddhas clearly allude to sex change, and yet this scripture does not narrate such a transformation. Instead, it maintains that awakening is readily available to women through straightforward ethical and textual practices. More provocatively, it argues that women make enlightening activity possible because they are the mothers of the buddhas and matrices for good deeds.

This article asks how the Sutra on Transforming Women into Buddhas became one viable option among multiple scriptural discourses during the Heian period. Following this introduction, I first provide a brief discussion of the apocryphal status and extant manuscripts of this sutra, together with its research history. The ensuing section introduces examples of the trope of the transformation of women in canonical Mahayana sutras that were familiar to audiences in ninth-century Japan, when the Sutra on Transforming Women into Buddhas was likely composed. Against this intertextual backdrop, I then provide a close reading of the apocryphal sutra itself. Like a traditional commentary, this section pairs a rendering of the text—in this case, a translation—with interpretive and explanatory comments.³ The next section examines the career of the sutra in Heian-period religious culture, based on evidence from devotional texts and courtiers’ journals. The conclusion offers some reflections on how our own attention to the Sutra on Transforming Women into Buddhas has the potential to impact the ways in which we think about sex, gender, and Buddhist scriptural culture during the Heian period and beyond.

In the absence of clear evidence, arguments about the authorship of the Sutra on Transforming Women into Buddhas must remain speculative, but it is possible that the text was actually composed by a member—or members—of the lay elite. At the very least, those who copied and used the sutra were laymen and laywomen—and also aristocratic nuns. It is important to note that high-ranking nuns were obliged to live within domestic, lay social structures due to the attenuation of Buddhist convents at the beginning of the Heian period.⁴ Therefore, for the purposes of this article I treat them together with members of the surrounding lay society.

Often lay Buddhists are portrayed as the passive recipients of watered-down versions of scriptural exegesis performed by learned male monastics, but they did in fact craft their own doctrinal worlds. By providing glimpses into the complex processes of the dissemination, and indeed the creation, of new religious ideas, the Sutra on Transforming Women into Buddhas reminds us that historical circumstances impinged upon doctrinal production. Dogmas are not given but made; they are produced at different times by specific constituencies, sometimes in direct conflict with one another. As Liz Wilson and Susanne Mrozik have noted, in times and places other than Heian Japan, Buddhist discourses on women’s bodies (and...