Female Mutability and Male Anxiety in an Early Buddhist Legend
In 399 ce a chinese monk named Fa-hsien (ca. 337–ca. 422) began a fourteen-year pilgrimage to South Asia in order to visit Buddhist pilgrimage sites and to gather Buddhist texts to bring back to China. In his account of that remarkable journey he related a story that was told to him during the summer of 404 while he resided at Sāṃkāśya in what is now north-central India.1 Sāṃkāśya has been an important Buddhist pilgrimage site since the second century BCE.2 It marks the spot where the Buddha is said to have descended from Trāyastrimṃśa Heaven, the heaven of the thirty-three gods, after having gone there to preach to his long-dead mother, Queen Māyā. Fa-hsien was told that when the Buddha prepared to descend back to earth a great crowd assembled to greet him: "Then the [End Page 14] nun by the name of Utpala thought: 'Now the kings, ministers and people have all come here to meet the Buddha. I am only a woman—how can I see him first?' Thereupon, by supernatural power, she transformed herself into a holy, universal monarch, and as such she was the very first to render homage to Buddha."3 Of immediate interest is the element of sex change in this story, which implies that gender was believed to be fluid, not fixed. The possibility of miraculous sex change, such as Utpala's, was a widely held belief in early Buddhism,4 and additional sex-change stories are discussed below. A complement to this belief is that because of karma one can change sex through reincarnation.5 In other words, everyone has lived as a woman or a man in innumerable past lives; good karma leads to rebirth as a man and bad to rebirth as a woman. Still today there are esoteric visualization [End Page 15] practices that allow women to visualize themselves as men, and men can visualize themselves as women, and these have a long tradition.6
Of further interest are contending versions of the Buddha's descent in Pali and Sanskrit texts, some of which call Utpala either Uppalavaṇṇā (Pali) or Utpalavarnṃā (Sanskrit). One version, preserved in the fifth-century commentary on the Dhammapada, does not mention Uppalavaṇṇā at all, saying instead that a male disciple of the Buddha, Śariputra, was the first to greet him.7 Similarly, a past life story about the Buddha that refers to his descent from Trāyastrimṃśa Heaven also says Śariputra was the first to greet him.8 The substitution of Śariputra for Uppalavaṇṇā, which is another form of sex change, albeit of a less dramatic nature, is an intimation of things to come, as variations in Uppalavaṇṇā's story and in that of the Buddha's descent are part of a Buddhist discourse on gender that spanned the centuries and vast geographical areas.9 [End Page 16]
Click for larger view | Figure 1 The center of this carving shows the Buddha descending from Trāyastrimṃśa Heaven. Near his feet is the bowed figure of Uppalavaṇṇā. It dates from the third century BCE and is from the Mathura Museum. |
The earliest evidence of the legend comes from iconographic depictions of the Buddha's descent from Trāyastrimṃśa Heaven, stone reliefs predating the common era.10 Unlike the many standardized scenes of the Buddha's life, however, the descent from Trāyastrimṃśa Heaven received different treatments, though its main feature, three staircases on which the Buddha and the Hindu gods Indra and Brahma descend, remains recognizable (figure 1). Relevant to Uppalavaṇṇā's role in this event are the variations at the base of the staircases. Several show a bowed figure of undetermined sex, while others have a king, both of which fit with Uppalavaṇṇā's story in...
