[Buddha-l] FW: CONF Symposium: Gender, Sex, Pollution in Buddhist Discourse, Los Angeles, USC, February 3-4, 2012

[Jo]

Here's a summary of a podcast lecture by Lori Meeks: Making Sense of the
Blood Bowl Sutra....[re Japan]
http://www.blubrry.com/shinibs/1027902/making-sense-of-the-blood-bowl-sutra-
gender-pollution-and-salvation-in-buddhist-sermons-from-early-modern-japan/ 

Sometime during the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, several
variants of an indigenous Chinese sutra known as the Xuepenjing  (“Blood
Bowl Sutra,” .......were transmitted to Japan.
Emphasizing the impurity of women’s reproductive blood, this short scripture
teaches that women are fated to fall into a special hell known as the ”Blood
Pond Hell” (chi no ike jigoku) in retribution for the sin of polluting the
earth with blood. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, temples
throughout Japan actively promoted the cult of the Blood Bowl Hell as a
method of saving women. In this cult, disgust for the female body, first
emphasized in Buddhist texts as a means of encouraging celibate monks to
remain distant from women, is directed no to celibate monks, but to a new
audience of lay men and women. My talk will explore two early modern
commentaries on the text in an effort to understand how priests presented
the teachings of the Blood Bowl Sutra to this audience.