Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism

Taking a new approach to the history of Buddhism, this book describes how Buddhist authors reorganized family values in China. Close readings of more than twenty Buddhist texts written in China from the fifth to the thirteenth century demonstrate that Buddhist authors crafted new models for family reproduction based on a mother-son style of filial piety, in contrast to the traditional father-son model. Building on itself century after century, Buddhist propaganda sought to produce three elemental responses: (1) guilt and a sense of indebtedness to one s mother, (2) suspicion regarding the mother s sexual and sinful nature, and (3) faith that the Buddhist monastic institution could, if correctly patronized, cancel the debts and expiate the sins that it so painstakingly promulgated. Emerging at the end of this arc of Buddhist ideology is something resembling original sin, or, better, the sin of birth, in which all mothers are threatened with infernal punishment simply for their role in procreation.