Abstract

Within the canonical Sutta Piṭaka (“Basket of Suttas”) of the classical South Asian Śrāvakayāna Buddhist tradition, the Buddha is depicted as claiming that there is something called ‘woman-indriya’ (itth-indriya) and something called ‘man-indriya’ (puris-indriya). While these claims appear only a handful of times in the extensive version of the Sutta Piṭaka that we have today, the rarity of canonical statements about gender meant that Śrāvakayāna Buddhist philosophers often invoked these two gender-related indriyas when advancing their metaphysical theories about gender. In current scholarship about these gender-related indriyas, it is generally accepted that they mean the same thing across the Sutta Piṭaka and the later Abhidharma Buddhist commentarial texts—they are material faculties within the bodies of individuals, determining an individual’s biological sex characteristics and gendered behaviours. I disagree. In my dissertation, I focus on demonstrating three different metaphysical accounts of the gender-related indriyas that were found within the texts of the classical Śrāvakayāna tradition, resulting in a multiplicity of attitudes about gender. The first chapter argues, based on the classical linguistic analysis (nirvacana) of ‘woman-indriya’ and ‘man-indriya’ and descriptions within the Sutta Piṭaka, that these terms refer to whatever is most powerful (indriya) over the soteriologically negative outcome of becoming fettered to a ‘woman self’ (itth-attan) and ‘man self’ (puris-attan). Here, I argue that the invocation of ‘woman self’ and ‘man self’ means that discussions about gender-related indriyas in the Sutta Piṭaka should be understood as a further elaboration of the central claim within this collection of texts that any and all views of self are inaccurate and must be abandoned. My second chapter focuses on identifying what is indriya or most powerful over this soteriological outcome within the Sutta Piṭaka. Based on the Saṃyoga Sutta’s description of an individual mentally generating (manasi karoti) what is indriya or most powerful over the fettering to a gendered self, I argue that ‘indriya over woman’ and ‘indriya over man’ are not described as singular material faculties, but as series of irrational mental generations (ayoniso manasi-kāras) on the part of the individual. These involve inaccurately labelling a variety of objects of attention as belonging to 'woman' or 'man' and as 'internal to self' or 'external to self', causing the individual to not only view the world through these gendered categories, but to become fettered to a gendered self. My third chapter focuses on the later Abhidharma Buddhist tradition which formed around the teachings of the Sutta Piṭaka. Where current scholarship claims that there is a single Abhidharma Buddhist view of the gender indriyas, I demonstrate through records from the Mahā-vibhāṣā (‘The Great Compendium’) that everything about the metaphysical status of the gender-related indriyas was up for debate. Eventually, the Abhidharma Vaibhāṣika view that these indriyas were real collections of atoms that held power over biological sex and gendered behaviour emerged as the dominant view. But even during this period, Vaibhāṣika-instructed philosophers like Vasubandhu pushed back against this view. Though he allowed that these indriyas were material faculties, he rejected that material entities could be most powerful over the arising of gendered conceptual distinctions and behaviours. He proposed a dualist account where these material indriyas were only powerful over biological sex, attributing gendered behaviour to consciousness or mind (vijñāna) instead.