Article: Female mutability and male anxiety in an early Buddhist legend.(Critical essay)(Brief article)

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 Samkasya in what is now north-central India. (1) Samkasya 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 Trayastrimsa Heaven, the heaven of the thirty-three gods, after having gone there to preach to his long-dead mother, Queen Maya. Fa-hsien was told ...

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