How women are reinterpreting menstrual taboos in Buddhist texts
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In many religions and cultures, women who are menstruating or who just gave birth are not allowed to enter sacred sites, such as temples, or participate in religious rituals. This is because they are often seen as ritually impure.
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Early Christians cited menstruation as the reason for not allowing female deacons or priests. Modern Catholic teachings do not express this attitude directly, but some Catholic feminists argue that views of women’s blood pollution still influence the church’s position against women’s ordination.
According to certain Hindu texts, menstruating women should be cut off from the rest of the household and avoid participating in ritual life. In Hinduism, as well as other religions and cultures, traditional taboos related to menstruation and childbirth are, however, no longer practiced widely.
An extreme attitude toward the ritual pollution of menstruation and childbirth appears in a Chinese Buddhist text called the “Blood Bowl Scripture,” which I have studied in my research on East Asian Buddhism.
This text, written in China by the 13th century, spread to Japan soon after. It describes a complicated chain of events in which a woman gives birth at home, then washes her bloody clothes in a nearby river. People downriver don’t realise that the water has been polluted with the blood of childbirth, and they use the water to make tea...