Abstract

Conceiving the Mother of Tibet is the first book about the literary tradition surrounding Yeshe Tsogyel, the foremost matron saint of Tibetan Buddhism. It traces the emergence of a body of narrative literature surrounding her in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Tibetan Nyingma Buddhist tradition to construct an emic Tibetan Buddhist theory of gender and female religious eminence. In these literary accounts, Yeshe Tsogyel’s identities as a disciple, a tantric consort, a sky-goer, and a mother all embody a dialectic that shifts back and forth between Tibetan women’s social and cultural inferiority and a Buddhist discourse of soteriological inclusivity. Conceiving the Mother of Tibet queries these texts for their social and religious functions, especially where ambivalence and contradictions abound. However, these ambivalences do not necessarily disadvantage women in Tibetan Buddhism. Operating with ambivalent, sometimes competing, discourses on womanhood, Nyingma Buddhist theorists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries created a space for a flexible treatment of gender, where they traverse between theological terms and embodied reality. This finding also provides a methodological framework that highlights localized, emic theories of gender as alternative ways of being in and interacting with the world as embodied agents, applicable to the larger field of Buddhist Studies and Religious Studies.