By Lori R. Meeks Associate Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages and Cultures

The apocryphal Buddhist Sutra Xuepen jing (“Blood Bowl Sutra”), produced in China during the eleventh or twelfth century, was imported to Japan by the early fifteenth century, where it came to be known as the Ketsubonkyō. This short text—only about 420 Chinese characters long—taught that women were bound for a special, purgatorial hell comprised of uterine blood. They were to be punished there for having polluted the earth with the blood of childbirth and menses. Cults to the sutra spread widely in Japan and became the basis of many devotional practices aimed both at saving women from the hell and at providing protection during the travails of female embodiment, especially childbirth. 

Many have claimed that the Blood Bowl Sutra was always regarded as a “popular” text and that it was never taken seriously by the orthodox tradition; after all, it is short, clearly apocryphal, and lacking in doctrinal sophistication. This paper challenges that stance, demonstrating the degree to which Japanese monastic scholars, especially those of the Tendai establishment (which was widely acknowledged as the intellectual hub of premodern Japanese Buddhism), presented the ideas of the Blood Bowl Sutra as consistent with mainstream Buddhist doctrine. I also argue that these same priests were at least partially responsible for popularizing the sutra’s contents in vernacular literature.   

This discussion is a part of "Sacred Ground " series. The paper will be pre-circulated for registrants to read prior the event.

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