60 BUDDHADHARMA: THE PRACTITIONER'S QUARTERLY
own female body, Shariputra tells her of the famous “five obstruc-
tions” experienced by women:
First, she cannot become a Brahma heavenly king. Second, she
cannot become the king Shakra. Third, she cannot become a devil
king. Fourth, she cannot become a wheel-turning sage king. Fifth,
she cannot become a Buddha. (Watson)The daughter of the dragon king, undaunted, attempts to win
Shariputra over with her skilled argumentation. Failing that, she
resorts to a less subtle persuasion technique: magic. Using her super-
natural powers, she takes on a male body, completes all the practices
of the bodhisattva, and then takes her seat on a jeweled lotus in the
“Spotless World of the South.” By first becoming a man, and then a
buddha, the daughter of the dragon king leaves us forever perplexed
as to whether or not a woman—or, in this case, a young dragoness—
is able to become a buddha in her own body. Does she take on a
male body because she must, or does she do so to show that, unlike
Shariputra, she is not attached to physical forms and is, therefore, a
more credible candidate for buddhahood than he?
The influence of the Lotus Sutra on the practice of Mahayana
Buddhism in East Asia cannot be overstated, and, in many times and
places across East Asia, the story of the daughter of the dragon king
has been read as a proof text that the female body is an impediment
to buddhahood. Such teachings are connected to widespread notions
about the impurity of—and feelings of disgust toward—the female
form, which can be seen in many Buddhist texts, as detailed by Liz
Wilson in Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Femin-
ine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature, as well as to the
attendant valorization of the male form in those same texts, which
is insightfully explored in A Bull of a Man: Images of Masculinity,
Sex, and the Body in Indian Buddhism by John Powers. Even in