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Langenberg, Amy Paris: Birth in Buddhism. The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom. Oxford: Routledge 2017. 210 S. mit 4 s/w Taf. Geb. £ 110,00. ISBN 978-11-3820-123-1.

Birth in Buddhism is a study of Buddhist attitudes toward the female body and the process of birth. Developed from Langenberg’s Ph.D. dissertation,1 the book, which is centred around the Buddhist embryological scripture Garbhāvakrāntisūtra “Sūtra on Entry into the Womb”, consists of an introduction and six chapters: 1. “Suffering is Birth”, 2. “Birth Narratives and Gender Identity”, 3. “Disgust for the Abject Womb”, 4. “The Inauspicious Mother”, 5. “Auspicious Ascetics”, 6. “Female Impurity and the Female Buddhist Ascetic.” As the titles of the chapters suggest, Langenberg’s project is much broader than an exegesis of the Sūtra, although she refers to it throughout. The Garbhāvakrāntisūtra is an account of conception, gestation, childbirth, and life shortly after birth, with an emphasis on the suffering that each stage entails. The heart of the Sūtra is a week-by-week account of the thirty-eight weeks of gestation. The Sanskrit text is lost, except for a few scattered quotations, but there are three Chinese and three Tibetan translations. The earliest translation, by Dharmarakṣa into Chinese, was made in 281 or 303. In this version, and in a version translated into Chinese by Bodhiruci and from Bodhiruci’s Chinese into Tibetan by Chos grub (found in the Chinese and the Tibetan Ratnakūṭa respectively), the Sūtra stands alone. The other three translations — which I shall call Group B — include a Chinese translation by Yijing, which is found in both the Chinese Kṣudrakavastu of the Mūlasarvāstivādavinaya and the Chinese Ratnakūṭa collection, a Tibetan translation of Yijing’s translation, and a Tibetan translation from the Sanskrit Kṣudrakavastu of the Mūlasarvāstivādavinaya. In the Group B versions the Sūtra is inserted into a frame story2 about the Buddha’s half-brother Nanda: Nanda does not want to leave his wife to become a monk, but the Buddha convinces him to enter the Saṅgha by preaching the Sūtra. Dharmarakṣa’s translation was rendered into German by Franz Huebotter.3 I critically edited