Liz Wilson is Professor of Comparative Religion at Miami University in Ohio. She is the editor of The Living and the Dead: Social Dimensions of Death in South Asian Religions, also published by SUNY Press, and the author of Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature.

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Family and the Construction of Religious Communities
Liz Wilson

Part I. Historical Families, Imagined Families

2. Serving the Emperor by Serving the Buddha: Imperial Buddhist Monks and Nuns and Abbots, Abbesses, and Adoptees in Early Modern Japan
Gina Cogan

3. The Tantric Family Romance: Sex and the Construction of Social Identity in Tantric Buddhist Ritual
David Gray

4. Bone and Heart Sons: Biological and Imagined Kin in the Creation of Family Lineage in Tibetan Buddhism
Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa

5. Families Matter: Ambiguous Attitudes toward Child Ordination in Contemporary Sri Lanka
Jeffrey Samuels

Part II. Parents and Children

6. The Passion of Mulian's Mother: Narrative Blood and Maternal Sacrifices in Chinese Buddhism
Alan Cole

7. Maya's Disappearing Act: Motherhood in Early Buddhist Literature
Vanessa R. Sasson

8. Mother as Character Coach: Maternal Agency in the Birth of Sivali
Liz Wilson

Part III. Wives and Husbands

9. Yasodhara in the Buddhist Imagination: Three Portraits Spanning the Centuries
Ranjini Obeyesekere

10. Evangelizing the Happily Married Man through Low Talk: On Sexual and Scatological Language in the Buddhist Tale of Nanda
Amy Paris Langenberg

11. Runaway Brides: Tensions Surrounding Marital Expectations in the Avadanasataka
Phillip Green

12. The Priesthood as a Family Trade: Reconsidering Monastic Marriage in Premodern Japan
Lori Meeks

Contributors
Index