Buddha’s great, but sometimes you want a woman to talk to.
SHAWNA1
∵
The goal of this chapter is to relate some examples of how a few contemporary Buddhist women think about their gender and their bodies in connection with their Buddhist practice, in their own words as much as possible. This work comes from in part from research for my 2021 book, Exploring the Heart Sutra,2 which involved a series of ethnographic interviews3 conducted in 2018–2019.4 The larger project involved seventeen women, ranging in age from late twenties to late seventies. Participants were American (white, Asian-American), Taiwanese, and Chinese, and practiced in Chan, Zen, (Taiwanese) Pure Land, Shin, Huayan, and Tibetan traditions. This essay begins with a discussion of the theoretical framing of the project in terms of feminist reclamation, and then organizes some of the participants’ comments into three broad sections: responses to the importance of their gender/body to practice; gender segregation and discrimination; and woes and/or wonders of a woman’s body. The
1 Feminist Reclamation and Buddhist Philosophy
In conducting these interviews, I have been deeply humbled by and grateful to the many women who took time from their busy lives to talk with me. When I began my study, I was unsure of exactly who would be willing to talk with me, and what they might have to say. As a philosopher by trade and not an ethnographer, I had little experience in conducting “fieldwork” in any traditional sense of the word, but for a variety of reasons I was convinced that the opportunity to listen to contemporary women Buddhists—especially those who do not normally have a voice in academic discourse—was particularly important for my project. This conviction stems in part from my commitment to feminist reclamation, as both a project of ideo-archaeology aimed at uncovering the work of historical women philosophers, and as a methodology that implies the need for significant change in how we understand the discipline and canon of philosophy today.5 In the context of this chapter, feminist reclamation pushes us toward greater inclusivity in a number of (inter-)related ways, including incorporating more women’s voices in our canons, in terms of both academic philosophy and the Buddhist canon(s), transforming how we understand and interpret Buddhist texts/practices that have historically tended to either exclude or malign women’s embodiment, and broadening the scope of philosophical practices to include ethnographic methods.
While feminist reclamation in East Asian philosophies is in its early stages, feminist reclamation in the context of Anglo-European philosophy has gained more ground. In describing the necessarily transformative effect of feminist reclamation on the discipline of philosophy, Sarah Tyson writes,
The history of European and Anglophone philosophy is more than incomplete; it has been constructed through practices of exclusion that we can critique. We need practices of reclamation that comprehend the myriad modes of prohibition and erasure employed to deny philosophical authority… Given that systematic practices of exclusion have so shaped our understanding… feminist reclamation’s goal should not be the supplementation of philosophy, but rather its transformation … we
need reclamation approaches that not only engage with historical women’s texts as philosophical, but do so in ways that contend with how the contemporary field of European and Anglophone philosophy has been and is constituted through women’s exclusion.6
In other words, once we are aware of the ways that we have inaccurately constituted our traditions—and of course not only with respect to gender—remedying these inaccuracies involves not only making space for the voices of those left out, but also reimagining and revising our practices. As Jonathan Ree explains, this is a complicated process:
There is … no need to postulate a peculiarly virulent strain of sexism amongst dominant philosophers in order to explain the almost complete absence of women from the modern philosophical canon. The thoroughness of the exclusion of women from the history of philosophy (particularly in comparison with their role in literary canons) is more likely to be a result of the peculiar historical evolution of the schematization of the philosophical canon. The story can be summarized in terms of what might be called the triple incidence of canonicity. If a canon functions, in the first place, to give a present identity to an intellectual discipline by defining the past of which it takes itself to be the inheritor, it also serves, secondly, to shape its sense of its intellectual options for the future, and hence to determine the kinds of works that get written, and indeed the kinds of thoughts that get thought. But in the third place, changes in forms of canonicity can have retroactive effects, entailing wholesale changes in conventional interpretations, alterations in traditional rankings, and even the deletion of whole ranges of works that were previously well-regarded… If we want to tackle the extraordinary bias against women in the history of philosophy… it will require a reconfiguration of philosophical inquiry itself and a systematic reworking of its relations to its future and its past.7
In philosophy, feminist reclamation has primarily been about rethinking these issues of canonicity.
Buddhist philosophical canons, however, have had complicated relationships to issues of gender and women’s embodiment. From early exercises designed to help (male) monastics exorcise desire for women’s bodies by visualizing women’s decay and death, to repeated claims of the need for possessing a man’s body (a monk’s body in particular) in order to achieve enlightenment and/or final nirvana and liberation, from the eight special rules to the general lack of textual preservation of women’s voices, it is not hard to read canonical Buddhist literature as being by and for men. The very existence of the Blood Bowl Sutra—a sutra describing the inevitable fall of women after death into a hell of menstrual blood—would seem to support this. It is, however, more complicated than that. We have canonical stories that resist this trend, from Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa to the Lotus Sutra, histories of women teachers like Moshan Liaoran (末山了然, 9th c.), Mugai Nyodai (無外如大, 1223–1298), and Kojima Kendo (小島賢道, 1898–1995), and figures such as Tara and Guanyin who, in at least some respects, push back against the “by and for men” narrative. And, moving from canon to contemporary world, we know that, worldwide, more women than men are Buddhists.9
Philosophically, the consideration of gender in a Buddhist context tends to evoke one of two responses. Either it evokes a discussion of the histories of patriarchy in Asian contexts (as if patriarchy were geographically isolated) and/or a discussion of non-duality and ultimate truth, suggesting that while gender may be relevant here in the “conventional” world, “ultimately” gender is
In considering the implications of feminist reclamation for Buddhist philosophy, in addition to the work being done historically to bring more women’s voices into the canon, as per Tyson and Ree’s calls for transformative imagination, philosophers should perhaps consider ethnography as a relevant tool in the philosophical toolbox. Ethnography can be a valuable part of philosophizing. Ethnography—“qualitative research, especially research that permits people to use their own language and to express their own ideas”12—is described by Penny Edgell Becker and Nancy L. Eiesland as having many functions:
Ethnography… can be a generative location for the restructuring of scholarship on a changing social reality… [it] is a method uniquely suited to challenging the conventional wisdom, for subjecting large-scale theories to empirical examination, for generating data on new phenomena, and for generating new theories or insights on the subjects we thought we already knew… It allows for the expression of emergent understandings, partial accounts, and contradiction… Ethnography can also make us aware of the inadequacy of our most frequently used theoretical categories.13
2 In their Own Words: on the Importance of Gender/Bodies to Practice, Gender Segregation and Discrimination, and the Woes and/or Wonders of a Woman’s Body
Over the course of 2018 and 2019, I conducted field interviews with seventeen women, in three countries. For the sake of this chapter, in what follows I share quotations from nine women, ranging in age from mid 30’s to 75, including white, Taiwanese-American, Japanese-American, and Chinese practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, Zen, Taiwanese Pure Land, and Shin (True Pure Land) Buddhism.
- –Julia: mid-thirties white American Tibetan practitioner
- –Mei: mid-thirties Chinese Zen practitioner
- –Katie: mid-seventies white American ordained Zen practitioner
- –Shawna: mid-sixties white American ordained Zen practitioner
- –Eleanor: mid-sixties Taiwanese-American Chinese Pure Land practitioner
- –Danielle: mid-sixties Japanese-American Shin practitioner
- –Lucy: mid-sixties Japanese-American Shin practitioner
- –Lisa: mid-sixties Japanese-American Shin practitioner
- –Diana: mid-seventies white American Zen and Tibetan practitioner
In the context of our conversations, which ranged over a variety of topics including but not restricted to gender and embodiment in Buddhist practice, a number of themes emerged. Participants had varied responses to the importance of gender and their body to their practice, their sense of gender segregation or discrimination in their practice context, and the woes and/or wonders of a woman’s body. In what follows I share their words on these themes, with as little of my own intervention as possible.
2.1 Is Your Gender/Body Important to Your Practice?
When I asked participants this question, the most common initial response was … confusion. Participants wanted me to clarify what I meant, and I wanted to be vague so as to not bias their response. This meant that I got a lot of answers that differ dramatically from one another, both in their content and in what they understood the question to be asking. For instance, Katie, one of the ordained women I spoke with, said:
I don’t … I wouldn’t say important or not important. What I feel is that … a lot of people are surprised that I’m a woman and a Zen Buddhist priest. Because when they hear the word priest they think of a man. You know, and then they’re happy. They go, “Wow, really? That’s something, maybe I could do something like that.”17
Diana, the oldest participant, who has practiced in a variety of different Buddhist traditions over more than fifty years, had this to say: “Well I’ll tell you something. As a child I remember thinking to myself: I’m neutered. I’m not male or female. I remember that. I prefer to identify with males and the way
Julia, an American practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, answered that for her, both embodiment, in general, and gender, in particular, are very important to her practice:
My experience is that it’s really important because so much of what we’re dealing with is … I know this sounds ‘woo woo’ but I don’t know a better way of talking about it. The sort of energetic currents of being embodied is a huge part of our experience and I don’t even know how a meditation practice would work if you weren’t engaging with that part of what it means to be human. In that respect I think being embodied is a huge part of my practice and even just the way that our quality of mind is manifest in sort of how we hold ourselves is a really … tiny example of that.19
She continued, making a more direct connection to gender:
At the very deepest heart level I think a lot of what I have had to work through as a practitioner has been … personal trauma in how gender functions in our society. And I wouldn’t have named that at the beginning but as I look at my own sort of biography as a practitioner and the ways that I’ve grown, so much of it has coincided with really confronting some deeply painful habits that seem to, in my perception, to intersect with the inherited trauma of being a woman in a patriarchy.20
Here, Julia identifies not only her experience as a gendered person as relevant to her practice, but as a core component of the kinds of things her practice has addressed. She also makes the connection between her own life and the way that gender as she has experienced it is a function of our hierarchical society, and notes that that is relevant to her practice as well.
The body thing, actually never really paid attention until one day when I’m sitting in there I could not get up from the cushion. I could not stand up when the bell rang. I entered what they called samādhi and everything was just gone, it was just like I was there, just sitting. Everything was gone and the bell shattered that and brought me back to reality and I could not move … And I’m listening, and I could hear the frogs and I could hear all the crickets and I could hear the noises in the forest in the back, and all of a sudden it just felt like all of it was just here. … But [later that night] when I walked into the ladies’ room one of the other ladies was still awake, Linda, when I walked in she looked at me and she goes “what’s that smile on your face … you’re glowing!” Didn’t realize you glowed when you had kenshō, or close to it.22
In these comments, Shawna describes an experience of kenshō, awakening or insight (into one’s own nature), as tied in not only with a meditative experience of consciousness but also deeply tied to her sensory experience, her hearing and her proprioception. Furthermore, her kenshō was visible to others because of a quality about her person—she glowed. Although perhaps it might be common in contemporary American discourse to associate the description of a woman “glowing” with a different sort of profoundly transformative experience—pregnancy—in a Buddhist context this language is commonly associated with the visible manifestation of enlightenment. In a variety of early texts, the historical Buddha is described as having a sort of “post-enlightenment” glow that makes his liberation literally visible to others.23 This phenomenon—the glow of awakening—has a long history associated primarily with male practitioners.24
Because I spoke with women who practice in very different Buddhist traditions, when I asked about their “practice” I received a number of different answers. Several of the women I interviewed spoke extensively about
These women’s reflections on the role of their gender and bodies in their practice were many and varied, but even for those like Shawna that initially stated that it was not important, they mostly came around to reflecting on aspects of their practice where gender and embodiment are relevant in some way. This data is useful in helping to remind us that women’s experiences of their own embodiment are complex and sometimes contradictory, and that philosophical discussions of Buddhism and gender need to be carefully nuanced to account for different communities, times, places, and to avoid monolithic claims about how “Buddhist women” are or are not.
2.2 Gender Segregation or Discrimination
In composing my set of questions for the interviews, I deliberately did not ask a question aimed at eliciting accounts of discrimination. Because there has been a lot of attention on sexual misconduct and abuse in a number of high-profile American Buddhist organizations, I did not want my participants to think that I was after something particular.25 However, a number of participants did bring up issues with respect to gendered segregation or
It’s been really valuable for me to be able to say this tradition can point us towards this enormous wisdom and has all of these tools for cracking open so much of the potential we have within us and they’re contained within patriarchal cultures and there might actually be aspects of how the tradition shows up in brick and mortar and financial institutions and in real human beings and all of this and I don’t just have to uncritically accept, but I can get to the pit of what it’s about and try to separate that from the chaff of what I do think are some social norms that I think honestly many Western Tibetan Buddhists sort of overlook because they’re like “Oh it’s just tradition that’s perfect and my teacher’s a Buddha” and we’re not going to talk about that they might have archaic ideas that harm people. I’m just not there, I just bracket. But maybe this is lazy of me, but I just have to bracket that and not throw away the whole tradition over that.26
She continued, reflecting on some of the gendered aspects of Tibetan Buddhism in particular:
Tibetan Buddhism, as I’m sure you know, deals a lot with masculine and feminine principles and deities that have this … Well they’re gendered and most of them are male and sometimes the ways that masculine and feminine in principle are described seem to essentialize aspects of gender that a lot people try really hard to de-essentialize. So, there’s all these politically problematic ‘un-PC’ parts of Tibetan Buddhism, and I confess that those have not been obstacles in my practice, actually.27
In contrast to Julia’s reflection, which centers in Shambala Tibetan Buddhism, often as practiced in mainly white communities, Eleanor’s experiences were very different. She, along with several female family members, runs a Buddhist center in the Midwest that caters mostly to local Asian immigrant communities, and that has extensive contact with Buddhist teachers coming into the U.S. from Taiwan and China. She notes that some of her community
are probably the most traditional, kind of old-fashion[ed] way. They want men and women to sit separate. Men should sit here and women there. And Carrie [her niece] went to that school [a traditional Buddhist school in Taiwan], did she tell you that? The boys and girls [don’t] even talk to each other, you don’t look at each other. We [don’t] discriminate, nothing here. But we’re trying to follow that.28
She also explained that when visiting Buddhist teachers arrive, they work hard to make sure the traditions surrounding gender are respected. For instance, she said that “If we go to the airport to pick up masters, if it’s a male we need to have another. I can’t just go pick him up, we need to have another male to accompany.”29 This is sometimes difficult for a center run by women.
In my conversations with several older women who are highly involved in a Japanese Shin Buddhist temple in Hawai‘i, the women reflected on the gendered difference in terms of power in the organization, both positively and negatively. Lisa, for instance, noted that “the Hongwanji tradition, is very male oriented, I think. You think of the head temples, the chief minister, it’s a very male dominated situation, I think; that’s what I see. With growing up as a kid that’s all I saw, male ministers; once in a while, you see one woman priestess, and that was shocking, almost.”30 She continued, explaining that
You know, to be quite honest, in terms of the women, my mom and the women were in the kitchen, cooking the foods for the congregation, you know, the “church lady” idea, it’s like that in many religions, church ladies, I talk to my friends at work and say this is made by the old temple lady … I’m an old church/temple lady myself.31
Lisa’s sense of a woman’s community and women’s role in her temple was echoed by Danielle and Lucy. Danielle said although the temple’s leadership is mostly men, that “more chances than not there are women in church. There are men too, but, just you kind of look around there’s more women … They’re important.”32 Lucy spoke of the Buddhist Women’s Group, a world-wide charitable organization in this tradition. She said, “I think in the Buddhist Women’s Group, we’re an organized group that supports the temple. And I think that
In discussing her ordination, Shawna, who had been practicing quiet meditation since she was sixteen years old and was an organizing force behind the creation of her local Zen group, related that her teacher (a white American who had been trained in Japan),
never believed in women becoming monks, never once. I was encouraged by two other women to ask him, they were monks. And [an American monk and friend], He went to [Sensei] and said, “you should make Shawna a monk” and [Sensei] said “no.” After the ladies encouraged me to ask him I did. In a not so nice way got turned down. But it didn’t stop me from practicing. Wearing the robes doesn’t change the practice.35
Shawna did later become ordained, and in her tradition women are ordained as monks, not nuns. This means that they are not subject to the eight special rules,36 and in most contexts they do not follow more traditional gender segregations. She related to me something that happened recently at a one-day retreat at a nearby (more traditional) Vietnamese Buddhist center:
And he [the head Vietnamese monk] noticed that I cut my hair short for the ceremony and he did ask me about it and I told him I said in honor of your group, I said I would not shave my head because I work in the professional world and I would not put my boss in the position of everybody
going to her saying, “what’s wrong with Shawna does she have cancer? Oh, poor Shawna.” I said I wasn’t going to put them in that position. This is just a one-day thing, so I cut it as short as I possibly could out of respect for your group. The next thing I knew he was talking about the 12th chapter of the Lotus Sutra and the head female was sitting next to me. So maybe what I said had an effect, I’m not sure. But whatever it was I was glad to see another female up on the podium that had never been there before in all the years that I’ve been going up there. And it was the first time the women were not looking around the corner. I think it helped. Because we need to become more diverse and yes, I don’t think men are above women, I don’t think women are above men, and Kanzeon actually helped me with that.37
One of her (male) monastic colleagues told me about the same event—but in his recounting of it, he was irritated on Shawna’s behalf that she was forced to sit with the nuns. It is telling, I think, that in her case Shawna saw this as the nun being elevated to sit next to her (a monk), a positive sign on behalf of the nuns, while her colleague was more concerned with the general lack of equity between monks and nuns.
2.3 The Woes and/or Wonders of Being a Woman
In one of the very first interviews I conducted, I asked Mei, a Chinese woman who came to be a devout Zen practitioner while studying in the U.S., if there was anything particularly important to her practice about being a woman, or being embodied. Her immediate response was that “being a woman, [it is] important, during my period I can’t sit as much.”38 Being a woman, in a woman’s body, means certain things that are rarely talked openly about in the context of contemporary Buddhist practice—like the discomfort of menstruation, and the various more traditional taboos against women doing a variety of things while menstruating (including in some cases entering a temple, or doing certain ritual activities, or sitting in meditation). Mei’s straightforward response brought to mind (for contemporary feminists) the troublesome Blood Bowl Sutra. This short sutra was brought to Japan from China sometime during the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries. In it, we learn that women are destined at death to fall into a special hell—a hell composed of pools or bowls of menstrual blood—because of having polluted this earth with their blood. Initially used as a text to emphasize disgust for women’s bodies to male monastics, the
In contemporary times, some teachers have attempted to re-read this sutra. Claire Gesshin Greenwood, for example, reads the “the Blood Bowl Hell [as] a metaphor for those FUCKING FIVE DAYS A MONTH WHEN EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE.”40 She describes a kind of Zen mindfulness perspective on this, what we might connect with philosophical concepts like zhenru 真如 (thusness, suchness; Sk. tathātā) noting that like all experiences, menstruation (or hormonal fluctional in general) is an experience that can be a site for awakening, or at least attending to the myriad ways in which our embodied experiences and our consciousness can benefit from a little zazen. In thinking about menstruation and practice, then, we might note that there are some kinds of duḥkha (suffering, discontent, unsatisfactoriness) where gender does seem to matter—perhaps including menstruation, miscarriage, and menopause for those gendered as women, in addition to the kinds of gendered suffering that result from social/cultural expectations, institutions, and injustices. To be clear, this is not to say that all and only those with ovaries, uteruses, and vaginas experience gendered suffering. Noting the gendered nature of some suffering is not just about women, or men, or those that reject this binary categorization, but about the way in which living in a world that seems to take gender as a fundamental category of existence is implicated in and intertwined with the particularities of both suffering and liberation.
My conversation with Mei moved on from menstruation to talk of her mother. Mei described having a sensitivity for meditative practice that she connected with being a woman, in part because of her experience teaching her mother to meditate:
I think women, for example, my mother is very good at qigong, so meditation for her is just easy and natural, I told her to do it then she just started … just doing it every day, so it’s easy for her. I don’t know if it’s easy and natural especially for women. But I think because it is good for
everyone … I am able to see the qi in my body, and that feels very good, maybe you will identify … that sensitivity with women, maybe.41
Mei was not alone in noting something distinctive about Buddhist practice for women and placing that in a maternal context. Lisa, Lucy, and Danielle all also talked about their mothers or grandmothers as important influences or connections in their commitment to practice. Shawna also mentioned, in the context of discussing how difficult it was to find time to sit zazen twice a day as a mother with small children,
Sometimes, and this is for the ladies. When ladies take long baths, that’s a meditation process. They don’t realize it. And I keep telling them … if you take a long bath and you think nothing and you’ve got your candles lit and you got your little sometimes a little glass of wine, or flowers on the water, you’d be surprised you actually go into a meditative state, and they don’t think about it.
And, through the course of our conversation, Eleanor described a number of difficult life circumstances that led to and supported her Buddhist practice, including especially family circumstances. She said,
I think it’s an advantage to be a woman. I think. Because … most of our group is women. And the guys, I don’t know, it’s hard for them to focus … I may be speaking too much for others but I’m just saying I’m glad I’m a female and I can more focus on my chanting [and] study.42
She continued,
Yeah, I don’t think much about it … But … I’m a mother, I’m a grandmother, I’m a wife, businesswoman … I feel like women in general … I wouldn’t use the word but it’s kind of like suffer more, work a lot harder than men. I know men have a job but people forget, women they have children or they have grandkids [and] it’s pretty much on the woman’s shoulder. So, when you suffer alone … usually you [are] kind [of] looking to get some help, mentally or [whatever]. So, I think being a woman, probably, still I think is a benefit to get enlightened.43
I would like to conclude this section by relating one of the most powerful stories shared in the course of these interviews. Shawna shared with me that while she was still studying with her teacher, before she was ordained, her teacher gave her the kōan “What was your face before you were born?” She went home later that day and was paging through a magazine when she came upon an image of a pregnant woman on a bright blue background, with a triumphant tiny fist pushing visibly up on her belly. Immediately struck by this image, she took it in to her teacher as her response to the kōan. In describing this to me, she explained that although she had been pregnant eleven times, she had only two children. The pregnant belly, she said to me, “is the most powerful place on the body.” It is the source of all our lives.44
She was careful to note that this was not really a traditional response to this kōan, according to the commentaries, but one that arose from her lived experience of having both miscarried and born children.45 She said that teachings need to be real, and to speak to real life. Just two weeks after giving her teacher this response, she was invited to sew her ordination robes—something she had been asking to do for years.
And, although she denied it, in many ways her response is in line with traditional commentaries—just not the ones she (and most practitioners) are familiar with. Her response—the power of the pregnant belly, the triumph of life in the face of trauma and tragedy—echoes some of Zen’s maternal ancestors like Miaozong, Eshun, and Yoshihime, each living with a profound depth of wisdom embodied in their gendered bodies. Consider the fourteenth-century case of Yoshihime, the strong-willed Tokeiji nun who, when asked by the gatekeeper at Engakuji “What is it, the gate through which the buddhas come into the world?” responded by grabbing his head and forcing it between her legs, saying “Look, look!”46 Commenting on this, the contemporary Zen
3 Conclusion
I opened this essay with an epigram from Shawna, who said in a conversation about Guanyin Bodhisattva, “Buddha’s great, but sometimes you want a woman to talk to.”49 Feminist reclamation in Buddhist philosophy ought, among other things, to put us more in touch with how actual Buddhists are using, not using, responding to, rejecting, and creatively modifying Buddhist philosophical ideas, concerns, and practices. Using ethnography as a method—as a complement to, not a replacement for, other philosophical methods—can help us take the idea of embodiment in a Buddhist context seriously by paying attention to the lived experiences of diverse practitioners, in their own words.
That being said, what I have shared here is only a small selection of a much longer and wider ranging set of interviews, but this is certainly a limited resource. My study involved only seventeen participants and my interviews were, at their longest, only two hours. And, while my study did attempt to dislodge certain assumptions by including a more diverse set of women and traditions than may commonly be represented, it did not involve any African-American participants and could have benefitted from increased representation by other gender or racial/ethnic minority participants. For example, while these interviews did reveal variation among participants with respect to views about gender and bodies, no participants brought up a connection between bodies or gender and race, and only one participant connected bodies to sexuality and issues in LBGTQ+ communities.50
- –What does nonduality mean in an inescapably embodied context?
- –How do/can we understand duḥkha that arises from a gendered/embodied context as a site of liberation, without demeaning or covering over the reality of existentially gendered experience, or replicating existing patriarchal structures?
- –How can we better understand and generate and sustain compassion to/from/in different bodies, genders, and situations? What forms can or should this take?
- –In reflecting on the mutual interconnectedness of conditions, what role do we play in creating gendered and embodied suffering in ourselves and in the world around us? How can we remedy this?
- –What would it look like to take seriously phenomenological investigations of menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, parenting, and sexuality, from within Buddhist contexts? How might this differ from these phenomenological investigations in other contexts?
- –How might a philosophy grounded in the transformative compassion of a figure such as Guanyin Bodhisattva provide a valuable counterbalance to the current use of the historical Buddha as a figure for the alt-Buddhist movement51?
As mentioned earlier, ethnography as a method can be helpful for “the restructuring of scholarship on a changing social reality,” among other things. One thing that we have learned from other efforts in feminist reclamation is that transforming our understanding of canons means questioning the way traditions have tended to boundary police issues of texts and genres. We may need to think beyond our norms when it comes to what kind of “texts” philosophers are interested in. Jin Park, for example, in her groundbreaking work on twentieth century Korean nun Kim Iryǒp, has argued for appreciating some kinds of biography as philosophy.52 Being more open and explicit about who we listen to, how we listen, and why, is a key part of transforming our canons and our practice.
Shawna (pseudonym), interviewed by author, Florida, 5/12/2019.
Some material in this chapter is reprinted from chapter four of my recent book, Exploring the Heart Sutra (Lexington Books, 2021). All rights reserved. My thanks to Lexington for permission to reprint.
This work is not intended to provide generalizable data.
This ethnographic work was funded in part by an Academic Affairs Scholarship Grant from the University of North Florida. My thanks to Will Gilbert for his help in transcribing these interviews, and to Jason Simpson for his editorial expertise. For the purposes of this work, the category of “women” was intended to include all those who identify in some way as such, although I did not interview any persons who had formally transitioned genders.
Philosophy lags significantly behind other disciplines such as Religious Studies, History, and Sociology, in accommodating the methods and insights of feminist reclamation.
Sarah Tyson, Where are the Women?: Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better (New York, New York: Columbia University Press. 2018) xxvii–xxix.
Jonathan Rée, “Women Philosophers and the Canon,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 10.4(2002)641–652. 651–2.
For more on this, see Chapter 3 in Exploring the Heart Sutra; see also my chapter “Three Common Misconceptions About East Asian Buddhisms: On Women and Gender, Violence and Non-Violence, and Philosophy and Religion” in Introducing East Asian Buddhism in the Undergraduate Classroom, ed. James McCrae and Robert Scott (New York: SUNY Press, 2023). Also, popular works have emerged on these subjects, including The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women (2013) and Zen Women: Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens, and Macho Masters (2009).
“The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World: Women are generally more religious than men, particularly among Christians” PEW Research Center Report, March 22, 2016. https://www.pewforum.org/2016/03/22/the-gender-gap-in-religion-around-the-world/
See for instance Buddhist feminist work by figures such as Rita Gross.
Paula Arai has done amazing in-depth ethnographic work with Soto Zen nuns in Japan (Women Living Zen: Japanese Sōtō Buddhist Nuns, 2012), showing clearly that the idea of women as passive subjects of the patriarchy is problematic. Her recent work, Bringing Zen Home (2022) focuses on lay Buddhist women’s healing rituals. For responses that problematize non-duality as the best/only philosophical response, consider for instance the experience of Ray Buckner, described here: http://blog.shin-ibs.edu/whose-gender-belongs-in-buddhism/. See also Amy Paris Langenberg, “On Reading Buddhist Vinaya: Feminist History, Hermeneutics, and Translating Women’s Bodies,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. XX, no. XX (2020)1–33 doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfaa049
Robert Wuthnow, “The Cultural Turn: Stores, Logic, and the Quest for Identity in American Religion” in Contemporary American Religion: An Ethnographic Reader, ed. Penny Edgell Becker and Nancy L. Eiesland (California: AltaMira Press, 1997) 246. In the larger passage, Wuthnow acknowledges that this is only a partial definition for ethnography.
Penny Edgell Becker and Nancy L. Eiesland, “Developing Interpretations: Ethnography and the Restructuring of Knowledge in a Changing Field” in Contemporary American Religion: An Ethnographic Reader, ed. Penny Edgell Becker and Nancy L. Eiesland (California: AltaMira Press, 1997) 18–19. My emphasis.
Wuthnow, 248.
To be clear, I am arguing specifically about the discipline of philosophy. Other disciplines have been responding to these criticisms for some time.
Participants’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.
Katie, interview with author, Florida, 5/10/2019.
Diana, interview with author, Florida, 5/11/2019.
Julia, interview with author, Skype, 7/23/2019.
Julia, interview with author, Skype, 7/23/2019.
Shawna, interview with author, Florida, 5/12/2019.
Shawna, interview with author, Florida, 5/12/2019.
The historical Buddha is repeatedly described as luminous, radiant, glowing, and emitting colored light, in early texts. He is also often depicted with a halo of light or a halo of flames as a sign of his attainments. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this important connection.
Arhats are also often depicted with halos.
See for instance Buddhist Project Sunshine (https://www.shilohproject.blog/sexual-misconduct-and-buddhism-centering-survivors/), a healing initiative started by Andrea Michelle Winn in 2017 involving professional investigation of sexual misconduct allegations against top Shambala leaders, which was directly responsible for Shambala publicly acknowledging widespread sexualized violence in the community. See also Tom Porter, “Buddhist Group Admits ‘Abhorrent Sexual Behavior’ by Teachers,” in Newsweek, March 5, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/buddhist-group-admits-abhorrent-sexual-behavior-teachers-830333. For more on sexual violations in varied US Buddhist contexts, see the recent and forthcoming work of scholars Amy Langenberg and Ann Gleig, introduced in “Sexual Misconduct and Buddhist: Centering Survivors,” on The Shiloh Project, November 18, 2020, https://www.shilohproject.blog/sexual-misconduct-and-buddhism-centering-survivors/
Julia, interview with author, Skype, 7/23/2019.
Julia, interview with author, Skype, 7/23/2019.
Eleanor, interview with author, Iowa, 2/16/2019.
Eleanor, interview with author, Iowa, 2/16/2019.
Lisa, interview with author, Hawai’i 6/10/2018.
Lisa, interview with author, Hawai’i, 6/10/2018.
Danielle, interview with author, Hawai’i, 6/10/2018.
Lucy, interview with author, Hawai’i, 6/10/2018.
Danielle, interview with author, Hawai’i, 6/10/2018.
Shawna, interview with author, Florida, 5/12/2019.
The garudhammas are eight special or heavy rules for fully ordained nuns, in addition to the monastic code required of men. These additional rules subjugate them individually to even the most junior male monastics, and require dual ordination of nuns by both nuns and monks.
Shawna, interview with author, Florida, 5/12/2019.
Mei, interview with author, Hawai’i, 6/17/2018.
For more on this see Lori Meeks, “Women and Buddhism in East Asian History: The Case of the Blood Bowl Sutra: Part I: China” in Religion Compass. 2020;14:e12336. https://doi.org/10/1111/rec3.12336 and “Women and Buddhism in East Asian History: The Case of the Blood Bowl Sutra: Part II: Japan” in Religion Compass. 2020;14:e12335. https://doi.org/10/1111/rec3.12335.
Claire Gesshin Greenwood, “That’s So Zen: Zazen and Menstrual Blood Hell” (unpublished manuscript, April 26, 2021) word document. My thanks to Gesshin Greenwood for permission to cite this piece.
Mei, interview with author, Hawai’i, 6/17/2018.
Eleanor, interview with author, Iowa, 2/16/2019.
Eleanor, interview with author, Iowa, 2/16/2019.
Shawna, post-interview conversation with author, Florida, 5/12/2019.
Philosophers tend to respond to this kōan by reflecting on the non-duality of subject and object, or advising us to turn our light inward and take refuge in practice (zazen).
“Yoshihime’s ‘Look, look!” in Hidden Lamp, 131.
Judith Simmer-Brown, “Refleciton on Yoshihime’s ‘Look, Look!’, in Hidden Lamp, 132.
Caplow and Moon, “Introduction,” Hidden Lamp, 7.
Shawna, interview with author, 5/12/2019.
There are an increasing number of practitioners engaged in publishing work connected to the complex suffering produced by injustices, including Lama Rod Owen, Rev. angel Kyodo Williams, Larry Yang, and Ruth King; and increasing scholarship on these issues, as seen for instance in the volume Buddhism and Whiteness: Critical Reflections, ed. Georgy Yancy and Emily McRae (2019).
For more on Alt-Buddhist movements, see for instance Ann Gleig and Brenna Grace Artinger’s “The #BuddhistCultureWars: BuddhaBros, Alt-Right Dharma, and Snowflake Sanghas,” in the Journal of Global Buddhism 22.1(2021): 19–48, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4727561. For more on Guanyin, see Chapter 3 of my monograph, Exploring the Heart Sutra (2021).
Jin Park, Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iryǒp (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017).
Becker, Penny Edgell and Eiesland, Nancy L. “Developing Interpretations: Ethnography and the Restructuring of Knowledge in a Changing Field” in Contemporary American Religion: An Ethnographic Reader, ed. Penny Edgell Becker and Nancy L. Eiesland. California: AltaMira Press, 1997.
Buckner, Ray. “Whose Gender Belongs in Buddhism?” Ten Thousand Things, January 29, 2020. http://blog.shin-ibs.edu/whose-gender-belongs-in-buddhism/
Caplow, Florence and Moon, Susan, eds. The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2013.
Gleig, Ann and Artinger, Brenna Grace. “The #BuddhistCultureWars: BuddhaBros, Alt-Right Dharma, and Snowflake Sanghas.” Journal of Global Buddhism 22, no. 1(2021): 19–48, DOI: .
Greenwood, Claire Gesshin. “That’s So Zen: Zazen and Menstrual Blood Hell” (unpublished manuscript, April 26, 2021) word document.
Langenberg, Amy and Gleig, Ann. “Sexual Misconduct and Buddhist: Centering Survivors,” The Shiloh Project, November 18, 2020, https://www.shilohproject.blog/sexual-misconduct-and-buddhism-centering-survivors/
Langenberg, Amy Paris. “On Reading Buddhist Vinaya: Feminist History, Hermeneutics, and Translating Women’s Bodies,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. XX, no. XX (2020)1–33 doi:
Mattice, Sarah. Exploring the Heart Sutra. MD: Lexington Books, 2021.
Mattice, Sarah. “Three Common Misconceptions About East Asian Buddhisms: On Women and Gender, Violence and Non-Violence, and Philosophy and Religion” in Introducing East Asian Buddhism in the Undergraduate Classroom, ed. James McCrae and Robert Scott. New York: SUNY Press, 2023.
Meeks, Lori. “Women and Buddhism in East Asian History: The Case of the Blood Bowl Sutra: Part I: China” in Religion Compass. 2020;14:e12336. https://doi.org/10/1111/rec3.12336
Meeks, Lori. “Women and Buddhism in East Asian History: The Case of the Blood Bowl Sutra: Part II: Japan” in Religion Compass. 2020;14:e12335. https://doi.org/10/1111/rec3.12335.
Park, Jin. Women and Buddhist Philosophy: Engaging Zen Master Kim Iryǒp. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017.
Porter, Tom. “Buddhist Group Admits ‘Abhorrent Sexual Behavior’ by Teachers,” in Newsweek, March 5, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/buddhist-group-admits-abhorrent-sexual-behavior-teachers-830333
Rée, Jonathan. “Women Philosophers and the Canon,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 10.4(2002): 641–652.
Yancy, George and McRae, Emily, eds. Buddhism and Whiteness: Critical Reflections. MD: Lexington Books, 2019.
Schireson, Grace. Zen Women: Beyond Tea ladies, Iron Maidens, and Macho Masters. Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 2009.
Tyson, Sarah. Where are the Women?: Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better. New York, New York: Columbia University Press. 2018.
Wuthnow, Robert. “The Cultural Turn: Stores, Logic, and the Quest for Identity in American Religion” in Contemporary American Religion: An Ethnographic Reader, ed. Penny Edgell Becker and Nancy L. Eiesland. California: AltaMira Press, 1997.