Directors:
Peter D. Hershock (East-West Center) and Wendi Adamek (University of Calgary)
Greetings!
Thank you for your interest in Women in Buddhism: Religion, Politics, and the Arts. We hope that you find the program described on this site as compelling and exciting as I do.
As the Director of the Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP), I’ve had the pleasure of designing and conducting faculty development summer institutes, field seminars and workshops for over twenty-five years, including nineteen NEH-funded summer institutes. Women in Buddhism builds on that experience, but in particular on the lessons learned from two previous NEH-funded institutes on Buddhism: Buddhist Asia: Traditions, Transmissions and Transformations (2015) and Buddhist East Asia: The Interplay of Religion, the Arts and Politics (2018). One of those lessons is that more attention needs to be given to the often very distinctive roles that women have played in shaping and transmitting Buddhist repertoires of practice. This institute is our attempt to address that next summer through four weeks of conversation with twelve leading scholars of Buddhism and a group of twenty-five undergraduate educators.
My academic training—both undergraduate and graduate—was in philosophy, not history or religious studies. As an undergraduate, I focused on the Western traditions of existentialism, phenomenology and pragmatism. But like many in my generation, I developed interests in Asian thought and culture, added Asian recipes to my culinary repertoire, experimented with meditation and martial arts, and then in 1980 made Buddhist meditation part of my daily schedule. When I decided to commit to graduate studies as well, I was determined to focus my doctoral work on Buddhist philosophy. The University of Hawai‘i philosophy department was ideal, then offering the only degree in the U.S. on Asian and Comparative Philosophy, with over a dozen faculty members with interests in Indian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese thought.
Still, it was a philosophy department, and my continued and deepening practice of Buddhism made it clear that—as important as the philosophical dimensions of Buddhism may be—they have generally played a supportive role in the “total care” system of Buddhist practice. Helping to launch ASDP in 1991 also helped to expand the horizons of my intellectual engagement with Buddhism and my appreciation of the historical complexity of the emergence across Asia of distinctive “ecologies of enlightenment.” But, perhaps more importantly, my work with ASDP provided me with amply repeated opportunities to merge learning-about other cultures with the even deeper pleasures of learning-from and learning-with others whose lives, interests and training are very different from my own.
For me, Women in Buddhism is a dream opportunity to engage in that learning triad, exploring the diversity of Buddhist “total care” systems and their ongoing transformation in response to contemporary realities. Our hope is that we will do so in ways that open prospects for greater equity in how Buddhism is taught in undergraduate classrooms—a process, fundamentally, of enhancing qualities of inclusion.
NEH Summer Institutes have inestimable value as opportunities for revitalizing and reorienting academic lives. My experience has been that they are also opportunities for exploring the value as opportunities for revitalizing and reorienting academic lives. My experience has been that they are also opportunities for exploring the value diversity as a relational quality that emerges to the extent that differences—of culture, discipline, cognitive style, gender, and positionality—are engaged as the basis of mutual contribution to truly and creatively shared flourishing. As Co-Directors, Wendi and I hope that you will take the time to apply for the program and, if selected, to spend four weeks with us in the “Aloha State” next summer exploring how women have contributed to Buddhist diversity.
Take care,
Peter D. Hershock
I am so glad that we are finally here, standing in an open doorway and beckoning you to join us on a magical mystery tour of the many worlds of Buddhist women. My lifelong research focus has been medieval China. Without ever intentionally setting out to recover the voices of female practitioners, it feels like my painstaking excavations of two very different practitioner communities spanning the fifth through eighth centuries ended up unexpectedly capturing images of women. Their lives and deaths became real to me, like marvelous dragonflies caught in amber.
Along the way I have been privileged to get to know many fellow-researchers. It is heartening that now there are a significant number of scholars from different disciplines who work on a wide range of topics about women in Buddhism. I am deeply grateful that some of them have been able to join us as fellow guides on this tour.
Moving between the world of medieval China and our own, I became interested in the proposition that experiences and conditions are copoietic (co-constituting, mutually shaping). I became attuned to theorizations and enactments of this principle in both medieval and modern works, experiencing rich copoietic relations among places and practitioners, the living and dead, women and men, clerics, and laity, acts and scripts, stones and buddhas, myself and my field.
I realized that these various kinds of work, powers, techniques, and disciplines all depend on shifting our focus away from the agency of actors, away from the binary of subjects and objects, and focusing instead on the agency of relations. By “agency of relations” I do not mean simply the power of collective action, but the way that constructions -- textual, visual, and reflexive -- emerge out of processes of intention and action that in turn have efficacy within these processes. Shifting focus to the efficacy of networks and relationships entails a broad definition of agency as the capacity to generate effects and be affected within a given field of conditions -- to produce and thereby be produced.
My inspiration for developing the term “agency of relations” as an historiographical method in my work is the foundational Buddhist teaching that the experience of the agency of a “self” is an effect of the momentum of aggregated processes rather than the property of a thing-in-itself or immutable essence. Furthermore, experience of “objects” is considered a functional correlate of this continuum of processes. This can extend to the notion of the “feminine,” which is deconstructed as lacking any real referent in the nonduality discourse of Mahāyāna Buddhism yet has real (causal) social effect. I feel that a relational approach to social roles has helped me to elucidate ways that both masculine and feminine agency were invested in masterful engagement with devotional, contemplative, and cultural practices.
While my primary research has been with pre-modern materials, I am also engaged in analyses of the social effects of contemporary religious discourse and practice. Most recently, I developed a collaborative project on dialectical processes in the use of contemplative practices. The aim of this project is to discuss ways that participants from diverse backgrounds may integrate the self-reflections of a researcher, doctor, or therapist with those of a “subject,” patient, or client. Since the therapeutic mindfulness boom began in the 1980s, a number of related fields have emerged. Fellow-investigators in this project work with modes like contemplative practice in palliative care, cognitive behavioral analyses, and traditional meditation practice, among others. We discuss individual experience and rationales for research that include the first-personal, lived-world experience of researchers and participants, the effects of self-reflection, and their interplay.
Likewise, in this Institute I hope to learn from all the participants about their own teaching and reflections on gender and identity. We all have a unique “observer position” in this shifting array that Buddhists call the dharmakāya, the body of truth/teaching/emptiness. It is, in the manner of rainbows, an appearance made of a moment of sunlight, a drift of rain, and someone who is looking. Hawai‘i, as I well know, is a place of rainbows.
E komo mai,
Wendi Adamek
Directors:
Peter D. Hershock (East-West Center) and Wendi Adamek (University of Calgary)
Greetings!
Thank you for your interest in Women in Buddhism: Religion, Politics, and the Arts. We hope that you find the program described on this site as compelling and exciting as I do.
As the Director of the Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP), I’ve had the pleasure of designing and conducting faculty development summer institutes, field seminars and workshops for over twenty-five years, including nineteen NEH-funded summer institutes. Women in Buddhism builds on that experience, but in particular on the lessons learned from two previous NEH-funded institutes on Buddhism: Buddhist Asia: Traditions, Transmissions and Transformations (2015) and Buddhist East Asia: The Interplay of Religion, the Arts and Politics (2018). One of those lessons is that more attention needs to be given to the often very distinctive roles that women have played in shaping and transmitting Buddhist repertoires of practice. This institute is our attempt to address that next summer through four weeks of conversation with twelve leading scholars of Buddhism and a group of twenty-five undergraduate educators.
My academic training—both undergraduate and graduate—was in philosophy, not history or religious studies. As an undergraduate, I focused on the Western traditions of existentialism, phenomenology and pragmatism. But like many in my generation, I developed interests in Asian thought and culture, added Asian recipes to my culinary repertoire, experimented with meditation and martial arts, and then in 1980 made Buddhist meditation part of my daily schedule. When I decided to commit to graduate studies as well, I was determined to focus my doctoral work on Buddhist philosophy. The University of Hawai‘i philosophy department was ideal, then offering the only degree in the U.S. on Asian and Comparative Philosophy, with over a dozen faculty members with interests in Indian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese thought.
Still, it was a philosophy department, and my continued and deepening practice of Buddhism made it clear that—as important as the philosophical dimensions of Buddhism may be—they have generally played a supportive role in the “total care” system of Buddhist practice. Helping to launch ASDP in 1991 also helped to expand the horizons of my intellectual engagement with Buddhism and my appreciation of the historical complexity of the emergence across Asia of distinctive “ecologies of enlightenment.” But, perhaps more importantly, my work with ASDP provided me with amply repeated opportunities to merge learning-about other cultures with the even deeper pleasures of learning-from and learning-with others whose lives, interests and training are very different from my own.
For me, Women in Buddhism is a dream opportunity to engage in that learning triad, exploring the diversity of Buddhist “total care” systems and their ongoing transformation in response to contemporary realities. Our hope is that we will do so in ways that open prospects for greater equity in how Buddhism is taught in undergraduate classrooms—a process, fundamentally, of enhancing qualities of inclusion.
NEH Summer Institutes have inestimable value as opportunities for revitalizing and reorienting academic lives. My experience has been that they are also opportunities for exploring the value as opportunities for revitalizing and reorienting academic lives. My experience has been that they are also opportunities for exploring the value diversity as a relational quality that emerges to the extent that differences—of culture, discipline, cognitive style, gender, and positionality—are engaged as the basis of mutual contribution to truly and creatively shared flourishing. As Co-Directors, Wendi and I hope that you will take the time to apply for the program and, if selected, to spend four weeks with us in the “Aloha State” next summer exploring how women have contributed to Buddhist diversity.
Take care,
Peter D. Hershock
I am so glad that we are finally here, standing in an open doorway and beckoning you to join us on a magical mystery tour of the many worlds of Buddhist women. My lifelong research focus has been medieval China. Without ever intentionally setting out to recover the voices of female practitioners, it feels like my painstaking excavations of two very different practitioner communities spanning the fifth through eighth centuries ended up unexpectedly capturing images of women. Their lives and deaths became real to me, like marvelous dragonflies caught in amber.
Along the way I have been privileged to get to know many fellow-researchers. It is heartening that now there are a significant number of scholars from different disciplines who work on a wide range of topics about women in Buddhism. I am deeply grateful that some of them have been able to join us as fellow guides on this tour.
Moving between the world of medieval China and our own, I became interested in the proposition that experiences and conditions are copoietic (co-constituting, mutually shaping). I became attuned to theorizations and enactments of this principle in both medieval and modern works, experiencing rich copoietic relations among places and practitioners, the living and dead, women and men, clerics, and laity, acts and scripts, stones and buddhas, myself and my field.
I realized that these various kinds of work, powers, techniques, and disciplines all depend on shifting our focus away from the agency of actors, away from the binary of subjects and objects, and focusing instead on the agency of relations. By “agency of relations” I do not mean simply the power of collective action, but the way that constructions -- textual, visual, and reflexive -- emerge out of processes of intention and action that in turn have efficacy within these processes. Shifting focus to the efficacy of networks and relationships entails a broad definition of agency as the capacity to generate effects and be affected within a given field of conditions -- to produce and thereby be produced.
My inspiration for developing the term “agency of relations” as an historiographical method in my work is the foundational Buddhist teaching that the experience of the agency of a “self” is an effect of the momentum of aggregated processes rather than the property of a thing-in-itself or immutable essence. Furthermore, experience of “objects” is considered a functional correlate of this continuum of processes. This can extend to the notion of the “feminine,” which is deconstructed as lacking any real referent in the nonduality discourse of Mahāyāna Buddhism yet has real (causal) social effect. I feel that a relational approach to social roles has helped me to elucidate ways that both masculine and feminine agency were invested in masterful engagement with devotional, contemplative, and cultural practices.
While my primary research has been with pre-modern materials, I am also engaged in analyses of the social effects of contemporary religious discourse and practice. Most recently, I developed a collaborative project on dialectical processes in the use of contemplative practices. The aim of this project is to discuss ways that participants from diverse backgrounds may integrate the self-reflections of a researcher, doctor, or therapist with those of a “subject,” patient, or client. Since the therapeutic mindfulness boom began in the 1980s, a number of related fields have emerged. Fellow-investigators in this project work with modes like contemplative practice in palliative care, cognitive behavioral analyses, and traditional meditation practice, among others. We discuss individual experience and rationales for research that include the first-personal, lived-world experience of researchers and participants, the effects of self-reflection, and their interplay.
Likewise, in this Institute I hope to learn from all the participants about their own teaching and reflections on gender and identity. We all have a unique “observer position” in this shifting array that Buddhists call the dharmakāya, the body of truth/teaching/emptiness. It is, in the manner of rainbows, an appearance made of a moment of sunlight, a drift of rain, and someone who is looking. Hawai‘i, as I well know, is a place of rainbows.
E komo mai,
Wendi Adamek