Institute Rationale

There are a number of reasons for educators to explore the complexities of women’s contributions to Buddhist repertoires of religious, political and artistic practice. Perhaps the most straightforward of these is that any account of Asian histories and societies would be incomplete without accurately and comprehensively addressing the place and agency therein of Buddhist women. While women’s influences are seldom readily discernible in premodern authoritative texts, commentaries, and treatises of the so-called “World Religions,” studies of archaeological, epigraphical, art historical and archival materials have revealed a heretofore obscured world of female engagement in shaping religious identities and communities. Foregrounding women’s voices in conversations about Buddhist histories is a much-needed academic corrective.

A second important reason for investigating the roles of women in Buddhism is the instructive light it may shed on such contemporary concerns as stereotyping and identity formation. A multidisciplinary paradigm shift is emerging that supports understanding agency and subjectivity in relational rather than individualist terms—a shift that opens prospects for going beyond non-exclusion as a benchmark of equity and instead conceiving of equity in terms of enhancing qualities of inclusion. Humanities courses are often forums in which students question, understand, and shape their own identities. Buddhist texts and narratives offer rich resources for exploring with students how gender narratives have been used historically both to enforce conformity and to disrupt it, but also to engage critically the ways in which positionality factors into humanistic, contemporary struggles with issues of diversity and inclusivity.

Reimagining Buddhist Diversity

Although Buddhism is customarily referred to as one of the great “world religions,” it is a religion without a defining creed, revelatory core text, or centralized authority structure. In fact, thinking about Buddhism as a single, pan-Asian religion is largely an artifact of early modern, trade-mediated, and politically-charged interactions among Euro-American and Asian cultures and societies. It was not until the 1893 World Parliament of Religions (held in Chicago) that “Buddhists” began identifying themselves as such. Prior to this, Buddhist practitioners across Asia thought of themselves as members of locally vibrant, family-like lineages of teachers, teachings and ritual practices that were as distinct from those in other parts of Asia as were their climates and cuisines.

In actuality, for much of its twenty-five hundred year history, Buddhism has not been a world religion in the modern sense, but something akin to what religious scholar Robert Campany has referred to as a “cultural repertoire”—one that proved remarkably open-ended, adaptive and appealing. Within a thousand years of the life of its nominal founder Siddhartha Gautama in the 5th century BCE, Buddhism was the most widely practiced religion in Asia , bridging cultures from the Swat valley of present-day Afghanistan to volcanic Java, from tropical Sri Lanka to Siberia, and from the bustling manufacturing and market centers of the Indo-Gangetic plain to the imperial capitals of what are now China, Korea and Japan.

The repertoires of women’s participation in Buddhist traditions have been and remain far from uniform. For instance, while it is possible for a woman to be fully ordained in Mahāyāna Buddhist East Asia, that is not the case today in Theravada Buddhist Southeast Asia. Given this, it is essential to refrain from universalizing the “female experience” in Buddhism. At the same time, it is essential to question the assumption that the theoretical default for viewing the place of women in Buddhism should be in terms of their roles as sovereign subjects.

One of the tasks of the Institute will be to facilitate critical appreciation of how the agency of Buddhist women might most aptly be explored as an “agency of relations.” This mode of exploration has much in common with such contemporary approaches as Karen Barad's agential realism and the “new materialism” that also situate agency in relational dynamics, rather than in the private “interiors” of ostensibly autonomous individuals. Especially with regard to Buddhism—a religion premised on the primacy of practice instead of doctrine—it is crucial to investigate how masculine and feminine agencies were differently invested in mastering social practices, rather than comparing the degrees of expressive individualism that males and females enjoyed.

This requires considerable care. The earliest Western studies of the place of women in Buddhism by the pioneering scholars Caroline Augusta Foley (later, Rhys Davids, 1857-1942), Mabel Haynes Bode (1864-1922), and Isaline Blew Horner (1896-1981) determined that Buddhist women evidently enjoyed nearly equal status with men in terms of their potentials for religious, institutional and social agency. Seen from the standpoints of  scholars in the late 20th and early 21st century, claims about the “near equal” status Buddhist women historically enjoyed appear less readily defensible. It is crucial to avoid anachronistic projections of contemporary gender concerns onto Buddhist women of the past.

Keeping in mind both the pedagogical aims of the institute and the dangers of overwriting the distinctive and diverse subjectivities of Buddhist women with contemporary conceptual defaults, the program will build on Judith Butler’s insights in the classic Gender Trouble, engaging gender as a matter of practices rather essential identities, while making clear that in Buddhist contexts this was never predominantly about performing individual personal identities, but rather interpersonal relationships. Especially in working with undergraduate students whose immersion in digital media can work against fully appreciating the significance of geographical and historical differences, taking into account the positions from which questions are asked about women—whether in relation with Buddhism or other religious and secular traditions—is critically important.

Women’s Contributions: Matters of Practice

Investigating women’s inclusion in Buddhism begins with understanding the complexity of their formal admission into Buddhist religious life. In the standard narrative, women were admitted as renunciates (bhikṣuṇī) due to repeated interventions by the Buddha’s male cousin, Ānanda, rather than in response to appeals by the Buddha’s aunt and foster-mother, Mahāprajāpatī. Moreover, the Buddha is said to have stipulated eight special rules that formalized institutional and ritual imbalances between the male and female communities. Yet, in its historical context, it is remarkable that—against prevailing religious norms—women requested and were granted full membership in the earliest Buddhist communities. This ancient “#MeToo” movement was successful enough that we have records of seventy-three women who attained nibbāna or release from the cycle of conflict, trouble, and suffering as students of the historical Buddha.

Nevertheless, in addition to institutionalized hierarchies between male and female monastics, clear inequalities developed in the roles of Buddhist laymen and laywomen, and over time there developed in Buddhist literature what Alan Sponberg describes as four “voices” regarding women: the earliest stressing inclusiveness and the possibility of final liberation for all; a later voice emphasizing the institutional privileging of male authority; a voice of ascetic misogyny depicting women as objectifications of male desire; and a still later voice of soteriological androgyny that positively valorized the feminine.

Yet, although Buddhist laywomen nominally occupied the lowest rung of the Buddhist social order, their generous donations of labor and material resources have made them essential agents in shaping Buddhist institutions, art, and popular literature. Moreover, close readings of such canonical texts as the Lion’s Roar of Queen Srīmālā, the Lotus Sutra, and the Vimalakīrti Sutra—all of which will be discussed during the Institute—reveal the extent to which questions about women’s inclusion/exclusion were prominently raised and grappled with as Buddhism evolved. Indeed, the Vimalakīrti Sutra features a particularly striking scene in which a goddess fluently debates one of the Buddha’s key male disciples, Śāriputra, arguing the merits of realizing the nonduality of all things, including gender—a point she illustrates by magically “switching bodies” with Śāriputra and asking him whether he experiences any spiritual shortcomings by having a female body.

The Institute is designed to facilitate balanced engagement with the fact that while Buddhism traditionally supported therapeutic—if not fully theorized—challenges to male/female or masculine/feminine binaries, these canonical precedents for gender equality with respect to religious potential did not prevent institutional inequality. Providing roadmaps for navigating this sensitive territory is an important feature of the Institute’s program of study.

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Institute Rationale

There are a number of reasons for educators to explore the complexities of women’s contributions to Buddhist repertoires of religious, political and artistic practice. Perhaps the most straightforward of these is that any account of Asian histories and societies would be incomplete without accurately and comprehensively addressing the place and agency therein of Buddhist women. While women’s influences are seldom readily discernible in premodern authoritative texts, commentaries, and treatises of the so-called “World Religions,” studies of archaeological, epigraphical, art historical and archival materials have revealed a heretofore obscured world of female engagement in shaping religious identities and communities. Foregrounding women’s voices in conversations about Buddhist histories is a much-needed academic corrective.

A second important reason for investigating the roles of women in Buddhism is the instructive light it may shed on such contemporary concerns as stereotyping and identity formation. A multidisciplinary paradigm shift is emerging that supports understanding agency and subjectivity in relational rather than individualist terms—a shift that opens prospects for going beyond non-exclusion as a benchmark of equity and instead conceiving of equity in terms of enhancing qualities of inclusion. Humanities courses are often forums in which students question, understand, and shape their own identities. Buddhist texts and narratives offer rich resources for exploring with students how gender narratives have been used historically both to enforce conformity and to disrupt it, but also to engage critically the ways in which positionality factors into humanistic, contemporary struggles with issues of diversity and inclusivity.

Reimagining Buddhist Diversity

Although Buddhism is customarily referred to as one of the great “world religions,” it is a religion without a defining creed, revelatory core text, or centralized authority structure. In fact, thinking about Buddhism as a single, pan-Asian religion is largely an artifact of early modern, trade-mediated, and politically-charged interactions among Euro-American and Asian cultures and societies. It was not until the 1893 World Parliament of Religions (held in Chicago) that “Buddhists” began identifying themselves as such. Prior to this, Buddhist practitioners across Asia thought of themselves as members of locally vibrant, family-like lineages of teachers, teachings and ritual practices that were as distinct from those in other parts of Asia as were their climates and cuisines.

In actuality, for much of its twenty-five hundred year history, Buddhism has not been a world religion in the modern sense, but something akin to what religious scholar Robert Campany has referred to as a “cultural repertoire”—one that proved remarkably open-ended, adaptive and appealing. Within a thousand years of the life of its nominal founder Siddhartha Gautama in the 5th century BCE, Buddhism was the most widely practiced religion in Asia , bridging cultures from the Swat valley of present-day Afghanistan to volcanic Java, from tropical Sri Lanka to Siberia, and from the bustling manufacturing and market centers of the Indo-Gangetic plain to the imperial capitals of what are now China, Korea and Japan.

The repertoires of women’s participation in Buddhist traditions have been and remain far from uniform. For instance, while it is possible for a woman to be fully ordained in Mahāyāna Buddhist East Asia, that is not the case today in Theravada Buddhist Southeast Asia. Given this, it is essential to refrain from universalizing the “female experience” in Buddhism. At the same time, it is essential to question the assumption that the theoretical default for viewing the place of women in Buddhism should be in terms of their roles as sovereign subjects.

One of the tasks of the Institute will be to facilitate critical appreciation of how the agency of Buddhist women might most aptly be explored as an “agency of relations.” This mode of exploration has much in common with such contemporary approaches as Karen Barad's agential realism and the “new materialism” that also situate agency in relational dynamics, rather than in the private “interiors” of ostensibly autonomous individuals. Especially with regard to Buddhism—a religion premised on the primacy of practice instead of doctrine—it is crucial to investigate how masculine and feminine agencies were differently invested in mastering social practices, rather than comparing the degrees of expressive individualism that males and females enjoyed.

This requires considerable care. The earliest Western studies of the place of women in Buddhism by the pioneering scholars Caroline Augusta Foley (later, Rhys Davids, 1857-1942), Mabel Haynes Bode (1864-1922), and Isaline Blew Horner (1896-1981) determined that Buddhist women evidently enjoyed nearly equal status with men in terms of their potentials for religious, institutional and social agency. Seen from the standpoints of  scholars in the late 20th and early 21st century, claims about the “near equal” status Buddhist women historically enjoyed appear less readily defensible. It is crucial to avoid anachronistic projections of contemporary gender concerns onto Buddhist women of the past.

Keeping in mind both the pedagogical aims of the institute and the dangers of overwriting the distinctive and diverse subjectivities of Buddhist women with contemporary conceptual defaults, the program will build on Judith Butler’s insights in the classic Gender Trouble, engaging gender as a matter of practices rather essential identities, while making clear that in Buddhist contexts this was never predominantly about performing individual personal identities, but rather interpersonal relationships. Especially in working with undergraduate students whose immersion in digital media can work against fully appreciating the significance of geographical and historical differences, taking into account the positions from which questions are asked about women—whether in relation with Buddhism or other religious and secular traditions—is critically important.

Women’s Contributions: Matters of Practice

Investigating women’s inclusion in Buddhism begins with understanding the complexity of their formal admission into Buddhist religious life. In the standard narrative, women were admitted as renunciates (bhikṣuṇī) due to repeated interventions by the Buddha’s male cousin, Ānanda, rather than in response to appeals by the Buddha’s aunt and foster-mother, Mahāprajāpatī. Moreover, the Buddha is said to have stipulated eight special rules that formalized institutional and ritual imbalances between the male and female communities. Yet, in its historical context, it is remarkable that—against prevailing religious norms—women requested and were granted full membership in the earliest Buddhist communities. This ancient “#MeToo” movement was successful enough that we have records of seventy-three women who attained nibbāna or release from the cycle of conflict, trouble, and suffering as students of the historical Buddha.

Nevertheless, in addition to institutionalized hierarchies between male and female monastics, clear inequalities developed in the roles of Buddhist laymen and laywomen, and over time there developed in Buddhist literature what Alan Sponberg describes as four “voices” regarding women: the earliest stressing inclusiveness and the possibility of final liberation for all; a later voice emphasizing the institutional privileging of male authority; a voice of ascetic misogyny depicting women as objectifications of male desire; and a still later voice of soteriological androgyny that positively valorized the feminine.

Yet, although Buddhist laywomen nominally occupied the lowest rung of the Buddhist social order, their generous donations of labor and material resources have made them essential agents in shaping Buddhist institutions, art, and popular literature. Moreover, close readings of such canonical texts as the Lion’s Roar of Queen Srīmālā, the Lotus Sutra, and the Vimalakīrti Sutra—all of which will be discussed during the Institute—reveal the extent to which questions about women’s inclusion/exclusion were prominently raised and grappled with as Buddhism evolved. Indeed, the Vimalakīrti Sutra features a particularly striking scene in which a goddess fluently debates one of the Buddha’s key male disciples, Śāriputra, arguing the merits of realizing the nonduality of all things, including gender—a point she illustrates by magically “switching bodies” with Śāriputra and asking him whether he experiences any spiritual shortcomings by having a female body.

The Institute is designed to facilitate balanced engagement with the fact that while Buddhism traditionally supported therapeutic—if not fully theorized—challenges to male/female or masculine/feminine binaries, these canonical precedents for gender equality with respect to religious potential did not prevent institutional inequality. Providing roadmaps for navigating this sensitive territory is an important feature of the Institute’s program of study.