In the weeks leading up to the reading of this book, its promising title took on deep resonances as I watched welcome news pour in of a historic ‘full bhikshuni ordination’ in Bhutan, met a Buddhist nun from that country who shared some of the challenges that beset this achievement, witnessed a woman delegate complain about the near-absence of women from the speakers’ list of the Global Buddhist Summit held in New Delhi, and on a somewhat different note, at a dastangoi on the life of the Buddha, heard a quote from the Hindi poet Maithili Sharan Gupt’s poem ‘Yashodhara’, in which Siddhartha Gautam’s wife Yashodhara plaintively complains of his quiet departure from domestic life: ‘bataa kar jaate…’ (he could have told me before leaving). If that quotidian complaint signals one kind of gendered perspective on the Buddhist tradition and other traditions with male renunciants at their heart, the celebratory news of bhikkhuni ordination provided yet another lens. The continued institutional marginalization of women tells its own story. Thus, while the book’s title seeds a range of explorative possibilities, particularly for this reader, several literary explorations of Buddhist women from Yashodhara to Amrapali, its authorship and original context of publication determine its focus and concerns.
A veteran scholar, nun, and activist born in the US as Patricia Zenn, Ven. Tsomo studied Buddhism extensively at the School of Dialectics in Dharamshala and received her novice ordination in France followed by full bhikkhuni ordination in Korea. She is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego, co-founder of the Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women, and founder of Jamyang Foundation that supports education for women and girls in the Himalayan region and Bangladesh. Her published work is extensive: Buddhist Women Across Cultures: Realizations (ed.), Buddhist Women and Social Justice: Ideals, Challenges and Achievements (ed.), Out of the Shadows: Socially Engaged Buddhist Women, Buddhist Feminism and Femininities (ed.), Sisters in Solitude: Two Traditions of Buddhist Monastic Ethics for Women, Eminent Buddhist Women, and Buddhist Women in a Global Multicultural Community. A contemporary global frame, especially the encounter of tradition with modernity, defines her oeuvre, while her own lived experience as a trained academic who is also an ordained Western Buddhist nun gives her work its distinctive tone.
A scholarly tome, the book starts with detailed notes on enunciation and etymologies of technical terms from Buddhist philosophy and literature and is attentive to the diversity of Buddhist practices and traditions across time and space.
Chapters focus on early Indian traditions, followed by a region-specific treatment of South and Southeast Asia, East Asia, inner Asia, the West, and Women’s ordination across cultures, ending with a chapter self-explanatorily titled ‘Grassroots Revolution: Buddhist Women and Social Activism’, which is an account of women in what is called ‘engaged Buddhism’. Blurbs by eminent Buddhist scholars such as Jay Garfield, Jose Cabezon, and Paula Orai situate it within academic discourse as a valuable resource. Written from an interdisciplinary perspective combining an activist zeal within historical, cultural, sociological, philosophical, ethical, and feminist analytic frames, its lucid style renders it useful to the general reader as well as the academic. The ‘Questions for Discussion’ at the end clearly signal its pedagogic and public orientation.
The author deftly negotiates the complex terrain of received textual tradition(s), institutional politics, and social reality with the empathy, authority, and criticality of an insider-outsider. She is attentive to concerns raised by eminent pioneering twentieth-century Buddhist monastics such as bhikkhuni Dhammananda of Thailand, for instance. While she takes a heads-on approach to the many contradictions between Buddhist philosophical assertions on gender transcendence and the lived reality, she desists from sweeping dismissals that result from decontextualized, ahistorical responses, pointing, for example, to the specific social context of the origin of some of the apparently misogynistic elements found in Buddhist textual traditions. This provides requisite nuance, even as it avoids lapsing into an apologia for encrusted patriarchal residues. Her focus on women as activists also frames them as agents, not victims.
The book ends with a note of regret about the Eurocentrism of research in the field and the under-representation of Asian voices. Though Romila Thapar is cited, I found myself wondering at the absence (even from the bibliography) of works such as Uma Chakravarti’s The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism. Classics of Asian Buddhist literature produced by women, such as the Pali Therigatha are occasionally cited but rarely quoted. A greater textual presence of such narratives would have certainly added depth, range, and texture. Nevertheless, the book paints a lively, inclusive, complex, and evolving picture of the place of women in Buddhist traditions, a topic of great contemporary relevance.
Maya Joshi teaches at Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, Delhi.