Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

WOMEN’S ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICAN BUDDHISM

WOMEN’S ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICAN BUDDHISM l 1207 life. Walk in love and beauty. Trust the knowledge that comes through the body. Speak the truth about conflict, pain, and suffering. Take only what you need. Think about the consequences of your actions for seven generations . Approach the taking of life with great restraint. Practice great generosity. Repair the web” (Rebirth of the Goddess, 167). For many women and men Goddess religion provides a vision of ethics rooted in deep feelings of connection, rather than in fear of judgment or hope for reward. SOURCES: Margot Adler gives a sympathetic account of the rise of neopaganism in the United States in Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (1979); Cynthia Eller does the same for the Goddess movement (though her conclusions trivialize the movement) in Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America (1993); Ronald Hutton places the Goddess and neopagan movements in historical perspective in The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (1999); while in Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister : Religions Dominated by Women (1994), Susan Starr Sered considers the feminist Goddess movement as a religion created and led by women. The American feminist Goddess movement was inspired by Z (Zsuzsanna) Budapest’s The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries, Part 1 (1989), originally published as The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows (1974); by Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979) and Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics (1982); by Naomi Goldenberg’s The Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (1979); and by Carol P. Christ’s “Why Women Need the Goddess”—see Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader on Religion (1979), 279–299. WomanSpirit magazine published from 1974 to 1984 (back issues available from 2000 King Mountain Trail, Sunny Valley, OR 97647) provided a place for women to name the sacred. Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) gave voice to women’s feelings of connection to the natural world. Mary Daly’s influential works, including “After the Death of God the Father,” in Womanspirit Rising, 53–62, and Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973), created a climate in which leaving Christianity seemed reasonable. Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman (1976) sparked feminist interest in Goddess history, while archaeologist Marija Gimbutas’s The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe 6500–3500 BCE (1974), The Language of the Goddess (1988), and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991) brought forth new evidence and theory that gained wide popular following. Cynthia Eller’s critique of matriarchy in The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (2000) is marred by imprecise definition of the term and antipathy to the whole idea of a Goddess movement, according to Kristy Coleman in “Matriarchy and Myth (Review Article)” in Religion 3 (2001): 247–263; feminist archaeologists consider the controversy surrounding Goddess history and prehistory from more balanced perspectives in Ancient Goddesses (1998), ed. Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris. Luisah Teish considers the Goddess from a black woman’s perspective in Jambalaya : The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals (1985); see also Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (1990). Christine Downing’s The Goddess: Mythological Representations of the Feminine (1981) is one of many influential Jungian feminist musings on the Goddess. Carol P. Christ in Rebirth of the Goddess (1997) and Melissa Raphael in Introducing Thealogy: Discourse on the Goddess (1999) reflect thealogically on the meanings of the rebirth of the religion of the Goddess from feminist perspectives. WOMEN’S ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY NORTH AMERICAN BUDDHISM Rita M. Gross THE SHEER DIVERSITY and variety of forms of Buddhism practiced in North America make it very difficult to generalize about Buddhist women’s issues. Every denomination of Buddhism practiced in the contemporary world is represented in North America. Asian forms of Buddhism that had little contact with each other for centuries are now being practiced in the same North American city—Theravada Buddhisms from Southeast Asia, Vietnamese, Tibetan, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese varieties of Buddhism—are all present. Some Asian Buddhisms, especially Japanese and Chinese, have been practiced in North America for four or five generations. Many other Buddhists have arrived only...