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Being a North American Buddhist Woman Reflections of a Feminist Pioneer In this final chapter I would like to reminisce about some of my key experiences and insights as a North American Buddhist woman and scholar-practitioner. How did I become a Buddhist in the first place? What was it like thirty years ago to be both a Buddhist and a feminist? Why do I think that Buddhists still need to be feminists? What has been most important to me about being a Buddhist? I would also like to reflect on what I have always considered the most important topic for Buddhist women—the presence of women teachers. One may well wonder, given Buddhism’s dismal record on equity and equality for women, why a Western woman already well grounded in feminism would choose to become a Buddhist.1 Indeed, after I began serious Buddhist practice in 1976 and took refuge in the Three Jewels in 1977, most of my feminist friends and colleagues were totally mystified .2 They could understand Jewish and Christian feminists who would decide to work for change within their inherited traditions, but they could not understand why someone would convert to a foreign tradition not known for its support of women’s equality. My involvement with Buddhism actually began much earlier. I first began to study Buddhism as a graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1965, but its doctrines did not compel me very much. It was not that I disagreed with those doctrines; I was just trying to learn a lot about a lot of religions, fast, and to learn Sanskrit at the same time. Buddhism as a doctrinal system did not stand out. Nevertheless, I had 311 chapter 20 Gross_Ch20 10/17/08 16:30 Page 311 been extremely taken by what I had learned of “Tantra” in my graduate school classes, and read everything available at that time on Tantra and Tibetan religions. They somehow made a deep impression on me, and years later, I found that that the stories that had drawn me the most were precisely the stories of the Tibetan lineages with which I had the most karmic affinity and whose practices I later took up with great enthusiasm.3 In the meanwhile, feminist issues consumed me much more. I had always been keenly aware of the subservient position of women in Western religions and had quietly rebelled and tried to work for change. As I moved further into my doctoral studies, I became aware of the pervasive androcentric (male-centered) methodology of my chosen field of study, which always thought of men as the more interesting and only important subjects of research. It may be hard to believe now, when there is so much research about women and religion, but only forty years ago, there was no information about women’s participation in religion in any of the major sources, and the topic was completely “off limits.” I was told that studying women was unnecessary because men were already being studied and “the generic masculine includes the feminine , making it unnecessary to focus specifically on women.”4 Given how pervasive gender roles are in most traditional cultures and the sexual segregation so characteristic of most, it still baffles me how learned scholars could have made such uninformed deductions, but such was the conventional wisdom of those times. Buddhism caught up with me in the fall of 1973. I was teaching a college -level survey course on Buddhism for the second time, struggling to understand its basic doctrines more adequately. I was also extremely unhappy. I had just moved to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where I have lived for more than thirty years, and had quickly realized it was going to be a very lonely place for me. I was also mourning the terminal illness of my lover, whom I had seen for what I knew would be the last time just days earlier. As I walked to my class on a beautiful fall day, trying to better understand the Four Noble Truths, which I was about to teach, I only longed to be able to appreciate the beauty of that day unburdened by my misery. Suddenly things became very clear. I could not appreciate the beauty of my immediate surroundings because I so desperately wanted things I could not have. Buddhism’s second Noble Truth, that desire is the cause of suffering, became completely clear. I did not need to be convinced of the first Noble Truth...

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