A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religious Exploration

19. Is the Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full?

Is the Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full? A Feminist Assessment of Buddhism at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century Even relatively casual observers of Buddhism often note that doctrinally Buddhism is free of the myths and symbols that make some other religions so intractable to feminist reforms. There is no Ultimate Reality spoken of as a male, no Ultimate Father or Male Savior; there is no myth of a rebellious female starting the world on its downward spiral. Those same observers also comment that, nevertheless, Buddhism and Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy look quite similar: many men in elaborate costumes in positions of authority, with very few women to be seen. Why? What is being done about this contradiction at the heart of Buddhism? In less than thirty years, we have gone from a situation in which almost nothing had been written about Buddhist women for many years to a situation in which books and articles appear regularly. In 1979, Diana Paul published her helpful and well-annotated collection of texts, Women in Buddhism: Images of the Feminine in the Mahayana Tradition.1 In 1980, I gave my first talk (and probably the first talk) on Buddhism and feminism at an international conference on BuddhistChristian dialogue, to the bemusement of some Japanese delegates who couldn’t understand how there could be a feminist critique of Buddhism.2 After all, they said, Buddhists had taken care of all those issues long ago by reassuring everyone that “deserving women would be reborn as men.” In the mid-1980s, Sandy Boucher was conducting the interviews that led to her book Turning the Wheel: American Women 291 chapter 19 Gross_Ch19 10/17/08 15:31 Page 291 Creating the New Buddhism.3 In 1987, Karma Lekshe Tsomo organized the first of many Sakyadhita conferences, which led to the first of many publications emanating from those conferences.4 Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism, the first somewhat complete feminist survey of Buddhism, was published in 1993.5 There is now a worldwide Buddhist women’s movement, many women Buddhist teachers, at least in North America, and a growing consensus that the traditional male dominance of Buddhism is a problem, though I would argue that institutional changes are still very slow. So is the glass half-full? Are we well on the way to recasting Buddhism in ways that make it more adequate for its female followers? Perhaps, if burnout, backlash, and complacency do not take too high a toll. Is the glass half-empty? Is Buddhism still a religion that works better for men than for women, despite the changes of the past thirty years? Many coffee table picture books about Buddhism would certainly give that appearance. And certainly the glass is half-empty and leaking the rest of its contents if premature self-congratulations lead to complacency. A colleague and friend once commented to me that in its philosophical views and it meditation practices, Buddhism has tremendous potential for deconstructing gender, but all that potential has led to very few results. In looking at the half-full, half-empty glass, I will consider three topics: first, Buddhism’s potential for deconstructing gender; second, some reasons why this potential did not come to fruition historically; and third, some of the changing situations in the contemporary Buddhist world, both Asian and Western. tara’s vow: gender and dharma in buddhism One of my favorite stories for illustrating many of the points that need to be made when discussing Buddhism and gender are found in a seventeenth-century Tibetan text that narrates how Tara, one of the favorite Tibetan female meditation deities, came into existence. Like all the exalted beings in Buddhist mythological universes, she was at one time a human being engaged in the same meditation practices we do. After much practice, she finally experienced awakened mind. The monks around her suggested that she could (and should) now take on a male rebirth. Instead of doing so, she told them, “In this life, there is no such distinction as ‘male’ and ‘female’ . . . and therefore, attachment to 292 Is the Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full? Gross_Ch19 10/17/08 15:31 Page 292 ideas of ‘male’ and ‘female’ is quite worthless. Weak-minded worldlings are always deluded by this.” She then vowed to take female form continuously through her long career as an advanced Bodhisattva, what some...