Notes
Notes introduction 1. Nancy Auer Falk and Rita M. Gross, eds., Unspoken Worlds: Women’s Religious Lives, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001); Gross, Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); and Gross, Feminism and Religion: An Introduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). 2. Innumerable books about the visual dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism are easy to find. Two books containing useful basic information are Jonathan Landaw and Andy Weber, Images of Enlightenment: Tibetan Art in Practice (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1993); and Rudy Jansen, The Book of Buddhas: Ritual Symbolism Used on Buddhist Statuary and Ritual Objects (Diver, Holland: Binkey Kok Publications, 1990). 3. Though I had picked my title before I was aware of this new book, another Buddhist author has recently chosen the same analogy for his lifework. See Khenpo Nyoshul, A Marvelous Garland of Rare Gems: Biographies of Masters of Awareness in the Dzogchen Lineage (A Spiritual History of the Teachings of Natural Great Perfection) (Johnson City, CA: Padma Press, 2003). chapter 1 1. Rita M. Gross, “Three Strikes and You’re Out: An Autobiography at MidLife ,” in A Time to Weep, A Time to Sing: Faith Journeys of Women Scholars of Religion, eds. Mary Jo Meadow and Carole A. Rayburn (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), pp. 30–46; and Rita M. Gross and Rosemary Radford Ruether, Religious Feminism and the Future of the Planet: A Buddhist-Christian-Feminist Conversation (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), pp. 25–47. 2. Gross and Ruether, Religious Feminism, pp. 33–5. 319 Gross_Notes 10/17/08 17:48 Page 319 3. Rebirth could mean literal physical rebirth, but it just as easily connotes a psychological style or mind-set in Buddhist psychology. Such a mind-set could last for a few moments, for an entire physical life span, or for many lifetimes. 4. Rita M. Gross, “‘Finding Renunciation and Balance in American Buddhism: Work, Family, Community, and Friendship,” in Soaring and Settling: Buddhist Perspectives on Contemporary Social and Religious Issues (New York: Continuum, 2000), pp. 94–107; and Gross, “Some Reflections on Community and Survival,” Buddhist-Christian Studies Journal 22 (2003): 3–19. 5. Rita M. Gross, “Impermanence, Nowness, and Non-Judgment: Appreciating Finitude and Death,” in Soaring and Settling, pp. 140–51. part two 1. For example, at some point in the mid- to late 1980s, by which time every scholar should have been able to assimilate the changes required by feminist scholarship, including gender-inclusive language and examples of how women practiced their various religions, a textbook publisher asked me to quietly “fix up” a prominent textbook on world religions. This textbook was multiauthored ; each chapter on each of the different world religions had been written by a prominent male scholar of that religion. Each chapter had been written in generic masculine language, using a completely androcentric model of humanity to select examples to be included in its description of the religion portrayed. The textbook was due for a revision, and by that time, professors and students would no longer accept a textbook that had not assimilated changes required by the emergence of women’s studies scholarship. Hence, I was asked to “revise” the book. Puzzled, I asked the publisher why he didn’t just require the authors of the various chapters to bring their own writings up to date. The publisher replied that that request had been made, but the authors had replied that “they just couldn’t do it; they didn’t know how.” T olerating such incompetence on the part of established scholars and covering for them has always seemed to me to be quite problematic. Why not simply withdraw their book from publication and commission a new textbook by authors capable of writing in genderinclusive and gender-neutral ways? And why did the publisher assume that I had no scholarship of my own that needed tending to? Why the assumption that I would gladly revise a male-authored book so that it would conform to the new scholarly standards of the day? 2. The first book I read after completing my dissertation was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I was amazed and furious. I had duplicated her conclusions about men viewing themselves as subjects and women as objects in the prevailing discourses of the day. Reading her book earlier could have given me many clues and saved me a great deal of work. The fact that none of my mentors even mentioned...
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