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How Did This Ever Happen to Me? A Wisconsin Farm Girl Who Became a Buddhist Theologian When She Grew Up Given current conditions of backlash, I have sometimes commented that it is important for those of us who are old enough to remember why the second wave of feminism ever emerged to record our memories. Most people are astonished at how dismal things were only a few years ago, in the 1960s in the United States, when women could not establish credit in their own names and almost no women went into advanced training in any field. Feminist reflections have always included the personal location of one’s work as a matter of honesty. Claiming that one feels something to be true does not make it so, but it is also the case that no one does the work they end up doing or comes to the conclusions that they derive completely abstractly either. Personal experience is a factor in everyone’s scholarly and theological work, period. “Objectivity” is better served by declaring one’s perspectives as honestly and completely as one can, not by pretending that one has no standpoint. I am utterly clear that, for better or for worse, I would not have done the work I did, had I not been a woman who entered a male-dominated field, religious studies, in the 1960s. How I got to be one of the very few women who entered that field at that time is more of a mystery, as is how that woman ended up being a Buddhist theologian. Very few other women who entered the field at that time ended up as Buddhist theologians. 23 chapter 1 Gross_Ch01 10/17/08 15:51 Page 23 early life I have written autobiographies before and have always included autobiographical elements in my work when relevant, as I did in the introduction to this volume.1 There is always a principle of selectivity that goes into writing a sketch of one’s personal life. In this case, the principle is to try to illuminate aspects of personal experience that may have led to my doing the work that is collected here. However, when I reflect on my life, it remains mysterious to me how I could ever have ended up as a leading Buddhist feminist critical and constructive thinker, given where I started out. Sometimes it seems to me that Indian notions of karma inherited from previous lives work as well as any other hypothesis to explain how one takes on certain elements of one’s work and life. How else to explain an immediate affinity for things Indian and Tibetan, even very early in my life in northern Wisconsin, where those places were virtually unknown? When I was about eight or nine, my parents went to visit friends in a nearby town. I was supposed to play with their child, but I found some cast-off books in the toy bin. Always hungry for books and never being able to find ones I hadn’t already read, I ignored my playmate, focusing instead on the books. Among them was a half-intact geography book which included a chapter on Tibet—certainly rare for an already cast off book in northern Wisconsin in the 1950s. From reading this book, I learned that Tibetans were dirty people who rarely bathed, but this supposed lack of cleanliness was explained by lack of water. I became indignant saying, “That’s not true. We’re not dirty.” I also remember somehow understanding from AM radio news in 1959 that the Dalai Lama had fled Tibet. Why did I search out books about India for high school book reports in the 1950s, well before the countercultural Indian craze? I suppose Western social science would say that as an alienated and lonely, socially inept teenager, I was compensating for my social misery by imaginatively identifying with places my peers would likely not venture . But sometimes it seems just as likely that karmic memories were inserting themselves, given how many socially maladjusted teenagers there are and how few of them gravitate to India or Tibet as a result, or at least how few did in the 1950s in northern Wisconsin. T oday, I still live in Wisconsin, one hundred and fifty miles from where I was born and grew up. It may seem that I have not moved very far, but internally that is not the case. I grew up in rural poverty, milking cows on a...

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