Buddhist Feminisms and Femininities by Karma Lekshe Tsomo;

Author:Karma Lekshe Tsomo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Question of a Gendered Buddhist Modernism

The turn of the twentieth century was a time of global encounter and exploration. Fueled by the technologies of the industrial revolution and exploitation of colonial resources and labor, the networks of travel and commerce that spread globally transmitted ideas and philosophies as much as commodities of empire. In addition to ideologies of exploitation, this period also brought about critical discussions of liberation and freedom in political, racial, and economic terms in the formation of trans-imperial intellectual communities.6 Two of the key discussions that circulated within these communities were the roles of women and religion in society. Enlightenment ideals espoused that women should be equal to men, and allowed access to independence in the forms of education, livelihood, wealth, and political suffrage. Similarly, religious freedom was seen as a key idea, and the self-critique of colonial ideologies and acceptance of the Orientalist-constructed “mystic East” facilitated the broad acceptance of a number of non-Judeo-Christian religious traditions. While the nontheism of Buddhism bewildered some intellectuals, other of its elements were seen as particularly conducive to global projects and definitions of modernity.7 As David McMahan has written, much of what is popular about Buddhism today in the public sphere is its popular representation as:

… a religion whose most important elements are meditation, rigorous philosophical analysis, and an ethic of compassion combined with a highly empirical psychoanalytical science that encourages reliance on individual experience. It discourages blindly following authority and dogma, has little place for superstition, magic, image worship, and gods, and is largely compatible with the findings of modern science and liberal democratic values.8

This form of “Buddhist modernism,” as he has termed it, is by no means new. Multiple projects by multiple intellectual and cultural communities have in turn colluded and competed to construct Buddhist modernisms over the past two hundred years. A number of these parties have used discourses about equality as their central focus. Despite these constructions, however, the treatment of gender as a category of Buddhist modernism has remained underdeveloped. The early links between the intellectual communities mentioned above, who were interested in religious freedom and women’s rights, respectively, have often been concealed within other projects. In the case of Buddhism, in the past two decades a number of scholars have discussed connections between Buddhist and feminist ideologies,9 but as Jean Byrne has recently argued, there still remains much to be debated and explored to demonstrate the viability of Buddhism as a system compatible with feminism, particularly due to the realities of its institutions on the ground in patriarchal societies.10 Concerns over cultural appropriation and structural inequalities within feminism have arisen that need to be addressed to create fully a representative and inclusive feminism, as well as to consider whether feminism is the most appropriate discourse for discussing issues of gender equality in different Buddhist communities.11

The study of Buddhist modernism has often ignored these questions, which is surprising as Buddhist modernists were concerned with social justice issues, including education, class equality, and democracy. However,

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