User:PurpleHedgeHog74/Buddhist feminism

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Buddhist Feminism as a Recent Understanding

Parallels between Buddhism and the Feminist understanding of equality between race, gender, class, sexuality and nationality have only recently begun to be explored. Buddhism's belief in understanding the truth of reality through practicing spiritual development is beneficial to feminist theory, particularly when compared to other religions. These parallels are undergoing evaluation as religious understandings of feminism become increasingly scrutinized in society and popular discourse.

Certain actions look to explore and connect Buddhist nuns. One unique problem that pertains to female Buddhists is their creation of a marginalized community in response to opposing the androcentric order of Buddhism, which isolates nuns to their respective region and separates them from other places. As nuns are isolated and not interconnected around the world, the Sakyadhita, or “Daughters of the Buddha '', was created with one of the goals of connecting ordained nuns around the world.

Buddhist Nun movements in the last few decades have an organizing emphasis on crossing racial and ethnic boundaries, across language differences, and tying opposing cultural viewpoints. One of the conflicting views is the cultural stance between Asian and Western values, with the West focusing on individual goals and fostering unique identity versus Asian identity in connection to community.

Ordination

Some Buddhist feminists advocate for the ordination of women in Buddhism. The ordination of women in Buddhism has been and continues to be practiced in some Buddhist regions, such as East Asia. It is being revived in some countries such as Nepal, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, as well as newly beginning in Western countries to which Buddhism has recently spread, such as the United States.

Recent developments in Sri Lanka had given nuns the right to official ordination. However, it is revealed that Sri Lankan nuns had created a marginal culture that separates themselves from the official Buddhist order. Lay nuns are practitioners of Buddhism, yet still hold onto their identity and roles of wives, mothers, and sexual beings. For the lay nuns, women who shave their heads, take on monastery robes and vow of celibacy are a threat to the social construction of womanhood.

In 1988, the lineage of Theravada bhikkhunis, or fully ordained nuns, was officially established in Nepal. Three Nepali Anagarikas were given ordination with the assistance of Fo Guang Shan nuns in Los Angeles. The female Theravada Buddhist communities in Nepal follow Burmese traditions of female renunciation. Some nuns detach from modern society and concentrate their time to meditate and study the Buddha dharma. Some take in the motivation to pursue such a path to escape traditional marriage and motherhood.

Through research, Darcie Price-Wallace highlights how Tibetan nuns reflect sentiments of feminism through the full ordination of female Buddhists. The findings reveal that the nuns’ attitudes reflect Buddhist soteriological inclusivity, which include ideas of gender equality and how men and women are equally similar. These nuns emphasize gender equality based on the results of their actions rather than equal opportunity to them. They stress the importance of actions over words, directing their focus towards achieving equality through spiritual practices instead of preaching it.

Criticisms

Jean Byrne argues that within this beginning of Buddhist Feminist understanding an ignorance of the reality of female and male roles may exist. Within her paper "Why I Am Not a Buddhist Feminist" she outlines the similarities shared between the two, and the possible increase in equality of genders, but highlights that because of this some misogynist and discriminatory aspects of Buddhism may be overlooked. The belief that Buddhism is a completely egalitarian religion concerns Byrne that this will overshadow some of the realities of Feminism in Buddhism. Postcolonial critics have noted the presence of more than one version of Buddhist feminism, critiquing, for example, the work of white liberal feminists like Rita Gross for presenting a myopic, universalist Buddhist feminism rooted in assumptions of white authority. In the process, the voices of non-white Buddhist feminists who may not fit the liberal mode of discourse are excluded and discounted.