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Buddhism Fe Minism BUDDHISM ——————–– & ——————–– FE MINISM VOLUME 3 | ISSUE 1 The Arrow A JOURNAL OF WAKEFUL SOCIETY, CULTURE & POLITICS The Arrow explores the relationship between contemplative practice, politics, and activism. We investigate topics in politics, economics, ecology, conflict transformation, and the social sciences. Inspired by the vision of meditation masters Chögyam Trungpa and Sakyong Mipham for a “union of social life and spiritual wakefulness” in society, The Arrow provides a critical and much needed space for investigating the meeting point of contemplative wisdom and pressing issues of climate change, racism, inequality, and conflict. Staff Advisors Chief Editor Founding Editor & Strategic Advisor Gabriel Dayley Kai Beavers Associate Editors Advisory Board Rachel DeMotts Michaele Ferguson Sara Lewis Holly Gayley Jacob Richey David Kahane Jessica A. Stern Adam Lobel Greg Lubkin Creative Director Judith Simmer-Brown Alicia Brown © 2016 The Arrow Journal www.arrow-journal.org Contents VOLUME 3 | ISSUE 1 FEATURES “Like Water into Water,” If Buddhism, Then Feminism. But What Sort of Feminism? 4 Alexis Shotwell IN RESPONSE Where Do We Look for Buddhist Feminism? 14 Holly Gayley Relative Inequality, Absolute Equality 19 Sara E. Lewis The Arrow | September 2016 Arrow | September The What Water? Feminism, Shambhala Buddhism, and the Feminine Principle 22 Judith Simmer-Brown The Arrow VOLUME 3, ISSUE 1 | SEPTEMBER 2016 “Like Water into Water,” If Buddhism, Then Feminism. But What Sort of Feminism? by ALEXIS SHOTWELL UDDHIST FEMINIST RITA GROSS died, unexpectedly, in Bthe fall of 2015; just before her death, we corresponded about the article you are about to read. I was interested in the claim, which she had made many times over the last forty years, that merging Buddhism 4 and feminism is like pouring “water into water”—that they seamlessly merge into one another. More boldly, Gross argued that holding to any of the core principles of Buddhism commits us also to core principles of feminism. This analogy, of water pouring into water, is also used in Buddhist teachings to evoke the way our experience of ultimate reality might be related to our experience of conventional reality, or the way that our mind and our teacher’s mind might meet. On this analogy, there is no inherent conflict between Buddhism and feminism, and indeed, if we follow Gross’s arguments, identifying as Buddhist should require us to practice feminism. But if Buddhism implies feminism, and I believe it does, the question remains of what sort of feminism it implies. In this short engagement, I’ll begin by discussing some key argu- ments for the doctrinal coherence of Buddhism and feminism, affirm- ing the claim that if we are to attain liberation from samsara, we must also liberate ourselves from certain conventional forms of reality, such as sexism. I agree with Gross: Anyone who is a practicing Buddhist should also be a practicing feminist. I am in dialogue here with Gross’s work on the synergies of practicing feminist and Buddhist liberation, particularly in her canonical text Buddhism After Patriarchy, as well as in the more recent A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religious Exploration. Gross’s definition of feminism is that it involves A. SHOTWELL IF BUDDHISM, THEN FEMINISM “freedom from the prison of gender roles” and the “radical practice of 5 the cohumanity of women and men.”1 If we are going to take up the feminist imperative in Buddhist practice, I argue that we do well to elaborate what we mean by “feminism.” There are many forms of fem- inism, though this is often not clear in popular culture’s understanding of feminism. There are three strands of feminism currently operating in the North American context that are particularly relevant for our thinking about Buddhism: liberal feminism, radical feminism and intersectional feminism. After first explaining why Buddhists should be concerned with feminism, I’ll examine these feminist approaches briefly, and conclude with an argument that current intersectional, or integrated-analysis, feminism is the most fruitful form for Buddhists to adopt. Gross makes four arguments for the claim that Buddhism and feminism have salient similarities: (1) Both maintain an allegiance to subjective experience and return to it as a key determinant of truth; (2) both express “the will and the courage to go against the grain at any cost, and to hold to insights of truth, no matter how bizarre they seem from a conventional point to view”;2 (3) both use their commitment to experience, combined with a certain outrageous disregard for received conventionality, to confront and directly work on habitual patterns and their results; and finally, (4) both hold to the possibility of libera- tion from the world as it now manifests. But even if one rejects these as common characteristics of both Buddhism and feminism, it is possible to argue that holding to certain key tenets of Buddhism would result in feminist behaviors. Consider three core teachings with feminist effects: emptiness, Buddha nature, and limitless compassion. The doctrine of emptiness of inherent nature holds that there is nothing in the world that is un- changing or independent. Instead, every way the world manifests is a relational, contingent, and changing unfolding of itself. Famously, gender fluidity has been a key scriptural example of this teaching—the “Goddess” chapter of the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, for example, stages a debate about gender stability between an elderly Śāriputra (one of the Buddha’s key interlocutors) and a “certain goddess” who appears be- cause she is delighted by a dialogue between Vimalakīrti and Mañjuśrī. Śāriputra asks the goddess what stops her from transforming herself out of her female state (the implication being that this state manifests a less fortunate birth), and she responds by saying that she has never been able to discern an innate female state to her being. Generously, THE ARROW VOL. 3(1) | SEPT. 2016 A. SHOTWELL IF BUDDHISM, THEN FEMINISM 6 Left to right: she posits that perhaps Śāriputra will have better luck—she magically White Tara, transforms him into her goddess form, takes his form, and asks him Ekajati, and Vajrayogini to define what he would transform. When he is unable to do so, she Illustration by instructs him, “All women appear in the form of women in just the Alicia Brown same way as the elder appears in the form of a woman. While they are not women in reality, they appear in the form of women. With this in mind, the Buddha said, ‘In all things, there is neither male nor female.’”3 Of course, this is true of everything in the relative world: We will never find anything unchanging and non-contingent, because there is no such thing. Naturally, then, we will not find any essential and unchanging nature to gender either; any honest Buddhist is bound to say that it follows that there is no way in particular that gender will manifest in the world, and no way in particular that people possessing gender ought to be. So any imputation that “boys will be boys” or “that’s women for you” is—doctrinally, anyhow—just one more false imputation to be shed as part of our practice. A second doctrine, Buddha nature—or as we put it in Shambha- la, basic goodness—is the only thing we might find that is, as Chög- yam Trungpa puts it, “unborn, dwells nowhere, and is unconditional, open space.”4 There is something that does not have conceptual refer- THE ARROW VOL. 3(1) | SEPT. 2016 A. SHOTWELL IF BUDDHISM, THEN FEMINISM ence points, that does not arise and fall away, that does not dwell and 7 change, and we call that thing our inherent nature. Basic goodness doesn’t have conventional characteristics, and so, obviously, one of the characteristics it doesn’t have is gender—or racialization, disability and ability, class, sexuality, ethnicity, or anything else in particular. Because it is unconditioned by relative truths like these, Buddha nature or basic goodness is a ground that can give rise to the possibility of working in a skillful way with the effects of the relative world. And the relative world’s main notable effect is remarkable suffering, which is distributed unevenly along fault lines such as gender. But again, holding fast to an experiential understanding of basic goodness requires us to recognize that it is everyone’s nature, completely unconditioned by the identity formations that make up who we are in the relative world. This rec- ognition does not mean that we bliss out or ignore the distribution of suffering in the realm of relative experience; rather, by recognizing the incoherence of imputing essential characteristics to identity and hold- ing an understanding of unconditioned nature, authentic practitioners are called to respond to oppression, injustice, harm, and suffering. This call to respond to the suffering involved in the relative world is tied to the third core teaching that turns out to have feminist effects: a commitment to the radical practice of compassion. To quote again from the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, the bodhisattva “follows the way of liberation without ever abandoning the progress of the world.”5 Be- cause of our understanding of basic goodness, or ultimate nature, prac- titioners are better able to respond to the world in all of its difficulty and all its specificity. And this will mean taking seriously and respond- ing well to the ways that suffering manifests and is perpetuated by our practices in the world. As Gross says, It is very common for Buddhists to try to understand what it is like to defuse the delusions of being a permanent, abid- ing, independent entity, but those same Buddhists seem to assume they will still be gendered, even when they are no longer attached to an imaginary self.
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