by Sandy Boucher
Women began voicing the Dharma two and a half centuries ago during the Buddha’s lifetime. The Buddha’s aunt, Pajapati, led the first women’s liberation march to demand ordination, a successful demonstration that resulted in the Buddha’s establishing the bhikkhuni order.
Now 2,500 years later, we are continuing that legacy and addressing the still-unfinished business around the world of changing patriarchal dominance and exclusion into equality and justice. In the United States, we have made large strides in the last twenty-five years since 1980 when I first did zazen in a Zen center where I found my Theravada teacher Ruth Denison and began the vipassana practice that I continue to this day. We have participated in the great adventure of Buddhism’s coming to the West and have transformed many elements of this spiritual path in the movement toward the evolution of a distinctively American form of Buddhism. We can be proud of our accomplishments. But for successive generations of Buddhist women to come, there is much unfinished business!
I want to give a brief appraisal of what feminist work in Buddhism has accomplished, and perhaps what it has failed to do.
Women began voicing the Dharma two and a half centuries ago during the Buddha’s lifetime. The Buddha’s aunt, Pajapati, led the first women’s liberation march to demand ordination, a successful demonstration that resulted in the Buddha’s establishing the bhikkhuni order.
Now 2,500 years later, we are continuing that legacy and addressing the still-unfinished business around the world of changing patriarchal dominance and exclusion into equality and justice. In the United States, we have made large strides in the last twenty-five years since 1980 when I first did zazen in a Zen center where I found my Theravada teacher Ruth Denison and began the vipassana practice that I continue to this day. We have participated in the great adventure of Buddhism’s coming to the West and have transformed many elements of this spiritual path in the movement toward the evolution of a distinctively American form of Buddhism. We can be proud of our accomplishments. But for successive generations of Buddhist women to come, there is much unfinished business!
I want to give a brief appraisal of what feminist work in Buddhism has accomplished, and perhaps what it has failed to do.
