Buddhist Nuns and Gendered Practice: In Search of the Female Renunciant [Paperback]

Nirmala S. Salgado offers a groundbreaking study of the politics of representation of Buddhist nuns. Challenging assumptions about writing on gender and Buddhism, Salgado raises important theoretical questions about the applicability of liberal feminist concepts and language to the practices of Buddhist nuns.Based on extensive research in Sri Lanka and interviews with Theravada and Tibetan nuns from around the world, Salgado's groundbreaking study urges a rethinking of female renunciation. How are scholarly accounts complicit in reinscribing imperialist stories about the subjectivity of Buddhist women? How do key Buddhist concepts such asdukkha,samsara, and silaground female renunciant practice? Salgado's provocative analysis questions the secular notion of the higher ordination of nuns as a political movement for freedom against patriarchal norms. Arguing that the lives of nuns defy translation into a politics of global sisterhood equal before law, she calls for more-nuanced readings of nuns' everyday renunciant practices.AcknowledgementsIntroductionPart I Narration1 Decolonizing Female Renunciation2 Institutional Discourse and Everyday Practice3 Buddhism, Power, and PracticePart II Identity4 Invisible Nuns5 Subjects of Renunciation6 Becoming Bhikkhunis, Becoming TheravadaPart III Empowerment7 Renunciation and ''Empowerment''8 Global Empowerment and the Renunciant EverydayNotesWorks CitedIndexNirmala S. Salgado(MA, SOAS, University of London; PhD, Northwestern University) has published widely on Buddhist nuns. She teaches religion to undergraduates at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois. A good corrective to much scholarship on the practices and lives of Buddhist nuns and therefore deserves serious attention by all scholars of Buddhism. --CHOICE

This brilliant and unsettling work enjoins us to think the 'everyday life' of Buddhist female renunciants in Sri Lanka without translating it into the 'globalatinizedlã4