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

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.

Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part I Narration
1 Decolonizing Female Renunciation
2 Institutional Discourse and Everyday Practice
3 Buddhism, Power, and Practice

Part II Identity
4 Invisible Nuns
5 Subjects of Renunciation
6 Becoming Bhikkhunis, Becoming Theravada

Part III Empowerment
7 Renunciation and ''Empowerment''
8 Global Empowerment and the Renunciant Everyday

Notes
Works Cited
Index

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 'globalatinized' language of our gendered politics. After reading this work, we can no longer arbitrate 'third world' questions of gender, renunciation, religious existence, law, and secularism in the same way. --Ananda Abeysekara, author ofThe Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures

In my view this is the most interesting and important recent study of Buddhist nuns. Salgado frames the multiple voicel£g