Amy P. Langenberg

This overview of gender and sexuality in contemporary American Buddhism starts from the premise that gender identities and sexual subjectivities are inextricable from other strong vectors of identity, especially race and ethnicity, but also ordained celibacy and survivorhood. Stepping around the narrative that white converts and their liberal feminisms have created a gender egalitarian Buddhism in America, it offers a different story by exploring the Buddhisms of Asian American and Asian immigrant lay women, Asian American ordained women, celibate women, Black women, trans and queer Buddhists, and sexual abuse survivors—often overlapping categories—at the seams of sex and gender. It argues that their innovative interpretations of Buddhist teachings and lifeways are shaped by their complex identities and experiences of violence and disruption. It concludes that the Buddhism of the multiply sexed and gendered individuals and communities profiled cannot be said to exist at the margins; rather, the rich multidimensionality of contemporary American Buddhism is now in large part their creation.

The study of global Buddhism through a study abroad encounter presents invaluable opportunities for teachers and students at liberal arts institutions to contemplate the conundrum of global citizenship, a standard aim of liberal education in North America. When studying abroad, students become viscerally aware of their own positionality, which is reflected back to them constantly as they move through the social and cultural landscapes of Buddhist Asia. This reflection leaves them eager to raise, to the level of critical thinking, what is quite literally an embodied experience of difference and privilege. The essay connects the field of Buddhist studies to a larger conversation in the field of global education, arguing that Buddhist studies travel courses must interrogate concepts of global citizenship, address the legacies of colonialism, and teach the principles of ethical travel, in addition to introducing students to the living traditions of global Buddhism.

This chapter analyzes the appropriation of a Buddhist monastic space by girls and young women. The author’s case study is the Peace Grove Institute, a small residential Buddhist community of 21 girls between the ages of 7 and 31 located in Lumbini (Nepal), site of the Buddha’s birth. The Peace Grove Institute provides a quasi-monastic, socially safe space for girls which allows them to delay marriage and to continue education. Langenberg also highlights how this institute is an ongoing creation of the Peace Grove girls themselves. She explores the modality of female agency of the Peace Grove nuns within the disciplinary norms of female Buddhist monasticism, and within the educational and cultural environment of Peace Grove nunnery. Langenberg sees an otherwise less obvious dimension of Buddhist female agency at work, which she describes as aesthetic agency, detectable in the girls’ expressiveness, confidence, physical charisma, and mobility—a significant manifestation of and precondition for the exercise of female power in gender-conservative Lumbini.