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.

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.

Although the Buddha is praised as the great physician of human suffering, the monastic life he is credited with chartering is ambivalent with respect to the medical arts. Monks and nuns are explicitly required to nurse one another through illness, a directive found in Vinaya texts (the disciplinary codes of Buddhist monks and nuns) that reportedly came about when the Buddha happened upon a sick monk left lying in his own waste, abandoned by his fellow monks (see chapter 1§3).¹ At the same time, scriptures understood to record the Buddha’s teachings (calledsuttas or āgamas) and other Vinaya directives indicate

Recent decades have seen a groundswell in the Buddhist world, a transnational movement pushing towards better opportunities for Buddhist women. Middle period Indian Buddhists had a habit of conceptualizing suffering in terms of, and liberation in contradistinction to, the vivid experiences associated with human reproduction. Buddhist canonical scriptures remind people time and time again that birth is fundamentally unsatisfactory, a precursor to disease and death. Ultimately, ancient Buddhists' efforts to make use of the contours of the human birth process to understand human life, death, and freedom were acts of world-building and world-peopling. The significance of the Garbhavakranti becomes more obvious, however, once the centrality of the birth metaphor to Indian Buddhist constructions of gender and freedom is acknowledged. Thus, a particular instance of what Michel Foucault calls a "discourse", a multiform of knowledge that is generated by and perpetuates a certain human environment, emerges around the topic of birth in the Indian Buddhist context.