Amy P. Langenberg

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.

Buddhist monastic law codes (vinaya) are rich sources for writing the history of the early nuns' community. If we hope to encounter these ascetic women of long ago as full real people, however, we must apply an intentional, transparent, critically informed, and sometimes interstitial reading strategy, not a theoretically naive historiography cloaked in philological rigor. Confronting head on the issue of what the vinaya actually can tell us about the early nuns' community, this essay offers a survey of hermeneutical approaches in vinaya studies. It articulates a revised approach based on accepted strategies within vinaya studies enhanced by innovations in the fields of religious studies, gender studies, historical linguistics, comparative law, and dharmasastra studies. It also analyzes several vinaya passages based on this revised approach, including a text legislating the nuns' use of what appears to be an ancient tampon when they are menstruating. Finally, it offers observations about the possible relationship between nuns' vinayas as texts and the realia of the early nuns' community. These observations include the possibility that the ancient Buddhist nunnery was a place where monastic women exercised certain types of agency as practitioners, interpreters, and even authors of monastic discipline, despite their oft-mentioned subordination to the male community.

Responding to and building upon José Cabezón's groundbreaking work, Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism (2017), this essay challenges a hermeneutic that capitulates to the androcentrism and misogyny of classical South Asian Buddhist views on female sexuality by suggesting avenues for 'reading against the grain' in search of alternative gynocentric views. In particular, it points to glimpses of a female sexuality that is relational, active, and creative in premodern South Asian Buddhist sources, especially vinaya. It also argues that a full and balanced treatment of sexual violence against women is an essential component of any comprehensive study of sexuality in classical South Asian Buddhism.

Modern people presume ‘sex’ to be a function of biology and ‘sexuality’ to be a fundamental aspect of identity. Since Buddhist monks and nuns are celibate by definition, many assume a uniform sex‐negativity in Buddhism. But Buddhist teachers and practitioners have thought about, talked about, and performed sex in many modes beyond the negative. Buddhism, a tradition originating in ancient India but straddling tens of centuries and multiple cultural, national, and linguistic boundaries, provides many opportunities for reflection on the putative universality of biological ‘sex’, and the theorized modernity of ‘sexuality’. How, when, and why do Buddhists have sex? Do Buddhists have a sexuality? This article employs the logical formula of the tetralemma to explore the topics of sex and sexuality in various Buddhist traditions, challenge the supposed sex‐negativity of Buddhism, and question the applicability of ‘sexuality’ in its modern usage as a term of critical analysis in Buddhist contexts.