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

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 as dukkha, samsara, and sila ground 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.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
Nirmala 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.

Review :
"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 of The 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 voices of nuns within their own lived existence and shows that from a cross-Buddhist viewpoint the many nuns living in our contemporary world do not have to carry the burden of uniformity." --Gananath Obeyesekere, Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Princeton University "The strength of Salgado's admirably rigorous and comprehensive book lies in how she questions the conceptual vocabulary of post-Christian secular modernity that organizes liberal feminist translations and interpretations of the practices of Buddhist nuns. This is an important and accessible work that presents a timely and very necessary engagement with postcolonial theory for the study of religion." --Ruth Mas, Assistant Professor of Critical Theory and Contemporary Islam, University of Colorado, Boulder