Women in Asian/Asian North American Religion: Whose Asian/Asian North America? Whose Religion?

Abstract

Women in Asian/Asian North American Religion:Whose Asian/Asian North America? Whose Religion? Sharon A. Suh (bio) In thinking about how to engage a more nuanced dialogue between Asian/Asian North American feminist theologians and similarly racialized religious others, I begin this essay with some suggestions about how we might move forward after having taken a step back to consider possible roadblocks to thick engagements with and about gendered and racialized subjects across religious traditions. My concern is for the vexing phenomenon of the hyperinvisiblity of Asian/Asian North American lay Buddhist women in the broader discourses of Asian/Asian North American feminist theological reflections. I ask to what extent might Asian/Asian North American feminist theological reflections intersect, or not, with racialized and gendered experiences of Buddhism and argue that we might glimpse the possibility of a constructive interreligious and intercommunity engagement in earnest by intentionally soliciting and drawing non-Christian religious peoples and worldviews into the discussion. As a scholar of Buddhism in a Jesuit institution, my engagement with Asian/Asian North American Buddhist laywomen in Seattle has introduced me to nuanced ways to move beyond interreligious methods that recenter Christianity, scripturalism, and Western hegemony. Toward that end, I first offer a caution against repeating the tendency to view Buddhism as primarily a meditative practice and then seek to highlight one of the most significant Buddhist teachings for many of the Asian/Asian North American lay Buddhist women that I have had the honor of meeting over the past twenty years: karuna (compassion). In so doing, I argue that thinking with and through the gendered racialized lives of Buddhists can help us engage in a politics of solidarity. Despite the seeming ubiquity of meditation as the primary form of Buddhist practice, recent survey results of Asian American Buddhists from the 2012 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life indicate that 61 percent of respondents seldom or never meditate.1 This fact certainly does not make them nominal or inauthentic Buddhists ignoring practices found in the texts. Instead, the data corroborates that there are many ways of practicing Buddhism beyond meditation that include attending community services at the temple on special holidays, chanting sutras, offering food to monks and nuns, burning incense, and lighting votive candles and lamps to honor the deceased. The presumption that [End Page 137] meditation makes one an authentic Buddhist (a popular view many Western Buddhists hold) has had the effect of rendering nonmeditating Buddhists superfluous to “the tradition” and simplistic practitioners of a less than authentic religion. Yet, if as the Pew study on Asian Americans and religion indicates, most Buddhists engage in practices such as celebrating lunar new year, ancestor veneration, and observing the Buddha’s birthday and enlightenment, then it is perhaps these Buddhists and their forms of practice that should be invited to engage in the most fruitful and constructive kinds of dialogues about religion that take as a given embodied, raced, gendered, classed, and sexed experiences. Let’s Talk about Living, Gendered, Raced Buddhists Not Protestantized Buddhists The Buddhisms of Asian/Asian North Americans are often cast aside as popular devotional practices by the broader white Buddhists and also not considered serious religion by those with more Protestant leanings toward sola scriptura. Yet, for the many Japanese American Buddhist women that I have met in Seattle, it is the practice of everyday life and expressions of gratitude that arise from the recognition of interdependence that bring about significant spiritual transformation not meditation. For the Korean American Buddhist women and men I encountered in Los Angeles, meditation played little role in their religious lives; instead, it was communal engagement, devotional chanting, singing, and listening to dharma talks that comprised the majority of their practices.2 If not in the main worship hall of the temples, women were bowing in front of the statues of the various Buddhas found in many a Buddhist temple. Meditation simply did not hold pride of place in their Buddhist lives. Despite evidence to the contrary, there remains a significant racial divide found between popular and scholarly constructions of Buddhism as a meditative tradition and Asian/Asian North American Buddhists engaged in devotional worship. In a...