Order Of Nuns Research Articles

Introduction

Introduction

The Role of the theri Sanhgamittā introducing order of nuns to Sri Lanka in 3rd century B.C.E

The Role of the theri Sanhgamittā introducing order of nuns to Sri Lanka in 3rd century B.C.E

Buddhism in the Feminist Context: Historical Experience and Modern Discourse

The author considers the problems of women's place in Buddhist culture in the context of feminist discourse. He notes that Buddhism is distinguished by a tolerant and respectful attitude to the female. Buddhism admits that women, along with men, are able to achieve enlightenment and find Nirvana. However, the relationship between male and female monastic orders in Buddhism was not fully equal. The order of nuns was considered to be the youngest in comparison with the order of monks, and the rules restricting the behavior of the nuns were more than for the monks, which was probably a forced step aimed at taking into account the realities of society. Despite this, the Foundation of the women's monastic organization, which opened the way for women to religious knowledge and spiritual rank, was in its essence a radical social revolution for that time. The emergence of the female monastic community was an example of a fundamentally new view of women and their position in society. With the release of Buddhism outside India female monasticism became widespread in many Asian countries. Later, however, in the countries of South, South-East Asia and Tibet, the Institute of full female monasticism disappeared. In the second half of the twentieth century the attempts to revive the Institute that have led to the emergence of the phenomenon of neonuns. As a result of the spread of Buddhism in the West, it was included in the field of gender studies and feminist discourse. The question of equality between women and men in Buddhism has been actively developed by Western female Buddhists in the feminist discourse, that has formed a statement about the original equality of the sexes in Buddhism. The theme of the status of women in society and their rights has become an important part of the social concept of Western Buddhism. The result was the emergence of the international women's Buddhist Association "Sakyadhita".

스리랑카 비구니 승가 소멸에 대한 고찰

이 논문에서 필자는 스리랑카의 비구니 승가의 소멸에 대해 탐구한다. 비구니 승가는 거의 1200년 동안 아누라다푸라(Anurādhapura)에서 번영하였다. 하지만 993년 아누라다푸라가 쫄라(Cōḷa) 침략자들의 손에 넘어가고 아누라다푸라 왕국이 쫄라 제국에 합병되면서 비구니 승가도 사라지게 되었다. 비구 승가도 동일한 운명을 맞이하였지만, 위자야바후 1세(Vijayabāhu I)가 쫄라 침략자들을 몰아내고 나서 복원되었다. 불행하게도 위자야바후 1세와 (빠락끄라마바후 1세를 포함한) 그의 후임 왕들은 비구니 승가 복원을 위한 어떠한 조치도 취하지 않았다. 적어도 미얀마 비문들이 13세기까지 미얀마에 비구니 승가가 존속했음을 입증하고 있음에도 불구하고 말이다. 싱할리즈 왕들과 비구들이 사라진 비구니 승가의 복원에 관심이 없었던 이유는 복합적이지만 대체로 세 가지로 유추해볼 수 있다. 한 가지 이유는 여성의 종교적 실천에 대한 애매모호하고 상충하는 모델을 제시하고 여성의 종속성과 하열한 업을 가리키는 간접적 힌트들이 존재하는 빨리 성전에서 찾을 수가 있다. 또 한 가지 이유는 폴론나루와(Polonnaruwa) 시기에 증대된 힌두교의 반여성주의와 남존여비사상이다. 세 번째 이유는 아란냐까(araññaka) 전통의 대두이다. 이러한 이유들에서 싱할리즈 왕들은 어려운 시기에 제한된 자원들로부터 더 많은 공덕(puñña)을 얻고자 비구 승가를 지원하는 쪽을 선택했던 것 같으며, 비구 승가도 비구니 승가의 존속을 바라지 않았고 싱할리즈 왕들에게 비구니 승가의 복원을 위해 필요한 조치를 취하도록 권고하지도 않았을 것이다.

Sound Effects in a Studio by Aidan Mathews (review)

representations of her in sculpture, paintings and stained glass and commemorations to her in the liturgy and in prayers. Various forms of her name, especially Brighid, Bríd, Brigid, Bridget have been popular for girls and an order of nuns, the Brigidines, was founded in her honour. In folklore she is venerated as the ‘Mary of the Gael’and even as foster-mother of Jesus. Her cult was widely established by Irish missionaries and emigrants on the continent of Europe from the seventh to the ninth century, and similarly, in recent centuries, in America, Africa and Australia. Since the mid-twentieth century the cult of St Brigid has declined, except with regard to the popular St Brigid’s Cross. Parents do not name their daughters after her as frequently as heretofore and the folk-tradition surrounding her is dying out. Somewhat ironically, St Brigid has been adopted as an icon by feminists who admire her achievements in a patriarchal society. Thus they echo Maud Gonne and Inghínidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland), who promoted her as a model for women at the beginning of the twentieth century. While the monograph is a valuable contribution to the historiography on St Brigid, it does not provide a satisfactory answer to those who doubt that she was a real person. Fr J Anthony Gaughan is a retired parish priest in the Archdiocese of Dublin and the author of numerous historical writings. Sound Effects in a Studio, Aidan Mathews (Cork: Southword Editions, 2017). In his biography Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan recounts meeting a guy who used to provide sound effects for radio shows. ‘I asked him . . . how he got the sound of the electric chair and he said it was bacon sizzling. What about broken bones? The guy took out a LifeSaver [mint] and crushed it between his teeth’. Dylan reflects, ‘I was raised on that stuff, used to quiver with excitement listening to these shows.’ In the poem, ‘Sound Effects in a Studio’,Aidan Mathews reveals how these associated sounds startle the imagination into accepting that what is being signified is real. In one particular scene of transformation, his eighteenth century heroine, ‘in a tank top and warm leggings under a denim skirt’, could Studies • volume 107 • number 426 250 Summer 2018: Book Reviews be a Greek station porter who is called Kurios Metaphor. ‘So let one thing stand for another’, the poet invites, our ordinary human lives laying claim on some deeper reality: ‘You breathing through a blocked nose now/ A breeze on the face of the deep, / My silence the only word for it’. ‘Francis of Assisi’, with its great opening line –‘Francis of Assisi is my bi-polar saint’ – takes an unconventional slant. Here the saint is interrogated as to gender clarification for ‘my manic depression’, this ‘neutered thing’ requiring for respite ‘the little vanillas of tranquillity’. ‘Is it Sister Stalker or Brother Trauma?’ ‘The wolf came to you with his hang-dog tail’, he appeals, ‘why not the werewolf?’ The poem reads as a howl against the frightening land of altered reality as the poet-child remembers being sent back to bed: ‘Stop the nonsense…though the stairs were melting in the sweat of my four feet on walkabout’. Mathews is a poet of the incarnational, our fleshy existence mapped for its floodplains and wetlands. For him there is no line of separation between body-blood and soul-divinity. Indeed, much of his writing carries the subtext that there is a surcharge of meaning in the nature of existence, for ‘the social lepers…damaged and ageing… are as human as God’(‘Healing the Lepers’). This short collection begins with the poem, ‘After Omagh’ – ‘It was where you turn at the meat-processing plant’ – the ferocity of the explosion, when it registers, silencing the impatient horn-blowing of those stuck in a trafficsnarl . His audacious pun, ‘The rest is sirens…’, captures all that cannot be said nor made amenable to speech beyond the sign language at pains to break the news on the News for the Deaf. A wry humour is never far away. Mathews’penchant for self-deprecation is one expression of it: ‘I walked our...

A Storied Sage: Canon and Creation in the Making of a Japanese Buddha by Micah L. Auerback

Reviewed by: A Storied Sage: Canon and Creation in the Making of a Japanese Buddha by Micah L. Auerback Margaret H. Childs (bio) A Storied Sage: Canon and Creation in the Making of a Japanese Buddha. By Micah L. Auerback, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2017. xii, 358 pages. $40.00, cloth; $40.00, E-book. This study of the many various biographies of the historical Buddha written in Japan over the course of fifteen hundred years focuses primarily on what [End Page 403] sources and motivations were behind various visual and written texts that convey biographical information about Śākyamuni. The premodern biographies are dealt with in just one chapter because there was not much interest in the historical Buddha, insofar as he was just a provisional manifestation of a "much greater cosmic reality" (p. 23). Bodhisattvas and the founders of the various denominations of Buddhism in Japan attracted more attention than did Śākyamuni. The point where this study blossoms with voluminous detail is when developments in historiography made biographies of the Buddha controversial in the early modern era. Eventually European studies based on Sanskrit texts came to dominate the discourse in Japan and the supernatural elements of early biographies were dropped in favor of credible stories of Śākyamuni as a historical personage. Auerback's coverage of these debates is exceedingly thorough. The following remarks are what struck this reader as highlights. The earliest Japanese biographies of the Buddha seem designed as teaching tools in which the Buddha himself is the teacher. Thus, the first chapter is titled "The Buddha as Preceptor." The oldest extant biography in handscroll format is the Kako genzai einga kyō (Illustrated sutra of past and present cause and effect) and the narrator is the Buddha himself. He tells of a former life and identifies personages from that prior life as people with whom he associated during his present life as Siddhartha (p. 40). This kind of handscroll copied its Chinese sources so closely that later scholars struggled to determine if they had been produced in China or Japan (p. 40). That conservatism continued to the extent that the format of eighth-century versions of this scroll, wherein illustration was presented parallel to and above the text, was still being followed in the sixteenth century. Biographical sculpture and paintings of this period were likewise produced in monastic environments and cited orthodox scripture (p. 60). Chapter 2, "The Buddha as Local Hero," describes how, in the first half of the Edo period, storytellers took up the topic of the Buddha's biography for wider audiences than the ones clerical authors of prior centuries had addressed. In otogizōshi tales and puppet plays, the focus shifted to how the Buddha suffered rather than his salvific teachings. New subplots, such as conflict between the Buddha's mother and her sister, were invented. Important scenes, such as that of the demon Māra trying to tempt Śākyamuni to abandon his religious quest, were eliminated. Most interesting is the development in these versions of the idea that Śākyamuni gained enlightenment not through his own strenuous efforts but due to the power of the Lotus Sutra or simply because he was "in the right place and sitting still" (p. 71). In reaction to the Edo-period vernacularization of the Buddha's biography in popular literature, a few reformist clerics wrote new, influential biographies using orthodox scripture. One of these, the nun Kōgetsu (1756–1833), wrote her biography of the Buddha in "elegant neoclassical Japanese prose" (p. 96) as part of her effort to reinvigorate clerical discipline, thus [End Page 404] the title of chapter 3, "Buddha as Exemplar." Her biography of the Buddha is notable for including a chapter on the founding of the first order of nuns, which had been neglected in Japanese biographies of the Buddha for several hundred years (pp. 109–11), and a chapter on the slaughter of the Śākya clan, probably for the sake of the lesson about karmic causality it presents (pp. 111–12). Chapter 4, "Buddha as Fraud," delves deeply into the work of Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843), who demythologized the Buddha through critical analysis of classical Buddhist texts. Atsutane called Buddhist scripture lies...

Networks and Bridges: Nuns in the Making of Modern Chinese Buddhism

Buddhist women have been building modern Chinese Buddhism for over a century and have been instrumental in the globalization of Buddhism. This article focuses on how Chinese Buddhist nuns constructed new networks, and their role as “bridges” between eras, people, institutions, and regions in modern times. The first section contextualizes the “Buddhist Revival” in turn-of-the-century China, and highlights the reforms of Buddhist modernizer Taixu regarding Chinese Buddhist women, particularly in the field of education. The second section discusses several networks of Buddhist women spanning a time-period from the late nineteenth century to the present, including those of two eminent nuns, Longlian and Tongyuan. I also discuss some reasons for the evolution of Taiwan's flourishing order of nuns and highlight networks of Taiwan nuns connecting Taiwan, China, Japan, and Hong Kong. The mission of these nuns past and present has been education, the key to the development of the nuns’ order and to the flourishing of Chinese Buddhism today.

Book Review

Jennifer Worth has written this novel based on her own experiences as a midwife working in London's East End in the 1950s. Working with an order of nuns practicing since the 1870s, she brings the poverty stricken conditions alive. The dedication of the midwives is quite humbling and the honesty of Ms Worth's writing is emotionally moving. The novel is an important piece of work detailing midwiferyhistory which would otherwise be lost to one incredible woman's memory. There is a beautiful description of the authors first breech birth at home, a 26-week old baby born prematurely who survived withkangaroo care at home, and a woman having her 25th baby in as many years.

Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South

Neither Lady Nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South. Edited by Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. i, 324. Tables. Cloth $55.00; paper, $19.95.)This collection of thirteen essays proves that thousands of southern women who were neither lady nor slave worked in sophisticated ways to promote the well-being of their families and communities. Neither Lady nor Slave promises to direct Southern women's history in significant new directions by exploring ordinary women's working (1). This book fulfills its promise. The well-written and thoroughly researched essays focus on a variety of women who normally are left out of southern history.The workers studied are a diverse group, including Native Americans, mill workers, teachers, domestics, prostitutes, and nuns. Despite variations of race, class, and profession, those studied managed to negotiate the market economy of the antebellum South. Two essays on Native-American women showed that they could operate in a capitalistic market economy and still maintain cultural traditions and older forms of production. After the Indian removal of the 1830s, basket making and selling was necessary for the family's survival. Another essay on the lives of yeoman farmers in South Carolina found that white females of all ages worked in the fields. Their contribution of female field-labor (which was often hidden from the public) combined with the creation of subsistence and market goods to give the yeoman farmer his treasured independence. A group of Ursuline nuns in New Orleans were more enterprising and economically independent than many of their married counterparts. This order of nuns used teaching, nursing, and other service activities to achieve financial autonomy. As slave owners, they imposed Catholic moral attitudes on the sexual and marital behavior of their slaves. Another theme, which runs through most of the selections, is the importance of class, race, age, and ethnicity to the type of work southern women pursued. A study of domestics based mostly on newspaper advertisements in border cities finds that demographic characteristics influenced employers' wishes for nurses, cooks, and general house servants. Another study of working women in Savannah shows that a number of complex variables beyond race and class such as age, ethnicity, and family background determined the type of work women performed. The last section of the book highlights women's work in the industrial sector of the South. These essays show women challenging and resisting traditional views toward labor and a surprising degree of interracial relations in the factories and mines.The medium of collected essays by a variety of authors gives the book the depth a case study of a single city would not. …

Power politics and religious faith: the fifth Martin Wight Memorial Lecture

In choosing a subject for this lecture, my mind turned to two books: both published during the war years, the first in 1941, Aldous Huxley's Grey Eminencel: the second at its very end, Arthur Koestler's The Yogi and the Commissar The titles of both have been incorporated into the language. The former was not its author's invention; but his use of it as the title of his study of Father Joseph won it a near universality of currency. So Lindemann is still spoken of as Churchill's scientific éminence grise. But the title of Koestler's essay, though less heard to-day, advertises dramatically a very important bifurcation of approach to the problems of human life and society, the one typified by the devotee in his ashram, the other by the commissar, the dedicated ‘social surgeon’ serving the cause of the total transformation of a given human society in the light of the directives of the party to which he belongs. But of course there is an important sense in which in Father Joseph, the subject of Huxley's book (which was incidentally a very well researched piece of work), the two life-styles are to a considerable extent conjoined. Father Joseph is at one and the same time the devoted fanatical Capuchin, the father-founder of the Calvarian order of nuns and the skilled, ruthless agent of Richelieu's purposes. He was no yogi, still less a commissar, but a man whose spiritual teachings rate an admittedly short and critical reference in Bremond's famous history of 17th century French spirituality, and one who played an unquestionably important part in the diplomatic history of a period, wherein diplomacy might well be characterized as war carried on by other means.