Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
In the past two decades, English-language scholarship has challenged the gendered dimension of the Buddhist tradition. Spearheaded by Rita M. Gross (Buddhism after Patriarchy: a Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993]), Karma Lekshe Tsomo (Buddhist Women Across Cultures: Realizations [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999]), and Bernard Faure (The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2003]), to name a few, the new scholarship exposes the ways in which androcentric and often misogynistic Buddhist history has left half the story untold--namely, the story of Buddhist women. Several dozen monographs and edited volumes now examine the lives and practices of female Buddhists in the East and the West and analyze implications of these recovered stories for understanding Buddhism as a whole. However, aside from two books, by Martine Bachelor (Women in Korean Zen: Lives and Practices [Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006]) and Daehaeng Sunim (No River to Cross: Trusting the Enlightenment That's Always Right Here [Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2007]), a comprehensive scholarly analysis of Korea's female Buddhists had not been undertaken. Thus, Korean Buddhist Nuns and Laywomen, the first English-language effort to reconstruct a picture of "the life and history of Korean Buddhist nuns and laywomen, from the fourth to the twentieth century" (p. 8), is a welcome and long overdue volume.
As the editor Eun-su Cho points out, contemporary Korean Buddhist nuns comprise half the monastics in the largest Korean Buddhist order, the Chogyejong. Moreover, in comparison with nuns in other Asian countries, Korean nuns enjoy a high level of autonomy, as well as significant visibility in Korean Buddhism and culture. Equally important is the role that laywomen have played in protecting and buttressing the sangha, both at its zenith and...