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Essay on Buddhism and Women in America
Women have always been a creative force in American Buddhism and, since the early 1980s, have come to hold a wide range of prominent positions as leaders and teachers, whether as fully ordained nuns or as laypeople. Joan Halifax, founder of the Upaya Institute in New Mexico, has been ordained in three different Zen lineages and incorporates many New World themes in her Buddhist teaching and writing. Buddhism provides the opportunity for women from many different traditions and countries to discover each other as they work together for the dharma in organizations such as Sakyadhita.
A drive for gender equity among Buddhists over the course of the 1980s and '90s reflected the egalitarian idealism associated with the 1960s as it continued to play out within the convert community. Women have played significant and diverse roles in the transmission of Buddhism to the United States from the start. One of the earliest, Helena Blavatsky, put her own idiosyncratic stamp on the dharma before transforming it into a popular and important alternative religious movement. Others played supporting roles, such as Mrs. Alexander Russell, an American housewife who hosted Shaku Soyen on one of his American tours. Ruth Fuller, a central figure in the Sokei-an circle in New York in the 1930s, was among the first Americans to travel to Japan and practice in Zen monasteries.
A few decades later, women like Ruth Denison and Jiyu Kennett, founder of California's Shasta Abbey, studied in Asia and were authorized to teach well before Buddhism turned into anything resembling an American mass movement. But between the '60s and the '90s, American women became a major force as practitioners and as teachers, intellectuals, and leaders in ways quite different from women in Asia. Virtually all commentators within the Buddhist community now note that one hallmark of American Buddhism is the way in which the dharma is being transformed in terms of gender equity......
