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Many of the women I spent time with had been involved norms and textual resources as well as complicated
with Buddhist groups, teachers and organizations social and political histories that have been passed
for decades and they felt such a strong connection to down to us in different ways. Furthermore, they can
really living out Buddhist teachings as authentically as also be contradictory, as many other large and complex
they could. The subtitle of my book is ‘commitment, religious traditions are. Drawing on the reading that I
connection and community’ and through the book I show have done as a scholar, there are contained in Buddhist
how these three interrelated themes dominate women’s text and practice ideas that are both challenging for me
practices and the choices that they make, particularly as a woman or for women wishing to ordain, but also
the relationships that they had with local Buddhist those that are ripe with soteriological possibility. In
communities. Although Buddhism is clearly an effective this regard, I have been strongly influenced by superb
transnational religion (and many women had important textual scholars such as Amy Paris Langenberg in her
connections with teachers and groups outside of the 2017 book, ‘Birth in Buddhism: The Suffering Foetus
UK), what was very important to them was their local and Female Freedom’ where she argues that what we
groups and supporters, and maintaining communities might perceive as negative within certain Buddhist texts
that surrounded them as well as connections with fellow (for example, the connections made between women’s
travelers in the dharma, and their teachers. In the book, I bodies and suffering) actually can offer liberatory
draw on stories of women who physically built Buddhist potential. I tend towards seeing the development
centers in Britain, including laying bricks and floors of Buddhist traditions as being shaped by dominant
and doing their best (despite often very challenging social norms of the time, but my role as a researcher
circumstances) to keep communities functioning. This of contemporary Buddhism isn’t to say what is ‘true’ in
is a difficult task, and requires vision and dedication, Buddhist history, but is to highlight the experiences of
which the women I spent time with displayed frequently. people in different groups and contexts today.
Women’s pioneering stories have often been missed
out of our historical narratives about the development Some of the Buddhist women you interviewed have
of Buddhism in Britain, and I wanted to use my book to been practicing Buddhism for many decades. Do
highlight and preserve them. I hope that when my book they feel that Buddhism in UK is now a mainstream
is read, the stories of pioneer women who worked very religion compared to when they first started to
hard to establish Buddhism on alien British shores are practice Buddhism?
inspirational.
What I chart in the book are some of the profound
As a Buddhist scholar, do you find that the Buddha changes that have occurred in British Buddhist
was particularly bias against women, for instance, communities over the past few decades, and I
the nuns, or was he responding more to social specifically focus my research on groups which are
norms of his time? predominantly made up of Buddhist converts (those
who didn’t grow up with Buddhism as their natal
I find this a difficult question to answer, and in many religion). One of my participants who became interested
ways my first response is as a practitioner rather in Buddhism as a young person in the 1950s, reported
than a Buddhist scholar (although those identities are how little information she had access to about Buddhist
clearly intertwined). As a practitioner (I am part of teachings in the early days, and she had to resort to one
a lay Theravada tradition), I believe that the Buddha- or two library books that mentioned Buddhism in her
dhamma offers liberatory potential for all regardless local, rural library. Other participants mentioned that
of gender, but of course, social norms shape the roles if they wanted to be part of a Buddhist group in their
that people are allowed to take and how they have been local area, they had to set one up and run it themselves.
treated throughout history as well as their experiences. This is most certainly not the case for those interested in
Buddhist traditions are multifaceted and complex, and Buddhism now, where there is a wealth of information
they house within them a huge range of practices, rituals, available online (including online meditation classes