Women-led Buddha-dharma, from Brazil to Breda

Despite having been excluded from the upper echelons of religious leadership in many traditions, women play a core part in religious communities. Women tend to attend religious rituals more regularly than men, and bring their male relations and spouses to these events. In more traditional societies, women facilitate community cohesion and assist the integration of […]

A Conversation with Tenzin Palmo on Nuns and Challenging Sexism

In this extended discussion recorded on the spot by Sónia Gomes, Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo discusses important but often uncomfortable gender issues in Vajrayana, including the need to challenge engrained cultural sexism in monasteries and the plight of ordained Western women, who more often than not have no institutional, psychological, or moral support after becoming nuns. […]

Embodied Women

What does it mean to be a woman in the Buddhist tradition? To me, even a question as important as bhikkhuni ordination in the Theravada and Vajrayana schools is not as basic as the question of “the woman” in Buddhism. Nor am I convinced that gender is inconsequential to conventional Buddhist life just because gender […]