Aspects and Values of Buddhism for the Women of the West

Abstract

Living in India, which is not yet linked into the electronic autobahn at quite the screaming pace of the rest of the world, I received my information about this conference in two barely legible faxes, which arrived more than three weeks apart and presented me with two different titles for my paper. The first was "Aspects and Values of Buddhism That Are Attractive to Peoples in the West" and the second was that printed in the conference program, "Aspects and Values of Buddhism for Women in the West." These are rather different topics, but in another way they are not so different. In that half the "peoples in the West" are women, the first topic in a sense includes the second, but one might approach the topic quite differently if considering it purely in terms of what Buddhism has to offer women. However, I think that certainly in the past and probably still now, most Western women encounter Buddhism first as a religious system, an idea system, or a way of being in the world, without much thought as to how it fits with feminist values, and only after time are forced to confront it in those terms. Thus, that is how I will approach the topic as well, first looking at those aspects of Buddhism that are attractive to Westerners in general, and then considering specifically what Buddhism does or does not offer Western women.