This book is a beautiful final gift from the pioneering Buddhist feminist and teacher Rita Gross—you might say her last testament. Rita was writing this book at the time of her death from a massive stroke on November 11, 2015. She was in her beloved home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, accompanied by her Siamese cats, her five hundred houseplants, her delicious library of scholarly, religious, and spiritual classics, and her many Buddhist artifacts, statues, and paintings. Writing was her passion; she had already completed six books and edited five more; her published articles are numerous. But it was always her dream to publish a dharma book with Shambhala Publications, and this one represents the pinnacle of her offerings. Rita was a close friend and colleague, and it is a great honor to introduce this book to you.
Rita came to Buddhism after a tumultuous history with religious communities. Raised in the German Lutheran Church in northern Wisconsin, she was excommunicated at age twenty-one for her edgy inquisitiveness and independence. In her first marriage, she converted to Judaism briefly and continued to appreciate Jewish ritual and communalism, even while she chafed at its patriarchal structures. India beckoned her with a pantheon of dynamic goddesses, and she entered a lifelong love affair with Hinduism, but she avoided institutional involvement. In 1976, she moved to Boulder, Colorado, and Naropa Institute to explore her attraction to Buddhism and meditation, and that is where she finally found a spiritual home. Sitting practice became a peaceful refuge; study under the tent of Tibetan Buddhism fed her voracious intellect; and guru devotion stole her heart. She became a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and entered the demanding training of the Shambhala Buddhist tradition.
When Rita became a Buddhist, however, she came with a fresh “outsider-analyst” perspective.1 She was a feminist scholar and had cofounded the 1971 Women’s Caucus of the American Academy of Religion. As one of the few female graduate students at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in the 1960s, she had dared to insist that the religious experience of half of humanity was ignored in the study of religion, and she completed the first dissertation in the emergent field of women’s studies on the topic of Australian female aborigine religious life. Her male professors were constantly taken aback by her clarity, persistence, and boldness in forging new methodologies in the study of religion, ones that relied on women’s voices—personal narrative, biography, lay ritual enactment, and anthropological case study. She shared these innovations with her feminist colleagues, and a new field of women’s studies was born.2
Given her history with patriarchal biases in religious communities, she entered her newfound Buddhist community with caution and critique. As she wrote, “Having already had trips through two sexist religions—Christianity and Judaism—I had no interest in repeating that experience. Enough already with patriarchal religious institutions!”3 Later she wrote of how deeply Buddhism spoke to her, explaining that she could not avoid becoming a Buddhist. “Buddhism was simply too profound to let the patriarchs have it without protest,” she later wrote.4
As Rita and I became friends in that Shambhala Buddhist community in early 1978, we shared a passion for feminism, for meditation, and for liberative Buddhist teachings. I also had experienced the crushing effect of patriarchy in academia and society, and I also struggled to reconcile a spiritual hunger and a feminist thirst, to borrow terminology from the feminist author Carol Flinders.5 As Rita and I completed long retreats together, the longest one lasting three months in the spring of 1980, we both felt the power of practice to settle the mind, open the heart, and refine the intellect. This led to deep conversations and many questions that laid the basis of lifelong friendship.
By 1985, Rita and I hatched a plan to write a book together, and we proposed to the State University of New York Press a feminist critique of Buddhism (hers) and a Buddhist critique of feminism (mine). She had previously edited two books of essays, Beyond Androcentrism (1977) and the groundbreaking Unspoken Worlds: Women’s Religious Lives (1980), the first collection of case studies about women from disparate cultures. I had published only a few articles and was an unknown in the publishing world. I deeply appreciated Rita’s generosity in suggesting this joint project. We negotiated a contract and began our work.
As we developed our outline, we encountered the differences that would ultimately lead to dissolving this particular book partnership. Rita felt a stronger affinity and trust for feminist perspective, and she sharply criticized in the finest detail the patriarchal structures of Buddhist texts, traditional institutions, Tibetan monasticism, American Buddhist communities, and Shambhala Buddhism itself. Even as she felt unquestioning devotion for our mutual teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, she could clearly see the circle of men who surrounded him and ran his organization, and she saw the obstacles faced by women who stepped at least temporarily into positions of power.
I shared these perspectives, but I was personally so inspired by the practice, the liberative teachings themselves, and the experience of belonging to a close-knit community that I was willing to navigate the injustice. In retrospect, I realize that I had arrived in Boulder as a student of Trungpa Rinpoche as a refugee from searing experiences on the feminist battleground, probably more intense than Rita had directly experienced. Or perhaps I was not as tough as she was. I had suffered the indignities of a Human Rights Commission class-action suit against my university, and its backlash, when they terminated me without cause. After my termination, I had directed a rape crisis center for three years, during which I had served as an advocate for sexual assault victims in hospitals and courtrooms, while encountering their imprisoned rapists in experimental confrontation interventions. While these experiences were in some way empowering to my feminist sensibilities, they were also personally and emotionally devastating. I was spiritually hungry. Applying myself to the rigorous demands of practice, study, and service brought tremendous healing and liberation. I recognized that feminism would not address my deepest suffering, and I sought a spirituality that would.
As Rita went on to write her 1993 landmark book, Buddhism after Patriarchy, her “metamorphosis from outsider-analyst to insider critic and advocate”6 became manifest. In this book, she took what she called “the prophetic voice.”7 Following women’s studies and feminist methodology, she intricately untangled the threads of Buddhist traditions that could support a feminist practicing within a historically patriarchal tradition. She valorized the liberative teachings of Buddhism while assailing the patriarchal structures that thwarted the ability of those teachings to genuinely deliver women’s liberation. In so doing, she addressed with clarity and consistency Buddhism’s ambivalence toward women.
At their foundations, the teachings of the Buddha clearly were aimed equally at the liberation of both men and women. Rita demonstrated that teaching after teaching in the Buddha’s sutras of the early period, as well as in the Mahayana, assured liberation for women, speaking of women’s enlightened potential, their capacity for practice, and their commitment to awakening. Surveying the foundational Indian teachings, Rita self-consciously “revalorized” Buddhism, meaning that she determined that no matter how sexist Buddhist institutions might appear, the tradition as a whole is not irreparably sexist.8 The purpose of her book, she wrote, was to retrieve “an accurate and usable past” that feminist practitioners could rely on as they committed to Buddhist practice.9
Nevertheless, human-made patriarchal structures from Indian society permeated Buddhism, so that female monastics were relegated to lower status, women played little role in leadership, and educational and meditative training was denied them. This follows a pattern of patriarchal religion everywhere, Rita argued, and suggests that Buddhism as a religion has denied the very foundations the Buddha intended. For this reason, Buddhism requires a “feminist reconstruction” in order to fulfill its promise embedded in the foundational teachings.
In her extensive critique and reconstruction, Rita distinguished between the foundational liberative view and the institutional conservatism of Buddhism, and her reconstruction envisioned what she called a “two-sexed” model of a vital, creative spiritual tradition. She called this “androgynous” Buddhism, in which women and men cocreate a living tradition together. Rita challenged women and men to free themselves from the “prison of gender roles,” her very definition of feminism. Until her death, she was committed to androgynous Buddhism at tremendous risk to her academic career and reputation.
Rita was well known in feminist circles in religion for her critiques of patriarchy and androcentrism, but many in Western and Asian Buddhist communities do not know the impact in those circles of her groundbreaking work. Shortly after the publication of Buddhism after Patriarchy, I was a presenter at a conference at the University of Toronto on the wide-ranging impact of the book. The feminist presenters there ferociously attacked Rita for practicing and advocating for a hopelessly patriarchal religion. The Buddha was male, they argued, and the patriarchal structures of Buddhism reflected his own biases. They detailed many of Buddhism’s sexist sins, real and imagined. How in good conscience could a card-carrying feminist like her betray her convictions so drastically?
In spite of this rejection by her previous feminist colleagues, Rita became the spokeswoman of a Buddhist feminism in the decades to follow, traveling North America and the world on behalf of disenfranchised women. She was renowned among Asian Buddhist women for her advocacy, and she spoke frequently at dharma centers of the major practice lineages in North America. For decades, she was a regular presenter at conferences of Sakyadhita, the international Buddhist women’s organization that advocates for Buddhist nuns and for leadership roles and education for Buddhist women worldwide. Eventually Rita herself moved into more centralized leadership roles within Buddhist institutions, first as a senior teacher and meditation instructor in Shambhala International and then later as lopon, empowered teacher, representing Her Eminence Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche, leader of the Mindrolling lineage of Nyingma Tibetan Buddhism in the West and a rare woman tulku incarnation. Until her death, Rita taught courses and led retreats at Khandro Rinpoche’s primary meditation center in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. This was the most fulfilling and joyful period of her life as she nurtured dharma students and guided them in their study and practice. Rita adored Khandro Rinpoche and faithfully practiced the teachings of the Nyingma as a pillar of her Western lineage.
What began as solitary advocacy from the margins matured for Rita into leadership from within. Her later books bring Buddhist feminism into the mainstream of contemporary Western Buddhism, and her 2009 book, A Garland of Feminist Reflections, represents a retrospective of her forty years of explorations.10 Her activist voice changes into that of an elder thinking back over her years of challenging boundaries. She writes of her hesitancy to focus so much on her intellectual work and writing on feminism and women’s studies, saying it all had a “certain accidental and reluctant quality.”11 But given the rampant androcentrism and patriarchy of academia and the world, this work was necessary for her full functioning as a complete human being—she was compelled by what she calls “circumstances and necessity.”12
In previous books, Rita’s prophetic voice awakened Buddhists to the necessity of completing dharmic endeavors, drawing from the core liberative teachings of the Buddha and critiquing androcentric institutional structures in order to open positions of leadership, authority, and learning to Buddhist women. In this current book she moves to another endeavor—supporting those same Buddhist women to sink into dharma teachings in order to fully find their own liberation from the prison of gender roles. She does this as senior dharma teacher, pastoral in her view and wise in her detailed counsel. In reading, we know she has tread this path herself and is showing us how to find the deep spiritual food we have hungered for. She has come full circle.
In this book she chides contemporary Western women and men for their excessive attachment to gender and for the gender stereotypes they hold that imprison themselves and others. She argues that clinging to gender roles has caused immeasurable suffering for women and men, and she observes that an essential point of the path is to contemplate the egolessness—indeed emptiness—of truly existent gender.
Yet the path Rita lays out is not mere spiritual bypassing. That is, it is not helpful to just assume that gender is meaningless or inconsequential and that mind beyond gender is accessed through some kind of leap of faith. She warns us that finding freedom requires deep training and precise contemplation, denying neither the absolute nor the relative truths along the way. Her book is a classic study of the Noble Truths through the lens of gender identity.
The first chapters of her book describe again, summarizing many of her previous writings, how both female and male gender roles are imprisoning for Buddhist practitioners, the first Noble Truth. Women have limited access to teachings and practice opportunities. They are expected in traditional societies to prioritize caring for their husbands and families and are warned away from independence. Their bodies are challenged with menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing. They also are demeaned by male projections upon them as sexual objects. In societies that place a premium on appearance, old age is a direct threat to women’s status. Men also are imprisoned by gender roles, which include the expectation of their economic, cultural, sexual, and physical success. Men suffer also from fears of being feminized in a culture where this is considered denigrating. Rita speculates that the male gender role may actually be killing men. The purpose of this portion of her book is to inspire a classic Buddhist desire for renunciation, couched within gender roles in our everyday life.
The cause for this suffering is that women and men have unthinkingly clung to their gender identities, Rita argues. Feminists can be just as guilty of this clinging as others in focusing excessively on their female identities. This clinging leads to fixation on victimization as well as to arrogance regarding female birth. It also causes the suffering of others, as when feminists disrespect nonfeminists or men. She reminds us that releasing clinging is the key to relief from suffering from the prison of gender roles and suggests the use of classic Buddhist practices to do so. Ethically, we need to commit to doing no harm and to refraining from sexual misconduct. This will bring tremendous liberation, she promises.
What does freedom from the prison of gender roles look like? she asks. Again, she turns to classic Buddhism. This freedom is not so much about changing lifestyles to traditional or radical ones; it is about changing the mind. The enlightened mind has equanimity but is not apathetic. The enlightened mind still sees injustice, patriarchy, and androcentrism. Not relying on anger, the enlightened mind moves to challenge these and change them. She argues that Buddhism has always had a feminist thread that opposed male dominance and that feminism has been indigenous to Buddhism.
Along the way, she challenges socially engaged Buddhism to take up the cause of feminism, as she wonders why this has been so lacking in Buddhist activism.
There are moments when we might wonder if Rita had not quite finished her writing. She tended to work alone on her books, and I had never seen this manuscript until her passing. If I had seen it earlier, these are the questions I would have asked:
Rita, what more could you say about critiques of the gender binary itself that imprisons not only women and men but also those who do not identify with either? Could you address transgender practitioners? (Shambhala editors informed me that Rita had, in fact, intended to include a short section on this topic, but it was never completed.)
What perspectives might you develop about intersectionality, an analysis of the interlocking oppressions that create societally imbued prisons of race, ethnicity, class, ableism, and ageism? You know that third-wave feminism acknowledges that women come from a variety of sociocultural locations—black, brown, queer, poor, non–English speaking. Surely there is more to this endeavor than understanding the constructed nature of gender alone and being included in Buddhist institutions? Isn’t the prison about more than gender roles?
Rita, could you provide more explicit examples of studying the constructed nature of gender identities along the classic lines of Madhyamaka logics or Mahayana emptiness contemplations? Your book begins with Dogen Zenji’s injunction that to study the Buddhaway is to study the self, and that to study the self is to forget the self. Could you trace more closely how we study the self so that we could forget the self?
All in all, this book clearly gathers Rita’s many years of thinking, writing, meditating, and teaching into one flowing narrative, sharing from a dharmic perspective how we can free ourselves from clinging to gender roles. Finally, this is what she cared about most, and this was most central to her own journey from liberal and then radical feminist to senior Buddhist teacher and feminist elder. It is a fitting culmination of a lifetime of sparkling analysis, dogged determination, and heartfelt devotion to the liberative path of dharma.
Judith Simmer-Brown is Distinguished Professor of Contemplative and Religious Studies at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and Acharya in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. Rita wrote of her: “Judith has been my closest and most long-term Buddhist friend all these years….She is the only person with whom I share so many of my passions—feminism, the world of Buddhadharma, interreligious exchange, and academia….To those four concerns we could probably add a mutual love of India.”13 Judith’s book, originally planned with Rita, is Dakini’s Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism (Shambhala Publications, 2001). She has also coedited, with Fran Grace, Meditation and the Classroom: Contemplative Pedagogy for Religious Studies (State University of New York Press, 2011).