John Blofeld, Bodhisattva of Compassion: The Mythical Tradition of Kuan Yin (Shambhala Dragon Edition) (Boston: Shambhala, 1988) (From the backcover: "This portrait of the Goddess of Compassion is both an informative study by a leading scholar of Buddhism and an engaging account of the author's search for the mystical significance of the goddess. An object of joyous devotion in Chinese folk religion, Kuan Yin is revered for her saving power: it is said that anyone in distress who calls on her with sincerity will be rescued from suffering and harm. On a deeper level, Kuan Yin symbolizes the liberating energy of compassion, which is an indispensable aid in the quest for enlightenment." From the text: "A devotional approach, like that of Pure Land followers, is currently out of favour in the West, being too reminiscent of the Christian and Jewish faiths which many people no longer find acceptable. Few Asians share this antipathy. Even Theravada (southern) Buddhism has a greater element of devotional practice than is generally recognized by Westerners. The same is true of Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism, many of whose most ardent followers (including the great Daisets Suzuku) have affirmed the validity of the Pure Land doctrine and regard Pure Land practice as a particularly efficient means of attaining Enlightenment. Even today, the Pure Land School has a much greater following among Japanese Buddhists than any other.... Under present circumstances, Pure Land practice may not be well suited to the West; nevertheless, its critics among Western Buddhists would do well to ponder the implications of Mahayana philosophy more deeply before dismissing Pure Land teachings, as they sometimes do, as being contrary to the spirit of traditional Buddhism. As Asian Buddhists have always understood, different kinds of people need to make widely different approaches to the same truth. This is possible because one in not dealing with understanding, which is to some extent governed by the rules of logic, but with a practice that, if properly performed, will achieve results however one may initially conceive it. A man who presses an electric light switch will succeed in turning on the light, even if he happens to be under the impression that he is switching on the radio" Id. at 89-90. "If this book has a particular message for Western Buddhists, it is: 'Do not fall into the trap of making distinctions that are meaningful only at a very superficial level. Ch'an, Pure Land and Vajrayana are not three paths to the same goal, but three gateways to the same path, or even one gateway seen in various lights.'" Id. at 121.).
Thomas Cleary & Sartaz Aziz, Twilight Goddess: Spiritual Feminism and Feminine Spirituality (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2000) ("Twilight imagery of the Goddess, like personalized imagery of God, intertwining light and dark, may be a penetrating mirror of the human mind, which finds ambiguity in its experience of the world and projects intention on the universe at large. To peer into the personality of the hidden weaver beneath the warp and woof of religious culture, we can attempt to look through the seams of the images and shadows of the twilight Goddess of light and darkness." "Throughout history, all over the globe, religions of the Goddess, spiritual perceptions of the feminine, and the divine matrix of existence itself are to be found sometimes in the light, sometimes in the dark, now revealed, now concealed. It is not only because of social and political conditions that Goddess religion may reveal or conceal itself as the time requires; for there is spiritual time as well as terrestrial time." "Revelation and concealment are not only terrestrial tactics but also spiritual needs, because the Goddess reflects both our brightest hopes and our darkest fears, helping us to confront them both in their times with good grace and inner fortitude." "Twilight Goddess is named for this mirror of human hopes and fears; for this is a book of meditations and musing on spiritual visions of the Goddess of light and darkness, the Goddess of life and death, and on the many expressions of feminine spirituality and spiritual feminism inspired by such visions over the ages." Id. at 3.).
Lenore Friedman & Susan Moon, ed., Being Bodies: Buddhist Women on the Paradox of Embodiment (Boston & London: Shambhala, 1997) ("We spend our lives in bodies, and if we realize anything we care to call 'enlightenment,' it's in our bodies. In this book we wanted to address a tendency we've both observed for spiritual seekers to leave the body behind, From our study of the Dharma we are clear that the body is not eh ultimate truth, and that attachment to it causes suffering. But still, we don't simply leap into the realm of the Absolute. The Absolute is here, we say, in each embodied moment--when we breathe, when we sweat, when we bleed, when we feel desire. even then? Even then, we say. No other time. Id. at x.).
Beata Grant, Daughters of Emptiness: Poems of Chinese Buddhist Nuns (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003) (My three 'favorite': (1) By Miaozhan: "In the shade of two trees and the hanging green of the cliffs, / One lamp for a thousand years broke open the dark barriers. / I too now realize that phenomena are nothing but a magic show / And happily grow old among the mist, the rivers, and the stones." Id. at 48. (2) By Wuwei: "After sixty-four years of working and toiling, / I've managed to achieve a samadhi of wisdom. / At dawn, I'll let it all go and head home to the West, / And the bright moon will blanket the earth just as before." Id. at 58. And (3) By Mingxiu: "Instructions to the Congregation": "Recklessly speaking of wisdom, carelessly talking of religion, / Mistakenly I entice the deaf to learn from my own deafness. / From the beginning form and substance have been complete, / Affairs follow the pattern of the world manifesting in emptiness. / It is because you are attached that opportunities are blocked; / Beings, once free of emotions, can fully penetrate the Way. / Right in the midst of this is where the truth can be realized, / As the sun heads toward the west and the river flows east." Id. at 112.).
David R. Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (New Preface) (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1986) ("An important aspect of the reverence for the divine feminine in the Hindu tradition is an awe for the sacrality of the land itself and for the Indian subcontinent as a whole. The most ancient expression of this in the Hindu tradition is found in the Rg-veda and its several hymns that praise the goddess Prthivi. It is clear that the hymns to Prthivi are grounded in reverence for the awesome stability of the earth itself and the apparently inexhaustible fecundity possessed by the earth. When Prthivi is described, characterized, or otherwise praised, the earth itself is usually the object of the hymn. Prthivi is the earth in a literal sense as much as she is a goddess with anthropomorphic characteristics." "An underlying implication of perceiving the earth as a great and powerful goddess is that the world as a whole, the cosmos itself, is to be understood as a great, living being, a cosmic organism...." Id. at 178. This reverence for the earth as a goddess is so radically different from the Christian attitude towards the earth as something merely provided by god to man for man's exploitation.).
David [R.] Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1997) ("What is one to make of a group of goddesses that includes a goddess who cuts her own head off, another who prefers to be offered polluted items by devotees who themselves are in a state of pollution, one who sits on a corpse while pulling the tongue of a demon, another who has sex astride a male consort who is lying on a cremation pyre, another whose couch has as its legs four great male gods of the Hindu pantheon, another who prefers to be worshiped in a cremation ground with offerings of semen, and yet another who is a haglike widow?" "Are these goddesses, who are known as the ten Mahavidyas, bizarre creations of radical groups within the Hindu tradition, obscure beings whose significance is peripheral to the basic themes of Hindu spirituality? Should we dismiss them as tangential, perhaps even irrelevant, to Hindu religion? After years of studying and musing on them, it seems to me that there is a logic to the group as a whole and that even its most outrageous members, if understood within their proper context, reveal important spiritual truths." Id. at 1. "Appreciating the liberating potential of antimodels, it seems to me, is one way of appreciating the Mahavidyas. It is a theme I take up at several points in the book. I argue that it is a feature of certain aspects of tantric spirituality in particular, but I also think it is a muted theme in much of the nontantric Hindu tradition as well. There is an insistence in Hinduism that the world as it appears to us is a show, that there remains hidden from our normal view an aspect of reality that is different, perhaps shockingly different, from our ego-centered way of apprehending it. The world is not the way we like to think it is, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will make progress in acquiring spiritual maturity. The Mahavidyas, as antimodels, are awakeners, visions of the divine that challenge comfortable and comforting fantasies about the way things are in the world." Id. at 7.).
Anne Carolyn Klein, Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) ("This book is a conversation between the profoundly different voices of Tibetan Buddhism and Western feminism. In some ways their worlds are incommensurable. Feminism is a modern, largely secular quest for political power and psychological well-being; Buddhism is an ancient religious quest for spiritual insight and inner discipline. Yet Buddhists and feminists share important common ground in that questions of selfhood are central to both...." Id. at xiii. "Western women are likely to experience themselves as individuals first and members of society second, despite the fact that they seek to undermine the hyperindividualism associated with male-centered ideas in Europe and North America. Their sense of individuality is less than that of Western men, but far greater than that of their Asian counterparts. Far more than in the modern West, in Asian cultures one lives within a well-articulated social matrix intricately connected with one's own projects and sense of identity. Even the freest and most independent of Tibetan religious seekers is embedded in cultural and social certainties in ways virtually unknown in the West today. This is true of other Asian cultures as well. Japanese are said to see babies as overly individualistic and in need of training to become connected; in the United States babies are seen as too connected and in need of training to become individuals. Analogously, the Korean-born therapist Kim Insoo Berg...observes that in the United States it is common to punish children by confining them to home. In Korea, the greatest punishment is to turn them out of the home, the place they most want to be." Id. at xvii. "It is of course an enormous challenge to live as if one were fearlessly available to experience whatever life presents. But there are many possible and interesting applications of this challenge. It is possible not to feel overwhelmed in a life filled with an enormous diversity of choices, relationships, responsibilities, and cultures? Is it possible to take in new and strange ideas without dismissing them, but making best possible use of the fresh vistas they suggest?" "It is helpful to find that despite the deep impact of diversity on one's identity, there is a space of the self free from this fracturing, a space from which to proclaim what changes must be made? Can one also, from this deeper dimension, find a space to be free from others' constructions, and furthermore, from the limiting or prejudicial projections one throws onto others? Can one use this dimension to maintain a broader vision of the wider good of community, of the world itself, to open up the narrow focus of concern on self or famiy and act accordingly?" Id. at 202.).
Susan Murcott, First Buddhist Women: Poems and Stories of Awakening (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1991, 2006) (By Nanduttara: "I used to worship fire, / the moon, the sun, / and the gods. / I bathed at fords, took many vows, / I shaved half my head, / slept on the ground, / and did not eat after dark. // Other times / I loved makeup and jewelry, baths and perfumes, / just serving my body / obsessed with sensuality. // Then faith came. / I took up the homeless life. / Seeing the body as it really is, / desires have been rooted out. // Coming to birth is ended / and my cravings as well. / Untied from all that binds / my heart is at peace." Id. at 62.).
Miranda Shaw, Buddhist Goddesses of India (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2006) (From the bookjacket: "The Indian Buddhist world abounds with goddesses--voluptuous tree spirits, maternal nurturers, potent healers and protectors, transcendent wisdom figures, cosmic mothers of liberation, and dancing female Buddhas. Despite their importance in Buddhist thought and practice, these female deities have received relatively little scholarly attention, and no comprehensive study of the female pantheon has been available. Buddhist Goddesses of India is the essential and definitive guide to divinities that, as Miranda Shaw writes, 'operate from transcendent planes of bliss and awareness for as long as their presence may benefit living beings.'" "Beautifully illustrated, the book chronicles the histories, legends, and artistic portrayals of nineteen goddesses and several related human figures and texts. . . . " "In addition to being a comprehensive reference, this book traces the fascinating history of these goddesses as they evolved through the early, Mahayana, and Tantric movements in India and found a place in the pantheons of Tibet and Nepal.").
Miranda Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1994) (From the backcover: "The crowning cultural achievement of medieval India, Tantric Buddhism is known in the West primarily for the sexual practices of its adherents who strive to transform erotic passion into spiritual ecstasy. Historians of religion have long held that the enlightenment thus attempted was for men only, and that women in the movement were at best marginal and subordinated and at worst degraded and exploited. Miranda Shaw argues to the contrary, presenting extensive new evidence of the outspoken and independent female founders of the Tantric movement and their creative role in shaping its distinctive vision of gender relations and sacred sexuality.").
Karma Lekshe Tsomo, ed., Buddhism Through American Women's Eyes (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1995) ("The words of the female elders (theris), so fortuitously documented, are practically the only record we have of women speaking from the heart about their Buddhist spiritual life. The theris were surely not the only women throughout 2600 years of Buddhist history to gain insights, yet of the others we have no record. And, as extremely valuable as these verses are for documenting Buddhist women's spiritual achievements, they are, after all, the words of women belonging to a very different time and culture than our own. Today's woman want to hear from today's women, to whom they can easily relate." "Here, then, we give women a chance to express themselves on the Dharma and their experiences of adapting and implementing the teachings in their daily lives. Rejecting the preconception that woman are only qualified to speak on women;s issues, these experienced women practitioners discuss Buddhist philosophy, its contribution to world peace, its practical application to everyday life, and the practice of Buddhism in the Western world." Id. at 13.).
Karma Lekshe Tsomo, ed., Buddhism Through American Women's Eyes (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1995) ("The words of the female elders (theris), so fortuitously documented, are practically the only record we have of women speaking from the heart about their Buddhist spiritual life. The theris were surely not the only women throughout 2600 years of Buddhist history to gain insights, yet of the others we have no record. And, as extremely valuable as these verses are for documenting Buddhist women's spiritual achievements, they are, after all, the words of women belonging to a very different time and culture than our own. Today's woman want to hear from today's women, to whom they can easily relate." "Here, then, we give women a chance to express themselves on the Dharma and their experiences of adapting and implementing the teachings in their daily lives. Rejecting the preconception that woman are only qualified to speak on women;s issues, these experienced women practitioners discuss Buddhist philosophy, its contribution to world peace, its practical application to everyday life, and the practice of Buddhism in the Western world." Id. at 13.).
