The Emerging Feminine Face of Buddhism

If the Buddha had been born a woman, would future generations have known more about his intimate feelings? The sorrow he might have felt growing up without his mother -- who died during childbirth -- or the anguish he might have felt when, as a young man, he left his family to seek enlightenment?

Like the world's great prophets, the Buddha generated a body of wisdom that has endured over the centuries, yet he left behind little trace of his emotional life.

As feminists once sought to link the personal and the political, however, a growing number of American women Buddhist teachers are connecting the personal and the spiritual. In books and workshops, they are speaking out on the way their emotional experiences of love and suffering have shaped their inner development.

In the process, they are humanizing the traditionally impersonal face of Buddhism.

In her classic book "When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times," for example, the American-born Buddhist nun Pema Chodron describes how her husband's affair and their subsequent divorce sparked her spiritual quest. "When anyone asks me how I got involved in Buddhism," she wrote, "I always say it was because I was so angry with my husband. The truth is that he saved my life."

Likewise, Vipassana lay teacher Sharon Salzberg wrote in "Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience" how a childhood riven by despair -- abandoned by her father at age 4 and an orphan by age 9 -- compelled her to seek out spiritual truths after a childhood "curled up in bed, lost in a separate shadowed existence built of sadness."

A college class on Buddhism seemed to offer Salzberg a way out of her melancholy. Reading about the Buddha's Third Noble Truth -- liberation from suffering -- she writes that she began to glimpse "the possibility of defining myself by something other than my family's painful struggles and its hardened tone of defeat."

She took up the study of Buddhism in earnest on a trip to India, adopting the Buddha's story about freedom from suffering as her own new narrative on life. She is now the senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Society and Center for Buddhist Studies in Barre, Mass.

Yet while Buddhist practices may have played a role in transforming Salzberg's painful childhood wounds, she in turn contributed her own experience as a contemporary Western woman to certain core doctrines.

Take, for example, the Buddhist philosophy of detachment, which many equate with cutting off feelings. Salzberg's own understanding of the principle of non-attachment, however, is more nuanced.

"When we're in the grip of certain emotions like anger, fear or jealousy, our world gets very small," she said in an interview. "So the teaching is not to push them away, but to be able to feel what we're feeling and not lose perspective. Mindfulness and detachment is about being connected in a much larger way when we're lost."

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