Rita M. Gross

Rita M. Gross

Rita M. Gross (1943–2015) was Professor Emerita of Comparative Studies in Religion at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. An important figure in the study of women in religion in general, she was also a Vajrayana Buddhist practitioner and teacher, appointed a lopon by Mindrolling Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of eleven books including her classic Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism.

Rita M. Gross

Rita M. Gross (1943–2015) was Professor Emerita of Comparative Studies in Religion at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. An important figure in the study of women in religion in general, she was also a Vajrayana Buddhist practitioner and teacher, appointed a lopon by Mindrolling Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of eleven books including her classic Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism.

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GUIDES

The Future of Religion: A Reader's Guide

In the world of religion, some things stay the same, while many are constantly adapting to meet our new world of the internet and cell phones, scientific discovery, increasing awareness of gender and race dynamics, multiculturalism, the numbers of people identifying their religion as “none” or “spiritual but not religious,” and so much more.

We have chosen a few books below that address these issues, each in its own way.

The Religion of Tomorrow

$34.95 - Paperback

By: Ken Wilber

"The religion of tomorrow, according to Ken Wilber, will not be one religion, but all religions guiding their respective constituents toward oneness with Ultimate Reality. This book is Ken Wilber’s comprehensive synthesis of all the elements that make for human development from the Big Bang through the course of material and biological evolution. The recent discoveries of science, especially in the areas of developmental psychology and historical criticism, as well as mystical experience, have enabled him to bring together contemporary science, the wisdom of the world religions, and an integral presentation of the human condition with all its potential. The endless complexities of the evolutionary process gives way to a sublime simplicity, culminating in the spiritual and integral evolution of the human person toward unity with That Which Is." —Thomas Keating, author of Open Mind, Open Heart

Buddhism beyond Gender

$29.95 - Paperback

By: Rita M. Gross

“Rita Gross offers readers an amazing example of a lifelong, ongoing commitment to feminist thinking and practice. Her visionary insistence that the path to ending patriarchal domination must lead us beyond gender is a revolutionary paradigm shift, one that can lead to greater freedom for everyone.”
—bell hooks

Integral Buddhism

$19.95 - Paperback

By: Ken Wilber

What might religion look like in the future? Using Buddhism to explore this question, Ken Wilber offers insights that are relevant to all of the great traditions. He shows that traditional Buddhist teachings suggest an ongoing evolution leading toward a more unified, holistic, and interconnected spirituality. Touching on all of the key turning points in the history of Buddhism, Wilber describes the ways in which the tradition has been open to the continuing expansion of its teachings, and he suggests possible paths toward an ever more Integral approach. This work is a precursor to and condensed version of Wilber’s The Religion of Tomorrow.

Mindfulness on the Go

$12.95 - Paperback

By: Jan Chozen Bays

If you’ve heard about the many benefits of mindfulness practice but think you don’t have time for it in your busy life, prepare to be proven delightfully wrong. Mindfulness is available every moment, including right now, as Zen teacher Jan Chozen Bays shows with these twenty-five mindfulness exercises that can be done anywhere. Use them to cultivate the gratitude and insight that come from paying attention with body, heart, and mind to life’s many small moments.

Hard to Be a Saint in the City

$16.95 - Paperback

By: Robert Inchausti

It’s been said that Jack Kerouac made it cool to be a thinking person seeking a spiritual experience. And there is no doubt that the writers he knew and inspired—Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and others—were thinkers seeking exactly that. In this re-claiming of their vision, Robert Inchausti explores the Beat canon to reveal that the movement was at heart a spiritual one. It’s about their shared perception of an existence in which the Divine reveals itself in the ordinary.

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Why Go beyond Gender? | An Excerpt from Buddhism beyond Gender

Rejecting the Idea of Gender Roles

Buddhism beyond Gender

The Prison of Gender Roles

What “it” has a greater hold on people’s imaginations or limits them more than ideas about what biological sex must mean, what I call “the prison of gender roles”? Almost all conventional people—often called “ordinary worldlings” in Buddhist texts—as well as many Buddhists hold fast to the notion that sex and gender must mean something definitive and incontrovertible. I cannot count the number of times convinced, sincere Buddhists who believe in egolessness have, nevertheless, adamantly argued with me that gender could not be dharmically irrelevant. It felt so real to them, the most real factor among their many identities, and, therefore, must mean something. In fact, a well-known Buddhist author once asked me to write an essay on what is distinctive about women’s enlightenment experience! I declined that invitation but countered that I would contribute an essay called “How Clinging to Gender Identity Subverts Enlightenment.” To imagine there could be something distinctive about women’s enlightenment experience is to suppose that gender identity exists as a real entity, rather than as something ephemeral and ultimately insubstantial. It would entail the claim that gender identity, alone among conditioned phenomena, is not empty of inherent existence but truly exists. Clinging to gender identity and letting conventional ideas about gender dictate one’s life thus contradicts all central Buddhist teachings. One would then also have to contend that egolessness is gendered, which would be a self-contradictory, illogical proposition. Imagine trying to hold on to both ends of the contradiction: though there is no permanent abiding self (or ego), nevertheless gender is real. Illogical as that proposition is, many seem to hold to it nevertheless.

Imagine trying to hold on to both ends of the contradiction: though there is no permanent abiding self (or ego), nevertheless gender is real. Illogical as that proposition is, many seem to hold to it nevertheless.

Why, if it is so absurd to regard egolessness as gendered and if clinging to gender identity indeed subverts enlightenment, does the prison of gender roles remain so strong? In Buddhist terms, such errors of judgment usually result from insufficient analysis and contemplation, and will persist so long as serious analysis and contemplation are lacking. And no one, least of all the Buddha, ever said it would be easy or quick to do the analyses and contemplations required to fully realize the relative character of all our relative, samsaric, worldly identities, to stop expecting more of them than they can possibly deliver. Nevertheless, that transforming and transcending change of expectations, no matter how difficult it may be, is what we need to accomplish if we want to be free. I once heard a wise Buddhist teacher say that if we could realize what the Buddha had understood in an hour or two, even a year or two, or possibly even a decade or two, it probably wouldn’t be worth much. But no one who has ever experienced some taste of freedom from the conventional, including freedom from the prison of gender roles, has ever said that it was not worth the requisite time and discipline.

The Dharmic Response to Gender

Buddhist disciplines need to include contemplation of these truths and the development of greater awareness of them. Yet mere mention of feminism, gender, women’s equality, or related topics brings giggles, hostility, and an assumption that such discussions could be of interest only to women and need not concern men, even though men are as fully gendered as women. These common ways of rejecting those who bring up topics pertaining to gender give the impression that the proper dharmic response to questions about gender is to ignore and suppress them. Especially when teachers are answering questions from timid (usually female) students about gender and Buddhism, a usual response is to strongly suggest that only people who are not sufficiently dedicated to Buddhadharma would ever think of raising questions about traditional Buddhist ways of dealing with gender—that good practitioners would not raise such issues.

Countless times I have heard revered teachers reply, somewhat angrily, to questioners, “Aren’t you over that yet!” or “Don’t you know that enlightened mind is beyond gender, neither male nor female, so, therefore, concerns about gender are unnecessary and irrelevant?” The Asian teacher newly arrived in the West says in a shocked voice, “But in Asia, we really revere our mothers.” Or the quintessential answer of the inexperienced teacher, “Just practice more. Sitting on the cushion solves everything. Eventually you won’t mind gender discrimination if you just practice enough.” No other dharmic question generates the answer that it would be more dharmic to just ignore what gives rise to the question!

The deep pain buried in these questions about gender deserves better answers than telling students that they should have already transcended that pain when they have only begun to have a little awareness of the peace that transcending conventional, samsaric ego can bring. And the teachers need to explore far more deeply how much the suffering of the samsaric ego is intertwined with the gendered ego—for both women and men. In fact, we should equate all three terms and use them interchangeably—“conventional,” “samsaric,” and “gendered” ego.

The deep pain buried in these questions about gender deserves better answers than telling students that they should have already transcended that pain when they have only begun to have a little awareness of the peace that transcending conventional, samsaric ego can bring.

The Response to Questions of Gender

But when dharma teachers answer questions about gender in such fashions, their very defensiveness, which turns so quickly into a recommendation to ignore, indicates that they may not have fully come to terms with the questions themselves. Asian teachers dealing with Western students may be misled by the superficial, recent veneer of equality between men and women, assuming equality to be much more deep-seated in the West than it is. For one thing, Western students have never been taught that “enlightened mind is beyond gender, neither male nor female.” Nothing in the Western religious or cultural heritage even hints at a state of mind “beyond gender, neither male nor female.” Everything from the original human being to the deity is sexed—male sexed. Everything of value in the culture has been the monopoly of males. So how could a Western student be expected to take as a real possibility for herself what the Buddhist teacher expects her to already know? It seems to me that some Asian teachers have little intimation of how much their Western students have internalized Western stereotypes of female inferiority and how deeply they have been scarred by their religious upbringing. Additionally, few male Asian teachers have worked deeply with female dharma students in their cultures of origin.

Contrary to all the revered teachers who recommend that, because enlightened mind is beyond gender, we should ignore our discomfort with conventional, deeply entrenched practices surrounding gender, Dogen Zenji’s text tells us we must study that gendered self before we can truly forget it. And, that if we do not study the self, we can’t and won’t forget the self either. Clearly, this sequence of studying and then forgetting applies to the gendered self as much as to any aspect of the self. It is curious that traditional analyses using “color” or “shape” to break down our assumption of real selfhood never use the terms “male” or “female” in the same way. This omission allows people to easily believe in egolessness while clinging to conventional gender norms and stereotypes. Would it not be just as useful to disclaim selfhood based on having a male or female form as it is to disclaim selfhood conferred by color or shape? Doing so intensifies the deconstructive power of analysis, making egolessness much less a theoretical belief and much more an “in your face” reality. Without that additional step, people can easily do the traditional exercises and genuinely believe in egolessness but still be quite attached to gender.

Why Is it Important to Rigorously Deconstruct Gender?

But if we all believe that enlightened mind, the natural state of mind, is beyond gender, why is it important to so rigorously deconstruct gender? When teachers scold students who bring up gender issues by reciting the slogan that enlightenment is beyond gender, they are missing an important point. People cannot go to a state of mind “beyond gender” on the spot any more than they can just drop self-grasping the first time they hear teachings about egolessness, even if they immediately and intuitively grasp the truth of those teachings. That transformation takes a great deal of time and effort, and just as training is necessary for people to actually approach egolessness, so is training required to transcend the prison of gender roles—which, in fact, amounts to the same thing as relaxing into egolessness. Neither just happens.

That transformation takes a great deal of time and effort, and just as training is necessary for people to actually approach egolessness, so is training required to transcend the prison of gender roles—which, in fact, amounts to the same thing as relaxing into egolessness. Neither just happens.

Additionally, a large percentage of self-grasping is not just ego-grasping. It is grasping at an ego that is deeply conditioned by its residence in a male body or a female body, and for many people the maleness or femaleness of that body takes precedence over its humanity. It is important to grab people where they really live, which for many is with their gender assignments. Until those attachments are cut, there will be ego-clinging, no matter how much people may believe in egolessness. Giving absolute answers to questions about the relative is unskillful in the short run, even if such answers are true in the long run. Instead, we must follow Dogen Zenji’s advice and first engage in thorough study of the gendered self, probing its reality and significance deeply. It is pointless and naive to claim that we can study that self without studying its gendered aspects, even though generations of Buddhist teachers may have done so.

Related Books

Buddhism beyond Gender

$29.95 - Paperback

By: Rita M. Gross

Dakini's Warm Breath

$39.95 - Paperback

By: Judith Simmer-Brown

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

$45.00 - Paperback

By: Ken Wilber

Dakini Power

$22.95 - Paperback

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Stars at Dawn

$24.95 - Paperback

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Rita GrossRita M. Gross (1943–2015) was an important figure in the study of women in religion in general. She was also a Vajrayana Buddhist practitioner and teacher, appointed a lopon by Mindrolling Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche. See more about her here.

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