eral contemporary movements seek to reestablish
strong communities of female renunciants, with or
without full ordination. Indeed, as Sid Brown indicates
regarding Thai maechi(female renunciants), many
women feel that renunciation without ordination is
preferable, since they can thereby remain independent
of male-dominated monastic institutions.
Women and the valorization of the female
Construed as the symbolic “other” of the male, femi-
nine images have a potent function in Buddhist liter-
ature and practice. Since desire is conceived of as the
fundamental cause of human suffering, the female, the
paradigmatic object of male desire, frequently comes
to represent the entrapment of samsara itself. At the
same time, the paradigmatic quality of the male/female
hierarchical dichotomy lends itself to numerous other,
quite different, manipulations. In the Vimalaklr-
tinirdes ́a ,for instance, a wise female deity transforms
the hapless S ́ARIPUTRAinto a woman in order to demon-
strate, through the apparent arbitrariness of GENDER,
the principle of nonduality. While some scholars
would see in this episode both a powerful female fig-
ure and the dismantling of gender categories (Schus-
ter), it should also be noted that the female deity might
be powerful in this context precisely because she is so
unusual, so unconventional, and that gender break-
down might function as such a trenchant symbol of
nonduality precisely because the gender hierarchy/
dichotomy was so deeply entrenched in Buddhist com-
munities. Herein lies the difficulty of interpreting fe-
male symbols in relation to women’s lives: This story
could be seen either as empowering women, or as re-
vealing their social disempowerment—or both.
The role of women in tantric Buddhist contexts,
where the symbol of the female is most highly val-
orized, is complex and controversial. While it is tempt-
ing to conflate the valorization of the female with the
valorization of women, the texts of tantric Buddhism
indicate that the glorification of the female most often
presumes the perspective of the male practitioner
and functions for his benefit. For instance, in the
VAJRAYANAvows, the practitioner is exhorted not to
disparage women; such an injunction indicates not
only that women were likely disparaged, but also that
the vows assume a male audience. Similarly, it is prob-
lematic to interpret the ubiquitous tales of highly re-
alized (and usually very attractive) female figures, both
human and divine, as corresponding to a historical
reality, since these tales likely functioned primarily for
male audiences. As is the case with S ́ariputra’s gender
transformation, the valorization of the female may gain
much of its potential symbolic power precisely from
its transgression of historical realities. The construal of
the female as the paradigmatic object of male desire
likely underlies the manipulation of powerful female
symbols by male practitioners: If the female is other,
then the (male) self can be transformed through ritual
identification or union with that symbolic other, an
other that could be embodied in actual women who
acted as sexual consorts.
On the other hand, the existence of such positive
and powerful female symbols, whether or not they
were intended to function primarily for men, obvi-
ously provided (and provides) productive resources
for women wishing to subvert societal gender norms.
While women within monastic institutions were gen-
erally subservient to men, legends of powerful female
tantric practitioners open a space for virtuoso Buddhist
women outside the monastic system—a space that
many women surely occupied. Quasi-historical tales
such as that of MA GCIG LAB SGRON(MACHIGLAPDÖN),
the extraordinary female tantric practitioner who is
said to have founded the practice of gcod(offering up
one’s body to undermine the notion of self) in Tibet,
may attest to the relative freedom of some women. Vir-
tuoso women, however rare, are still known to live itin-
erant (and highly esteemed) lives in contemporary
Tibet; their existence points to a tradition that, for all
the difficulty of locating its historical traces in Indo-
Tibetan tantric literature, has a long lineage.Contemporary appropriations and subversions
As notions of the equality of women in the contem-
porary world gain more widespread acceptance, female
Buddhists not only in Europe and America but across
the Buddhist world are grappling with the symbolic
and institutional legacies of widely varied Buddhist
conceptions of women. Buddhist women are begin-
ning to ask how female symbols that were designed pri-
marily for male practitioners relate to the lived
religious experience of contemporary women. Can
such images be appropriated to serve the religious goals
of women, or are they inextricable from male-
dominated thought and practice? Should women seek
equality by attempting to gain recognition from insti-
tutions controlled by men, or should they establish
their own communities and institutions that are not
dependent on the still-pervasive authority of male fig-
ures? Can contemporary women simply dismiss as his-
torical and cultural artifacts the ubiquitous references
in Buddhism to the female body as an inherently lowerWOMEN