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UPDATED Marie Beuzeville Byles
(1900-1979) was an Australian pioneer of Buddhism, as well as the first woman solicitor in
New South Wales. She authored many books on Buddhism, including Footprints of
Gautama the Buddha which is still in print. Marie Byles was sensitive to the
subjugation of women in traditional Buddhist societies; in another of her books (Journey
into Burmese Silence, 1962), she commented: "All this monk-worship and nun
servility would be merely a source of amusement to the tourist [...] The Western
man, even though a meditator, would probably hardly have noticed it unless he were very
unusual. But when you are a woman meditator and a member of the servile community,
you notice it very much indeed. And when you have been trained to abhor sex and
class superiorities the abhorrence upsets your equilibrium and causes pain." |
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UPDATED
Rita M. Gross, PhD., is Professor of Comparative Studies in Religion at
the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire. A former
president of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, she is the editor of Beyond
Androcentrism: New Essays on Women And Religion, and with Nancy Falk, of Unspoken
Worlds: Women's Religious Lives. She is also the author of numerous articles
and essays on women and religion. Her most recent book is Soaring
and Settling: Buddhist Perspectives on Contemporary Social and Religious Issues
(1998). |
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Janet Gyatso,
Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Religion at Amherst College. She has studied with many
Tibetan teachers and has received her doctorate in Buddhist studies from the University of
California at Berkeley. Her recent research interests have focused on Tibetan visionary
practices, lifestories, diaries, and female religious masters. Her most recent book is Apparitions
of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary (Princeton, 1998). |
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Sarah Harding, B.A., has been a student of Buddhism for 25 years,
practicing mainly under the great master Kalu Rinpoche (1904-1989). Author of Creation and Completion,
she completed the traditional three-year retreat required for lamas in 1980. She
co-founded the Tibetan Language Seminar, a correspondence course in Tibetan language. She
is a faculty member of the Religious
Studies Department of the Naropa Institute. |
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Anne
Carolyn Klein, Ph.D., is Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University,
where she specialises in Asian Religions with
strong emphasis on Indo-Tibetan Buddhist thought and practice, as well as comparative and
cross-cultural work on women and Buddhism incorporating contemporary feminist theory. Dr. Klein also teaches meditation outside the university at Dawn Mountain (of which she is
founding director). She has studied Buddhist philosophy and practice with Asian
scholars and meditation masters since 1971, including three years of fieldwork in India,
Nepal, and Tibet. Dr. Klein has written several works on Buddhist philosophy,
including Path to the Middle, Oral Madhyamaka Philosophy in Tibet; Knowing,
Naming and Negation: A Sourcebook on Tibetan Sautantrika; and Knowledge and
Liberation: Buddhist Epistemology in Support of Transformative Religious Experience.
Her most recent book is Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the
Art of the Self. |
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Miranda Eberle Shaw, Ph.D.
is a scholar, translator, and author of Passionate Enlightenment (a
study of women in Tibetan Buddhism -- see bibliography).
Dr. Shaw is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Richmond. A short
work of hers which is available online is her translation of three
Tantric Buddhist women's songs. |
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Dr. Judith Simmer-Brown
(B.A. Cornell College, M.A. Florida State University, advanced graduate study, Columbia
University, Univ. of British Columbia, Ph.D. Walden University). Judith was trained in
South Asian Religious Studies and Sanskrit at Columbia University, University of British
Columbia and Walden University. Before coming to Naropa Institute in 1978, Dr. Simmer-Brown
taught at Fordham and Western Washington Universties. She serves on the board of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies and
is presently chair of the Naropa Institute's Religious Studies Department. A
student of the late Ven. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Dr. Simmer-Brown also teaches
frequently within the Vajradhatu community. Her current work in progress is a book
called Dakini's Warm Breath: Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism. |
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Kamala Tiyavanich
is a fellow at the Kahin Center for Advanced Research on Southeast Asia at Cornell
University. Her recent book, Forest Recollections,
is a formidable examination of wandering forest monks in Thailand during the twentieth
century and has received superior reviews (see Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Inquiring
Mind, and many other Buddhist publications). "Her scholarship and
innovation in presenting a clear picture of how state Buddhism stifled the wandering monks
and their relationship to their communities, should be required reading for anyone
interested in Theravada Buddhism." -- Ellie Waters. |
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Ven. Karma Lekshe Tsomo
is Instructor of Buddhist Studies at Antioch University and a Degree Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu. She is the
author of several books on Buddhism, including Buddhism Through American Women's Eyes,
Sakyadhita: Daughters of the Buddha, Jorcho: Preparatory Practices and
most recently Sisters in Solitude - Two Traditions of Buddhist Monastic Ethics for
Women. Lekshe also serves as International Secretary of Sakyadhita International, the international
association of Buddhist women. |
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Janice Dean Willis,
Ph.D. is among the first Western "scholar-practitioners" of Tibetan Buddhism.
She authored Diamond Light of the Eastern Dawn, one of the earliest collections of
translated Tibetan Buddhist meditation rituals, and her most recent work is Enlightened
Beings: Life stories from the Ganden Oral Tradition, a study of some of the greatest
figures of the Geluk school (Boston: Wisdom, 1994). She also edited, and contributed two
essays to, Feminine Ground: Essays on Women and Tibet (see bibliography).
Dr. Willis is Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University. |
