With assured theology-as-male-oppression statements by feminist religious scholars, de-gendering and re-gendering belief systems of the other have been flourished; the current intercultural religiousness and interfaith dialogues, in fact, contributed to this de- and re- phenomenon. While the feminist-theologians or thealogists are articulating that feminine principle should dominate the Ultimate Reality and the Sacred, asking for a gender-balanced Church lineage, demanding more gender-based comprehensions when reading the Bible, or exploring diverse values from goddess traditions, from where several shortened distances between the Supreme Being and the female devotees could be possible, Rita M. Gross (1934 – 2015) has converted to Tibetan Buddhism, and declared that “Buddhism is feminism” marks her comparative studies to be a work of revalorization, asserting that gender is as nondual as the Buddhist egolessness, as skillful as a bodhisattva’s upaya, as ultimate as the dynamic emptiness, and being physically female is also potential to gain the Buddhist enlightenment and achieve Buddhahood in one lifetime. What, then, should have been hybridized between the theological and biblical inferiority of women in the western society and the ultimate femaleness that Gross as a feminist Buddhist grounded? And how can this western, white, American female scholar articulate her Buddhist belief and meditative practices to the eastern, Asian, Buddhist culture by learning second-handed, English-written Buddhist doctrines? In terms of cultural translation as inter-engaged ultimate truths, Gross’ being a feminist religious scholar seems to be not less provoking than inspiring. In this dissertation, I plan to understand Gross’ feminist-Buddhist studies, from where the concepts such as interfaith dialogue, comparative religious patterns, cultural translation, thealogical issues, and female spirituality help a lot in clarity and insight to Gross’ feminist-identified and feminism-oriented analyses on the nonduality of gender, gender as upaya and emptiness, and the interrelationship between a female Buddha and her western devotees. Chapters one and two are a brief introduction about the biographical, academic and social contexts of Rita Gross and her Buddhist studies. Chapter three gives a multi-faced exploration that has interlinked to Gross’ feminist-Buddhist scholarships, relating to the Cobb-Abe Christian-Buddhist dialogue, the ideas of religious diversity from Paul Knitter and John Hick, the various types of feminist theologian scholars and thealogians. Certain Buddhist concepts like nonduality, bodhicitta and Buddhist sense of gender, libera
