會議地點：越南胡志明市；時間：2009.12.18 - 2010.01.03；大會主題：傑出的女性修行者與典範=Eminent Buddhist Women
摘要
Throughout history, there has been a tradition of brave Buddhist women pioneers crossing borders, breaking boundaries, and establishing new territories. This tradition begins with the legacy of Mahaprajapati, who walked, together with five hundred women, beyond the boundaries of the palace to follow the Buddha’s path. Time and again, we see Buddhist women continuing this dissident tradition, despite innumerable obstacles that have come their way. Imagine the travels of Princess Sanghamitra, who made her way from India to Sri Lanka, carrying with her a sapling from the bodhi tree, to transmit the bhiksuni lineage to the women of this beautiful island. Imagine the groups of bhiksunis who traveled for two years by sea all the way from Sri Lanka to China back in the 5th century CE to pass on the bhikhuni lineage to their Chinese sisters at the other end of the ocean. In the 20th and 21st centuries, we again witness eminent Buddhist women pioneers flying beyond borders and starting brand new Buddhist communities outside their homelands. Even when they may not speak the local language well and may have to start everything literally from scratch, they appear unstoppable.
This paper hopes to continue the documentation of the brave Buddhist women who have gone beyond borders of various types in the contemporary era. As a linguist, I have always been especially intrigued by the nature and role that language plays in human communications. Therefore, I will examine the role of language of these eminent Buddhist women’s works and lives, how they manage to break through boundaries with or without language expertise, and how they manage to build transnational networks. I will focus particularly on Bhiksuni Hiuwan (1912-2004) and Bhiksunis Suimiao (1922-1998), two eminent Buddhist nuns who left their homelands in Guangdong (or Canton) and Fujian (or Hokkian), China, respectively, and examine how they managed to create transnational legacies, despite their noticeable disadvantages in the use of local languages. In addition to sharing my own participant observations, I will present the results of interviews with people who personally encountered Bhiksuni Hiuwan and Bhiksuni Suimiao. Eventually, I hope to use these two examples to initiate a project documenting the various methods of speaking/communication employed by eminent Buddhist women in different speech communities. In this way, I anticipate that our understanding of the nature of language may lead us to a new level of understanding about how language use may be integrated into Dharma practice.
