Author Information Pacific Lutheran University (Emeritus)
摘要
Salgado's thesis is that the renunciant narratives of Buddhist nuns are misinterpreted and misunderstood when placed, as they usually are, within a theoretical framework of liberal feminist methodologies. She calls into question how the subject of the “female renunciant,” that is, “Buddhist nuns”—at least in Theravada traditions and other traditions of Buddhism—is conceptualized through cross‐cultural comparisons and embodied in concepts and philosophical assumptions foreign to the actual experiences of Theravada women who enter the Samgha as Theravada nuns. At the heart of her thesis is her questioning of the conceptions of the post‐Christian vocabulary of secular modernity assumed by liberal feminist translations, and interpretations of the history and practices of Buddhist nuns that actually falsify the experiences of Buddhist nuns. She concludes that the actual renunciant experiences of Theravada nuns are not easily comparable to those of Tibetan or Mahayana nuns. That is, the renunciant experiences of Buddhist nuns are pluralistic structures of existence. Salgado's book is a good corrective to much scholarship on the practices and lives of Buddhist nuns, particularly in Sri Lanka, and therefore deserves serious attention by all scholars of Buddhism.
