Women in the Footsteps of the Buddha by Kathryn R. Blackstone

Balancing an accurate past and a usable past is not always easy A great deal is at stake for women, or any other group, in deciding which stories are most important to retell. However, because writing history is a highly selective process, all traditions could recount many pasts that are both accurate and useful. Fantasies about a golden past in which women were powerful and honored-but which has no basis in the data of empirical history-are not very useful. Consequently, practitioners are interested in fi nding a usable past, a past that includes women with whom contemporary feminists can identify and women whom they fi nd inspiring. If women are represented as having fared badly in the tradition's past, there is less warrant for improving their situation in the present. Religious practitioners, however, know that, in the present, a religion constitutes itself, at least in part, on the basis of the past it remembers. Scholars are not necessarily personally invested in the promise and potential a religious tradition may hold for women, although feminist historians of religion do want to know how women fared in the historians' area of specialization. 2 I think these are still useful categories for examining feminist history.įor scholars, the quest for an accurate past is the more important of the two categories, but for religious practitioners, the quest for a usable past is more important. 1 Especially in Buddhism after Patriarchy, I worked with the questions of what would constitute an accurate and a usable past, two categories of analysis that I learned from feminist historian Eleanor L.

Two of my major books, Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism (1993) and Feminism and Religion: An Introduction (1996), devote considerable attention to questions of who is included in histories, why they are included in or omitted from histories, and what difference such inclusions and omissions make, both for scholarship and for religious life. Yet in my work as a feminist scholar it has been impossible for me to avoid historical analyses. Nevertheless, the empirical linear development of religions is not especially emphasized by this school.) By inclination, I prefer critical and constructive thought to historical studies. (In this case, 'history' refers to a choice to study religion in nonnormative and nontheological ways, as a historical phenomenon rather than as a nonhistorical revealed truth. Trained at the Chicago School of the History of Religions, I am more at home in the realms of symbol, myth, and ritual than in the realm of empirical history, despite the institution's name. Unlike Margaret Miles, whose work I greatly admire, I am not a historian, either by education or by inclination.

Women in the Footsteps of the Buddha by Kathryn R. Blackstone