When A Woman Becomes A Religious Dynasty

Author : Hildegard Diemberger
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231143214
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book When a Woman Becomes a Religious Dynasty written by Hildegard Diemberger and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the fifteenth century, the princess Chokyi Dronma was told by the leading spiritual masters of her time that she was the embodiment of the ancient Indian tantric deity Vajravarahi, known in Tibetan as Dorje Phagmo, the Thunderbolt Female Pig. After suffering a great personal tragedy, Chokyi Dronma renounced her royal status to become a nun, and, in turn, the tantric consort of three outstanding religious masters of her era. After her death, Chokyi Dronma's masters and disciples recognized a young girl as her reincarnation, the first in a long, powerful, and influential female lineage. Today, the twelfth Samding Dorje Phagmo leads the Samding monastery and is a high government cadre in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Hildegard Diemberger builds her book around the translation of the first biography of Chokyi Dronma recorded by her disciples in the wake of her death. The account reveals an extraordinary phenomenon: although it had been believed that women in Tibet were not allowed to obtain full ordination equivalent to monks, Chokyi Dronma not only persuaded one of the highest spiritual teachers of her era to give her full ordination but also established orders for other women practitioners and became so revered that she was officially recognized as one of two principal spiritual heirs to her main master. Diemberger offers a number of theoretical arguments about the importance of reincarnation in Tibetan society and religion, the role of biographies in establishing a lineage, the necessity for religious teachers to navigate complex networks of political and financial patronage, the cultural and social innovation linked to the revival of ancient Buddhist civilizations, and the role of women in Buddhism. Four introductory, stage-setting chapters precede the biography, and four concluding chapters discuss the establishment of the reincarnation lineage and the role of the current incarnation under the peculiarly contradictory communist system.

Author : Suzanne M. Bessenger
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190225289
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Echoes of Enlightenment written by Suzanne M. Bessenger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Echoes of Enlightenment explores the issues of gender and sainthood raised by the recently discovered "liberation story" of the fourteenth-century Tibetan female Buddhist practitioner Sönam Peldren. Born in 1328, Sönam Peldren spent most of her adult life as a nomad in eastern Tibet until her death in 1372. She is believed to have been illiterate, lacking religious education, and unconnected to established religious institutions. For that reason, and because as a woman her claims of religious authority would have been constantly questioned, Sönam Peldren's success in legitimizing her claims of divine identity appear all the more remarkable. Today the site of her death is recognized as sacred by local residents. Suzanne Bessenger draws on the new-found biography of the saint to understand how the written record of the saint's life is shaped both by the hagiographical agendas of its multiple authors and by the dictates of the genres of Tibetan religious literature, including biography and poetry. She considers Sönam Peldren's enduring historical legacy as a fascinating piece of Tibetan history that reveals much about the social and textual machinations of saint production. Finally, she identifies Sönam Peldren as one of the earliest recorded instances of a historical Tibetan woman successfully using the uniquely Tibetan hermeneutic of deity emanation to achieve religious authority.

Author : Yuhang Li
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231548737
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Becoming Guanyin written by Yuhang Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2024 Geiss-Hsu Book Prize for Best First Book, Society for Ming Studies The goddess Guanyin began in India as the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, originally a male deity. He gradually became indigenized as a female deity in China over the span of nearly a millennium. By the Ming (1358–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods, Guanyin had become the most popular female deity in China. In Becoming Guanyin, Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. Li focuses on the power of material things to enable women to access religious experience and transcendence. In particular, she examines how secular Buddhist women expressed mimetic devotion and pursued religious salvation through creative depictions of Guanyin in different media such as painting and embroidery and through bodily portrayals of the deity using jewelry and dance. These material displays expressed a worldview that differed from yet fit within the Confucian patriarchal system. Attending to the fabrication and use of “women’s things” by secular women, Li offers new insight into the relationships between worshipped and worshipper in Buddhist practice. Combining empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies, Becoming Guanyin is a field-changing analysis that reveals the interplay between material culture, religion, and their gendered transformations.

Author : Jinhua Jia
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231545495
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gender, Power, and Talent written by Jinhua Jia and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Tang dynasty (618–907), changes in political policies, the religious landscape, and gender relations opened the possibility for Daoist women to play an unprecedented role in religious and public life. Women, from imperial princesses to the daughters of commoner families, could be ordained as Daoist priestesses and become religious leaders, teachers, and practitioners in their own right. Some achieved remarkable accomplishments: one wrote and transmitted texts on meditation and inner cultivation; another, a physician, authored a treatise on therapeutic methods, medical theory, and longevity techniques. Priestess-poets composed major works, and talented priestess-artists produced stunning calligraphy. In Gender, Power, and Talent, Jinhua Jia draws on a wealth of previously untapped sources to explain how Daoist priestesses distinguished themselves as a distinct gendered religious and social group. She describes the life journey of priestesses from palace women to abbesses and ordinary practitioners, touching on their varied reasons for entering the Daoist orders, the role of social and religious institutions, forms of spiritual experience, and the relationships between gendered identities and cultural representations. Jia takes the reader inside convents and cloisters, demonstrating how they functioned both as a female space for self-determination and as a public platform for both religious and social spheres. The first comprehensive study of the lives and roles of Daoist priestesses in Tang China, Gender, Power, and Talent restores women to the landscape of Chinese religion and literature and proposes new methodologies for the growing field of gender and religion.

Author : Kara Cooney
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 0307956784
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Woman Who Would Be King written by Kara Cooney and published by Crown. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engrossing biography of the longest-reigning female pharaoh in Ancient Egypt and the story of her audacious rise to power. Hatshepsut—the daughter of a general who usurped Egypt's throne—was expected to bear the sons who would legitimize the reign of her father’s family. Her failure to produce a male heir, however, paved the way for her improbable rule as a cross-dressing king. At just over twenty, Hatshepsut out-maneuvered the mother of Thutmose III, the infant king, for a seat on the throne, and ascended to the rank of pharaoh. Shrewdly operating the levers of power to emerge as Egypt's second female pharaoh, Hatshepsut was a master strategist, cloaking her political power plays in the veil of piety and sexual reinvention. She successfully negotiated a path from the royal nursery to the very pinnacle of authority, and her reign saw one of Ancient Egypt’s most prolific building periods. Constructing a rich narrative history using the artifacts that remain, noted Egyptologist Kara Cooney offers a remarkable interpretation of how Hatshepsut rapidly but methodically consolidated power—and why she fell from public favor just as quickly. The Woman Who Would Be King traces the unconventional life of an almost-forgotten pharaoh and explores our complicated reactions to women in power.

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 136 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book New Books on Women, Gender and Feminism written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Matilda Joslyn Gage
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 570 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Woman, Church and State written by Matilda Joslyn Gage and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Ian Johnson
Publisher : Pantheon
ISBN 13 : 1101870052
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Souls of China written by Ian Johnson and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2017 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist: a revelatory portrait of religion in China today, its history, the spiritual traditions of its Eastern and Western faiths, and the ways in which it is influencing China's future. Following a century of violent antireligious campaigns, China is now awash with new temples, churches, and mosques as well as cults, sects, and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Driving this explosion of faith is uncertainty over what it means to be Chinese, and how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality a century ago and is still searching for new guideposts. Ian Johnson lived for extended periods with underground church members, rural Daoists, and Buddhist pilgrims. He has distilled these experiences into a cycle of festivals, births, deaths, detentions, and struggle a great awakening of faith that is shaping the soul of the world s newest superpower. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout).

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 652 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Holy Bible, Containing the Old & New Testaments written by and published by . This book was released on 1888 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Arvind Sharma
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 9780887063749
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Women in World Religions written by Arvind Sharma and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book by women about women in the religions of the world. It presents all the basic facts and ideological issues concerning the position of women in the major religious traditions of humanity: Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, and tribal religions. A special feature of the book is its phenomenological approach, wherein scholars examine sacred textual materials. Each contributor not only studies her religion from within, but also studies it from her own feminine perspective. Each is an adept historian of religions, who grounds her analysis in publicly verifiable facts. The book strikes a delicate balance between hard fact and delicate perception, the best tradition of phenomenology and the history of religions. It also demonstrates how much religions may vary over time. Contributors are Katherine K. Young, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at McGill University; Nancy Schuster Barnes, whose Ph.D. is in Sanskrit and Indian Studies; M. Theresa Kelleher, Assistant Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Manhattanville College; Barbara Reed, Assistant Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College; Denise L. Carmody, Professor and Chair, Department of Religion, The University of Tulsa. Also Jane I. Smith, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Harvard Divinity School; Rosemary Radford Ruether, Georgia Harkness Professor of Applied Theology at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary; Rita M. Gross, Associate Professor of Comparative Religions at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Clair.