Overview

In this revised edition of June Campbell's ground-breaking and ambitious work, many of the key issues concerning gender, identity and Tibetan Buddhism, are now broadened and further clarified in order to create a better understanding of the historical importance of gender symbolisation in the very construction of religious belief and philosophy. With its cross-cultural stance, the book concerns itself with the unusual task of creating links between the symbolic representations of gender in the philosophy of Tibetan Buddhism, and contemporary western thinking in relation to identity politics and intersubjectivity. A wide range of sources are drawn upon in order to build up arguments concerning the complexities of individual gender roles in Tibetan society, alongside the symbolic spaces allocated to the male and female within its cultural forms, including its sacred institutions, its representations and in the enactment of ritual. And in the light of Tibetan Buddhisms popularity in the west, timely questions are raised concerning gender and the potential uses and abuses of power and secrecy in Tibetan Tantra, which, with its unique emphasis on guru-devotion and sexual ritual, is now being disseminated worldwide. What is made clear in this new edition, however, is that Campbell's ultimate aim is to elucidate, through the use of a psychoanalytical perspective, something of the dynamic inter-relationship between the inner lives of individuals, their gender identities in society, and the belief systems which they create in order to provide cohesion, continuity and meaning, whether it be in the east or the west.

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9780826457196

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Reviews

"""Essential reading for anyone concerned with a creative encounter between Tibetan Buddhism and the West""--Kirkus ""Certainly one of the most important books on Tibetan Buddhism which has been written in the last years""--Numen"

Essential reading for anyone concerned with a creative encounter between Tibetan Buddhism and the West --Kirkus Certainly one of the most important books on Tibetan Buddhism which has been written in the last years --Numen

""Essential reading for anyone concerned with a creative encounter between Tibetan Buddhism and the West""--Kirkus ""Certainly one of the most important books on Tibetan Buddhism which has been written in the last years""--Numen

Feminist theory and psychoanalysis combine in this unusual study of Tibetan Buddhism by a Scottish woman with a unique experience of the tradition. Since Campbell became a Buddhist in 1967, she has lived in a Himalayan nunnery, studied at Tibetan monasteries in India, and traveled throughout Europe and North America as an interpreter to the late Kalu Rimpoche, who had spent 14 years in solitary retreat and was at that time one of the most senior Tibetan lamas in exile. Campbell tells us that for several years she was the tantric consort of Kalu, despite the fact that he was a high-ranking abbot with vows of celibacy. She believes that the Tibetan use of sexuality as part of the mystical path is flawed, because the insistence on secrecy denies the integrity of the woman as an individual capable of relationships in which mutuality is the key factor. Drawing on Robert Paul's Freudian analysis of Tibetan Buddhism, she targets the 13th-century creation of the Tulku, whereby lamas are believed to reincarnate themselves generation by generation, as a way of sidestepping the mother, and the feminine, with the implied identification of the sacred with the masculine. She argues that women stand for the mysterious other from a male perspective and, as such, serve merely as objects through which men have access to wholeness. Campbell gives us a succinct account of Buddhism and its Tibetan heterodox form. Campbell believes that a basis for a more authentic role for women can be found in the cult of the dakini, female spirits, and she pleads for diversity as well as oneness in the spiritual quest. In spite of occasional obscurity, essential reading for anyone concerned with a creative encounter between Tibetan Buddhism and the West. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

June Campbell began studying Buddhism in the 1960s and was among the first western students to study Tibetan Buddhism in India with exiled lamas from Tibet. In 1977 she travelled throughout Europe and North America as a Tibetan translator during the time that Tibetan Buddhist centres were being established in the West. As a university lecturer she later combined her interest in gender and religion by teaching both Religious Studies and Women's Studies.

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