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
This paper outlines the development of the oral biography of a Tibetan Buddhist nun named Pelling Ani Wangdzin (188?-192?) who lived at the turn of the 20th century. Pelling Ani Wangdzin is a unique figure in the history of the Sikkimese branch of Tibetan Buddhism, for she remains the only woman in recent memory to have established and taught in a Buddhist community in Sikkim. Pelling Ani Wangdzin was born into a religious clan of the Sikkimese Lhopo aristocracy in the late 19th century, when Sikkim was still a nominally independent Buddhist kingdom.
Sometime in the early 20th century, Pelling Ani Wangdzin left Sikkim to travel throughout the Himalayas and Tibet. She is said to have undertaken pilgrimages at Tsari in southeastern Tibet, visited the sacred sites of Kathmandu, and studied with some of the most famous Buddhist teachers of her time in eastern Tibet before eventually returning to establish a meditation center in Pelling, west Sikkim. She taught there until her early death in the 1920s. Her legacy lives on today in Sikkim in unexpected ways. This paper explores the creation of an oral biography for Pelling Ani Wangdzin while considering questions of women's space in Buddhist biographical traditions. This exploration will entail a wider examination of issues regarding the creation of biographical traditions and will ask questions including: what makes a religious practitioner memorable to a community and what shifts in authority and recognition are necessary before a person’s life passes out of oral remembering and into textual redaction? What relationship does the creation of an “official” memory, signified by the presence of a text, have with considerations of gender? This paper will examine the significance of the absence of women’s biographies in the Tibetan textual canon, while also considering alternative modes of memory and authority available for Buddhist women in Himalayan cultures.
