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
In recent years, several excellent works exploring the role of wisdom and its feminine idealization have emerged. These include Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self by Anne Carolyn Klein, and She Who Is by Elizabeth Johnson. These two works explore prajna, the Buddhist idea of wisdom, and Sophia, the Greek Christian conceptualization of wisdom. In this preliminary survey, I would like to examine these Buddhist and Christian lineages of the ideal of wisdom, it’s relationship to the principal concepts of these traditions, how the qualities and ideals of compassion and relationship are honored and promoted, and, finally, the repercussions the idealization of wisdom has had for the role of women in our era.
My study is also an attempt to understand what is at the root of the appeal of wisdom by women and for women. As a relic of past symbolic systems, the traditional image of wisdom as a feminine archetype in both Buddhist and Christian cultures is, in many ways, limited by the predominantly masculine ambiance that has pervaded both religions. In its contemporary prototype, the ideal of wisdom as a form of knowing has moved beyond gender-based imagery and its concomitant restrictions. This new ideal also provides a prospect that responds to the divisive conflicts between women and men, and between women and other women.
As we explore the observations of Johnson and Klein, we will discover an ambivalence as to whether wisdom should be inherently neutral or feminine. Both idealizations have their limitations. While Klein emphasized the importance of the female form in the formation of wisdom and Johnson the importance of female qualities, there is reluctance to focus on the conflicted state that women presently inhabit. Women can now take pride in entering echelons of power and acquiring knowledge formerly denied to them. However, women are also nostalgic and insecure at the loss of perceived past strengths (however compromised).
What women naturally desire is to combine the strengths of past spiritual ideals and contemporary feminist ones. Women’s explorations of wisdom need not require definitive explanations but rather may be expansive and open-ended. Wisdom may be an antidote to assertions that feminism has subverted the natural order, that violence and disintegration are inevitable, and that a new war of the sexes is underway. Wisdom can see beyond these extremes and provide a calming and inspiring influence. The ultimate question will be not whether this is simply a utopian fantasy but, rather, how women can achieve wisdom as a worthwhile practical reality. The aim is show that the ideals of past, powerful and pervasive as they are, are the only options for women’s self-development.
