Show Sidebar Log in
  • Home
  • About Us
    • News
    • Admin
  • Journal
    • About JFSR
    • People
    • Features
    • Volumes
    • Subscriptions
    • Submissions
    • Advertising
  • Blog
    • About the FSR Blog
    • People
    • Submissions
    • @theTable
    • Open Calls
  • Books
    • All Titles
    • About FSR Books
    • FSR Bookstore
  • LAB
    • About LAB
    • People
    • Feminists Talk Religion Podcast
  • Across Generations
    • Description
    • Process
    • Video Projects
  • Donate
  • Conferences
  • Awards

Tibetan Buddhist Metaphors and Models of Motherhood

Volume 37 Number 1
Author(s):
Sarah H. Jacoby
Abstract:

Motherhood is at the core of the central Buddhist metaphor for how we should treat one another. And yet within Buddhist texts there remains a deeply gendered chasm between the universalized Buddhist call to love all beings as if they were our mothers, an ideal embodied most often by male renunciates, and the intensely particular affections involved with actual mothering, an everyday activity most often embodied by female householders. In this article, the author takes a fresh look at the tension between the valorized mother metaphor and its ambivalent referent through a perspective rarely foregrounded in Buddhist sources or their scholarly interpretations: that of a Tibetan Buddhist adept who was herself a mother. Jacoby traces the ways that the life narrative written by Sera Khandro Dewé Dorjé (1892-1940) moves within the space between as if and actual motherhood, presenting a gynocentric view of the female body as the locus of both.


Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.37.1.04 

Back to: https://www.fsrinc.org/journal/volume-37-number-1/

Recent Blog Posts

  • Reading Mary’s Magnificat as an Ode to Reproductive Justice

    June 22, 2022
  • Can We Speak? When Speech Has Color: Aphonic Speech and Respectability Politics

    April 27, 2022
  • The FSR Blog is Hiring!

    April 21, 2022
  • “Standing Up To Russian Aggression Really Brings Out His Eyes”: Zelenskyy Thirst-Trapping

    April 18, 2022
  • Dante’s Regressive Body Politics: How Dante Brought an Ableist, Misogynist, and Domineering Hell to Earth

    March 9, 2022

Recent JFSR Articles

  • Psalm for Asherah, and: The Commandment, and: Prayer for the Woman Scorned

    June 18, 2022
  • Engaging the World as Onna and Religious Minority: Second-Wave Feminism and Christian Social Activism in Japan during the 1970s

    June 18, 2022
  • Les Indocumentadxs: The Coloniality of Gender, Complementarity, and Rethinking Border Being/s

    June 18, 2022

@theTable Blog Series

FSR Summer Book Club

Racism and the Feminist Study of Religion

Manthologies

Parenting in the Field

Planetary Solidarity

Transcending Transphobia

Intersecting Islamophobia

Feminism Online

Contact Us

Managing Office: [email protected]

Journal Office: [email protected]

Blog Office: [email protected]

>> More Contacts

Copyright 2015 © Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc.
All rights reserved. Direct questions to [email protected]

Login