Book review: Nirmala S. Salgado,Buddhist Nuns and Gendered Practice: In Search of the Female Renunciant

This extensive monograph by Nirmala S. Salgado argues that the Buddhist nun of Sri Lanka, not unlike the pious woman of Egypt, is a historical subject who destabilises the naturalised relationship between agency and subversion found in the writings of first world feminists (Mahmood, 2005). It tries to show how the philosophy and practice of Buddhist renunciation problematises secular notions of gender empowerment. The author attempts to achieve this by re-centring the multiple voices of the renunciant practitioners based on 25 years of research on the lives of Buddhist nuns in Sri Lanka. This has enabled her to critique existing analytical frameworks and concepts on Buddhist female renunciants of Asia.

Salgado argues that dominant feminist narratives fail to truly represent the lives of non-western women. She attributes this to the modernist tendency to construct binaries such as liberated/subjugated, empowerment/subordination, householder/renunciant, etc. This dyadic discourse obscures subjectivities found outside the modernist telos and misrepresents the third world woman as an ahistorical subject sufferer (Salgado, 2013, p. 133). She makes a compelling argument about the householder–renunciant relationship. The conventional discourse of renunciation presents a simplistic dichotomy between the layperson and the renunciant, where the latter is identified by her complete separation from her family and household responsibilities. Salgado problematises this by showing how many bhikunnis (ordained nuns) maintain familial ties.

The text traverses two terrains. The first is easily available, that is, a critique of the ethnocentric tendencies of liberal feminism. She also shows how the notion of bhikunni and later upasampada (higher ordination) are discursive formulations, shaped by the Sri Lankan State’s modernised development agenda and liberal feminist empowerment projects. Although the resisting feminist nun is a recent concept created by various agents of hegemonic discourses, the realities of practitioners escape such goal-oriented discourses. The female renunciants seek neither higher ordination nor recognition. Enlightenment too cannot be understood as a goal. The meaning of renunciation is founded in the everydayness of their practice, in their sincere adherence to the sila (Buddhist codes of conduct) and dhamma. One infers a second terrain here, which one inadequately calls metaphysics. The dominant narrative gets destabilised partially because of its own restricted imagination, which cannot fully comprehend a Weltanschauung outside of the material world.

The book echoes a crucial argument about the need to construct analytical tools, which can justly represent postcolonial gendered subjectivities. Although this reiteration remains important, one also needs to historicise dukka (suffering). The experiences and meanings of suffering in the hands of one’s family, employer, politicians or mundane human life, in general, too are informed by history. One wonders how the text would have unfolded if sexual exploitation of nuns, which was mentioned briefly, was the focus of the research? (Salgado, 2013, p. 96).