Deconstructing Androcentrism in Buddhist Literature Through the Lens of Ethnography: A Case Study of Bhutanese Nuns

Traditional androcentric sociology has reinforced biased views of women andportrayed women as silent research objects of minor importance that figure marginally inacademic writing, thereby distorting the knowledge base. The same tendencies have beenobserved in Buddhist religious literature. The bone of contention in the feminist critique ofBuddhism is the omission of women from religious literature. Although Buddhist women’sspiritual prowess was well documented in early Buddhism in religious literature such asthe Therīgatha, later Buddhist literature began to demonstrate androcentric tendencies, inmost instances completely ignoring the religious lives of women. Since women have beenlargely sidelined in Buddhist texts, it is important to go beyond textual dimensions to gaindeeper insights into women’s religious lives. The feminist Buddhist scholar, Rita Gross(2009), in her monumental work, A Garland of Feminist Reflections, emphasised the needto explore various ways other than our own to think, live and practice religion to broadenour horizons to avoid a narrow-minded approach to academic research. Citing two casestudies of Buddhist nuns in Bhutan, this paper argues for ethnography as an alternative totraditional text-based scholarship on religious studies whereby women tell their stories and paint their own reality.