A Buddhist Approach to Ending Rape Culture; Beyond Neo-colonialist Critiques of Gender Violence in Tibetan Communities

This lecture focuses on indigenous paradigms of women's liberation in Buddhist contexts. It will examine Buddhist scriptures for finding ideal sexual partners, literature about how to spot female demons and poetry spoken by female buddhas, drawn from Tibetan Great Perfection Seminal Heart literature (rdzogs chen snying thig). These examples demonstrate that simply referring to tantric Buddhist texts as misogynistic is a limited and abstract framework that obscures more than it reveals and renders a greater context of advancement for women invisible. Drawing on emerging perspectives opened by post-colonial feminisms and anthropological research on rape-prone and rape-free cultures, this lecture explores Tibetan tantric proto-feminist literature from the classical period in the fourteenth century. It suggests a deconstruction and expansion of pressing concepts of misogyny, woman, abuse and women's liberation to highlight surprising indigenous discursive practices that undermine gender violence.