| Nonduality What
is Nonduality - Nondualism - Advaita?
Jerry Katz, editor
Encylopedia Britannica article
Traditional
Various
authors and teachers
Brief
Explications
Lengthier
Explications
From What
Is Enlightenment magazine
From 'A Brief History of Everything', by Ken Wilber
Secondary
Nondualism and Ultimate Nondualism of Da Free John
Meeting
the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists and the Art
of the Self, by Anne Carolyn Klein
The
Rotten Root, by Drew Hempel
Advaita
Vedanta web site FAQ
Meeting the Great Bliss
Queen:
Buddhists, Feminists and the Art of the Self
By
Anne Carolyn Klein
Nondualism...is
reified and practiced in the Bliss Queen ritual
Philosophy East & West
Vol. 46 No.2
Apr 1996
Pp.295-296
Copyright by University of Hawaii Press
this article appears at
http://pears2.lib.ohio-state.edu/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/klein.htm.(link
may no longer be working.)
Meeting the Great Bliss
Queen is a significant contribution to the field of
Buddhist studies and offers critical insights into the
growing dialogue between Buddhist and Western feminists
struggling to reenvision subjectivity. Yeshey Tsogyel, a
semimythological figure from Tibetan history, becomes the
metaphorical Great Bliss Queen, an enlightened embodiment
of wisdom and compassion. Klein presents her as a
potential bridge between two seemingly antithetical
philosophical positions on subjectivity: essentialism
(women are their feminine essence, however broadly or
narrowly defined)and constructionism (womenbecome women
as a result of their cultural and political contexts).
Klein acknowledges that Buddhism may not and probably
should not be asked to provide answers to thorny
political questions, especially in this nascent stage of
development in the West when it is still poorly
interpreted and frequently misunderstood. What Klein does
offer is a sketch of a possible path to connect these
diverse philosophical and cultural contexts of Buddhist
philosophy and practice and Western and postmodern
feminist positions on subjectivity. She begins by
detailing the very different understandings of the
individual and the self acted upon by Westerners as
inheritors of the Enlightenment tradition and by Tibetan
Buddhists (specificallythe Geluk and Nyingma traditions
most closely associated with the Bliss Queen sotras and
practices) with whom she has studied and practiced.
Westerners coming to Buddhist practice have an innate
understanding of the individual as a unique,
self-contained unit, the result of
specific personal choices and preferences. Tibetans (and
other Asian Buddhists)have an understanding of the self
that is part of more extensive social ties to family,
community, village, and the cosmos. This interpretation
of the self, as nondualistically conceived, offers a
middle path between essentialism and constructionism.
Klein argues that rather than see these positions as
dualistically opposed to one another, Buddhism offers a
way to understand them as mutually dependent, dependently
arising.
Nondualism--ontological nondualism (themutual dependence
of conventional reality on its own emptiness) , cognitive
nondualism (themutual dependence of subject and object),
and evolutionary nondualism (themutual dependence of the
enlightened and unenlightened mind)--is reified and
practiced in the Bliss Queen ritual. The philosophical
non-dualism embodied by the Bliss Queen makes it possible
for the feminist to understand the self as both
conditioned and unconditioned, as essential and
constructed, and that the two positions, diametrically
opposed in the Western mind, are in fact dependent on one
another for their existence.
Klein offers the Great Bliss Queen as a potential bridge
between Buddhist and feminist discussions on subjectivity
and with the hope of facilitating the continued
conversation in this very rich field.
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