Womens in Ephigraphs of Gongu Nadu

Ephigraphs of Kongu Nadu has the Evidence of Women’s Contribution both from Royal Family and poverty-stricken family. Though the disparate regions of Kongu Nadu was ruled by various kings, the evidence of women’s contribution is found only in the Ephigraphs of Pandyas, Cheras, and Cholas. However, women Contribution was at peak during Chozha Period. Women of Royal Clan was provisioned with the ability and rights to maintain and rejuvenate Temples. Devaradiyarkal contributed Gold and coins which stands as a testimony to their social standard. It also reflects their Wealth. The wives of Government officials offered lands as part of their contribution. The evidence of contributions made by lay women could be traced only in the Epigraphs of 12th or 13th Century only. It is believed that women made their contribution with regard to God but the trace of evidence couldn’t be found anywhere. Further, the glimpses on women’s right to property and in addition, their freedom to use their property regardless of any exterior interventions were also been recorded.

Rethinking Gender and Female Laity in Late Imperial Chinese Pure Land Buddhist Biographies

This paper explores how lay female believers are depicted in the Chinese monastic Pure Land Buddhist texts and how a particular late-imperial Chinese Buddhist biography collection betrayed the previously existing narrative of female laity. Moreover, I wish to show that there had existed a long-lasting and persistent non-binary narrative of lay women in Chinese Pure Land biographies admiring female agency, in which female Pure Land practitioners are depicted as equally accomplished to male ones. Such a narrative betrays the medieval monastic elitist discourse of seeing women as naturally corrupted. This narrative is best manifested in the late Ming monk master Yunqi Zhuhong’s collection, who celebrated lay female practitioners’ religious achievement as comparable to men. This tradition is discontinued in the Confucian scholar Peng Shaosheng’s collection of lay female Buddhist biographies in the Qing dynasty, however, in which Peng depicts women as submissive and inferior to males. This transition—from using the stories of eminent lay female Buddhists to challenge Confucian teachings to positioning lay females under Confucian disciplines—exhibits Peng Shaosheng’s own invention, rather than a transmission of the inherited formulaic narration of lay female believers, as he claimed.

Differences of Opinion: The Debate on Thai Theravāda Bhikkhunīs

This paper attempted to summarize the findings regarding the question about the acceptance of Theravāda bhikkhunīs in Thai society across different sections of the Thai population. The statistics approach to this research article and questionnaire sample is cross-sectional data from April 20 to May 12, 2017. Interviews and group discussions have also been utilized as a method to facilitate an open-conversation atmosphere to get our subjects speaking. Nevertheless, since the questionnaire method is anonymous, our subjects feel more at ease to express their opinions regarding the Theravāda bhikkhunī ordination debate in Thailand. Thus, it is hoped that this paper provide a better comprehension of how the Thai people perceive the role of Theravāda bhikkhunī in Thai Buddhist culture and the possibilities for their recognition in the future. Moreover, it is hoped that this research will reveal how the Thai Theravāda bhikkhunīs perceive themselves in their role inside the fourfold assembly consisting of bhikkhus, bhikkhunīs, lay men, and lay women in propagating the Gotama Buddha’s teachings.

Preliminary Practices: Bloody Knees, Calloused Palms, and the Transformative Nature of Women’s Labor

In this article, I explore the prostration accumulation portion of the Preliminary Practices of a specific group of Tibetan Buddhist women in Bongwa Mayma, a rural area of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province. I focus specifically on the nuns and lay women who utilize this set of teachings and practices. The Preliminary Practices not only initiate practitioners into a specific tradition (that of the Drikung Kagyu and more specifically the Amitabha practices of this lineage), but also more fundamentally into Vajrayāna Buddhism as it is practiced in contemporary Tibet. Although monks and male lay practitioners in this region also tend to perform the same Preliminary Practices, I focus specifically on women because of their unique relationship with bodily labor. I begin this article with a discussion of the domestic and economic labor practices of contemporary Tibetan women in rural Yushu, followed by an analysis of Preliminary Practices as understood through the Preliminary Practice text and oral commentaries utilized by all interviewees and interviews (collected from 2016–2020) with female practitioners about their motivations, experiences, and realizations during the Refuge and prostration accumulation portion of their Preliminary Practices. Women themselves view bodily labor as a productive and inevitable aspect of life. On the one hand, women state openly that their domestic duties impede upon their ability to achieve religious realization. On the other, they frequently extol the virtues of hard work, perseverance, patience, and fortitude that their lives of labor helped them to cultivate. Prostration is meant to embody the act of going for Refuge, of submitting oneself to the teachings of the Buddha, to the path of the dharma, and to the community of religious practitioners with whom they will study and grow. Prostrations are meant to embody the extreme difficulty of Refuge, to remove obscurations, to crush the ego, and to confirm a dedication to endure the hardships on the path to realization. Buddhist women, despite their ambiguous relationship with physical labor, see the physical pain of this process as a transformative experience that allows them a glimpse of the spaciousness of mind and freedom from attachment-filled desire promised in the teachings they receive.

A Material History of the Bible, England 1200-1553

This book examines the production and use of Bibles in late medieval and early modern England. The analysis of hundreds of biblical manuscripts and prints reveals how scribes, printers, readers, and patrons have reacted to religious and political turmoil. Looking at the modification of biblical manuscripts, or the changes introduced into subsequent printed editions, reveals the ways in which commerce and devotions joined to shape biblical access. The book explores the period from c.1200 to 1553, which saw the advent of moveable-type print as well as the Reformation. The book’s long-view places both technological and religious transformation in a new perspective. The book progresses chronologically, starting with the mass-produced innovative Late Medieval Bible, which has often been linked to the emerging universities and book-trade of the thirteenth century. The second chapter explores Wycliffite Bibles, arguing against their common affiliation with groups outside Church orthodoxy. Rather, it demonstrates how surviving manuscripts are linked to licit worship, performed in smaller monastic houses, by nuns and devout lay women and men. The third chapter explores the creation and use of the first Bible printed in England as evidence for the uncertain course of reform at the end of Henry VIII’s reign. Henry VIII’s Great Bible is studied in the following chapter. Rather than a monument to reform, a careful analysis of its materiality and use reveals it to have been a mostly useless book. The final chapter presents the short reign of Edward VI as a period of rapid transformation in Bible and worship, when some of the innovations introduced more than three hundred years earlier began, for the first time, to make sense.

The Medieval Economy of Salvation

This book shows how the burgeoning commercial economy of western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, alongside an emerging culture of Christian charity, led to the establishment of hundreds of hospitals and leper houses. Focusing on the county of Champagne, the book looks at the ways in which charitable organizations and individuals saw in these new institutions a means of infusing charitable giving and service with new social significance and heightened expectations of spiritual rewards. Hospitals served as visible symbols of piety and, as a result, were popular objects of benefaction. They also presented lay women and men with new penitential opportunities to personally perform the works of mercy, which many embraced as a way to earn salvation. At the same time, these establishments served a variety of functions beyond caring for the sick and the poor; as benefactors donated lands and money to them, hospitals became increasingly central to local economies, supplying loans, distributing food, and acting as landlords. In tracing the rise of the medieval hospital during a period of intense urbanization and the transition from a gift economy to a commercial one, the book makes clear how embedded this charitable institution was in the wider social, cultural, religious, and economic fabric of medieval life.

‘Woman Seems to Be Given Her Proper Place’: Western Women’s Encounter with Sikh Women 1809–2012

Over a period of two centuries, western women—travellers, army wives, administrators’ wives, missionaries, teachers, artists and novelists—have been portraying their Sikh counterparts. Commentary by over eighty European and north American ‘lay’ women on Sikh religion and society complements—and in most cases predates—publications on Sikhs by twentieth and twenty-first century academics, but this literature has not been discussed in the field of Sikh studies. This article looks at the women’s ‘wide spectrum of gazes’ encompassing Sikh women’s appearance, their status and, in a few cases, their character, and including their reactions to the ‘social evils’ of suttee and female infanticide. Key questions are, firstly, whether race outweighs gender in the western women’s account of their Sikh counterparts and, secondly, whether 1947 is a pivotal date in their changing attitudes. The women’s words illustrate their curious gaze as well as their varying judgements on the status of Sikh women and some women’s exercise of sympathetic imagination. They characterise Sikh women as, variously, helpless, deferential, courageous, resourceful and adaptive, as well as (in one case) ‘ambitious’ and ‘unprincipled’. Their commentary entails both implicit and explicit comparisons. In their range of social relationships with Sikh women, it appears that social class, Christian commitment, political stance and national origin tend to outweigh gender. At the same time, however, it is women’s gender that allows access to Sikh women and makes befriending—and ultimately friendship—possible.

Partners in Ministry & Mission: Women Religious and Associates

Women’s religious communities—like other communities of religious—began exploring the possibility of embracing lay women and men as associate members in the 1970s and 1980s. Associate member groups offered congregations a new way to extend the reach of their respective missions and charisms, while deepening the relationships with lay women and men who partnered with them in ministry.In this paper, I explore the relatively recent history of associate groups and how these organizations have and continue to work with their sponsoring congregations. I use data from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA)—commissioned recently by the North American Conference of Associates and Religious (NACAR)—to look at demographic trends among women religious and associates. I describe how religious communities incorporate associates into their organizational decision-making, and how certain internal processes—like general chapters—are now open to associate members.Overall, I submit that given the declining numbers of sisters and aging populations of many religious communities, associate groups have the potential to provide opportunities to conceptualize new forms of religious life in the Catholic Church. Finally, I argue that associate groups also have the important role of increasing gender, racial, and class diversity among communities of women religious, and that this diversity may lead to a more inclusive and democratizing corporate structure for women’s religious congregations in the 21st century.