ABSTRACT
Except for the writings of Stephanie Kaza and Rita Gross on Buddhist ecology, there was no significant literature on Buddhist ecofeminism up till 2000. There has been significant literature written by Western Buddhists and Western scholars of Buddhism on the contours of Buddhist ecological vision. There is also a large body of influential global work on ecofeminism, almost none of which is written by Buddhists. Ecofeminism is so popular in some Western circles that claims are made about it being the ‘third wave of feminism’, following the 19th- and early 20th-century movement to secure voting rights for women in much of the Western world and the re-emergence of a feminist movement in the 1960s and the following decades. There is also a small but very influential body of literature on Buddhism and feminism. The question posed here is: Why is there nothing on Buddhism and ecofeminism, given the large body of literature on Buddhism and ecology, the influence of feminist analyses of Buddhism, and the prevalence of ecofeminism in contemporary Western discourse? These are the threads I will attempt to untangle in this article, presented as a Buddhist evaluation of ecofeminism.
