One Plus One Makes Three: Buddhist Gender, Monasticism, and the Law of the Non-Excluded Middle

This article addresses the need for a more specific account than we now have of how the female is conceived in Buddhism. One reason for providing such an account is so that we can better construe what has variously been perceived as the misogyny of Buddhist traditions, on the one hand, and the deification of a feminine principle in Buddhism, on the other. ¹ These perceptions have important ramifications as they bear on some difficult issues that are live in Buddhist communities today. One of those would be the controversial status of women in the practice of tantric sexual yoga, and another has to do with sex and gender hierarchies in Buddhist monasticism; I will be touching on the latter, but not the former, in the present article.