Women's Access to the Buddha in Southeast Asia

Harvard HDS

Women remain the most active supporters of Buddhist institutions across Southeast Asia despite widely held understandings of women's karmic inferiority. This central tension in the study of Buddhism will form the core of our study of women's devotion to the Buddha in Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. The course advances through close study of ethnographic case studies, auto/biographies, and other vernacular works (in translation).