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Megan Bryson and Kevin Buckelew eds., "Buddhist Masculinities" (Columbia UP, 2023)
00:55:25
An interview with Megan Bryson and Kevin Buckelew
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- [00:01]
Megan Bryson
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Juliang
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Megan Bryson
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Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical, there are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Juliang
Hi everyone. Welcome to New Books in Buddhist Studies. I am one of the co hosts, Juliang from Case Western Reserve University. I am very excited today to be joined by Megan Bryson and Kevin Bucklew to talk about their new book published by Columbia University, Buddhist Masculinities. Megan Bryson is Associate professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Asian Studies Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her BA in Religious Studies and Chinese from University of Oregon and her PhD in religious studies from Stanford University. Her research focuses primarily on themes of gender and ethnicity in Chinese religions, especially in the Dali region of Yunnan Province. The geographical specificity of her work is balanced by its temporal breadth, which ranges from the Nanzhou and Dali Kingdom to the present, as reflected in her monograph Goddess on Religion, Ethnicity and Gender in Southwest China, published by Stanford University University Press in 2016. An interview with her about this book is also on the New Books Network, which traces the worship of a local deity in dali from the 12th to 21st centuries. Kevin Bucklew is Assistant professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. He received his BA in the Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College and his PhD from Columbia University's Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. His research focuses on Buddhism in pre modern China, with special attention to the rise of Chan, or San Buddhist tradition and to interactions between Chinese Buddhists and Taoists. Thematically, his work explores how religious identities take shape and assume social authority, how materiality, embodiment, and gender figure into Buddhist soteriology, and how Buddhists have grappled with the problem of human agency. Welcome to the New Books Network, Megan and Kevin. Thank you. So, as is part of the tradition of the Channel, we almost always start with the intellectual biographical question. So if you don't mind answering, how did you come into the field of Buddhist studies?
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Megan Bryson
All right, I can go first. So I think my entry into Buddhist studies really came through questions about gender, because as an undergraduate, I think like a lot of people in the United States more generally, I encountered Buddhism as a very progressive religion, one that was presented as being very. Almost scientific or psychological. And that interested me as someone who hadn't grown up in any kind of religious tradition. But then the more I studied Buddhism, the more I encountered essentially misogynistic ideas that seemed really out of sync with the initial image that I had about the tradition. And as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon, I was studying with Kyoko Tokuno, who was an expert in Chinese Buddhism, and. And she knew about my interests and steered me in the direction of the Blood Pond Hell as a topic of research. And so I wrote an undergraduate thesis about the Blood Pond Hell in connection to the gendered nature of karmic retribution. And that is really one of the things that set me on the path. So these questions about how Buddhism navigates issues of gender have been with me from the beginning of my academic journey and my interest in Buddhism. And I've continued to explore those interests in graduate school and beyond. And I think eventually coming to masculinities was a natural, I guess, evolution of these interests that started at this point well over 20 years ago.
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Kevin Bucklew
Yeah. So I got interested in Buddhism in college, and I took a class on Chan and Zen Buddhism with Griff Folk at Sarah Lawrence. And that really, like, definitely set my interest in Chan in particular in motion. I went to grad school at Columbia, so I studied with Jun Fang Yu and Bernard Foer and later Zhao Hua Yang. And so the people at Columbia, really, a lot of them are either in research or teaching, are really interested in gender. My first semester at Columbia, I took a class with Professor Yu on women in Chinese Buddhism and read works by scholars like Miriam Levering, to whom the book is dedicated, and Ding Hua Xie scholars who worked on women in Chan Buddhism, especially in the Song dynasty. I think that class was really formative for me because I went through several different, completely different possible dissertation topics. And when I wound up back to Chan, I think I sort of had this like Griff Folk Bernard for Qingfeng Yu kind of hybrid like mindset that was, I think, noticing a lot of the gendered aspects of Chan rhetoric and bringing sort of a more like graduate school level analysis to that topic. So. So masculinity has ended up figuring into my dissertation and now my book manuscript project and my chapter in this volume. And yeah, I think I presented something from my dissertation at the International association of Buddhist Studies and Megan asked to include my chapter and then later brought me on as a co editor. So it's been a really wonderful chance to be part of this project.
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Juliang
Thank you both. I am very encouraged to hear that your interest in Buddhism are both rooted in. In the study of Buddhism, but also in the interest in gender and sexuality studies. I was just chatting with Megan before we started recording about how we use this study in our undergraduate teaching. Hopefully maybe this will bring future generations of scholars. So there's always hope to that. Since Kevin, you mentioned you're already talking a little bit about how this book came into being. I was wondering if you want to just introduce a little bit more about how did this book come about, how did the project get started?
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Kevin Bucklew
Yeah, it might be good for Megan to start with that because I think it started as a. As a panel that I wasn't on.
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Megan Bryson
Yeah, so it's 10 years ago. So it's a nice round number. 2013 meeting of the American Academy of Religion. It was in the, you know, Buddhism section of that. So it was Gina Cogan who had organized this panel on Buddhist masculinities. And unfortunately she's no longer in the profession, no longer in the academy, but she had put together this panel that included several of us speaking about different facets of Buddhist masculinities. And it was a really exciting topic. It was something that I had been interested in getting into as I started finishing up the first monograph and moving into other areas. So I really jumped at the chance to get into the study of Buddhist masculinity is in my own specific area. So I was looking more at intersections of ethnicity and masculinity around the Dali region. Of that panel, I think only Steve Berkowitz and I continued into the volume because just people weren't necessarily available going forward. But after the panel, I had been meaning to come back to that topic to do some kind of edited volume. When Gina Kogan ended up leaving academia, essentially, I put the project on pause for a little while to wait and see. I also had to wait, of course, for my own monograph to come out, wanting to not take on too many things at once or too soon. And then after, I think about five years had passed, I think it was around 2018 at another AAR, I had heard one of Kevin's presentations again on this topic, and I thought it was time to really get into this project. And so, you know, he agreed very graciously, especially for someone in a junior position to take on a project like this. He agreed to co edit, and we went from there in terms of contacting prospective contributors. And the process, I think, went fairly speedily, all things considered, including the pandemic right in the middle of everything. So I'm sure Kevin can talk more about some of the other parts of that process. But going back to the early, early years, it would, I think, have its Genesis. And that 2013 AAR meeting.
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Kevin Bucklew
Yeah, I guess it tells us something about academic, like publishing, maybe especially edited volumes that five years from when we, you know, 10 years from the, from the panel and five years from when we started contacting people is speedy. But I mean, I mean, the pandemic definitely slowed us down, but everything went pretty smoothly.
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Juliang
Yes. And for me personally, it's certainly a much anticipated volume, which is also something I had struggle with as I started teaching a class called Buddhism, Gender and Sexuality, I think five years ago. I always wanted to include materials on masculinity, but the. The most useful book I found is writings by Jose Capison, which is a while ago, and also the books A Bow of a Man, which I think you both referred to in the introduction by John Powers. So I'm very excited to see this book coming into existence. And also one thing I noticed is that you also included a lot of scholars at different stages of their career, which maybe also speaks to the rising field of Buddhist masculinity studies. So if someone's listening who is a PhD student, this might be something they might want to pursue a little bit further. And I wonder if you have anything you want to add on the editing or collecting process.
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Megan Bryson
I mean, I think I can maybe start and then I'm sure Kevin will have things to add to this. I think for people who have done edited volumes, this will not be a surprise. But you start with a plan and then you have to adjust the plan many times throughout the process because people have to drop out for various reasons or people produce things that don't fit the spirit of the volume or aren't quite right for what we wanted to publish, basically. And so it requires a certain amount of adaptability and flexibility. So the, the contributors have shifted somewhat over the years, but I think we're both really proud of the group of scholars who came together and contributed to this volume. Scholars in different stages of their career, scholars from different disciplines. So we do have several Buddhist studies scholars. We also have people coming from art history, we have people coming from media studies. So it's a pretty rich, I think, disciplinary variety.
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Kevin Bucklew
Yeah, I mean, just one other thing that sort of, I thought of just in terms of sort of deciding what goes in and out of this type of book. It's. Buddhist masculinity is such a broad topic. I think this type of book can only be considered sort of like, you know, an opening gesture toward a field that hasn't really yet come into being. And so I think part of our thinking about it was to lay the foundation for how we would like to see that field develop. And one of the things, one of the decisions that we made was just to define Buddhism sort of broadly and inclusively, not sort of. We're not taking our position as editors of this volume, which is supposed to include, you know, sort of in a way like speak to the Buddhist tradition, you know, broadly, as an opportunity to gatekeep what is the definition of, what's the sort of normative definition of Buddhism that we would like, you know, that we're trying to keep relatively narrow. On the contrary, I think we really wanted to see sort of the field of Buddhist studies continue to open up and include sort of topics and regions and so on that have for a long time maybe been left out. So we're really pleased with how that aspect came together also.
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Juliang
Thank you both so much for sharing. And since we are onto the topic of masculinities and Buddhist masculinities as a field, and it's as you have already identified, it's a field full of promise and also sometimes contentions, I want to ask you, why masculinities? Why do you think it matters? For those who are still waiting to be on board as a field of studies and maybe a follow up question will be, what does Buddhism have to do with it?
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Megan Bryson
Yeah, so that's a very big question. I think. I think the question of why masculinity has to do with something that I think I really first came to notice with John Powers book Bull of a Man. I think that was a really important book for shining light on Buddhist masculinities as a topic. And I taught a class in my last year of graduate school on gender and Buddhism, where I incorporated some readings from that book as well. Well, and I think it. It especially helped to show ways of engaging with gender beyond the feminine and beyond women, where, of course, studying women and gender, studying femininities like these are all really important projects as well. But if gender only ever means women, or occasionally if it does refer to men, or masculinity is. If it only refers to marginalized forms of masculinity, then I think there's just this huge field of study that remains really invisible. And I think there have been really powerful critiques of that coming from gender studies more broadly, also the critical race theory and studies of whiteness, which call attention to ways in which these majority or hegemonic identities are also constructed, even if part of their hegemonic status is cloaking themselves in this veil of invisibility. And, of course, there are differences in Buddhist traditions from those examples, or at least some of the disciplines that have generated a lot of scholarship on these topics. But I think the same cloak of invisibility is still present there to the extent where in talking about this volume with some generally more senior scholars, one of the reactions I would get is, like, what. What does that even mean? Like, like, how can you even study masculinity? And I think that question underscores the need for the study of masculinity because it's something that can just feel so natural. And. And one of the things that I think we're hoping to do in the volume is highlight the ways in which it's also constructed and the different possibilities for thinking about masculinity in these Buddhist contexts. And, of course, the Buddhist part of that is also, as Kevin was saying, defined very inclusively. And perhaps Kevin can also take the question of sort of, what's Buddhist in these masculinities? I think that there was the second part of the question that you had asked.
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Kevin Bucklew
Yeah, I mean, so I think that one thing that I would say is I might jump off from a line that I highlighted in Megan's introduction to the volume that I'm quoting in my book manuscript Introduction, because it's. I think it puts it really clearly. Megan writes, quote, studies of Buddhist women usually treat gender as a key facet of their experience, but studies of Buddhist men rarely do the same. I'd say virtually never do studies of Buddhist men take gender as something that's any part of the people that they're studying, any part of their world. And I think that that so. And I think that something speaking to people who work on masculinity, I think something that we often hear as sort of pushback is to say this is anachronistic, especially if we're talking about a pre modern time period. This is sort of imposing modern categories onto the past. And I just think it's demonstrably not true that gender is only a category that applies in the last however many decades or hundreds of years. And in my own research, it's like you can see beyond a doubt that gender terms are being used all the time by Chan Buddhist men. They're using them in the context of talking to each other, talking to fellow people, Chan men, to say, here's how you should be a man and Chan master. You know, the two are closely bound up to each other. Only by deliberately ignoring that language can we say they're not talking about, you know, masculinity. And they also use it in conversation with women where they'll say, you know, this woman is exemplary, sort of like by virtue of having demonstrated this honorary masculinity. And so we can see, you know, and I mean in the case of Chan as well, you see studies all the way up to the present day of Buddhist Chan monks and nuns sort of negotiating, what do we make of this term? Is this really gendered? You know, and even when you have sort of contemporary interlocutors saying, you know, tropes of masculinity, we don't have to take them that way. You know, they can be interpreted as gender neutral in the first place. They're dealing with a playing field that is set by the terms that this tradition has laid down that are gendered, you know. So I think it's important to say, like, I just don't think it's true that this is. That this is an anachronistic application of modern categories under the past. And I think. But so, you know, it requires sensitizing ourselves to particular types of language and particular sort of social structures that scholars in the field of Buddhist studies maybe are just sort of under trained to do. And so I think that's one hope for this volume is that it just like puts out there. And I think there's another thing that, you know, John Powers volume did, really importantly was just put out there in Buddhist studies. Like, this is a thing that we might talk about. So hopefully this volume will contribute another step to this being treated as a legitimate field of study that could potentially illuminate domains of the Buddhist world that have sort of remained hidden because people sort of just don't have sort of been blind to these normative categories that often come across as invisible.
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Juliang
Thank you both so much. And I actually highlighted the same quote from Megan's introduction and would definitely quote in my, in my future writing as well. That's such a. Such a powerful quote and reminds me of Joan Scott when she first wrote about gender, a useful category for historical analysis. She mentioned that scholars of gender cannot just build onto the existing house of scholarship, but rather have to take down the house brick by brick and to rebuild from the very beginning. And if we only assume gender equals women, we're actually just taking down half of the house and we're leaving the other half somewhat unconstructed. So I'm very encouraged to see this change of scholarship directions. And Kevin, you actually anticipated. Another question I was planning on asking is why Buddhist masculinity, meaning that masculinity is a English word and there is a way of appending English Latin terms into a tradition that is linguistically and culturally categorically different from what we're talking about today in 21st century America. And you did discuss this, and I would like to highlight this for the listener, is the tension between using English terms such as gender, masculinity, and say, normative traditions and attending to a lot of imic categories. For Kevin, yours will be in Chinese. Say the words like the great man Da Zhang Fu and many of the other contributors actually shows a great degree of care and rigorous, rigorous scholarship actually tending to those local categories and actually asking the hard questions. How do we think about, across different cultural traditions, those norms of what it means to be a man, be a woman, be someone of a different sex, and how that actually impacts daily life. So that is something I would like to highlight. Now I would like to also just move on to the exciting body of the book. So it is divided into four, four different sections. The first one is called Masculine Model. So starting with the normative model, you move on to Mighty Masters with a specific discussion, to masculine power and its display. And the third part, making Men, talking about the Buddhist contributions of something we have just talked about, of what creates personhood, what, especially in the idea of making a man masculine personhood. And the very last one, I think I'm most excited about it because I'm contrarian called Breaking Boundaries. It's talking about how those normative models are being transgressed and subverted or challenged. I know it's difficult to speak for another scholar, but I wonder if you would like to just highlight some of the works, be it yourselves or someone else's, you would really like to introduce to the listener within those sections.
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Megan Bryson
I think it would make a lot of sense for Kevin to talk about his own chapter. I know he's already discussed it some. And then I think in addition to Kevin's chapter, we could maybe highlight some of the contributions by up and coming scholars, especially those still in graduate school or just finishing, because I think they deserve to have their names out there and be known.
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Kevin Bucklew
Yeah. So I kind of mentioned my own chapter, which is about Chan Buddhism in the Song Dynasty, and just the construction of this concept of the great man as a term for the ideal Chan master. And one of the arguments of that chapter is that martial masculinity and like the use of military language a little bit surprising. I mean, people who read Chan literature know there's a lot of military language, but I don't think we even were necessarily used to thinking about Chan as a tradition of martial masculinity. But one of the things that was really exciting for me as the volume came together was just to see how those terms reverberate in all these different places. So, for example, in Rebecca Mendelsohn's chapter on Rinzai, Zen Lay Buddhism in modern Japan, we really see some of the same terms come up again, but they're sort of mobilized in this kind of Japanese nation building, modern nation building project in ways that I think for me doing research from sort of a thousand years ago, it's easy for me to think like this is all in the distant past. But seeing these categories sort of bounce off of these different chapters was really kind of eye opening for me. And I think that Rebecca's chapter is really exciting for thinking about masculinity in modern Buddhism. And another one that also I think was one of my favorite chapters was Marcus Evans's chapter about Afro Asian masculinities in RZA's films the man with the Iron Fists 1 and 2. And it's another place where Chan Buddhism, it's a little bit sort of like Budo Daoist, kind of like martial arts, Chan and Taoist self cultivation. But there's some explicitly Chan monks involved in this. These films about, directed by rza about a formerly enslaved person leaving the United States and going to China and being empowered to become this sort of martially masculine hero. So I was amazed just to see sort of the ways that martial masculinity, in particular that I've been thinking about in this particular context, crop up over and over again in all these very different contexts. That suggests that these categories have a lot of rhetorical power. They have this kind of staying power that just sticks into culture and continues to be available also for different people to sort of draw upon at different times, sometimes in unexpected ways. So that was sort of an exciting thing for me to see. Of course, I liked all the chapters, Megan, I don't know if you want to highlight some other ones.
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Megan Bryson
Yeah, I mean, I think those, like, the connections that Kevin has drawn between those three chapters are really important and powerful. And I also really love Rebecca and Marcus's chapters. I would also call attention to Joshua Braylor Shelton's chapter on Padma Sambhava, the siddha who tamed Tibet, in part because I think he has such a strong grasp of gender theory and masculinity is theory that he brings into that chapter really effectively. And highlighting how, you know, these stories about Padmasambhava are displacing the previous kingly model of Buddhist masculinity with this new siddha model of masculinity, such that this siddha is the one who humiliates the king and how that process is happening narratively. So I think that's a really important chapter, one that also carries along from some of the themes in the previous chapter by Steve Berkowitz on the Bodhisattva kings of Sri Lanka. And then, I think, echoes in B. Sharer's chapter about the transnational Tibetan group led by the Danish lama Ole Nudal. So I think we try to have these resonances throughout the book that think about how royal power, political power, come together with masculinity in different ways. And then it's hard. I mean, it's like choosing a favorite child, I assume. But I think that the last section of the book, the Breaking Boundary section, both Song Geng and Amy Langenberg are well established scholars, so I don't think they need as much promotion. But I think both of their chapters are still really wonderful. For Song Geng, in talking about the really fascinating journey of Xuanzang Tripetica from Journey to the west in Contemporary East Asian Media, Television, Film and now streaming series. But he also gets into, you know, manga and anime. And I think that those examples of the fluidity, as well as the exchanges between mainland China, South Korea, Japan, around this figure, I think are really, really interesting. And then, yeah, I Don't want to leave anyone out. So for Ward Keeler's chapter, he also has his book about this subject of Buddhism and Burmese masculinity. So people are also welcome to expl Expand on that. Nadawan Wang Chillard was great because especially because she was coming in from a very different perspective, more of a, you know, media studies and an English disciplinary perspective. But I thought that her reading of, you know, Hanuman style masculinity in the. The Cave rescue was also like. It matched really nicely with Keeler's chapter and that they're pointing out very different aspects of Buddhist masculinity in Southeast Asia, like in Theravada countries. And so getting that contrast, I think, is really helpful in resisting any overly simplistic reading of, you know, total autonomy or total devotion, dominating the other. And then the last one I think we haven't mentioned is Desi Vandova, which is the first chapter. And, you know, on art historical material, visual material. So really bringing in a different way of thinking about gender because we've talked a lot about terminology, which is, of course, rooted in particular linguistic traditions. But thinking about visual material takes us into a really different realm where, of course, we can never necessarily leave the realm of language, but there's a different set of, you know, symbols to engage with. And I think she did that really nicely in comparing the different images of the Buddha's body, like, very aesthetic versus the, you know, royal images, and thinking about this kind of middle way, masculinity as a visual trope. So we probably talked too much about all of the chapters, but that's.
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Juliang
Yeah.
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Megan Bryson
And maybe Kevin has more to add on that as well.
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Kevin Bucklew
I think just one other thing I would say was something that struck me sort of thematically that came out of a lot of the chapters was just the sense that it's not like there's just one Buddhist masculinity even within a particular Buddhist context. So, like, Amy Langenberg's chapter really highlights the idea that Buddhist masculinity, as constituted by the Vinaya, would be sort of deliberately contrasted in nature with this sort of Vedic householder masculinity. And that in certain ways, the coherence of each of the masculinity categories hinges on what it's being contrasted with in China. There's this, like, martial and civil binary that you see just all over the place once you start looking for it, that people have talked about, but they, you know, Cam Louis pioneered the study of this civil and mass and martial categories being fundamentally about masculinity. I think that's such a powerful idea. And also with Desi's chapter, just this idea that the Buddha's masculinity is being constructed in a context where it's contrasted in particular ways. And it's compelling partly by the way that it sets itself apart from other kinds of norms. And there might be sort of competing hegemonic norms, there might be sort of hegemonic and subordinate sort of ideas of masculinity. So this. So I think these are. These provide examples of how complicated the study of masculinity is. It's really not a simplistic enterprise. And Ward Keeler also just studying how in certain ways the sort of very seemingly different categories of layperson and monk can be. Can be seen as operating sort of. Oops, I just froze. I think Ward Keiller's chapter also just talks about the sort of like, common coin of masculinity uniting the lay and sort of lay people who might be. Seem like very un Buddhist. But he argues that they're autonomous. Their autonomy marks them as masculine in a similar way to the way that extreme sort of dedicated meditators in Bonnie's Buddhist monasticism are also sort of autonomous. And it's precisely their autonomy that gives them this sort of sense of masculinity. So. Or fulfilling a masculine norm. So I thought that's just a few examples, but this sort of contrastive sense of the theme that I found across a lot of the chapters.
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Juliang
Thank you so much. This is such a fascinating an introduction and it raises. I was furiously taking notes and it raises more questions than I could ever ask in the interview. But I might just throw this understanding of me and my reaction to this book out there and see how you react to it is that I. The more I think about each of the chapter, the more I think about them as interconnected to each other in a. In a fascinating way that it presents so many different forms and so many different presentations of Buddhist masculinity. So. So there is way that you organize it of somewhat about different aspect of masculinity per se. But then you can also think about different types of Buddhist practitioners. You can think about what is tantric masculinity. You see it being represented in many different articles. You could read all the ones about monastic masculinity, which some people will argue, say that wouldn't it be just gender neutral for men and women. But it's surprisingly not the case. And sometimes we see that being actually interjected by another masculinity we consider and Especially in the Southeast Asian case of secular masculinity also being influenced and inscribed by Buddhist ideals. So that's one way for me to think about. Also another way of categorizing the different ideals of masculinity, but also the historical conversation partners Buddhism have had. So starting with Hinduism, Buddhism with South Asian religions, with Confucianism, Daoism most famously. And we see that being actually introduced in all those different chapters as well. So I like when Kevin Yu said there is not one singular Buddhist masculinity, but there always have been multiple, inhabited by different categories of Buddhist practitioners, but also by Buddhism inhabiting different locales and sometimes incorporating or cooperating local ideals and discourses, and sometimes seeing, for example, Amy Langenberg's article by resisting certain established gender ideals. So I was wondering if you have any thoughts or responses to the multiple masculinities.
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Kevin Bucklew
Yeah, I mean, one that I forgot to mention, but is another example of this sort of sense of contrasting masculinities within the same context is Joshua's chapter about Padmasambhava. And just the sense of Siddha masculinity as a sort of type that you might track, it probably changes over time. It's subject to different kinds of negotiation, but it also is identifiable as having fairly sort of coherent sort of characteristics that are really different from the sort of mainstream monastic sort of Bodhisattva archetype. And so, yeah, I think that this is something that can really sort of valuably be measured. And the other thing is, I mean that Padma Sambhava challenging the king, you know, and sort of in terms of kingly masculinity versus versus Siddha masculinity, I think is an interesting example of how there are sort of real world context for these interactions. In my research on Chan, I've noticed that Ja Zhangfu is used, you know, in totally non Buddhist context to talk about heroic generals and heroic ministers who sort of serve the state in a very outstanding way. And so to me, it seems like Chan Buddhists were really actively sort of participating in history when they decided to make Da Zhang fu a key term in their lexicon because it allowed them to join conversations, to sort of partake of hegemonic masculinity in a way that in my view, I think probably Buddhist monastics in China before that hadn't really fully done. And so. But a contrasting case would be Song Gen's chapter in literature. Shenzhong is really not a martially masculine character at all. He's cast as a sort of effeminate character who needs to be protected. And so certain kinds of tropes of femininity are being utilized to portray Xianzhong. So it's definitely not ever a single picture. Yeah, I don't know if that sort of answers.
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Megan Bryson
Yeah, I think those are all really important points. I think another aspect of Buddhist masculinities that really has stood out to me in the process of putting this book together are how it's sort of similarly complicated situation and similarly contradictory in a lot of ways to the situation with Buddhist femininities and feminine ideals in Buddhism, where I think with the study of women in Buddhism, there's often a question of, you know, what are the liberatory resources? Or how did different Buddhist texts and images and practices help women somehow find space or create space for themselves in what are generally patriarchal societies? To what extent did these Buddhist materials further reinforce aspects of patriarchal structures? And I think we find sort of similar issues when we look at Buddhist masculinities, which is that it's also challenging, right, for men to achieve these masculine ideals. And these masculine ideals are also contradictory, and they're paradoxical in certain ways that create similar challenges in trying to identify any type of direct, one to one relationship between images of Buddhist masculinity and Buddhist men's lives. So I think that that stands out also that the multiplicities of Buddhist masculinities within context and across contexts create similar challenges for deciphering any sort of one way to be a good Buddhist man, or at least needing to understand that there are multiple possibilities, there are competing discourses and competing traditions over what that looks like. And I'm, of course, also invested in the project of treating Buddhism more broadly. And this was one of the questions that came up in the review process, which is like, are all of these chapters really about Buddhism? And our answer is, yes, they are. And that comes up, I think, most in the making men section of the book, because it's about the process of becoming a man in Buddhist terms, whatever those might be. But it's also about the ways in which Buddhism is part of cultures and part of societies to the extent that it becomes impossible to really disentangle, like, okay, well, what is uniquely or purely Buddhist versus being just part of a larger cultural repertoire from which people are drawing a lot of different ideas and ideals. So I think taking that more expansive view of Buddhism and, you know, allowing for broader interpretations that go beyond a monastery, that might not be recognizably Buddhist to all Buddhists, but that's I think part of doing justice to the diversity of Buddhism in different times and places, which is one of the goals of this volume. So I think that we have a lot of reasons for trying to be as expansive as possible with both Buddhism and masculinities.
- [43:00]
Kevin Bucklew
And just to pick up on one thing that Megan just said about contradictions, sort of going back to this piece by Miriam Levering that really inspired my work on the term Da Zhengfu, which appeared in The, I think, 1992 edited volume, Buddhism, Gender and Sexuality, edited by Jose Capozon. And she separates, you know, she identifies these two kinds of rhetoric, the rhetoric of equality and the rhetoric of heroism. Da Zhang Fu is an example of the rhetoric of heroism. You need to be a hero in order to be a Chun master. And the rhetoric of equality would be the idea that everyone has Buddha nature and so all gender doesn't matter for liberation. And I think what to me is so compelling about that chapter in that volume and Levering's analysis of these terms is that I think it would be easy just to say that the concept of universal Buddha nature is sort of just. Just empty rhetoric. It doesn't actually mean anything. But I think it actually is. I think we don't have reason to think that the Chan masters didn't take that very seriously. There's so much discussion of emptiness doctrine, deconstruction of formal categories of all kinds in Chan literature. I think we have every reason to take them seriously about that as a serious aspect of their worldview. And that just makes it all the more sort of troubling and interesting that they then turn around and use this gendered language to talk about what a tongue master looks like. And so I think that's an example where it's like, I think that really is a tension. It's not just a matter of resolving it in favor of Da Zhang Fu as the real thing. And the other stuff is all just like sort of window dressing. Because I often think that Buddhists, in cases where there's contradictions like this, are sort of animated, you know, in their. In their teachings or whatever. They're, however, they're addressing sort of problem, the problems of the path or of human existence. They're addressing that kind of tension and they're wrestling with that kind of problem. And so, yeah, I think that identifying these kinds of contradictions that just show us that, you know, you can't just say Chan teachings are X. This is their coherent view. It's always, always this negotiation that's very fraught.
- [45:19]
Juliang
Thank you. That is a wonderful reminder of the classic Buddhist teaching of the two truths. Right. On the one hand, you have the ultimate truth, and we all know that in enlightenment there's no distinction or discrimination, gender markers included. But on the other hand, you are also inhabiting this very gendered, very discriminated reality that you living every day. And I think the most powerful part for me about the two truth teaching is that they are existing right now at this moment, at the same time. Right? So part of the complexity and the capaciousness of Buddhism is to invite you to, to think about and to reflect on those two at the same time and not to say that this is true and the other is not. So while we are entertaining the multifaceted ideals of masculinities, I do wonder, after the editing and compiling and the successful publication of this book, is there any future directions or big picture questions you see in the field of Buddhist masculinities? Are there any questions you want to look for answers? Are there future direction you like to yourself go in or to see other scholars going into?
- [46:42]
Megan Bryson
I think there's so much work left to do, I mean, which is one of the really exciting things about this area. And I think one of the things that I found reassuring about this project is how many junior scholars were involved and interested in these areas because the time goes fast, you know, once you're in a job. And it's easy to get more and more alienated from what younger people care about, frankly. And I think listening to what undergraduates are saying and listening to what graduate students are saying and what they're interested in is a good way of thinking about sort of what matters to people now. And that doesn't have to be the only question that guides our research. But I think it's helpful to just keep in mind, you know, who's coming along after us and what are the kinds of questions that they seem to be interested in. Because I know with my students, and I just teach undergraduates here at Tennessee, there's a lot of interest in non binary gender. There's a lot of interest in trans identities and Buddhism. So I've had students write papers on Guanyin, you know, Avalokiteshvara as a trans icon. And I think those are areas where it goes beyond just Buddhist masculinity, is to really think about Buddhism and gender much more broadly and thinking about how to conceive of this as a larger topic for myself within the study of Buddhist masculinities, because so much of what I'm interested in has to do with how gender interacts with other categories of difference, including ethnic difference. So I'm still interested in pursuing questions about how masculinity interacts with ideas of ethnicity and those kinds of categories of difference, especially in like Tang and Song China. Or from my perspective, looking at Nanzhao Dali, even though it's a little harder to work from some of those materials because there aren't as many. But those are things that I'm interested in. But I think there's such a huge range of questions to get into that I think there's a lot of tremendous potential for scholars to explore.
- [49:20]
Kevin Bucklew
Yeah, I agree. And I think, I mean one thing, just taking sort of holding the book in our hands and like looking at the chapters, I think something that strikes me is just the feeling like sort of any of these chapters could jump out into a larger sort of future conversation. And there's just a sense that this is really like the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's out there to discuss. And also I think I would hope that the, you know, people continue to pursue interdisciplinary collaborations because I think we really benefited in this volume from people working in different disciplines coming together around this theme. And just I think that we see different perspectives that are. That we're often sort of just don't quite notice when we only stick to sort of really pure sort of Buddhist studies type of scholars or people who are in a religious studies department or whatever it is, that the field definitely will continue to benefit if people keep sort of trying to collaborate across these lines.
- [50:19]
Juliang
Exactly. I would love to see more interdisciplinary collaboration and future aspiring scholars of Buddhist masculinities. Definitely read the book, read all the footnotes and find out what you're interested in or imagine something totally different altogether. I think that's where also the fun is as well. So thank you so much for your time. One last thing I would also like to ask on behalf of the listener is that I know the book publishing business is a time consuming project and normally we have already moved on to something totally different or somewhat related. So I was wondering, what are each of you working on at this moment? Would you like to share?
- [51:01]
Megan Bryson
Sure. I'm trying to finish a second monograph on Buddhist transmission around the Dalit Kingdom, so taking my regional focus and fixing it more in a temporal area. So in this case the Dali Kingdom, which is roughly contemporaneous with the Song dynasty. And I'm still trying to adopt a somewhat interdisciplinary approach in looking at texts, images and objects as they circulated through the Dali Kingdom to Better get a sense of how some of these Buddhist materials were traveling in. In the middle period, because Dali is such an understudied, but I, you know, think very fascinating and important region. So that's. That's the other piece that I'm working on, which I think a lot of this work coalesces around questions of what has gotten left out of the scholarship on, you know, Buddhism or East Asian religions, in my case. And so the. That's where Buddhist masculinity fits in and where the Dali Kingdom also fits in.
- [52:09]
Kevin Bucklew
Yeah. So I'm finishing my book manuscript, which is closely related to my chapter in this volume about Chan Buddhism in the Song Dynasty. And the book is really about how Chan masters were understood to be sort of Buddhas or Buddha like, and were cast in various terms that were drawn from canonical scriptures to sort of praise the Buddha and apply to Chan masters. But they also combined these sort of Indian Buddhist terms in Chinese translation with indigenous Chinese tropes. Da Zhang Fu is a really nice example because they. Because it's sort of. It's used in some translations of Buddhist scriptures as a translation of the Sanskrit word mahapurusha, but it also has this legacy and sort of a genealogy in Chinese texts. So Cheng Buddha sort of ingeniously, you know, fused those two to forge a new image of the Chamastrosa Chinese Buddha. So I'm finishing that, and then I'm sort of starting work on a second project about embodiment in Buddhism and Taoism. I got really interested in the relationship between Buddhism and especially inner alchemy and embryological and other kinds of bodily images in Buddhist and Taoist context and seeing how they're speaking to each other. So I'm sort of just going back to that for a second project.
- [53:18]
Juliang
Thank you. Those are all fascinating topics and kind of embody the spirit of sitting at the intersection of Buddhism and all of its possibilities and conversation partners. So I very much look forward to welcoming both of you back for your future project as well. So thank you very much for making time for us today, and again, congratulations on the publication of such. Such a wonderful volume.
- [53:44]
Megan Bryson
Thank you so much.
- [53:45]
Kevin Bucklew
Thank. You, sam.