Special event: Gender Identity, Liberation and Buddhadharma

Presenter: Damcho Diana Finnegan (from America)

Sat 12 November| 10am-11.30am

Online: link provided below

Cost: By Donation

Buddhist texts encourage us to let go of our personal identities, deconstruct our sense of self and liberate ourselves from our fixation on self. Mahayana Buddhism embraces a philosophy of non-duality. Yet few (if any) Buddhist texts or practices invite us to question our own gender identity, transcend gender binaries in our communities and reduce our grasping at gender as a social category.

We find gender treated as a highly stable category in most Buddhist communities and storytelling traditions, yet we also find gender fluidity, with bodhisattvas depicted as male in one place and female in another, as well as stories of spontaneous sex change in monastic texts.

This talk will explore gender identity from a Buddhist perspective, asking whether (and how) gender identity is relevant in Buddhism. Does it matter whether we are practicing as women or men or without a binary gender identity? Is Buddhism “one size fits all” or does the body we are practicing in make a significant difference?

There will also be a component of group discussion and interaction with the speaker at this event.

About the Speaker: Damcho Diana Finnegan was born and raised in New York. After working as a journalist in New York and Hong Kong, she ordained as a Buddhist nun in 1999. In 2009 she earned a PhD in Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhism, with a dissertation on gender and ethics in narratives about early Buddhist nuns. Damcho co-founded and heads Dharmadatta Community (Comunidad Dharmadatta), which is today the largest Spanish-speaking Dharma community with a seven-year study program, online meditation halls and weekly YouTube talks on its faceBuda channel. For over a decade, she has lived in community with a small group of other nuns, first training together in India, then teaching in Mexico. She now lives with the other Dharmadatta nuns in rural Virginia in the United States, where she continues teaching online while working on a book on the sevenfold method for generating bodhicitta, exploring how it shifts when women are placed at the center of the practice.

Login details: If you would like to join our session, just click on this link to access the session: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83506489824?pwd=cmpNQ1ljSmFVYURLWVN1dWllYUN1dz09 Alternatively, you can dial in from your telephone (call charges apply): +61 2 8015 6011

Meeting ID: 835 0648 9824| Passcode: 718905