In April 2017, CU Boulder was honored to host the eminent Buddhologist, Jan Nattier, Professor Emerita of Soka University, Japan. Her talk on Thursday, April 27th, "Gender and Awakening: Sexual Transformation of Mahāyāna Sūtras," was well attended by faculty members and graduate students of the Department of Asian Languages & Civilizations, Religious Studies, and Women & Gender Studies as well as by members of the public. Prof. Nattier's analysis of sex change narratives in the Buddhist canon was an impressive piece of philological and religious scholarship that challenged the commonly held assumption that the rise of Mahāyāna opened new spiritual horizons for Buddhist women and created a more egalitarian atmosphere for female practitioners. Prof. Nattier's close reading of a set of narratives featuring female characters that either suddenly (within a single lifetime) or gradually (at some point during the course of rebirth) turned into men instead demonstrated that these tales encode a decidedly non-egalitarian vision of what women can and cannot achieve. She also concluded that doctrinal concerns, especially the wish to confirm the superiority of Mahāyāna, were preeminent as compared with questions of sex or gender.
On the day before her talk, Prof. Nattier also met with the graduate students of the Chinese program at the Department of Asian Studies & Civilizations for a lively and highly productive discussion of recent developments in the area of Buddhist Studies. This opportunity to connect with the most cutting-edge scholarship in Buddhology was particularly valuable, since CU does not currently count a scholar of Professor Nattier's specialization among its faculty.
Written by Antje Richter, Professor and Graduate Director of Chinese