Papers by Pascale F . Engelmajer
Honors in Practice: A Publication of the National Collegiate Honors Council , 2024
What do students hear when we talk of mindfulness? To reframe unexamined assumptions among studen... more What do students hear when we talk of mindfulness? To reframe unexamined assumptions among students who conceptualize both mindfulness and honors education as "doing more" (more exercises to gain psychological bene ts and more work to gain higher GPAs), the authors of this paper piloted a new course in philosophy and religious studies. In this essay, they discuss their collaborative experience designing, co-teaching, and assessing an honors course on mindfulness: its roots in Buddhist thought and practices, its contemporary secular developments, and its potential impact on students' learning and lived experience. Integral to this experiment is also an approach to teaching philosophy and religious studies in the context of a general education curriculum that aims at presenting the disciplines and their focus areas as forms of collaborative experiential learning.
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1. The King's daughter 2. A Buddhist theory of gender: what is a woman? 3. A woman's trad... more 1. The King's daughter 2. A Buddhist theory of gender: what is a woman? 3. A woman's traditional career: from daughter to wife 4. Only Dhamma pays off the filial debt 5. Motherhood as a soteriological path 6. Bhikkhunis and the four assemblies 7. The Buddhist family: spiritual paths for women
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Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, Jul 5, 2022
This article examines the themes of choice and agency in the context of motherhood as it appears ... more This article examines the themes of choice and agency in the context of motherhood as it appears in the Pāli Buddhist texts. I focus on two characters, Māya, the Buddha’s birth mother and Visākhā, one of his best known female lay disciples. Both of these women are known primarily because of their connection to the Buddha, and their spiritual path is neglected, or even disdained, because they are considered as secondary and auxiliary characters whose only purpose is to support the men they surround (Gross, 1995). In this article, I propose a “matricentric” feminist approach (O’Reilly, 2014) to challenge this attitude, and the patriarchal hierarchy that underlies it. Based on this radical interpretation of Buddhist principles, I show how the Buddhist path appears, in the Pāli texts, as a “mothering path” that a number of women, like Māya and Visākhā, choose and undertake as a spiritual path, thereby recognizing women’s agency as mothers and the validity and value of mothering in a soteriological context.
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Bristol University Press eBooks, Aug 30, 2018
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1. The King's daughter 2. A Buddhist theory of gender: what is a woman? 3. A woman's trad... more 1. The King's daughter 2. A Buddhist theory of gender: what is a woman? 3. A woman's traditional career: from daughter to wife 4. Only Dhamma pays off the filial debt 5. Motherhood as a soteriological path 6. Bhikkhunis and the four assemblies 7. The Buddhist family: spiritual paths for women
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Breastfeeding(s) and religions, 2019
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1. The King's daughter 2. A Buddhist theory of gender: what is a woman? 3. A woman's trad... more 1. The King's daughter 2. A Buddhist theory of gender: what is a woman? 3. A woman's traditional career: from daughter to wife 4. Only Dhamma pays off the filial debt 5. Motherhood as a soteriological path 6. Bhikkhunis and the four assemblies 7. The Buddhist family: spiritual paths for women
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EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo
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Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses
This article examines the themes of choice and agency in the context of motherhood as it appears ... more This article examines the themes of choice and agency in the context of motherhood as it appears in the Pāli Buddhist texts. I focus on two characters, Māya, the Buddha’s birth mother and Visākhā, one of his best known female lay disciples. Both of these women are known primarily because of their connection to the Buddha, and their spiritual path is neglected, or even disdained, because they are considered as secondary and auxiliary characters whose only purpose is to support the men they surround (Gross, 1995). In this article, I propose a “matricentric” feminist approach (O’Reilly, 2014) to challenge this attitude, and the patriarchal hierarchy that underlies it. Based on this radical interpretation of Buddhist principles, I show how the Buddhist path appears, in the Pāli texts, as a “mothering path” that a number of women, like Māya and Visākhā, choose and undertake as a spiritual path, thereby recognizing women’s agency as mothers and the validity and value of mothering in a sot...
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This chapter argues that motherhood in ancient Buddhism is conceptualized as a set of activities ... more This chapter argues that motherhood in ancient Buddhism is conceptualized as a set of activities that focuses on nurturing and spiritual guidance and provides a soteriological path for women. Engelmajer examines two women, Mahāpajāpati, the founder of the order of Buddhist nuns, and Visākhā, a wealthy lay-follower of the Buddha, who both earned the title of “mother” by embodying these mothering activities. Mahāpajāpati was the baby Buddha’s foster-mother, and Visākhā her father-in-law’s spiritual role model and guide, but Engelmajer shows that their mothering extended beyond these relationships to everyone around them throughout their life. The chapter concludes that the Buddhist sources present the mothering experience as a valuable and meaningful means to actualize the Buddhist path within the confines of ancient Indian women’s lay life.
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Food, Faith and Gender in South Asia
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Open Theology
This paper examines mothers and mothering in the Pāli canon and commentaries and contends that a ... more This paper examines mothers and mothering in the Pāli canon and commentaries and contends that a mothering path emerges when the deeply patriarchal traditional hierarchy of values is challenged and, following Karen Derris, the unthoughts related to mothers and mothering, which this hierarchy of values generates, are also challenged. The article focuses on three main female characters, Māyā, Mahāpajāpatī, and Visākhā, whose paths as mothers or as lay followers of the Buddha who “stand in the position of a mother” constitute a deliberate soteriological path in the Pali Buddhist texts. It draws on contemporary Buddhist Studies feminist scholarship (in particular, the work of Karen Derris (2014) and Liz Wilson (2013)) as well as motherhood studies (in particular, Sara Ruddick’s (1989) work based on Adrienne Rich’s (1976) foundational distinction between motherhood as a patriarchal institution that oppresses women and mothering as women’s lived experience to outline how mothering activit...
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How do religions deal with breastfeeding? This is the main question we aimed at answering during ... more How do religions deal with breastfeeding? This is the main question we aimed at answering during the International Workshop Breastfeeding(s) and Religions: Normative Prescriptions and Individual Appropriations. Cross-Cultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Antiquity to the Present (Max-Weber-Kolleg, University of Erfurt, July 11-12, 2018). The goal is to analyze how religious discourses have described and influenced such a natural and strictly female practice. Within religious discourse, breastfeeding(s) can be seen as biological, spiritual, or even transgressive (for example, babies breastfed by animals, saints breastfed by the Virgin Mary, old men breastfed by young women). Greek and Roman goddesses, for instance, except in some rare and specific exceptions, do not breastfeed (they avoid biological aspects of motherhood in general), but in the Egyptian narratives breast-milk is notoriously central for Horus (and the Pharaoh). Does a divine child need breast-milk and why? To what extent do (male) religious authorities and sacred texts dictate maternal practices in a normative way? Do they tell women how, how long, when, and where to breastfeed? Do they blame women who don't have milk, or who decide not to breastfeed? To what extent do women feel free to transgress without blaming themselves for not being a “good” mother and obedient member of a specific religious tradition? In which way can a mother's decision not to breastfeed be perceived as religious individualization and autonomy from social inter-connectedness? Which kinds of rituals do women perform in relation to breastfeeding and which deities do they appropriate, and eventually alter and reinvent for this purpose? These are just some of the questions that can arise by putting together “breastfeeding/ s” and “religion/s”, and which clearly show how and why “breastfeeding/s” and “religion/s” can definitely go hand in hand with academic research.
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Ageing and intergenerational relationsFamily reciprocity from a global perspective, 2010
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Contemporary Buddhism, Jan 1, 2003
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Books by Pascale F . Engelmajer
It is said that the Buddha-to-be, as a deva in Tusita heaven, surveyed the world in order to choo... more It is said that the Buddha-to-be, as a deva in Tusita heaven, surveyed the world in order to choose the mother of his last incarnation. He chose Mahāmāyā, a “woman entirely unlike any ordinary human woman”, for her qualities of virtue and purity. Her extraordinary qualities, together with her supernatural pregnancy and birth-giving, put her far above any other human woman, and her death, seven days after the Buddha’s birth, frees her of any mistake she might have committed while raising her son. This chapter asks whether it is possible to offer a reading of Mahāmāyā that embraces her as the perfect mother in the ancient Indian Buddhist context, and therefore providing, if not a usable role model, an aspiration and an ideal for women that allows her to transcend the patriarchal framework within which she seems to be confined. According to the tradition, Māyā expressly made the wish to become the Buddha’s mother, and she had to be pure for “one thousand eons of lifetimes” for that wish to be fulfilled. The renunciation of her enlightenment that this entails within Buddhist soteriology has never been examined, either by the tradition or by scholars. I argue that it provides a meaningful reading of Mahāmāyā that recognizes her desire to be a mother both as a truly Buddhist aspiration – as she sacrifices her own nirvana in order to provide a fitting vessel for the future Buddha – and as a feminist appropriation that claims motherhood as a valid choice for women, and not merely the internalization of the patriarchal framework.
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Papers by Pascale F . Engelmajer
Books by Pascale F . Engelmajer