Meeting the Great Bliss Queen:

·期刊原文
Meeting the Great Bliss Queen:
Buddhists, Feminists and the Art of the Self.
By Anne Carolyn Klein
Philosophy East & West
Vol. 46 No.2
Apr 1996
Pp.295-296
Copyright by University of Hawaii Press

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Meeting the Great Bliss Queen is a significant contribution
to the field of Buddhist studies and offers critical insights
into the growing dialogue between Buddhist and Western
feminists struggling to reenvision subjectivity. Yeshey
Tsogyel, a semimythological figure from Tibetan history,
becomes the metaphorical Great Bliss Queen, an enlightened
embodiment of wisdom and compassion. Klein presents her as a
potential bridge between two seemingly antithetical
philosophical positions on subjectivity: essentialism (women
are their feminine essence, however broadly or narrowly
defined)and constructionism (womenbecome women as a result of
their cultural and political contexts).

Klein acknowledges that Buddhism may not and probably should
not be asked to provide answers to thorny political
questions, especially in this nascent stage of development in
the West when it is still poorly interpreted and frequently
misunderstood. What Klein does offer is a sketch of a
possible path to connect these diverse philosophical and
cultural contexts of Buddhist philosophy and practice and
Western and postmodern feminist positions on subjectivity.
She begins by detailing the very different understandings of
the individual and the self acted upon by Westerners as
inheritors of the Enlightenment tradition and by Tibetan
Buddhists (specificallythe Geluk and Nyingma traditions most
closely associated with the Bliss Queen sotras and practices)
with whom she has studied and practiced. Westerners coming to
Buddhist practice have an innate understanding of the
individual as a unique, self-contained unit, the result of
specific personal choices and preferences. Tibetans (and
other Asian Buddhists)have an understanding of the self that
is part of more extensive social ties to family, community,
village, and the cosmos. This interpretation of the self, as
nondualistically conceived, offers a middle path between
essentialism and constructionism. Klein argues that rather
than see these positions as dualistically opposed to one
another, Buddhism offers a way to understand them as mutually
dependent, dependently arising.

Nondualisim--ontological nondualism (themutual dependence of
conventional reality on its own emptiness) , cognitive
nondualism (themutual dependence of subject and object), and
evolutionary nondualism (themutual dependence of the
enlightened and unenlightened mind)--is reified and practiced
in the Bliss Queen ritual. The philosophical non-dualism
embodied by the Bliss Queen makes it possible for the
feminist to understand the self as both conditioned and
unconditioned, as essential and constructed, and that the two
positions, diametrically opposed in the Western mind, are in
fact dependent on one another for their existence.

Klein offers the Great Bliss Queen as a potential bridge
between Buddhist and feminist discussions on subjectivity and
with the hope of facilitating the continued conversation in
this very rich field.