Reveals how Buddhist women across Asia have shaped, sustained, and transformed Buddhist religious life as practitioners, patrons, teachers, ritual agents, and sacred figures.

Women and Representation in Buddhist Asia examines diverse and often divergent representations of women across Buddhist cultures, histories, and textual traditions. Bringing together twenty-one contributors, the volume is uniquely valuable for undergraduate teaching, and proceeds as a methodologically reflexive anthology that connects undergraduate teaching and pedagogy with original research and scholarship to demonstrate their relationality in the work of teacher-scholars across academic disciplines. The volume offers alternative epistemologies, including unconventional narratives of traditional Buddhist stories, reading texts against the grain, and reimaging patriarchal perspectives on women by bringing into focus the particularized experiences of the oppressed over idealized abstractions. By rethinking how, by whom, for which reasons, and in which contexts women and Buddhism are translated, this volume represents a timely intervention into Asian Studies and other related disciplines. Intentional in having the authors make explicit the often implicit socio-cultural, economic, and political deep structures impacting individual and collective ways of knowing, the volume (re)centers the authority and agency of women's experiences as alternative epistemology while de-centering Eurocentric models in order to reveal more nuanced narratives and praxis in the study of women in Buddhist Asia.