Women of the Way: Discovering 2,500 Years of Buddhist Wisdom - Softcover

Tisdale, Sallie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061146595 ISBN 13: 9780061146596

Publisher: HarperOne, 2007

Synopsis

In this groundbreaking work, Sallie Tisdale traces women Buddhist masters and teachers across continents and centuries, drawing upon historical, cultural, and Buddhist records to bring to life these narratives of ancestral Buddhist women.

About this title

About the Author:

Sallie Tisdale is the author of several books, including The Best Thing I Ever Tasted and Talk Dirty to Me. She is a consulting editor at Tricycle. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Harper's, the New Yorker, New Republic, Allure, Outside, Vogue, Tin House, Antioch Review, and Creative Nonfiction. Tisdale is currently training as a priest at Dharma Rain Zen Center in Portland, Oregon.

From Publishers Weekly:

Known for her books and essays but less well-known as a lay Buddhist teacher and consulting editor to the magazine Tricycle, Tisdale unites her spiritual and feminist concerns by breathing life into historical women of Buddhism. The book constructs a female lineage (line of teachers) for Zen Buddhism, including ancestors known through mythic tales and through Indian, Chinese and Japanese traditional writings. So much of women's history is unwritten that Tisdale "reimagines" the past in a series of stories about individual women who taught and practiced Buddhism. Some sketches are as beautifully done as brush paintings, apparently simple yet the result of skillful rendering of details selected to summon up an unknown and far removed life. Tisdale's descriptive writing is especially imaginative ("Their waters are endlessly broken by canoes and rough sailing boats, and endlessly renewed"). Occasionally, the book is confusing; the Western eye only slowly negotiates the Japanese names that can pile up in any given story of a woman and her family, teachers and temples. Although not a book for beginning students of Buddhism, this compilation of gracefully written stories helps American Buddhism put its egalitarian stamp on the evolving wisdom tradition that originated with the Indian prince Siddhartha 2,500 years ago. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0061146595
• ISBN 13: 9780061146596
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 299