Catherine Rathbun

"Despite the omission of women’s stories from the majority of the Buddhist historical record, Catherine is quick to disabuse us of the notion that there has been a corresponding lack of enlightened women across real time. "There have always been", she says, "awakened women." What has accounted for the distortion in representation, she argues, has been the long history of patriarchy in social and religious structures that has affected the ways in which we think about enlightenment as well as the texts written about it—that is, their tendency to be written by men and for men. In addition to neglecting women’s spiritual experiences, the patriarchal leaning creates two problems: it establishes a hierarchy in biological capacities for enlightenment dependent upon sex, while also discounting the potential differences in the paths men and women take to reach enlightenment. Though there’s no difference between a man and woman when it comes to the awakening itself, Catherine argues, the “path to the path of enlightenment” may itself be different."

/http://torontobodymind.ca/articles/catherine-rathbun-womans-journey-enlightenment /