Alison Melnick Dyer, "The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldron: A Woman of Power and Privilege" (U Washington Press, 2022)
Born to a powerful family and educated at the prominent Mindr\xf6ling Monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Mingyur Peldr\xf6n (1699\u20131769) leveraged her privileged status and overcame significant adversity, including exile during a civil war, to play a central role in the reconstruction of her religious community.\xa0In\xa0The Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldr\xf6n: A Woman of Power and Privilege\xa0(U Washington Press, 2022),\xa0Alison Melnick Dyer employs literary and historical analysis, centered on a biography written by the nun's disciple Gyurm\xe9 \xd6sel, to consider how privilege influences individual authority, how authoritative Buddhist women have negotiated their position in gendered contexts, and how the lives of historical Buddhist women are (and are not) memorialized by their communities.\xa0\nMingyur Peldr\xf6n's story challenges the dominant paradigms of women in religious life and adds nuance to our ideas about the history of gendered engagement in religious institutions. Her example serves as a means for better understanding of how gender can be both masked and asserted in the search for authority\u2014operations that have wider implications for religious and political developments in eighteenth-century Tibet. In its engagement with Tibetan history, this study also illuminates the relationships between the Geluk and Nyingma schools of Tibetan Buddhism from the eighteenth century, to the nonsectarian developments of the nineteenth century.\nThe Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldr\xf6n\xa0is available for\xa0free open-access download\xa0here.\xa0\nBruno M. Shirley is a PhD candidate at Cornell University, working on Buddhism, politics, and gender in medieval Sri Lankan texts and landscapes. He is on Twitter at @brunomshirley.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies