In Search of Buddha's Daughters

December 14, 2015
In this personal travelogue and investigative report, Toomey, a foreign affairs journalist, seeks out and interviews Buddhist nuns to examine the question of women’s status in and relationship to Buddhism. The women Toomey interviews in Nepal, Japan, and California are inspirational in their devotion, endurance through hardships, and bravery in fighting patriarchal norms to earn respect for their spiritual callings. The topic is fascinating, but the book sometimes reads more like scattered anecdotes than a cohesive narrative, jumping from place to place to showcase new subjects and short vignettes without a strong thesis or conclusions. Toomey attempts to provide an underlying narrative by musing on her own life and reasons for exploring the subject, but at times this threatens to eclipse the focus on her interviewees. Nonetheless, the book’s perspective on Buddhism is rarely found in other sources, revealing room for invention and ingenuity within the tradition, as well as a great variety in women’s experiences as devotees. This is a worthwhile read for those seeking accounts on the intersection of feminism and Buddhism.

December 15, 2015
A British journalist's account of her yearlong investigation into the lives and motivations of women who chose to become Buddhist nuns. Throughout her more than 20-year career as a foreign correspondent, Toomey had always been drawn to writing about the courage and compassion of the many women she met. In 2011, she decided to focus her attention on women who sought ordination into the male-dominated world of monastic Buddhism. Her project began as a purely "journalistic endeavor." However, the deaths of her father and mother soon infused the journey with a need for both "a deeper understanding and a wisdom that would heal." Toomey started in Nepal, "the land where the Buddha was born," and worked her way east to west through India, Burma, and Japan before heading west to the United States and Europe. The women she met came from a wide array of backgrounds. Some had fled poverty and violence while others, like the Tibetan princess Choying Khandro, had turned their backs on lives of privilege. Still others had left successful careers as policewomen, pilots, actresses, or writers or marriages and families to find the inner peace and fulfillment that had eluded them. Regardless of the particular Buddhist sect they joined, each of Toomey's interviewees shared a common devotion to Buddhist teachings and to doing good in the world. Many of them also shared a desire to see women become fully integrated members of a religion that, for the most part, still considered them inferior and subservient to male monks. Intelligent and informative, Toomey's book reveals the hidden lives of women who have been neglected by Buddhist discourse, and it brings to the fore the contributions that more high-profile nuns, such as Pema Chodron, have made to the resurgent worldwide interest in Buddhist philosophy. An inspiring and necessary addition to the body of work about modern-day Buddhism.

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