Dr. Holly Gayley
Holly Gayley is an associate professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research areas include gender and sexuality in Buddhist tantra, ethical reform in contemporary Tibet, and theorizing translation, both literary and cultural, in the transmission of Buddhist teachings to North America. She is author of Love Letters from Golok: A Tantric Couple in Modern Tibet (2016), co-editor of A Gathering of Brilliant Moons: Practice Advice from the Rime Masters of Tibet (2017), translator of Inseparable across Lifetimes: The Lives and Love Letters of Namtrul Rinpoche and Khandro Tāre Lhamo (2019), and editor of Voices from Larung Gar: Shaping Tibetan Buddhism for the Twenty-First Century (forthcoming in 2021). Her articles on ethical reform in contemporary Tibet have appeared in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Contemporary Buddhism, Journal of Religious Ethics, and Himalaya Journal. Her writings on gender and sexuality in Tibetan Buddhism have appeared in the journals History of Religions and Religions as well as the anthology Buddhist Feminisms and Femininities. In addition, Gayley is co-founder of the Tibet Himalaya Initiative at CU Boulder and co-chair of a five-year seminar on "Transnational Religious Expression: Between Asia and North America" at the American Academy of Religion.
Supported Project:
Dr. Holly Gayley, “The Entanglement of Buddhist Devotion and Sexual Abuse”
As a specialist in gender, sexuality, and ethics in contemporary Buddhism in Tibet, I attend to representational practices and emergent narratives involving tensions and entanglements between the devotion impulse in Tibetan Buddhism and recent accounts of sexual abuse. There are three discrete components to this project, transnational in scope, each engaging a distinct set of materials and methods. The first, “Parody and Pathos: Sexual Transgression by ‘Fake’ Lamas in Tibetan Short Stories,” is an article nearing completion and co-authored with my former graduate student Somtsobum. This is a literary analysis of modern Tibetan-language fiction that critiques sexual transgression by Buddhist lamas (or those posing as such) and queries uncritical devotion on the part of Tibetans. This facet of the project illuminates an emergent discourse on religion and sexual abuse on the Tibetan plateau, otherwise taboo and largely restricted to gossip. The second component comes closer to home and involves my first foray into autoethnography. As part of the global Shambhala Buddhist community, I chronicle the unfolding first years of a community in crisis in the wake of reports of sexual abuse by its spiritual leader and examine a range of community responses and emergent narratives in which devotion and loyalty are being pitted against transparency and accountability (and vice versa).
The third component of this project is theological in nature, a paper on “The Cultural Translation of Buddhist Devotion in North America,” accepted for the XIXth Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (IABS) in Seoul, Korea, rescheduled for August 2021. Here I examine presumptions about the guru-disciple relationship in Tibetan Buddhism as it has been translated, both in literary terms in translated works on the topic and in a cultural sense, i.e. how Tibetan teachers and American Buddhists speak and write about devotion in English. I am interested in how (mis)understandings of devotion and the (in)fallibility of the guru have allowed for novel configurations (institutional and social) around Tibetan Buddhist teachers in exile that may have enabled abuse, sexual and otherwise. As such, this paper explores salient discourses that influence understandings and enactments of devotion among so-called “convert” communities in North America, now in their second and third generations. Specifically, I focus on a dozen key translations of Tibetan Buddhist classics on the topic of devotion—as well as a range of popular books, talks, interviews, and blog posts by leading teachers—and put these in conversation with voices on social media in response to the recent sexual abuse crisis. This will allow me to explore the unexpected trajectories of Buddhist devotion in translation, even as transnational connections among Tibetan communities complicate unidirectional analysis.
