Soaring and Settling: Buddhist Perspectives on Contemporary Social and Religious Issues

Soaring and settling, riding the winds of change, finding ease in impermanence are all images that govern Rita Gross's text. The over-riding concern is with how Eastern wisdom traditions transform our lives and are themselves transformed by contact with the wisdom of the West. In the first part of the text, Gross deals with autobiographical and methodological issues related to being a feminist Buddhist scholar-practitioner in North America. The next part considers major "lifestyle" or social issues, arranged to proceed through the life cycle from conception to death and grieving. Here are such matters as population control, work and family, environmental ethics, and a personal approach to finitude and death. Finally, she turns to properly theological questions such as immanence and transcendence in womens religious experience and expression, the use of goddess images in Buddhism, and several practices from the author's own Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist tradition.