Women and Buddhist Philosophy, Jin Y Park

This is a very good book. You can find it here.

In one sense, the book is a biography of Kim Iryôp, a writer and Korean women's movement turned Buddhist monk. Iryôp was a pioneer of critique of patriarchy in Korea, and senior Zen Buddhist nun.

But the book is more ambitious than this. As the title indicates, Park wants to investigate women and their relation to Buddhist philosophy. Incorporating the work of various philosophers, including Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Tanabe, Park begins to answer the following questions:
How do women engage with philosophy and Buddhist philosophy? Is women's marginal position in society comparable to Eastern philosophy's marginal position within academic philosophy? How closely related are feminist and existential questions? Is Buddhism as patriarchal as the society it emerges in? Do Buddhist stories of gender fluid Buddhas and bodhisattvas have any relevance at all to whether Buddhism is a patriarchal system of practice? Why have post-colonial Japanese and Korean philosophers struggled so much with the question of whether Buddhism is a religion or a philosophy? Does this struggle show a distinction that is culturally located and has been unhelpful, even hurtful, to those who didn't contribute to the original distinction between philosophy and religion? Is philosophy primarily a theoretical practice or do biographical and story based accounts, as in Iryôp's Reflections of a Buddhist Nun, also constitute philosophical thought? Can we, in good faith, call an early Korean women's movement activist's life a failure because they became a Buddhist recluse, or because their life ended in tragedy, when these criticisms are identical to those levied against these women by Korean patriarchal society during their lifetime?

The above questions feature more heavily (or rather, explicitly) as the book progress, which made a great experience to reconsider the earlier chapters, and hence Iryôp herself.

You can find a discussion of this book during the fourth episode of the Buddhist Philosophy Podcast.

Edit: oh, one more thing. I always love and appreciate when an author gives lots of references so that you can dive further into whichever thinkers they mentioning in passing that you find interesting. Park does this very well.