The 2022 Outstanding Women in Buddhism Award

At this time, on Worldwide Girls’s Day, the Worldwide Girls’s Meditation Middle Basis (IWMCF) presents its annual Excellent Girls in Buddhism Award on-line by way of Zoom. This 12 months, 20 Buddhist girls from eight totally different international locations have been chosen to obtain the award, together with Martine Batchelor and Pamela Ayo Yetunde.

Working out of Rayong, Thailand, the IWMCF goals to advertise gender equality in Buddhism, particularly in Thailand and Myanmar, by establishing bhikkhunis as leaders in society. Along with the award, the muse offers meditation and dharma teachings for ladies and ladies in addition to consulting, schooling, and IT and media providers for bhikkhunis.

The award was established in 2002 by Bhikkhuni Rattanavali and Bhikkhuni Dr. Lee as a part of the worldwide girls’s motion and with the target of celebrating acts of braveness and dedication by girls within the historical past of Buddhism. Within the award’s 20-year historical past, practically 200 girls from 20 international locations have been honored for his or her work in one of many following classes: meditative follow, social work and group improvement, dharma propagation, and peace activism. Throughout this 12 months’s ceremony, every awardee will declare their commitments in lieu of a conventional acceptance speech.

Dr. Lee instructed Tricycle that the choice course of for the award consists of somebody nominating an impressive girl, adopted by a range made by a committee of a couple of dozen members. She added that Buddhist monastics and students from all over the world “share their concepts on how one can empower these candidates.”

What occurs subsequent after the ceremony? Dr. Lee shared that IWMCF might be engaged on the subsequent section of making a girls’s empowerment motion, each home and overseas. “Networking, collaboration, visits, examine excursions, and so on., are all a part of this section,” she mentioned. In earlier years (previous to COVID restrictions), the IWMCF held examine excursions whereby girls who attended the occasion might journey freed from price to go to the temples of award recipients from present or earlier years. Throughout these examine excursions, girls would share concepts and envision new prospects for ladies’s participation in Buddhism.

The recipients for the 2022 Outstanding Women in Buddhism Award are: