Summer Series Book Club – Buddhism Beyond Gender

Wednesday, August 7, 2019 at 7:30 PM – 8:30 PM

The Rime Center will holding a book club on the first Wednesday of the month from 7:30 – 8:30 p.m. and is open to anyone who would like to participate. The book to study is: “Buddhism beyond Gender: Liberation from Attachment to Identity.” Copies of this text will be available in Rime Gift Shop.

At the heart of Buddhism is the notion of egolessness—“forgetting the self”—as the path to awakening. In fact, attachment to views of any kind only leads to more suffering for ourselves and others. And what has a greater hold on people’s imaginations or limits them more, asks Rita Gross, than ideas about biological sex and what she calls “the prison of gender roles”? Yet if clinging to gender identity does, indeed, create obstacles for us, why does the prison of gender roles remain so inescapable? Gross uses the lenses of Buddhist philosophy to deconstruct the powerful concept of gender and its impact on our lives. In revealing the inadequacies involved in clinging to gender identity, she illuminates the suffering that results from clinging to any kind of identity at all.
Date: One Session beginning August 7, 2019
Time: 7:30 – 9:00 pm