Women in East Asian Religions with Jingjing Li and Yingruo Show

This episode features two colleagues having a discussion about gender in East Asian Religions. The first guest, Jingjing Li, is a University Lecturer in Chinese and Comparative Philosophy at Leiden University. Her primary work examines theories of mind and consciousness across East Asian and Continental traditions, particularly Chinese Wei Shi philosophy and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, respectively. The second guest, Yingruo Show, was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and now serves as Research Coordinator with the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre (SCCC). She specializes in the intersection of gender and Chinese Buddhist practice. Earlier this summer, Jingjing and Yingruo led an international workshop here in Leiden entitled “Re-staging the Periphery as the Center: Women Communities in East Asian Religions.” The interdisciplinary event was organized by the Leiden University Center for Intercultural Philosophy (LUCIP) with the support of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS). The workshop also received generous funding from the Leiden University Fund and the Dutch Research Council (NWO)’s Veni programme. In the following conversation, Jingjing and Yingruo discuss the event as well as the special issue of the journal Religions that they co-edited earlier in the year. In the course of our discussion, they touch on a variety of topics, including canonical religious texts, lay and monastic practices in East Asia, philosophies of mind, and how all of these are both challenged and invigorated through an interdisciplinary analysis of gender.