Echoes of Enlightenment: The Life and Legacy of Soenam Peldren
explores the issues of gender and sainthood raised by the discovery
of a previously unpublished "liberation story" of the
fourteenth-century Tibetan female Buddhist practitioner Soenam
Peldren. Born in 1328, Peldren spent most of her adult life living
and traveling as a nomad in eastern Tibet until her death in 1372.
Existing scholarship suggests that she was illiterate, lacking
religious education, and unconnected to established religious
institutions. That, and the fact that as a woman her claims of
religious authority would have been constantly questioned, makes
Soenam Peldren's overall success in legitimizing her claims of
divine identity all the more remarkable. Today the site of her
death is recognized as sacred by local residents. In this study,
Suzanne Bessenger draws on the newly discovered biography of the
saint, approaching it through several different lenses. Bessenger
seeks to understand how the written record of the saint's life is
shaped both by the specific hagiographical agendas of its multiple
authors and by the dictates of the genres of Tibetan religious
literature, including biography and poetry. She considers Peldren's
enduring historical legacy as a fascinating piece of Tibetan
history that reveals much about the social and textual machinations
of saint production. Finally, she identifies Peldren as one of the
earliest recorded instances of a historical Tibetan woman
successfully using the uniquely Tibetan hermeneutic of deity
emanation to achieve religious authority.
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