Buddhism and women empowerment: review of literature and future research directions

Abstract

Buddhism emerged as a belief system that promoted the principles of equality, fairness, and moral fortitude, thereby empowering women. In today's world, it is more important than ever to promote women's empowerment. In the Buddhist age, women were fully empowered in religion and morals. Even though there was economic freedom and social equality, things stayed the same in politics and around the house. Overall, Buddhist women had more freedom, equality, better status, and a more liberal environment than women did in the past. During the Buddhist Period, women had more power. Current social concerns demand more and more empowered women in society to tackle the challenges that we face. It is a timely requirement of academia, especially in the context of Sri Lanka, to revisit and research the literature related to Buddhism and women empowerment to provide sustainable solutions to the prevailing issues in the current society. This paper aims to revisit the prevailing literature related to this area and suggest future research directions. A desk research strategy has been followed in this conceptual paper, and a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in the PRISMA framework has been conducted in order to perform the review. VOSviewer software has been used to perform keyword co-occurrence analysis. Articles have been obtained from the Scopus database. A comprehensive framework is needed to be established in order to study the issues related to this area. More empirical studies, as well as qualitative studies, can be conducted in order to gain a clear picture of the relationship between Buddhism and Women's Empowerment.