What is Buddhadharma?

Reading the July-September 2007 issue of WIE magazine (for those not subscribed, this back issue is available online), featuring "Woman: A Cultural, Philosophical, and Spiritual Exploration" or, as the intro says,

"In the nineteenth century there were the suffragists. In the 1960s there were the feminists. But what does women’s liberation mean today? Where is women’s evolutionary edge? WIE searches for the answers to these questions in a provocative engagement with the historical, social, and spiritual dimensions of transforming women’s consciousness."

Although I have my reservations on minor details, WIE is doing the desperately needed work of ushering the leading edge spiritual culture. Then, "Buddhadharma" (Practitioners Quarterly) in the current Winter 2007 issue includes "Are We Equal Yet?" or quote,

"The primary feminist criticism of Buddhism is that dharma teachers are most often men. Feminists have responded with different solutions to this problem. One obvious solution is to make structural changes to ensure that women are trained and promoted as teachers. However, some feminists have argued that giving dharma teachers any real authority is itself a patriarchal practice that cannot be redeemed by encouraging women to become teachers."

I subscribe to both magazines, and I enjoy both greatly. While the WIE feature comes out as an extraordinary exploration into the yet uncharted territory of women's authentic coming together at the evolutionary edge, strenghtened by a provocative "Guru/Pandit" exchange by A. Cohen and K. Wilber on the subjects of "Women, Enlightenment, and the Evolution of Culture", the Buddhadharma approach in the section is limited to the not-so-amazing subject of gender in/equality, thus indicating a lag in the '80s and '90s mode, strenghtened in tenor by a discussion at the "Psychology and Buddhism" forum by J. Kornfield, J. Lief, and H. Aronson, that again seems rooted in the postmodern manner of merely synthesizing what is useful in both domains and thus not really breaking through in any significantly new way (Ken Wilber's awesome contribution to this subject is not mentioned, of course, as the whole rehashing exercise would become pointless). The contrast between the two magazines in these two issues feels basically as one between green and turquoise altitudes. While WIE is pushing forward and generating a content for an emerging culture, the Buddhadharma Quarterly basically caters to a discourse that's been around for the last 30 years or so. The stark difference is clearly discernible when they consider the same topic, such as women's liberation in this case. The ads for Genpo's Big Mind can be found in Buddhadharma (no Integral Spiritual Center, though), but as far as their own content goes, the policy is at best green through and through. While Buddha and Freud on the cover seem to share the common "It's all in the mind" misquote, down below one finds the disclosure, "Many Buddhists, One Buddhadharma". To my mind, commendable but not enough.