To modern feminists who have grown up in an era of relative sexual freedom it is difficult to understand that till the present virtually the only way a woman could be free of being a sex object for males was to renounce sexuality altogether. As this song from the Therigatha illustrates, the Buddhist teachings helped empower women to cut through the tangle of humiliating sexuality:
Mara (Illusion):
You who are so young, so lovely
seated beneath sal tree with blossoms crowned
so aware of your loneliness.
Do you not tremble when seducers come along?
Nun :
Though men like you, seducers,
a hundred thousand should approach,
no single hair of mine will turn
Nor will I quake with, fear.
And so, tempter, coming all alone,
of what effect are you?
I who possess super-normal powers
can make my form disappear.
Between your eyebrows or your belly,
I could lodge and stay.
How then, Mara, could you see me…
Know tempter, I have triumphed over you.
The Sisterhood was, in fact, a direct affront to male control and appropriation of women’s sexuality. A nun was a woman who had resigned from the sex-trade, and nuns were consequently the focus of even more unpleasant sexual attention than lay women. After the rape of the highly respected and eventually enlightened nun, Uppalavanna, the Buddha forbid nuns to live alone in the forest, and the rules of the Sisterhood enforced an even more, corporate life than that among the monks. A nun had always to have a nun companion, and wake up within an arms length of another nun. Though the nuns and monks’ communities were separate, nuns were to spend their 3-month rains retreat near a monks community, partly for protection against molestation.
The frustration some men felt when confronted by nuns’ disinterest in the patriarchal sex-game is clear in the story of Subhi Theri, who was waylaid by a “seducer” while walking through the forest. He spoke lovely verses attempting to convince her of the folly of renunciation for one so young and beautiful, but she remained strong in determination and counseled him to lay aside his lust. Reminding him that her body was made of elements, doomed to decay and death, transient, intangible, an illusion, she inquired what was so attractive to him. After he had ‘praised her eyes she plucked them, out and gave them to him, frightening him away. While this may give a whole new meaning to Christ’s injunction “If thine eye offend thee pluck it out”, some may feel that rather than suggesting self-mutilation as the correct response to sexual harassment, that Sister Subha should have threatened to pluck out his eyes instead. The Zen approach certainly seems to be different as in this story of 1331 A.D. Japan:
....when Nitta Yoshisada was fighting against Hojo Sodatoki, the chief retainer of the Hojo family, named Sakunda Sadakuni, was slain. His wife, Sawa, wished to pray for the dead man; she cut off her hair and entered Tokeiji (monastery) as the nun Shotaku, For many, years she devoted, herself to Zen under the 17th teacher at Enkakuji, and in the end she became the third teacher at Tokeiji. In the Rohatsu (meditation intensive) training week of December 1339, she was returning from her evening interview with the teacher at Enkakuji, when on the way a man armed with a sword saw her and came to rape her. The nun took out a piece of paper and rolled it up, then thrust it like a sword at the man’s eyes. He became unable to strike and was completely overawed by her spiritual strength. He turned to run and the nun gave a Katzu shout, hitting him with the paper sword. He fell and then fled.
Zen student’s Test: Show the paper sword which is the heart sword and prove its actual effect now.
(Ling, 1976)
Three hundred years after the Buddha, the Indian Buddhist monarch, Asoka, had sent his son, the monk Mahinda Thera, to mission to the Lankans. Seeing that the sister-in-law of King Devanampiya Tissa was practicing with a number of other Sri- Lankan women as ten-vow novices, and in need of full ordination, Mahinda sent for his sister, the nun Sanghamitta. Comforting her father, Asoka, on his loss of son and daughter, Sanghamitta said:
There are holy women impatient for my coming, waiting
to receive the ordination, so I must hearken to the
call, and we are both sufficiently brave to bear the
parting, my father, when it is my duty that commands me.
Embarking with a sapling of the Buddha’s original Bo tree, the descendent of which still grows today in Anuradhapura tended by 10-vow nuns, Sanghamitta imparted the higher ordination in Lanka. The Lankan Sisterhood was said, probably exaggeratedly, to have reached ninety thousand nuns not many years later. This fully-ordained line died out eventually in all Therevedan countries (that is Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Cambodia) though the line was passed to China when a delegation of Lankan nuns learned Chinese and went to instruct Chinese nuns in orthodoxy. Though this order of fully-ordained nuns still exists today in Taiwan and Hong Kong, these nuns are Mahayanists and thus not accepted as legitimate by the Therevedans. Secondly, they no longer practice the double ordination into both the Brotherhood and Sisterhood, rather being newly ordained each generation by monks without have an independent lineage. Though more than 100,000 “nuns” exist today in Buddhist countries, the vast majority of them are technically only 10-vow novices with very little prestige.
It is interesting that “nuns” and lay-women’s energies in Therevedan countries are usually focused on devotional rituals and shrines, such as the Bo-tree at Anuradhapura. Conversely, in the Mahayana tradition where the devotional aspect has been integrated with the core doctrine, rather than being a secondary, inferior pursuit, the nuns’ order has been comparatively more successful. Monks frequently attribute the decline of the Sisterhood to women’s Weakness for devotionalism and emotionalism, and men’s alleged preference for meditation and discipline, [though we should remember mystic Simone Weil’s words when we are taught history by Buddhist monks:
History therefore is nothing but a compilation
of the depositions made by assassins with respect
to their victims and themselves.
(Weil, p. 225)]
Alongside the generally liberative strain, there developed in Buddhism a patriarchal strain .which reflected the pattern of the outside world. This included the appearance of the notion that women cannot attain enlightenment, but must die and be reborn as men; a doctrine flatly contradicted by the Buddha and the early enlightenment stories, though there is a sutra which suggests that women cannot become Buddhas (Anguttara, I, p.28, 9-19). The negative strain in Buddhism emphasizes that women cannot attain enlightenment since they are by nature lustful, clinging, devious, weak-minded and feeble, born to this miserable condition because of their wicked past karma. In the later literature on the Buddha’s past lives, the Jataka Tales, women are usually portrayed in an unflattering way, many responsible for holding back or seducing away the enlightenment- seeking male. Buddha is never portrayed as having taken a woman’s form.
The scriptures hold up the man who abandons his wife and family in his monastic search for personal fulfillment as faultless; in fact the Buddha abandoned his wife shortly after she gave birth to their first son, whom he named “Rahula” meaning “bond”. Some of the early nuns were the ex-wives of men who had left to become monks, sometimes after violent arguments. In a previous life the Buddha had given away his wife and children to a wicked brahmin as an act of renunciation. Much of the negative tradition emphasizing women’s seductress natures can be attributed to monks not being very well grounded in self-understanding and blaming external forms for the desires that arise within them. (I couldn’t help raping that woman, your honor, when she wore such sexy clothes…) If women were more manipulative it is understandable since interpersonal power was the only avenue open to them.
A slightly less oppressive notion was that women could attain enlightenment, but only after changing into a man according to the formula “their female organs disappear and male organs appear” (see Paul, 1979). In a sense, the nun’s discipline was less a means to get back to the androgynous void beyond sex differences, than it was a way to become more like men and overcome their female karma.
Obviously women do have different karma than men; karma here understood as those limiting conditions which obscure our inner wisdom, which tend to manifest as habitual tendencies of thought, speech and behavior, or as external circumstances, and which we are partly responsible for because of our past actions. The question is, what precisely is the nature of “woman’s karma” and how is she responsible for it. If one says that the karma consists of women’s weaker bodies and minds or lack of spiritual capacity one falls, into the misogynist trap. Certainly Buddhists should acknowledge that women have a more difficult life, with family burdens and disempowering socialization. But the Buddhist path does not tell the oppressed that there is nothing they can do about their situation since it is the result of their past actions. Rather, that our unwillingness or lack of determination to liberate ourselves in the past has contributed to the oppression we face now and it’s about time we seized the moment and took responsibility for our lives. The handicap is not knowing how to deal correctly with our karma, not the karma itself.
For instance, Buddhism displays a certain ambivalence about the Mother: on the one hand mothers are said to have strong karma holding them back from enlightenment because of their attachment to their children. Yet Buddhist scriptures recommend that one meditate on compassion by reflecting that in some previous birth each of us has been the mother of every other one of us, and that we must have the same love towards all beings that the mother has for her child, whom she would sacrifice her own life for.
(This issue is parallel to the discussion in the women’s movement about whether there are any intrinsic qualities of “womanhood” beyond all the deformed patriarchal programming, or whether humans are basically androgynous, and that this should be our goal.)
Even when the scriptures do not give a negative or inferior cast to femininity, and are moderately progressive for their time, they still show a certain contentment with the status-quo position of women, as in the wife’s obligations to her husband (Sigalovada and Uggaha Suttas); a wife should rise early and go to bed last; doing all things willingly and with a sweet voice; honor all that her husband honors; be skillful in home crafts; oversee the servants and slave; in the household; not commit adultery and protect the household monies. Though Buddha says a daughter may turn out to be better than a son (in the Samyutta Nikaya), another sutra points out that wise parents desire sons to keep up the traditions and possess the heritage (Anguttara, III, 36).
Unfortunately the Buddhist scriptures were not written down until several hundred years after the Buddha died, having been passed down as an oral tradition, and thus we don’t know how much was added on by later monks. But only the most ardent apologist will blithely dismiss what she disagrees with as commentary and accept the rest as the Buddha’s own words. Really, it is more correct to look on even the earliest Buddhist scriptures as reflections of the total social, intellectual, psychological and politico-historical phenomenon of early Buddhism, and thus only an indirect reflection Of the Buddha himself. In this way we may honestly hold the perfect wisdom that the Buddha represents aloft from the complex and contradictory body of scripture, and its occasional misogyny.
If the slow death of the Sisterhood and the rise of misogyny in Buddhism were indicators of a decline in pure dharma, and if one is superstitious enough to believe that the dharma would die after 500 years, then the rise of the Mahayana tradition roughly 500 years after the Buddha can be seen as a fresh awakening of radical insight which again had consequences for women. The Mahayanists placed much more emphasis on the potential wisdom of women and laity, and their creation of a semi-divine pantheon of enlightened beings. (“bodhisattvas”) many of whom were female , liberated women in the Buddha-realms if not on earth. The famous Chinese/Japanese bodhisattva Kuan Yin is depicted sometimes as a male, sometimes as a female and sometimes as androgynous. The chief female bodhisattva of Tibet, Tata, has some forms which carry weapons and which minister to such specific needs as removing the fear of tyrannical governments.
The Vimalakirti Sutta, a late Mahayana scripture, provides the most delightful example of the effect of the Mahayana emphasis on Sunyata or “Voidness”, and its relationship to sexuality. It is also an important Sutta because the protagonist is a layman whose wisdom and supernatural powers are equal to the Buddha’s and superior to all the Buddha’s monks. The following section is an encounter in the sutta between the monk Sariputra (well-respected in the Pali scriptures, but a favorite target for the Mahayanists) encountering a highly enlightened goddess.
Sariputra: Goddess, what prevents you from transforming yourself out of your female state?
Goddess: Although I have sought my “female state” for these twelve years, I have not found it. Reverend Sariputra, if a magician were to incarnate a woman by magic, would you ask her, “What prevents you from transforming yourself out of your female state?”
Sariputra: No! Such a woman would not really exist, so what would there be to transform?
Goddess: Just so, Reverend Sariputra, all things, do not really exist. Now would you think, “What prevents one whose nature is that of a magical incarnation from transforming herself out of her female state?”
Thereupon, the Goddess employed her magical power to cause the elder Sariputra to appear in her form and to cause herself to appear in his form. Then the Goddess, transformed into Sariputra, said to Sariputra transformed into the Goddess, “Reverend Sariputra, what prevents you from transforming yourself Out of your female state?”
And Sariputra, transformed into the Goddess, replied “I no longer appear in the form of a male! My body has been changed into the body of a woman! I do not know what, to transform!”
The Goddess continued, “If the elder could again change out of the female state then all women could also change out of their female states. All women appear in the form of women in just the same way as the elder appears in the form of a woman. While they are not women in reality, they appear in the form of women. With this in mind, the Buddha said, “In all things, there is neither male nor female”
(Thurman, p. 61)
To Be Continued. Part 1 is HERE. Part 3 will appear March 7, Part 4 will appear March 8
special thanks again to Molly Brown for transcribing this from the original 1984 essay
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