Can There Be Buddhist Gender Equality?

[nagaseeker]

Buddhist women, including nuns, have faced harsh discrimination by Buddhist institutions in Asia for centuries. There is gender inequality in most of the world's religions, of course, but that's no excuse. Is sexism intrinsic to Buddhism, or did Buddhist institutions absorb sexism from Asian culture? Can Buddhism treat women as equals, and remain Buddhism?

Unequal Rules for Nuns

The Vinaya-pitaka section of the Tripitaka (Pali Canon) records the original rules of discipline for monks and nuns. A bhikkuni (nun) has rules in addition to those given to a bhikku (monk). These include subordination to monks; the most senior nuns are to be considered "junior" to a monk of one day.

Some scholars point to discrepancies between the Pali Bhikkuni Vinaya (the section of the Pali Canon dealing with the rules for nuns) and other versions of the texts, and suggest the more odious rules were added after the Buddha's death. Wherever they came from, over the centuries the rules were used in many parts of Asia to discourage women from being ordained.

When the orders of nuns died out in India and Sri Lanka centuries ago, conservatives used the rules that called for monks and nuns to be present at nuns’ ordination to prevent the institution of new orders. Only recently has the ordination problem been solved by allowing properly ordained nuns from other parts of Asia to travel to ordination ceremonies. However, the establishment of nuns' orders in Tibet, where there had been no nuns before, for some time met with resistance. Even today, in some parts of Asia nuns receive less education and financial support than monks.

Struggle for gender equality in Buddhism ups global pitch
http://twocircles.net/2011dec02/struggle_gender_equality_buddhism_ups_global_pitch.html


An Argument Against Gender Discrimination Within The Buddhist Sangha
http://ibc.ac.th/en/node/216

[WisdomBeing]

i believe that gender inequality in Buddhism is a cultural thing rather than a Buddhist one.

It was only in April last year that the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, a college of Buddhist philosophical studies in Dharamsala, bestowed the title of Geshe on Venerable Kelsang Wangmo, a Buddhist nun from Germany, making her the first woman ever to become a Geshe. In Tibetan Buddhism, a Geshe degree is roughly equivalent to a PhD in philosophy, awarded after years of study and rigorous exams. In the centuries-long tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, no woman has ever earned the prestigious title before.

There are many stories about the origin of the Bodhisattva T?r?. One in particular has become popular for those interested in feminism in Buddhism.

I hope that in this world system at least, we will soon be able to make Buddhism treat all with equanimity - including women!

Anyway for those who are interested, the origin of Tara's story is mentioned in wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_%28Buddhism%29) -  In this tale there is a young princess who lives in a different world system, millions of years in the past. Her name is Yeshe Dawa, which means "Moon of Primordial Awareness".

For quite a number of aeons she makes offerings to the Buddha of that world system, whose name was Tonyo Drupa. She receives special instruction from him concerning bodhicitta — the heart-mind of a bodhisattva. After doing this, some monks approach her and suggest that because of her level of attainment she should next pray to be reborn as a male to progress further.

At this point she lets the monks know in no uncertain terms that from the point of view of Enlightenment it is only "weak minded worldlings" who see gender as a barrier to attaining enlightenment. She sadly notes there have been few who wish to work for the welfare of beings in a female form, though. Therefore she resolves to always be reborn as a female bodhisattva, until samsara is no more.

She then stays in a palace in a state of meditation for some ten million years, and the power of this practice releases tens of millions of beings from suffering. As a result of this, Tonyo Drupa tells her she will henceforth manifest supreme bodhi as the Goddess T?r? in many world systems to come.

With this story in mind, it is interesting to juxtapose this with a quotation from H.H the Dalai Lama about T?r?, spoken at a conference on Compassionate Action in Newport Beach, CA in 1989:

There is a true feminist movement in Buddhism that relates to the goddess T?r?. Following her cultivation of bodhicitta, the bodhisattva's motivation, she looked upon the situation of those striving towards full awakening and she felt that there were too few people who attained Buddhahood as women. So she vowed, "I have developed bodhicitta as a woman. For all my lifetimes along the path I vow to be born as a woman, and in my final lifetime when I attain Buddhahood, then, too, I will be a woman."

[buddhalovely]

In the Buddha's time the predominant religion was Brahmanism, in which people were divided into hereditary castes, from the  priestly caste down to the "outcastes," the "untouchables." It was a discriminatory system the Buddha emphatically rejected. The Buddha ordained students from all backgrounds, some coming from great power and privilege and others from the fringes of society. The Buddha also taught both men and women. Men were ordained as monks (bhikkhus) and woman as nuns (bhikshunis). The tradition of bhikkshunis continues to this day in many places, including Viet Nam, China, Korea, and in the West. However, the lineage of fully ordained bhikkshunis has died out in other countries, such as Thailand and Sri Lanka, and seems to have never even reached the Himalayas at all.

It is said that the Buddha instructed his students to always teach the dharma in the local idiom and to be able to adapt the teachings so that they are applicable and relevant in whatever culture they reached. It seems to me that this is both a blessing and a curse. Adapting dharma to different cultures makes sense when it is a safeguard against unquestioned dogma and spiritual stagnation, but if this is ever used as a justifaction for  a culture's desire to keep a system of inequality and oppression in place, it just doesn't make sense. In these cases, the orginal Buddhist principles of equal opportunities for all classes, races, and genders must supersede any local cultural notions that suggest otherwise.

As Jetsunma says, "Perhaps this gradual redress of the gender balance is one of the contributions that the West is making—along with contemporary Asia—to the richness of the Dharma modern times." I hope this is the case.