AlternativeApproaches.com
Buddha and the Female Spirit
Christine Hall
Since the 1960s, many women have turned to alternative religions, seeking to find a system that doesn’t treat women as second class spiritual beings. Writers like National Public Radio’s Margot Adder and west coast Wiccan Starhawk have written about their disenchantment with Christianity. In “Drawing Down the Moon,” sort of a catalog of Goddess-based religions, Adder speaks of finding herself drawn to neo-Paganism, with it’s emphasis on Goddesses like Demeter, Isis and Aphrodite. She says that this feminine aspect spoke to her in a way that Christianity, with it’s emphasis on a male God, couldn’t. Starhawk, in “Dancing the Dark,” talks about a Paganism that believes in shared power, instead of the “power over” philosophy of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions.
But it’s not only the Goddess-based religions that have been gaining converts from among the ranks of disenchanted women. Many have also turned to the practices of Tibetan Buddhism, attracted by its emphasis on personal attainment. However, Buddhism in its current form is no utopia of matriarchy, nor is it the genderless system that it claims to be. Tibet and India are both extremely patriarchal societies, and all spiritual systems tend to mirror the values of the societies from which they come.
Buddhist literature is full of stories of great male practitioners that are offered as examples for other followers, but relatively few stories of great female Buddhists, though there have been many. This may seem like a moot point, until we realize that it’s through myth and parables that we attain much spiritual knowledge. The story of male Buddhists like Milarepa or Naropa may teach us much about how to be a good male bodhisattva, but very little about how to be a good female Buddhist.
In “Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on a Spiritual Quest,” Carol Christ speaks of the need for a mythology that is unique to women. “Women’s stories have not been told,” she writes. “And without stories there is no articulation of experience. Without stories a woman is lost when she comes to make important decisions in her life. She does not learn to value her struggles, to celebrate her strengths, to comprehend her pain. Without stories she is alienated from those deeper experiences of self and world that have been called spiritual or religious.”
According to the Sutras, the written record of the Buddha’s teachings, this inherent sexism in Buddhism is quite old, going all the way back to the Buddha himself. When the Buddha achieved enlightenment and began teaching others his method, he was approached by his aunt, Mahaprajapati, who had nursed him when his mother died. She asked that women be admitted to his spiritual community, but he declined to grant this request.
Not to be so easily refused, she and a group of other women shaved their heads and began following the Buddha and his male entourage. Eventually the Buddha relented and began admitting women, on the condition that they take eight extra vows oriented towards keeping them under the control of the male Buddhists. For example, a female Buddhist, no matter how knowledgeable or experienced, was to treat any monk as if he were her senior. The Buddha also said that by allowing women into the spiritual community, the life of that community would be cut short by five hundred years.
The Buddha is reported to have told his women followers, “The female’s defects of greed, hate, delusion and other defilements, are greater than the male’s. You women should have such an intention, ‘Because I wish to be freed from the impurities of the woman’s body, I will acquire the beautiful and fresh body of a man.’”
Whether or not the Buddha actually said these things is open to speculation, since his teachings were transmitted orally for five hundred years before finally being set on paper. Some modern scholars suggest that, if true, he may have been trying to pacify the greater Indian society which believed that women had no place in serious spiritual study. No matter what the case, such beliefs have persisted all the way to the modern era. It’s long been a common belief among many Tibetan Buddhist that a woman may progress along the spiritual path, but she will not be able to achieve enlightenment until she is reincarnated as a man.
In recent years, Tibetan Buddhists have made a serious effort to move in the direction of equality of the sexes. These days, women are found in positions of influence and even teach male Buddhists, something that would’ve been all but forbidden a generation or so ago. This does not mean, however, that old attitudes have ceased to exist.
In the introduction to “Women of Wisdom,” American born Buddhist nun Tsultrim Allione writes about her search for stories about great women Buddhists. “When I asked a lama...if men and women had the same capacity for enlightenment,” she writes, “he assured me that they did. Then, when I asked him for stories of great women in his lineage, he drew a complete blank. I asked him how this could be if men and women had essentially the same mind and the same capacity for enlightenment. Then he confessed that there was a slight difference between men and women. He described women as being ‘slightly less emotionally stable.’ He said this was his own observation from working with both men and women; however, behind this comment lay hundreds of years of male monks passing judgment on the spiritual capacities of women.”
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