Women in Buddhism

other 'female' deities in the context of later Mahaayaana and Vajrayaana visualisation practices. Relevant to our concern here is the progressive emergence of what Alan Sponberg calls a revalorization of the feminine, in the context of re-stressing 'the goal of Buddhist practice psychologically as a dynamic state of nondualistic androgynous integration'.[53]

This idea is echoed in another outstanding example of scholarship, an article at http://www.enabling.org/ia/vipassana/Arc... called The Place of Women in Buddhism by Swarna de Silva.

De Silva begins with the sutras which define the position of women as completely subject to men in early Hindu society:

The position of women under Hinduism is well-known:

"By a girl, by a young woman, or even by an aged one, nothing must be done independently, even in her own house. In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent". (Laws of Manu, V, 147-8).

But, de Silva goes on to say, Buddha introduced more liberal--liberal for that day--thought on the question. This came about not so much as a quest for social justice, but more because gender in itself has no place as a concept in a belief system which posits the unreality of the temporal self.

Later academic speculation has raised the question whether a female could become a Buddha or a Bodhisattva. Mahayanists have taken an affirmative position (e.g. the cult of Kwan Yin as a Bodihisattva who heeds the pleas of those in distress), but the Theravadan position is less clear. Some have claimed that the Buddhas have to be males, others have taken a more ambiguous position. The correct way to approach this question is to regard it as another of those profitless questions which the Buddha left unresolved (avyâkata), as it is irrelevant to the question of release from samsâra. There can be only one Buddha in a given Buddha-era (despite what some of the Jâtakas may imply), and the present era happened to have been inaugurated whether by necessity or coincidence, by a male, Siddhatta Gotama.

Another way to regard this question is that even though the male-female identity is set at birth, this is only true of a particular birth. The Buddhists doctrine of rebirth asserts that gender can change over successive transmigrations. Thus in the samsaric sense there is no male or female, but only a single karmic stream. This is

The copyright of the article Women in Buddhism in Buddhism is owned by Yeshe Chodon. Permission to republish Women in Buddhism in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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