Women in P?li Buddhism

Walking the Spiritual Paths in Mutual Dependence

Pascale Engelmajer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415629942
• eBook ISBN: 9781317617983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

The P?li tradition presents a diverse and often contradictory picture of women. This book examines women's roles as they are described in the P?li canon and its commentaries. Taking into consideration the wider socio-religious context and drawing from early brahmanical literature and epigraphical findings, it contrasts these descriptions with the doctrinal account of women's spiritual abilities.

The book explores gender in the P?li texts in order to delineate what it means to be a woman both in the context in which the texts were composed and in the context of their ultimate goal - that of achieving escape from the round of rebirths. The critical investigation focuses on the internal relationships and dynamics of one tradition and employs a novel methodology, which the author calls "critical sympathy". This assumes that the tradition's teaching is valid for all, in particular that its main goal, nibb??a, is accessible to all human beings. By considering whether and how women's roles fit within this path, the author examines whether women have spiritual agency not only as bhikkhun?s (Buddhist nuns), but also as wives and mothers. It offers a new understanding that focuses on how the tradition construes women's traditional roles within an interdependent community. It aims to understand how what many scholars have seen as contradictory and inconsistent characterizations of women in Buddhism have been accepted and endorsed by the P?li tradition.

With an aim to show that the P?li canon offers an account of women that is doctrinally coherent and consistent with its sociological facts, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Buddhism and Asian Religion.

1 The King’s daughter

In the Kosalasam.yutta of the Pāli canon, King Pasenadi of Kosala is depicted visiting the Buddha who offers him advice or comments on various matters, from defeat and victory in battle to restraining his appetite. A well-known passage shows the King lamenting the birth of a daughter to his wife Mallikā and the Buddha enjoining him to accept the birth gracefully. Several authors and scholars have quoted the Buddha’s consoling remark to the King as a clear indication of his favourable attitude towards women (e.g. Horner, 1930: 110; Falk, 1974: 105; Gross, 1993: 48). It is indeed a positive statement, but one that needs further attention, and particularly a close examination of the full gāthā in which the verse is found:

A woman, O lord of the people,

May turn out better than a man:

She may be wise and virtuous,

A devoted wife, revering her mother-in-law.

The son to whom she gives birth

May become a hero, O lord of the land.

The son of such a blessed woman

May even rule the realm.

(MLDB 179; S I 86)¹

When the whole stanza is included, the oft-quoted verse no longer seems, by our modern standards, to be so resolutely favourable to women qua women. It does tell us, however, what worth can be found in a daughter, a female offspring – mostly as a wife and the mother of a son. In fact, this stanza can be applied to both of the Buddha’s mothers, whose place in the tradition is related to their status as mothers – Māyā, his birth mother, whose destiny was to give birth to the Bodhisatta, and Mahāpajāpatī, his foster mother, who nourished him as a baby, thereby assuring his survival, and later accepted his renunciation and became a lay follower and donor to the Sangha, before becoming the founder of the order of nuns.

This description of a woman’s life can be seen both as positive and reductive. From a modern perspective, it is certainly constraining and limiting, and represents an ‘enabling’ role whose focus is on the men around the woman rather than the woman herself (Gross, 1993: 51). Yet, this description must be seen as a text produced in a context vastly different from those in which they are being examined today, since what may appear as ‘androcentrist and patriarchal’ and ‘a limit to [the Buddha’s] omniscience’ (Gross, 1993: 34–5) to a late twentieth century American feminist scholar may have seemed very progressive and supportive of women in the brahmanical context of ancient India and was even perceived to be so by early twentieth century feminist scholars, such as I.B. Horner, who saw Buddhism as an improvement on Brahmanism, and ‘an attempt to promote the cause of rights for women’ (1930: 117).

To understand how the Pāli texts view women and their soteriological path, it is necessary, as Alice Collett (2006: 57) has argued, to expand the scope of study to include rarely examined texts and to question the tradition’s own ‘taxonomy of value’ (2006: 66). As a first step, I wish to understand better how and why this ‘taxonomy of value’ was adopted. One fairly obvious reason is that the compilers were men in an androcentric environment. What is interesting and deserving of more attention, however, is that such texts as the Therīgāthā managed to survive centuries of male editors and compilers. We need to understand why and how these editors and compilers felt comfortable with statements about women and their capacities that we see as contradictory and inconsistent and, in particular, how they seemed to have reconciled the inescapable fact of women’s inferior position in society with Buddhism’s doctrinal claim to equality.

Defining the field of study

This study, the substance of which was originally submitted as a doctoral dissertation to the University of Bristol in 2010, aims to show that the Pāli canon offers an account of women that is doctrinally coherent and consistent with its sociological facts. It does not seek to present a feminist analysis of the roles and status of women in Buddhism, but rather to understand how those characterizations of women in Buddhism, which many scholars have seen as contradictory and inconsistent, have been accepted and endorsed by the Pāli tradition. The question Collins (1998: 188) asks, in his consideration of the concept of nirvāṇa, ‘how to find a way to understand nirvana from the external (etic) point of view which preserves the internal (emic) characterization of it, without simply restating what that is?’ may be asked of gender and the position of women in the Pāli Nikāyas. My goal is to understand gender in the Pāli context better, taking both the outside and the inside of the texts into account, to delineate what it means to be a woman in the context in which the texts were composed and in the context of their ultimate goal, that of achieving escape from the round of rebirths, and to show how the texts bring together the constraints imposed by the social and cultural milieu and the egalitarian ideals propounded in the doctrinal accounts. I want to describe the soteriological paths and options that the texts offer women and understand why some are more favoured than others.

To examine these themes, I focus on the Pāli canon, not because I take it to be uniquely representative of ‘early Buddhism’ and therefore closer to what the Buddha really taught, but because it is the only complete canon extant in an Indian language and provides a complete set of texts of one particular tradition that had, and still has, an important place in the Buddhist world. While it may not represent an entirely uniform worldview, the Pāli imaginaire, as Collins has called it, is sufficiently stable and coherent to offer a glimpse into this particular way of thinking. In addition, as Lamotte (1988: 156) noted, comparisons between the Pāli Nikāyas and the Chinese Āgamas show that the suttas of the four Nikāyas constitute a ‘common heritage of all the sects’ and therefore may shed light on other Buddhist traditions.

The canon comprises three sets of texts, the three baskets (piṭaka), which include the monastic rules (vinaya-piṭaka), the discourses of the Buddha (sutta-piṭaka), which are divided into five sections, the Nikāyas, and the theoretical texts (abhidhamma-piṭaka). According to the tradition, the teachings of the Buddha were first compiled at Rājagaha during a council convened after the death of the Buddha, at which Ānanda, his personal attendant for many years, recited to an assembly of 500 arahants (including himself) the teachings he had heard directly from the Buddha; the tradition therefore sees the canon as ‘the word of the Buddha’. In the third century BCE, the teachings were taken to Sri Lanka by King Aśoka’s son, Mahinda, where he and his sister, Sanghamittā, established the bhikkhu and bhikkhunī Sanghas. The teachings continued to be transmitted orally until the first century BCE at which time, tradition says, they were written down. In the fifth century CE, Buddhaghosa, a monk from the Mahāvihāra monastery in Sri Lanka, compiled the commentaries we have today, allegedly from earlier Sinhalese commentaries that had been transmitted down from the time when Mahinda first brought them to the island. Historical evidence for the existence of the canon before Buddhaghosa’s time dates from second century BCE Brāhmī inscriptions (Lamotte, 1988: 150).

A few remarks can be made on this: it is problematic to know what the Buddha really taught, or what the original Buddhist teachings might have been, or even to separate the ‘authentic’ from the ‘cultural accretions’, as some scholars have attempted. Even trying to stratify the texts within the canon itself is hazardous. Rupert Gethin (2001: 11) has suggested how much of the criteria used in earlier attempts at stratifying the canon was based on scholars’ preconceived ideas about the nature of ‘early Buddhism’, rather than historical evidence. Today, the scholarly consensus² is that the texts can be very broadly stratified with the earliest texts found in the Nikāyas and the Vinaya, and later texts found in the Abhidhamma and the Khuddaka Nikāya (although some of the texts of the Khuddaka Nikāya are also found in the four main Nikāyas and some of them have been deemed to be among the earliest texts³). However, it must be kept in mind that this stratification, while practical, is not set in stone and that, for all intents and purposes, we can only be sure that the Pāli canon as we have it today is no later, for the most part, than the fifth century CE when Buddhaghosa translated the Sinhalese commentaries into Pāli (Collins, 1990: 96). We must therefore remain constantly aware that the texts were composed over a period of time that spans several centuries⁴ and that they are the products of ‘actual, historical collectivities’ (Collins, 1990: 57), implying that we must attempt as much as possible to keep in mind the social and cultural milieu in which they were composed and compiled and, possibly, the particular agendas of the compilers.⁵

The study of women poses certain challenges with regard to the textual material. Although passing references to women are scattered throughout the canon in various forms – girls, women, women slaves, wives, to name a few – and they are included in stock lists describing the world, in expressions such as ‘a woman or a man’, in metaphors pointing out feminine traits or behaviours, still the scarcity of women in the four Nikāyas must be emphasized repeatedly, especially when discussing the place of women in the texts. Women are present in the texts, but in a very marginal way. One can read pages and pages and even entire sections (vagga) in which there is not a single reference to women. Furthermore, there are actually very few suttas that deal directly with women, either as subject of the sutta, as the ‘author’, as one of the characters or main interlocutor. Women as women were not a primary concern of the composers/compilers of the Pāli canon. Any statement or claim about women therefore must be viewed in the context of their relative absence. On the other hand, it is noteworthy that there are texts presented as authored by women (such as the Therīgāthā and the therīs’ Apadānas), devoted to women (suttas throughout the Nikāyas, the Itthivimāna of the Vimānavatthu, for example) or even texts merely referring to women. When specific terms or categories are examined, the incidence of references to women varies even more widely. For example, the term mātugāma – used in some contexts to refer to women – is almost completely absent from the whole Dīgha Nikāya: it only occurs in the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (D II 55), in a passage placed, rather randomly, between a discussion on shrines and what to do with the Buddha’s remains. Ānanda suddenly asks the Buddha how one should act towards women (mātugāma) and is told not to see them, talk to them and, if addressed by a woman, to practise mindfulness. Bhikkhunīs (nuns) similarly are missing from entire texts: only one bhikkhunī is identified in the Dīgha Nikāya and none in the Dhammapada or Suttanipāta. Identified women, whether bhikkhunīs or laywomen, are even rarer.

Researching the five Nikāyas extensively, examining occurrences of words such as woman (itthi, mātugāma), wife (dārā, bhariyā), mother (mātar) and nun (bhikkhunī), and every passage mentioning a woman or a female figure (hens, for example, sometimes appear in metaphors on meditation), whether it is a passing reference or a more substantial episode, yields some interesting and unexpected results. For example, as I have already emphasized, it clearly shows that there are very few women in the Nikāyas, except for the texts in which they appear predominantly (the Therīgātha and the Itthivimāna). It also surprisingly reveals that there are much fewer ‘misogynistic’ passages in the four Nikāyas than is usually thought (and pointed out) and they are found only in a few texts – the Anguttara is the Nikāya in which they are most common. It also shows the place occupied by women in the Nikāyas globally rather than narrowly focusing on the rare and isolated passages in which women appear or are discussed. Furthermore, it allows us to start delineating the traits and qualities that are associated with women in the Pāli ‘culture’. This gives a more nuanced and fuller picture than is usually presented, one in which women are not depicted from a single angle or perspective, but revealed in all the fullness and diversity of their lives.

The focus on the Nikāyas is supplemented with analysis of relevant passages in the Vinaya piṭaka and the commentaries. The Vinaya piṭaka, because of its nature as the document that describes the rules and regulations governing the behaviour of monks and nuns, contains relatively more references to women, especially the passages that govern relationships with the lay community, and one must keep in mind its purpose of regulating monastic behaviour, which colours its attitude towards women. The commentaries are notable for the attention they give to biographical details in a spiritual perspective (extending to previous lives) when discussing individuals, whether the Buddha or secondary characters, with a marked emphasis on dāna as the first step on the spiritual path, which results in remarkable circumstances in future rebirths. Of c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 The King’s daughter
• 2 What is a woman?
• 3 A woman’s traditional path: from daughter to wife
• 4 Only Dhamma pays off the filial debt
• 5 Motherhood as a soteriological path
• 6 Bhikkhunīs and the four assemblies
• 7 The Buddhist family
• Bibliography
• Index