Buddhism and Gender: Ordination and Female Bodies

Introduction

• Buddhist literature and scholarship focus on gendered bodies' roles in attaining awakening and liberation.
• Gendered discourses shaped Buddhist monasticism, understood through access to ordination and enlightenment for women.
• Buddhist texts often considered certain gendered bodies more capable of spiritual transformation.
• The chapter outlines key topics related to viewing gendered bodies as instruments and examines: women's ordination, motherhood, views on female bodies, gender, sexuality, and sexual transformation in Mahayana texts.
• The chapter argues for more attention to lay practitioners and practices that don't reject female bodies or gender differences, broadening the understanding of Buddhism and gender.

Ordination

• Female ordination is a key issue in Buddhism and gender, especially bhikkhuni ordination in the Theravada tradition.
• Many Western Buddhist feminists see ordination and access to the sangha as central problems.
• Susanne Mrozik notes full bhikkhuni ordination mainly affects Theravada and Tibetan Buddhists where women are often limited to novice status.
• Sri Lankan Buddhists were ordained as full bhikkhuni in 1996 and 1998 through the Mahayana lineage.
• The bhikkhuni lineage revival via Korean and Taiwanese Buddhists is contested due to ordination lineage and identity concerns.
• Ordination wasn't originally from Theravada monasteries and Mrozik notes women's access to ordination as a contested issue.
• Even with full ordination, controversy persists.
• Theravada monastics worry ordination happens outside their lineage.
• Bhikkhu Analayo says the ordination remains legal even if invalidated by the Theravada sangha.
• The legality originates from the Buddha delegating ordination to bhikkhus for Mahāpajāpati Gotami's followers.
• Despite innovations, local vs. international concerns sometimes override "any means possible" arguments for ordination.
• Many support full ordination outside Theravada, but some believe the matter needs local and national debate.
• Some Theravada and Tibetan monastics claim ordination outside local lineages are Western impositions, arguing full ordination arguments don't address local needs.
• At the Hamburg Conference in 2007, Tibetan nuns hesitated to support bhikkhuni ordination to maintain the Tibetan Mulasarvastivada lineage, concerns about public perception, and challenges of maintaining the 354 bhikshuni precepts.
• In January 2015, the Seventeenth Karmapa announced restoring the full ordination lineage to Tibetan nuns.
• Besides full ordination, some renunciant women have little interest in full access to the bhikkhuni/bhikshuni sangha.
• Concerns for these Novice nuns relate to government support for their positions, such as mae chi in Thailand, tila shin in Myanmar, and dasa sil mata in Sri Lanka.
• Because they aren't fully ordained, they may not receive government assistance, education, or subsidized transportation.
• Despite drawbacks, many who live as full-time novices using the eight precepts do not want to be subordinate to a bhikkhuni order through garudhamma rules purportedly established by the Buddha in response to his aunt
• Nunnery life as a mae-chi allows freedom (isala) for meditation and study.
• Nirmala Salgado studied the difference between local and international concepts of Buddhist female ordination in Sri Lanka.
• Salgado argues the past 35 years saw increased gender studies, complemented by ethnography, to resolve ordination problems shaped by what she calls liberal discourses and Western feminist categories.
• Echoing Tibetan nuns' concerns at the Hamburg conference, Salgado critiques overlaying Western feminist concerns, arguing nuns find empowerment, self-realization, morality, and nirvana in renunciation.
• Monasticism and women's access to the monastic order is often studied via the narrative of the first Buddhist women's ordination, noted as marking women's entry into subordination to the male order.
• Mahaprajapati asks the Buddha for entry into the monastic order but is denied, later through Ananda, the Buddha allows her ordination after confirming women can become enlightened like men.
• The Buddha then establishes eight fundamental rules (garudhamma) that subordinate the bhikshuni sangha to the monks' order.
• The rules include that the following should be done by nuns:
• always rise from her seat and pay obeisance to any monk
• cannot criticize a monk
• cannot punish or admonish a monk
• The ordination ceremony into the nun's order must take place in both orders.
• When a nun commits an offense, she must undergo penance in both orders.
• Every fortnight, nuns have to ask monks for instruction.
• Nuns may not pass the summer retreat in a place where there are no monks.
• At the end of the summer retreat, the nuns have to carry out the pravarana ceremony, which invites others to point out the wrongdoing of the individual in both orders.
• The establishment of the bhikshuni order and the eight extra rules have been feminist critique and interpretation sources.
• Scholars have seen an indication that early Indian Buddhism was androcentric, perhaps misogynist for institutional subordination of the nuns to the monks.
• Other scholars argued Buddhist literature contains multivalent views and tensions regarding women and females.
• Texts like the Cullavagga represent multiple perspectives on women because they addressed multiple perspectives of the time, including challenges such Hindu gender norms.
• This interpretation establishes multivocality of Buddhist texts around female ordination, women's bodies, and spiritual potential for awakening.
• Such reading seems to reflect the concerns of Western feminists interested in curing and ridding androcentrism, patriarchy, misogyny, and liberating Buddhist nuns whose lives have seemingly been limited.
• Interviews with Theravada nuns conducted by Nirmala Salgado find find meaningful ways to subvert explicit subordination, exhibiting attitudes of indifference, ignorance, or denial of rules showing contemporary voices should be a caution against assuming the institutional record regarding the ordination of women is one that is internalized by all practitioners.

Motherhood and the Maternal in Buddhism

• Buddhist literature has gendered maternity imagery and debts owed to mothers, connected to and separated from women and the female body.
• Motherhood's trope is viewed as a karmic hindrance, emblem of suffering, and bodhisattvas should emulate.
• Association of motherhood with bodhisattva ideals, as well as the Budda as the ultimate mother transcends sexuality and the female body and gets co-opted by a specifically male form of motherhood.
• In cultural and historical Buddhist contexts, motherhood is desexualized, and the historical Buddha becomes the ideal mother who in the Lotus Sutra gives birth through the mouth, thus complicating birth through a woman's body as impure.
• Early Indian Buddhist images of motherhood reflected suffering and samsara.
• Contrasting Hindu maternity ideas as an ideal where a woman's identity is asserted through son's birth, Buddhist motherhood is associated with pain.
• The womb as a life bearer renders maternity a hindrance for mother and child.
• The mother is a samsaric suffering emblem through excessive attachment to her children, and the child (usually the monk) cannot reach his potential due to guilt for his mother in his present and path lives (Paul 1985).
• While motherhood was viewed as the samsara, they highlighted polluted by menstruation and birth-blood and karmic hindrance.
• Only through the Buddhavacana (Word of the Buddha) in sutras could these women escape.
• Soto Zen priests would give posthumous ordinations primarily to women and also recite the Menstruation Sutra enabling the female women to escape the impurity of their bodies and avoid hells.
• In post-Tang China, sons will fulfill filial obligations by freeing mothers of polluting blood that will bind her to samsara.
• In the posthumous "Blood Bowl" ritual, a son drinks the menstruation bowl and destroys it, freeing mothers from karmic pollution retributions.
• Women can only be freed of binding maternity after their death as their purification is transitioned by sons and monks via transitioning symbolically via bodies' dispossessing physicality from women's identity when women are still alive.
• Inferior/dangerous mothers appear in the Buddha's past lives, where he appears as a bodhisattva sacrificing himself to save mothers from devouring children.
• Early Indian sources find physical motherhood associated with craving, delusion, and suffering.
• In the Jataka tale of the "Hungry Tigress," the Prince encounters one that is hungry and who is on the urge of devouring her own children when a rush of compassion occurs and pierces his throat and blood to the tigress, who drinks the blood and eats from the sacrified flesh.
• Crave motherhood where mothers thwarted from killing children shows the deplorable state of place so evil that mothers kill kids from delusion and selfishness.
• Another story of a dangerous example of maternity appears in the life of Rupavati, a woman who slices her breasts and who gives her breasts for the other person's sake which gives her a good mother against the "bad" mother that has depraved and is over samsaric motherhood as well which makes the bodhisattva appear in the baby’s true mother

BODIES, NON-SELF, AND SUBJECTIVITY

• Wilson reveals gender distinctions and denouncing imagery of the female body in practice to edify men.
• Through meditating on decay female corpses in cremation, Buddhist monks gain insights into impermanence, attachment to desire (usually the form of a woman).
• The monk gains insight into duplicity by the foulness of the body and inciting while inciting loathing and detachment.
• Because women are presented to be downfalls, they are devalued as men caught between their charms.
• To thus cultivate detachment and self, Buddha implores meditation on female forms one one found captivating as to insight in permanency to then enable awakening.
• While women and men renounce and be members the texts indicate to only one.
• The way one seems to consciousness women never depicted that's they’re always subjects without able to.
• if women had the option to practice impermanency it would the their body rather than a male's.
• If women do engage in such meditations, in doing so it is argues that by applying impermanence on own bodies women should absorb a specifically male seeing and denied themselves body self.
• Vimala tries to seduce Maha Moggallana and recognizes that is deceiving and ensnaring after she decides to join and recognizes aging: She explains that she was once drunk off one's skin and has now been sobered.

Sexual Transformation in Mahayana Literature

• Wisdom is symbolized as the Mother of the Buddhas in the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras and is protected, worshipped by would be Buddhas to show children emptiness.
• Female and empty symbols has also been in Mahayana texts that that deploy images of male, female, gender and sexual transformation such as the Lotus Sutra Sutras and Vimalakirti to allow instructions of emptiness.
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• Mahayana device that the significance normatively what between males and females to the the to abandoning state of time.

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