In the correct context: The Buddha was no misogynist

In yesterday’s first part of this article, I argued that in a not-dissimilar manner, the controversial monk Phra Kasem bashed all women in high positions by citing passages from the Tipitaka without bothering to understand their linguistic and narrative context. In this second part, their situational or philosophical aspects will be discussed. 

The fact that the second passage cited by Phra Kasem was named Kamboja Sutta after one of the 16 lands in the Indian subcontinent is a reminder that each of the Buddha’s discourses was given to a specific audience in a specific situation. The beginning of this sutta locates it at Kosambi, a famous city on an important trade route, of which Kamboja was a major destination. (The Thai translation glosses over “Kamboja” as “out of town”.)

Kosambi was also the scene of the most notorious crime of passion told in the Tipitaka. It was here that Queen Samavati was reportedly burned alive in her palace, along with many ladies-in-waiting, by the jealous Magandiya, another of King Udena’s queen-consorts. The incident must have been a disaster in terms of public opinion against all Kosambi women, and imaginably jeopardised whatever social status and opportunities they had hitherto enjoyed. I therefore would like to conjecture that the statement was made by the Buddha as an observation – by no means an endorsement – of Kosambi’s social reality and prevailing prejudices against women. 

With this in mind, one reads Kamboja Sutta in an entirely different light: “Because some women are angry … jealous … weak in wisdom, Ananda. That’s why they don’t (get to) sit in the assembly, nor undertake business, nor go to Kamboja.” 

Whether these social restrictions were applied conditionally to Kosambi women who behaved badly, or on all Kosambi women due to prevailing stereotypes – similar to that of Phra Kasem – we will never know for certain from the short sutta. 

However, we can be sure of what is not the case. The sutta can’t be regarded as the Buddha’s generalisation of women’s intrinsic nature – let alone his vision of women’s role in an ideal society – because that would amount to a wrecking ball to knock down the whole edifice of his own teachings. 

During the Buddha’s time, Brahminism taught the existence of unchanging “soul” with intrinsic nature, and segregated people with caste and gender lines. One’s role and duty is accordingly pre-packaged and sealed from birth. Therefore, it’s virtuous for warriors to kill enemies, priests to conduct rites, merchants to trade and slaves to serve. Similarly, gender also determined one’s roles and duties. Men perform ancestral rites and conduct important businesses while women take care of households.

On the contrary, the marks of existence the Buddha recognised were not caste or gender, but dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), anicca (impermanence) and anatta (non-self). The last of these was a complete deconstruction of unchanging “soul” and rejection of the intrinsic nature of all things – most importantly of humans. If human nature were not malleable, the Buddha argued, it would be possible to become enlightened.   

With centuries of Indian influence, Thai culture has inherited many Brahmanistic ideas mixed with Buddhist ones. This can be seen in the Thai word for “nature”, thammachart, which refers not only to “the way things are” but also “the way things ought to be”. Like its equivalent in pre-scientific western thought, the word does not differentiate between facts and values or between the descriptive and the normative. (For example, during the chill in March, some Thais thought the weather “unnatural” for the summer month.)

Not only did the Buddha refute fixed natures of persons, for him ethical values are determined only by the quality of a person’s intentional acts – not status (sex, caste, race, age) or conformity to the “duty” ascribed to it. 

Pali scholar Richard Gombrich wrote in his momentous book What The Buddha Thought, “The Buddha took the Brahmin word for ‘ritual’ [karma] and used it to denote ethical intention. This single move overturns Brahminical caste-bound ethics. For the intention of a Brahmin cannot plausibly be claimed to be ethically of quite a different kind from the intention of an outcaste. Intention can only be virtuous or wicked.” 

With this paradigm-changing twist, the Buddha also struck down gender roles. A man’s intention cannot be said to be different in quality from that of a woman or a transgender. These important points were beautifully and comprehensively reiterated in Vasettha Sutta, where the Buddha proclaimed the biological unity of all human beings regardless of physical differences, including those of sex organs. Tellingly, the Buddha accepted women and men from all castes as equally capable of enlightenment.

Before using the Tipitaka to bash women, Phra Kasem should have remembered that, if anything, the Tipitaka is full of stories with deeply flawed men who committed all sorts of crimes from rape and serial murders to patricide. Not to mention the fact that the two most maligned figures in Buddhist stories were, or appeared as, male: Devadatta and Mara. 

In conclusion, it’s easy to paint a negative stereotype of any group of people by cutting-and-pasting a Tipitaka passage out of context. But such practice is misleading and runs fundamentally against the Buddha’s teachings both in letter and spirit. 

It’s unfortunate that many Thai “Buddhists” still blindly hold on to the belief in fixed nature of men and women so as to reject women in top positions out of hand. After all, many other countries have elected female leaders without falling off the face of the Earth. To cite some exemplary cases, Ireland’s former president Mary Robinson is widely regarded as a transformative figure for her country and was internationally applauded in her subsequent role as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her successor, Mary McAleese is also highly regarded, easily winning two presidential terms. 

Meanwhile, there’s much left to be done to improve the status of Thai women, as the country ranks at 60 among 135 countries in the World Economic Forum’s recently released 2011 Global Gender Gap Report – compared to the Philippines at 8. If Phra Kasem’s video clip reveals anything, it is the pervasive sexism that allows some to publicly denigrate women – most hideously by taking the Buddha hostage.

 

This is the concluding part of a two-part series that began in yesterday’s edition.