Céline Leboeuf just interviewed me for her “Why Philosophy?” newsletter, where I talk about philosophy and its role in my life. Have a look!
“Why Philosophy?” interview
22 Monday Apr 2024
Posted in Buddhism, Emotion, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy
(I don’t know if this long non-relevant comment is appropriate, and please feel free to tell me if it’s not–but there’s a lot of issues I’d be really interested in getting your thoughts on!)
You’ve written before about Buddhism and gender, and how you think its lack of valorization of the ‘natural’ as normative makes it uniquely (potentially) LGBT-friendly compared to other religious traditions.
I’d be curious to know if you share my growing sense that Buddhism–or at least the Buddhism of the Pali Canon–is uniquely gender-egalitarian compared to other pre-modern religious traditions. Or is this an illusion created by apologetic sources?
(On the subject, I’ve read Harvey’s “Introduction to Buddhist Ethics”, Rita Gross’s “Buddhism After Patriarchy”, and Engelmajer’s “Women in Pali Buddhism”, along with a detailed analysis of the garudhamma rules by Thubten Chodron. I’ve also read Faure’s “The Power of Denial”, which offers a much more pessimistic portrait of deeply-engrained misogyny–albeit his analysis is mostly confined to Mahayana texts and traditions, East Asian ones in particular.)
In particular, I was struck by how:
1) In the Pali Canon and almost all the Theravada commentarial tradition, the idea (sadly endemic in East Asian Buddhism, as Faure makes clear) that women are *morally and spiritually inferior* to men is absent.
Unlike other Indian religious traditions–or even the strikingly-egalitarian Plato–the Pali Canon never claims that rebirth as a woman is due to bad karma. And unlike other agamic canons, the Pali canon denies that a woman can become a teaching Buddha, but not that she can become a pratyekabuddha–which would seem to support Analayo’s argument that it’s not a matter of spiritual inferiority, but purely of a practical matter of a female Buddha’s inability to gain an audience for her teachings.
(The Kamboja Sutta seems like a counterexample, and I don’t think any of the sources deal with it. But it seems significant that the sutta apparently didn’t have much influence on how later Theravada tradition talked about women.)
2) It’s particularly noteworthy that where you would most expect a theoretical declaration of female inferiority–the story of the Buddha’s reluctance to admit women to the order, prediction that the order would decay faster if he did, and imposition of the garudhammas–nothing of the sort is present. And throughout the vinaya, the garudhammas seem to be presented as ‘brute facts’, never justified by appeals to female inferiority–thus rendering more plausible the claim that they were purely practical in nature, meant to secure the acceptance of the surrounding patriarchal culture.
(Contrast with how, in the New Testament, the restriction on women assuming teaching roles in the church in 1 Timothy 2 was accompanied by a theoretical justification, grounding it on women’s alleged moral inferiority and secondary status in the order of creation.)
3) One issue which the above sources don’t discuss, but which stood out to me, was the seemingly strikingly-egalitarian view of marriage presented in the Sigalovada Sutta.
The lack of emphasis on hierarchy between husband and wife–in particular, the lack of any command to the wife to obey her husband–stands out by contrast to both the NT household codes and to most earlier Greco-Roman philosophical advice on marriage, to say nothing of the Dharmashastric ideal of the wife revering her husband as a god.
Hajime Nakamura finds that early Chinese translators of parallel agamic passages regularly changed the text to be more hierarchical–inserting references to the husband ‘controlling’ his wife and the wife ‘serving’ her husband–suggesting that it was interpreted as notably egalitarian at the time.
(The sutta on Sujata and the seven types of wife–which definitely exercised a major influence in later Theravada culture, given how Burmese legal codes regularly cite it–does seem to offer a less-egalitarian perspective on marriage. Just how inegalitarian it is seems to depend on whether we should take Sujata’s decision to emulate the ‘wife like a slave’, as opposed to the other praiseworthy options of the wife like a friend or the wife like a mother, as normative.)
I’d be interested in knowing if this impression of greater egalitarianism in the Pali Canon that I’ve picked up is justified. And, if it is accurate–what do you think could have caused it? Ascetic traditions being more gender-egalitarian than ones that valorize family life seems close to universal–but why did early Buddhism seemingly go further in this regard than ascetic Platonism or Christianity?
I would really like to think the depiction of greater gender equality is accurate, but alas, I don’t think it really is. I’ve written about the Kamboja Sutta denigrating women. And when the Buddha allows women to be monks he does it only under protest, and laments that the true dhamma will last a much shorter time as a result – that is there in the Pali vinaya. So unfortunately, the early Buddhists are still reflecting their patriarchal society just as the dharmaśāstra is.
The point about marriage being egalitarian in the Sigālovāda is interesting, though, and I hadn’t thought of that. That may be where things connect with my earlier points: there’s no natural necessity that wives submit to husbands because there’s no natural necessity in marriage at all.