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t world we can see it in so many ways everywhere we look and none of it none of the spark the renewal the creation of possible futures is happening within the halls of the patriarchs i became interested in the bhikkhunī issue when i noticed as many people do that most of the people who come to learn and practice dhamma are women why is this so one patriarch in thailand so i heard said it was because all the dedicated men have ordained as monks ridiculous the same phenomenon is seen everywhere in places where there are few monastics of any sort and anyway it s the same in other religions as well i asked a man at my former monastery in thailand and he said it s because the men are working hard and have no time to come to the monastery funny i thought i always seem to see women working hard in the villages and men lounging around all day so i did something very few monks ever seem to think of i asked a woman for her opinion she said it s because the men prefer to go gambling drinking and whoring while their wives are at the temple tempting as it is i don t think that s really the answer either these are just imaginariums worlds we live in that we build from our own thoughts and ideas these worlds have some relation to the facts but they are flexible and uncertain in my own imaginarium the real reason why most spiritual seekers are women is because they are disempowered it is because the opportunities for them in other spheres of life have been successively blocked or restricted in addition to the absolute barriers of overtly sexist cultural constructs there is the more subtle pervasive and ultimately more damaging soft sexism which does not actually stop women from doing anything but adds a grit to whatever women do slowing them down and making everything more work than it needs be everything is harder for women than it is for men so they end up turning inwards let go of the external you ll never change it anyway right change yourself that s the real dhamma anyway last year we had a series of sutta discussions in sydney and invited a panel of young people to help out one of the guys was seriously manspacing you know what i mean men taking up too much space an unconscious assertion of male privilege one of the women politely asked him to restrain himself as it was seriously difficult for them to fit at the table one of the other women jumped in and said shouldn t we just take this as a practice and let it go this is an example of how patriarchy gets internalized and women become its best defenders meanwhile the guy did shrink his space by about an inch or two he was still taking up twice as much space as the women apparently oblivious to the fact even when it was pointed out and the women exhausted their energies on the issue by disagreeing with each other this is how the patriarchy wins when we talk about buddhist history we talk about what we imagine the facts such as they are are barely relevant a patriarch once said to me that we can t have bhikkhunī s because it s been like this since the beginning when i started working on this issue i took this attitude as a challenge and investigated the history of bhikkhunī s like others before me and since i found that this simply was not the case in the beginning there were bhikkhunī s there were also bhikkhunī s when buddhism went to sri lanka and according to our oldest records the sri lankan vinaya commentaries found in both pāli and chinese there were bhikkhunī s when buddhism was founded in suvarnabhūmi myanmar thailand but when i tried to bring these and many other findings to the attention of monks i was disappointed to find they were not very interested patriarchs are proud of their history and try to maintain everything exactly as they imagine it was when the facts at our disposal disagree with these imaginations they are brushed aside the past is not a reality it is just another imaginarium i was very naïve i thought that if the monks could learn about the situation we would respond in an informed compassionate manner how wrong i was what struck me was how little reason there was in the discussion and how much energy whenever bhikkhunī s were mentioned otherwise reasonable men came up with all kinds of absurd irrational statements pushed by a palpable psychic force a compulsive need to deny the reality of bhikkhunī s at all costs many of the patriarchs are it seems quite willing to destroy themselves and their religion in order to deny bhikkhunī s i wrote a book about these things and i called it white bones red rot black snakes it is the longest and most complex thing i have ever written or probably ever will write i like it but i think hardly anyone has read it it s a book about myth about magic about taboo about bodily fluids about imagination and about darkness all things that do not sit easily with how we like to think about buddhism but the gist of the book is simple i ll summarize it point by point so you don t have to read the whole thing but you should it has very nice pictures how we think about bhikkhunī s in the present is conditioned not determined by how buddhists thought about bhikkhunī s in the past how bhikkhunī s were thought of in the past is part of how women were thought of in the past how women were thought of in the past includes dark and bright aspects and all this happens in the minds of men if we are to imagine a future then there are many things it may be but one thing it must be is fully human we can no longer let half of humanity arrogate the dhamma to itself the future of the dhamma is human and that is all of us the sight of a monastic is one of humanity s most recognizable powerful and durable symbols it was the sight of a monastic the robes the shaven head the bowl that inspired the bodhisatta prince siddhartha to go forth from home to homelessness in the hope of putting an an end to suffering probably each of us has had a similar experince of this symbol i have a very old very dim memory just a half grasped echo of a nun a buddhist nun on a television show probably australian abc probably a documentary made in the 1970s that is my earliest image of a buddhist monastic i don t know who she was but thank you your image was mysterious challenging and haunting you made a difference monastics bear these signs externally and that for men anyway is very easy you can go to thailand show up at any of 1 000 monasteries and get ordained this weekend no problems no questions you re a bhikkhu and you are the genuine heir to the dhamma or at least that s how a male monastic s external image is perceived inside of course is another matter this is an area where women are the experts women are used to being judged and judging on appearances femininity is a performance to be beholden and to be criticized by men and women if you are a human being who happens to be female becoming a monastic is a decision to stop the performance of femininity for monks whose monasticism is also a performance this is not easy to accept mahākassapa sometimes doesn t get have such a good reputation when it comes to women s issues he comes across as a bit of a grumpy old monk who doesn t think too much of women one of the many pleasant surprises i came across while writing white bones red rot black snakes was that his story as imagined by the buddhist community reveals a powerful and moving insight into how femininity is performed to be very brief when mahākassapa was a young man his family wanted him to marry but he didn t want to so he set an impossible task for himself he made a beautiful statue of gold of the perfect women and he said he would only marry a woman who looked like that well that was no easy matter but messengers set out across the country exhibiting the statue in markets and town squares nowhere could they find a woman so beautiful one day an old nursemaid came up to the statue and gave it a slap thinking it was bhaddā kāpilānī the daughter of her family who apparently matched this ideal image and so the marriage was arranged bhaddā it turned out was no more interested in marriage that the young man was the two exchanged letters but the letters were intercepted and destroyed by their families notice that both were equally literate the two were married but agreed to live a chaste life with a garland of flowers lain between them in bed when the time came they went forth and both became arahant s there is an interesting coda to this idealized love story the story is found so far as i know only in a tibetan source even as a nun bhaddā was so stunning that when she went to the village for alms she had to endure the catcalls of men so on her life s journey she was joined to mahākassapa because of her appearance she was all image like a statue through her connection with him in a relation of mutual support and respect they both found a path to a truer inner reality she let go of her image and consciously chose the external signs of a renunciant to announce her inward journey yet the men making catcalls did not respect her choice any more than the patriarchs today respect the choices of women when mahākassapa heard about this he offered to help stay bhaddā he said you shouldn t have to put up with this i will collect alms for you here we have so far as i know the first time in history that a man helped a woman deal with sexual harassment in the workplace ask people who work in the field of development and they will tell you that the key to prosperity in any country is empowering women a google image search for meditation yields images mostly of women the images are usually white slim pretty young women signaling that meditation has a diversity problem but that s a topic for another time it is obvious that if the future of buddhism is to take a healthy form it will include women we can continue to imagine a past where there were no women or where women were content to offer food and wash robes for the monks and we can long for a future where this simple reassuring bit of fantasy is the only reality but this future will never exist in our minds now the future has the same dreamy haze as the imagined past the difference is this in every moment that dreamy haze collides with the reality of the present we re tumbling headlong into a future and our dreams are constantly being exposed in the pitiless light of day if we imagine a past where women are forever the lesser and the other we re in for a bumpy ride but if we imagine a past where humanity is lived in all its depravity and glory then maybe we can start to imagine a future for buddhism that is living history is on our side we don t have to do much of anything just stay the course the day of the patriarchs is over but there is one thing that more than anything else can derail the future for nuns and that is if the nuns start acting like the patriarchs we and here i mean the monks who have supported the nuns have given everything so that women can live as fully ordained nuns to do so we received no support from our peers and we have had to go against the power structures and hierarchies of our respective orders we are happy to do that because we know that those hierarchies are not the dhamma they are not vinaya in large measure in fact they are the exact opposite of the dhamma and the vinaya the notion that the sangha should be governed by a politically appointed hierarch authorized by an act of parliament and imposing his will on the sangha is a feudal system of governance that was reinvented in modern times yet in recent months we have seen monks in thailand even so called forest monks marching on the streets of bangkok to protect their right to be governed by a feudal hierarchy the vinaya as taught by the buddha is all about collective ownership decision making by consensus and the rule of principle no monastic has the power of command over any other all monastics must participate in important decisions it is the sangha and the sangha alone that has the power when it comes to making decisions in accordance with the vinaya the vinaya gives nuns the power to choose their own destiny to make their own decisions to build their own monasteries to run their own communities and to do their own teaching buddhist nuns now have a once in a lifetime chance to do away with the feudal hierarchies don t choose hierarchy over vinaya don t choose to let this happen and then when it doesn t work out undermine your own authority by asking monks to fix it let s be clear top down hierarchies do not work they create dysfunctional sclerotic out of touch institutions in countries like thailand people talk of the need to reform the sangha hierarchies but reform is what is done to correct something that is basically okay and needs to be improved what the hierarchies need is not reform but abolition they re dead weight get rid of them and buddhism will be much better off this why the buddha deliberately set up his sangha to undermine hierarchy by rejecting the preeminence of the brahmin s and the nobility by empowering every single member of his sangha let the buddha s sangha be your sangha and let the buddha s vinaya be your vinaya hierarchies serve only the desires of men to control real estate and other worldly assets in buddhism vitality comes from those who reject the hierarchies and work outside them let me leave you with one of my favorite lines from the pātimokkha evam samvaddhā hi tassa bhagavato parisā yadidam aññamaññavacanena aññamañña vutthāpanena for this is how there comes to be growth in the buddha s following that is with mutual admonishment and mutual rehabilitation pali bhikkhuni saṅghādisesa 16 bhikkhu saṅghādisesa 12 august 10 2015 sujato 45 comments sujato in europe just a reminder i m disappearing off to taiwan but i ll be in europe later in the year you can follow details here https sujatoeurope wordpress com and here s where i m teaching oct 30 nov 08 zell am see salzburg austria booked full nov 10 nov 11 bgh hamburg germany nov 13 nov 15 jhana retreat italy nov 19 nov 22 le refuge france nov 25 nov 29 theravada pl poland dec 01 dec 03 muttodaya forest monastery germany dec 03 dec 06 saarland germany dec 08 dec 19 seminarhaus shanti bad meinberg germany august 10 2015 sujato 3 comments girl rising film screening inspiring talks food music aug 8 saturday 6 9pm glebe town hall ayya yeshe s bodhicitta foundation educates girls and empowers women so as to better the lives of females living in poverty and oppression but also to advocate for their rights in the society they live in bodhicitta foundation invites you to participate in this noble cause and to discover your own empowerment in the society that you live in find out more join us in a night of charity and inspiration watch the profound film girl rising hear from notable guest speakers network while enjoying food and music be an agent of change proceeds from the night will go towards educating girls in indian slums june 29 2015 sujato 2 comments faces of me...
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