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Женщины в буддизме
Aug. 12th, 2004 02:08 pmBasically, the relationship is considered equal. According to a literal reading of some of the sutras, the Buddha appears to have thought that women are perfectly able to follow the path to the same goal as men, but in the process they were expected to do it differently. For instance, nuns have a good deal more precepts to follow than monks. And nuns and monks are (technically) never to even come into contact with each other.
Modern commentators believe the harder rules the Buddha set down for nuns were designed for expediency. For instance, the Buddha declared that all nuns were subservient to a monk of any rank. Later on, however, this rule seems to have been dropped, when women took over the administrative authority in the convents. The expediency of this authority rule lies in the fact that the Buddha considered authority to depend on your experience; since all monks by nature had more experience than any nuns (since women weren't ordained until several years after men were), all monks were initially senior to nuns, therefore every monk had authority over every nun: this rule only makes sense and is consistent with the Buddha's outline as a whole.
In modern Buddhism, women are ordained on an equal basis as men. Since most western Buddhism comes from Japan and is some form or another of Zen, the notion that some early Buddhists had (and some fundamentalists still have) that women can't progress beyond arhat is not generally held by westerners. This was a notion that Zen Buddhism found absurd, and of course still does today.
I'd say the place of women in Buddhism is overall pretty positive, meaning "equal to men". There are female saints, and female figures are worshipped (one of the most popularly honored bodhisattvas in Buddhism is a woman, Tara). Women have been ordained since the lifetime of the Buddha, and he believed they could obtain enlightenment, despite the claims of some later Buddhists to the contrary. Zen Masters specifically have gone on record saying that enlightenment is "neither male nor female". No doubt the line of succession of ancient Zen was a patriarchy (it is indeed often referred to simply as the Patriarchy), but you can certainly argue that this has more to do with ancient Chinese and Japanese imperial culture than Buddhism, particularly since the Patriarchy is not really in force anymore (many people consider it to have ended a very long time ago with Hui-Neng, although various schools of Zen trace a lineage back to him).
Modern commentators believe the harder rules the Buddha set down for nuns were designed for expediency. For instance, the Buddha declared that all nuns were subservient to a monk of any rank. Later on, however, this rule seems to have been dropped, when women took over the administrative authority in the convents. The expediency of this authority rule lies in the fact that the Buddha considered authority to depend on your experience; since all monks by nature had more experience than any nuns (since women weren't ordained until several years after men were), all monks were initially senior to nuns, therefore every monk had authority over every nun: this rule only makes sense and is consistent with the Buddha's outline as a whole.
In modern Buddhism, women are ordained on an equal basis as men. Since most western Buddhism comes from Japan and is some form or another of Zen, the notion that some early Buddhists had (and some fundamentalists still have) that women can't progress beyond arhat is not generally held by westerners. This was a notion that Zen Buddhism found absurd, and of course still does today.
I'd say the place of women in Buddhism is overall pretty positive, meaning "equal to men". There are female saints, and female figures are worshipped (one of the most popularly honored bodhisattvas in Buddhism is a woman, Tara). Women have been ordained since the lifetime of the Buddha, and he believed they could obtain enlightenment, despite the claims of some later Buddhists to the contrary. Zen Masters specifically have gone on record saying that enlightenment is "neither male nor female". No doubt the line of succession of ancient Zen was a patriarchy (it is indeed often referred to simply as the Patriarchy), but you can certainly argue that this has more to do with ancient Chinese and Japanese imperial culture than Buddhism, particularly since the Patriarchy is not really in force anymore (many people consider it to have ended a very long time ago with Hui-Neng, although various schools of Zen trace a lineage back to him).
