Although many of its concerns are shared with women and men as recorded in the very earliest sources, Buddhist feminism is a modern ideology that challenges patriarchal structures in Buddhism that oppress or inhibit women’s experience and development. Buddhist feminism as an organized movement began to take shape in the 1980s; still a very young movement, it is gaining momentum and strength rapidly. Although at first influenced by various traditions of secular Western feminism, Buddhist feminist thinkers, especially those in Asia, are increasingly developing and shaping feminist awareness and action to address their particular contexts in distinctively Buddhist terms. They draw insight and inspiration from Buddhist ideas about spiritual equality, and its ideals of love, compassion, wisdom, and liberation.
Evidence of awareness and resistance to the plight of women in Buddhism and ancient Indian society is apparent in the early Theravada scriptures. For example, when the Buddha at first refused to allow women to join the monastic order, his foster mother and aunt, Mahapajapati Gotami, persistently challenged the Buddha to reconsider. She had become the leader of a large group of women who sought to follow the monastic path as celibate religious women.
These women were aided in their cause by the Buddha’s close disciple, Ananda, who argued successfully that women were as capable as men at attaining spiritual awakening and thus should be supported. These religious women recorded their poems as they became nuns. The poems offer their voices that articulate a clear consciousness of the challenges women face in a patriarchal society, and seek, through their lives as nuns, to be liberated from many of them.
Although these voices and others from many contexts in the long history of Buddhism are important for indicating an awareness of women’s conditions under patriarchy, modern feminism works through collective action to dismantle gender imbalance in social, political, religious, and economic spheres of life. Buddhist feminists argue for women’s equality on the basis of both modern conceptions of human rights and the Buddha’s own teachings of the equal spiritual potential of women. They draw from fundamental Buddhist principles on the importance of eliminating suffering, promoting peace, and working for the liberation of all living beings. Buddhist feminism is thus a modern interpretation of Buddhism. Like other forms of “Engaged Buddhism” it draws from the many ethical and religious resources of Buddhist traditions to address modern issues, crises, and concerns.
Feminists deploy various strategies in dealing with Buddhism’s patriarchal history. Some argue that because most Buddhist textual sources were preserved or composed by men, women’s contributions and voices have been lost or suppressed; moreover, male depictions of women, despite their obvious sexism and sometimes even misogyny, have enjoyed normative status in many Buddhist traditions. For these feminists, Buddhist feminist analysis must recover and revalorize women’s history and roles in Buddhism. They contend that Buddha’s own teachings were not sexist, but that Buddhist institutions were androcentric in ways which distorted them. This rereading of history will result in a more balanced and accurate history regarding both genders.
Another strategy is to develop a reconstructed Buddhism that discerns a set of key Buddhist principles and that can be used to formulate a progressive Buddhism—one that is not only sensitive to modern ideas about sexual equality and social justice, but is also more in keeping with what they regard as the Buddha’s true teachings.
There are many forms of gender discrimination today that Buddhist feminists are confronting. In contemporary Theravada and Tibetan traditions the order of fully ordained nuns died out—or was never established in the case of Tibet—and many women are working to reestablish these monastic lineages so that women may become nuns and receive the same status and support as their male counterparts. They argue that full ordination is a crucial step toward addressing the exclusion of women from positions of leadership and authority and the significant disparities in education and opportunities for religious women. They also suggest that Buddhist societies benefit enormously when there are strong, well-educated orders of nuns, as for example, in Korea and Taiwan.
Buddhist feminism is also concerned with the injustice, oppression, and violations of human rights that women and girls face in many contexts. Feminists are working to draw attention to—and end—the large-scale practices of sexual exploitation, slavery, and forced prostitution of women and children in their societies. Activists are protesting the prevalence of domestic and gender-based violence that women face. They also recognize that women and girls are often denied the same opportunities for education that are available to men and boys. In the context of rapidly changing global economic forces that have created vast disparities of wealth and power between the developed and the developing world, the vulnerabilities associated with poverty are often felt most acutely by women and children. As Buddhism gets retooled to handle particularly modern crises and problems, an awareness of gender and the conditions of women will play an essential role in its work for social justice.
Although the challenges in achieving gender justice in Buddhist societies are considerable, progress is well under way. Today Sakyadhita, an international movement of Buddhist women, brings together women from all corners of the Buddhist world to share and identify their concerns, to educate women and develop them as Buddhist teachers, and to improve women’s standing in Buddhist institutions.
