IB World Religions 2.5.3. Gender and Religious Experience: Scripture, Nuns, the Taras and Tantric Ritual Notes

2.5.3. Gender and Religious Experience: Scripture, Nuns, the Taras and Tantric Ritual

Gender in the scriptures

1. The Pali Canon speaks with more than one voice about women. Some passages treat their spiritual capacity as equal to that of men, while others record unease about their presence near the monastic life.
2. The jatakas (birth stories) hold that the being who became the Buddha was male in the lives leading to his awakening, and Theravada tradition has often read a male body as the form in which final Buddhahood occurs.
3. A recurring line of argument ties women to samsara through reproduction and sexuality, treating both as occasions for tanha (Sanskrit trishna, craving) and therefore for dukkha.
4. The Cullavagga of the Vinaya records the Buddha admitting women to the order at the request of his foster mother Mahapajapati Gotami, with the eight garudhammas (weighty rules) attached, placing every nun under the seniority of every monk. Scholars inside and outside the tradition read those rules variously as the Buddha's own condition and as a later addition.
5. Mahayana scriptures push against the restrictive reading. The Vimalakirti Sutra has a goddess swap bodies with the monk Sariputra to show that no fixed male or female nature can be found, and the Lotus Sutra tells of a naga princess who reaches Buddhahood in an instant.

The nuns' own accounts

1. The Therigatha (Verses of the Elder Nuns) sits in the Khuddaka Nikaya and is among the oldest surviving collections of women's religious writing anywhere.
2. Buddhists read it as testimony rather than as doctrine. Each poem is presented as the words of a named nun describing what her own release from dukkha was like.
3. The collection uses the same formulas of attainment for its nuns that the parallel Theragatha uses for monks, so the texts themselves do not mark women's awakening as a lesser kind.
4. The Canon also names women declared foremost in particular qualities, Khema in wisdom and Uppalavanna in supernormal power, alongside the more familiar lists of eminent monks.
5. Several of these women appear as teachers of other women. Patacara, who lost her husband, her children and her parents, is remembered instructing the bereaved out of her own grief.

Women in the lay sangha

1. Most Buddhist women have practised as upasikas (laywomen) rather than as nuns, so any account of their religious experience has to begin in the household.
2. Mahayana communities describe the sangha as four assemblies, monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen, which treats lay practice as a site of experience rather than as support for the monastery.
3. Teachers in Mahayana settings commonly hold that every person exemplifies both feminine and masculine principles, and on that basis they give women and men identical meditation exercises.
4. Merit making gives laywomen a recognized share in religious value. Offering food and robes to the ordained generates punna (Sanskrit punya, merit), which the giver may then transfer to the dead.
5. In much of East Asia the household altar is tended by women, so daily puja and the care of ancestors are experienced first as domestic acts rather than as temple ones.

The Taras and devotion

1. Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhists venerate female bodhisattvas, and the best known are the Taras, a name usually glossed as the one who ferries across, or as star.
2. Devotees approach Green Tara for rescue from immediate danger and White Tara for healing and long life, and Tibetan practice counts twenty one forms of her in all.
3. A story told in Tibet has the princess Yeshe Dawa vow to reach Buddhahood in a female body and keep returning in one, refusing the advice that she pray for rebirth as a man.
4. The experience is verbal and repetitive as much as visual. Practitioners recite the mantra om tare tuttare ture soha on a mala (rosary), often tens of thousands of times during a retreat.
5. In East Asia the comparable figure is Guanyin (Japanese Kannon), a form of Avalokiteshvara represented as female, approached above all by women praying for children or safe childbirth.

Tantric ritual and the feminine

1. Vajrayana ritual runs on a paired symbolism. The female stands for panna (Sanskrit prajna, wisdom) and the male for upaya (skill in means), and liberation is described as the union of the two.
2. The paired image is the yab-yum (father mother) figure, a deity in sexual embrace, painted on thangkas and cast in bronze throughout Tibetan temples.
3. The dakini, in Tibetan khandroma (sky goer), is the female figure who carries awakened energy. She appears sometimes as a human teacher and sometimes as a visionary presence.
4. Yeshe Tsogyal, the eighth century disciple and consort of Padmasambhava, is remembered in the Nyingma school as a teacher in her own right and as the concealer of terma, treasure texts recovered later.
5. Most practitioners meet these rituals in visualized form, with the consort imagined during meditation rather than physically present. Tibetan commentators have long argued over when literal practice was ever meant.
6. Historians and Tibetan women teachers have also asked whether the symbolism raised the standing of actual women, and the answers given inside the tradition differ sharply.

Change in the present

1. The bhikkhuni lineage lapsed in Theravada lands centuries ago and full ordination was never established in Tibet, so the highest monastic experience was long closed to women there.
2. A large ordination at Bodh Gaya in 1998 drew on Chinese Dharmaguptaka nuns to restore a Theravada line, and Sri Lanka now counts its bhikkhunis in the thousands.
3. Thailand has not recognized the revival in law. Women such as Dhammananda Bhikkhuni ordained in Sri Lanka and returned home to teach, and the argument there is still live.
4. Tibetan nuns take the getsulma novice ordination, and the Dalai Lama has said publicly that he supports full ordination for women and that the decision needs agreement among Vinaya holders.
5. Sakyadhita, founded at Bodh Gaya in 1987, links nuns and laywomen across all three branches and meets every two years.
6. Western communities have moved fastest. Tenzin Palmo, who spent twelve years in a Himalayan cave, founded the Dongyu Gatsal Ling nunnery, and several Zen lineages in North America have appointed women as abbots.