(I don’t know if this lengthy non-relevant remark is acceptable, and please be at liberty to inform me if it’s not–however there’s a whole lot of points I’d be actually focused on getting your ideas on!)
You’ve written earlier than about Buddhism and gender, and the way you assume its lack of valorization of the ‘pure’ as normative makes it uniquely (doubtlessly) LGBT-friendly in comparison with different non secular traditions.
I’d be curious to know when you share my rising sense that Buddhism–or a minimum of the Buddhism of the Pali Canon–is uniquely gender-egalitarian in comparison with different pre-modern non secular traditions. Or is that this an phantasm created by apologetic sources?
(On the topic, I’ve learn Harvey’s “Introduction to Buddhist Ethics”, Rita Gross’s “Buddhism After Patriarchy”, and Engelmajer’s “Ladies in Pali Buddhism”, together with an in depth evaluation of the garudhamma guidelines by Thubten Chodron. I’ve additionally learn Faure’s “The Energy of Denial”, which gives a way more pessimistic portrait of deeply-engrained misogyny–albeit his evaluation is generally confined to Mahayana texts and traditions, East Asian ones specifically.)
Particularly, I used to be struck by how:
1) Within the Pali Canon and virtually all of the Theravada commentarial custom, the concept (sadly endemic in East Asian Buddhism, as Faure makes clear) that ladies are *morally and spiritually inferior* to males is absent.
In contrast to different Indian non secular traditions–and even the strikingly-egalitarian Plato–the Pali Canon by no means claims that rebirth as a lady is because of dangerous karma. And in contrast to different agamic canons, the Pali canon denies {that a} lady can turn out to be a instructing Buddha, however not that she will be able to turn out to be a pratyekabuddha–which would appear to help Analayo’s argument that it’s not a matter of non secular inferiority, however purely of a sensible matter of a feminine Buddha’s incapability to realize an viewers for her teachings.
(The Kamboja Sutta looks as if a counterexample, and I don’t assume any of the sources cope with it. However it appears important that the sutta apparently didn’t have a lot affect on how later Theravada custom talked about girls.)
2) It’s significantly noteworthy that the place you’d most anticipate a theoretical declaration of feminine inferiority–the story of the Buddha’s reluctance to confess girls to the order, prediction that the order would decay quicker if he did, and imposition of the garudhammas–nothing of the kind is current. And all through the vinaya, the garudhammas appear to be offered as ‘brute details’, by no means justified by appeals to feminine inferiority–thus rendering extra believable the declare that they had been purely sensible in nature, meant to safe the acceptance of the encircling patriarchal tradition.
(Distinction with how, within the New Testomony, the restriction on girls assuming instructing roles within the church in 1 Timothy 2 was accompanied by a theoretical justification, grounding it on girls’s alleged ethical inferiority and secondary standing within the order of creation.)
3) One challenge which the above sources don’t talk about, however which stood out to me, was the seemingly strikingly-egalitarian view of marriage offered within the Sigalovada Sutta.
The dearth of emphasis on hierarchy between husband and spouse–specifically, the shortage of any command to the spouse to obey her husband–stands out in contrast to each the NT family codes and to most earlier Greco-Roman philosophical recommendation on marriage, to say nothing of the Dharmashastric preferrred of the spouse revering her husband as a god.
Hajime Nakamura finds that early Chinese language translators of parallel agamic passages repeatedly modified the textual content to be extra hierarchical–inserting references to the husband ‘controlling’ his spouse and the spouse ‘serving’ her husband–suggesting that it was interpreted as notably egalitarian on the time.
(The sutta on Sujata and the seven sorts of spouse–which undoubtedly exercised a serious affect in later Theravada tradition, given how Burmese authorized codes repeatedly cite it–does appear to supply a less-egalitarian perspective on marriage. Simply how inegalitarian it’s appears to rely upon whether or not we should always take Sujata’s choice to emulate the ‘spouse like a slave’, versus the opposite praiseworthy choices of the spouse like a buddy or the spouse like a mom, as normative.)
I’d be focused on realizing if this impression of larger egalitarianism within the Pali Canon that I’ve picked up is justified. And, whether it is correct–what do you assume may have prompted it? Ascetic traditions being extra gender-egalitarian than ones that valorize household life appears near common–however why did early Buddhism seemingly go additional on this regard than ascetic Platonism or Christianity?
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