A Feminist Awakening?
I’m at my wits end with village life and the expectations my parents put on me, most of which stems from my insistence to remain unmarried. When visiting with family and friends during Losar I was asked several times when I will marry. When the hailstorm destroyed the village my parents and several of my friends said, “You’re lucky nothing happened to you, without a husband to take care of you you’d be in rough shape.” This, despite being largely involved in repairing the houses and animal pens that were destroyed. In fact I taught several people how to repair their own houses. Oh, and remember when Sidd and I oversaw, directed, and were involved in the construction of the library? Yet my status in the village is defined by who I am connected with or belong to. I don’t think people are consciously insulting my ability to take care of myself, but unconsciously they are obviously expressing doubts in my capabilities.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not remaining unmarried out of spite or pride. I truly wanted connection in my life, but I’ve always made an effort to be self-sufficient and take care of myself. As I was growing up my parents did not believe in arranged marriage because they had a rare romantic courtship. Most of the suitors I’ve had throughout my life have wanted a traditional wife who will stay at home to cook and raise children, or conversely expect me to work unbearably long hours at their farms[1]. I’m a successful builder and a trader, and I’ve worked hard for years to be able to support myself and have enough extra money or resources that I can help others. My parents don’t understand this, and so the men they have tried to set me up with don’t understand this. After a while I just gave up looking, and resigned to be alone in this life. I confronted my cravings for a husband and a family life, and saw inside myself a strength to travel through this life on my own. I saw that marriage makes sense either for love or for resources, and I don’t need either, so I have no reason to be married.
My mother accuses me of being selfish. She says respectable women are either married or nuns, or at the very least consorts to other married men[2]. My father says it pains him to see my low social status because I am unmarried[3]. Monastic lifestyle is not for me. Things came to a boiling point last week when my parents sat me down with some of the elders in our village and told me they would be arranging a marriage for me if I had not found someone in six months. The man they have in mind to become my husband is a farmer in a nearby village and a widower. My role in his life would be to bear him children and work long hours in his fields. I know form my travels that women in that part of Tibet work so hard they barely have time to raise their children[4]. This is not the life I want. I love and respect my parents, and I know they want me to be happy, but I will not accept them determining my life like this. I am a grown woman. My father became very angry when I told him this, and I got even angrier in response. We said hurtful things to each other, and I stormed out. I packed a bag with clothes and money and some medicines to sell/trade and left the village immediately. I walked for hours until I made camp for the night.
Not knowing what to do next, and still too mad to return home, I decided to go to Lhasa take a break from the village and possibly to find someone to talk to about the role of women in Tibetan culture and in Buddhism. I wanted a fresh perspective. At the same time, I could hear my mother’s voice calling me selfish for pursuing my independence. I started to doubt myself, wondering if I was being led astray by pride and obstinacy. I thought that if I took refuge in the dharma I would be comforted. I stopped at a monastery along the way, asking for some food in exchange for some medicines. There was a retreat happening when I got there and so the compound was full of both monks and nuns. Instead of seeking refuge in the dharma all I could see what the inequality between the monks and nuns. The monks ate better and were elevated on a raised platform while the nuns sat below and ate with the lay retreat attendees. The monks slept in cleaner and better maintained quarters[5].
Has the Buddha’s message been lost along the way? Is there something that I am not understanding? Do the status differences between men and women arise from Buddhist practice directly, or from our culture? While some of the Buddha’s teachings prescribe women the same status as men, while some of them do not. I thought it was a cultural influence, but by asking some questions at the monastery I learned that in monastic practice nuns have to abide by more and stricter rules than men, and only certain avenues of enlightenment are open to them[6]. The Buddha taught that all earthly beings are the same from humans to animals, we are all interconnected, we all suffer, and that because of this we have to have compassion for each other because we are all going through the same things in this life. If this is so, why would his followers set additional rules to make it more difficult for women to become nuns and become enlightened, and specifically state their subservience to monks?[7] In my experience, Buddhist women hope for a male rebirth because it is not possible to attain enlightenment in a woman’s body. I’ve heard it from nuns and from lay women in the village[8]. I asked a monk about it when I was at the monastery. He responded: “If women awaken to the thoughts of enlightenment, then they will have the great and good person’s state of mind, a man’s state of mind, a sage’s state of mind … If women awaken to the thought of enlightenment, then they will not be bound to the limitation of a woman’s state of mind. Because they will not be limited, they will forever separate from the female sex and be sons.”[9] So much for taking refuge.
If it is true that the interconnection of all things means that I am equal to a man, is it my karma to be born to a culture in a religion that does not see women as equal? Is my female form itself not a lower rebirth, but being born in a culture that holds women as less valued the lower rebirth? If there is no essential self, and we are all the product of our consciousness as determined through dependent origination, then I cannot believe Buddhism is correct in assigning the female form as a lower rebirth. Is Buddhism so bound by its cultural surroundings in Tibet that it cannot elevate beyond it? My faith has been shaken, and I am full of questions.
While I was in Lhasa I met a small group of female lay Buddhist practitioners from the United States that were visiting Tibet. They were modern looking women in their mid-30s. Seeing that I was on my own they invited me to eat and talk with them. Two of them spoke some Tibetan after studying it in university, and I speak just a tiny bit of English, so we were able to have some basic conversation. They were surprised and pleased when I told them I was not married. They weren’t either, and said they were waiting until their careers started before settling down to start a family. It got us started on the topic of being an unwed woman in a rural village. I told them about the fight with my parents, and the traditional expectations of me to marry and become a mother. The women voiced their support for my decision, but I felt that their praise was hollow because they were judging me from the context of their culture, not my own. If they saw my situation from my perspective they would see it is painful and confusing, not empowering as they experience it in their own lives.
One of the women is a tantric practitioner, and she described how difficult it has been, at times impossible, to find someone to teach her tantric instructions because she is a woman. One of the only accessible outlets she has encountered is sexual experiences with advanced tantric practitioners claiming that the sexual merging can further both of their enlightenment journeys[10]. She expressed a belief in the effectiveness of this practice for advanced adepts, but also lamented that opportunities for study and meditative practice were not as accessible to her because she is a woman. She said she had more to offer than sex, and that she wanted to access deeper sacred teachings with her mind and heart, not her sex organs.
Another of the American women studied Women’s Studies in university. She said that in cultures where the power is dominated by men women are assigned roles and have morals imposed on them, often to maintain the status and control of the men in power, and that women living outside those imposed boundaries are seen as dissenting and disruptive[11]. I could identify with this as part of my experience as a self-sufficient woman capable of physical labour and building skills, though I’ve experienced it more outside of my village. Two years ago on a trading trip I passed through a village that had several houses and animal pens washed away by a storm and flood, so I offered to help rebuild. Most of the men who rebuilding said I’d be better suited to work with the women who were trying to salvage crops. I explained the extent of my construction skills, which are excellent, but they were reluctant to let me work alongside them, saying I was better suited to work in the field with the other women despite my protestations that I’d never harvested anything or worked in a field before[12]. When I continued to try to help them rebuild they said they didn’t want me around the village, poisoning it with my selfish and prideful attitude.
After dinner I said goodbye to the American women. I went back to my hotel room feeling depressed. I realised I was envious of their worldliness, their modernity, and the fact that they could choose their destinies without pressure from their parents. The low status women are given in Tibet prevents many of them from ever receiving a formal education, and the ones that do leave their villages to lead their own lives or seek an education are at risk of being abandoned by their families[13]. In my misery I reflected on the dharma and saw that the principles of emptiness and impermanence do not prescribe the status of the sexes.
Emptiness tell us that we have a consciousness in us, and it’s being inside a bodily form causes us to create an identity that identifies a gender, but that that identity and gender are ultimately empty. We have a conventional identity, the voice that I think with, and my sense of “me-ness”, but that the ultimate identity is a consciousness that floats from one life to the next, as determined by the karmic flow of samsara, and that it is empty, it does not have inherent value or existence. We create the sense of conventional identity as part of the suffering and illusion of this life. You’d think all those monks meditating on the nature of emptiness and impermanence and suffering would figure out that they are projecting their patriarchal identities and continuing oppressive cultural traditions. If everything is empty of inherent existence, then how can the female form be inherently less able to achieve enlightenment?
The physical form is impermanent, and the body, organs, and hormones that make up a man or woman are temporary. What matters are our actions in this life toward enlightenment, and there is no reason I can see that the physical form would limit the journey toward enlightenment. The only sense I can make of it is that women are either denied monastic ordination or are given more monastic rules and vows to distance them from the monks who are trying to confront the nature of their sexual desires and passions. If that is the case then the problem lies with the men, not inherently with the women. Perhaps men should wish to be reborn as a woman so they wouldn’t have to impose rules on the opposite sex to control their own desires and temptations. But that thought is not shared by many that I know. More commonly, and despite acknowledging the impermanence of the body and transcending it to reach enlightenment, people believe the being born make is fortuitous while females are an inferior rebirth, captured in the idioms bsod nams che gi and skye dman[14].
So where do I go from here? I will not return to my village for some time. I need to reflect, to experience, to be on my own without outside influence pressuring me. I will stay living in Lhasa for now, which seems to have a slightly more modern view of the roles and capabilities of women than the village. What I do know is that we are all suffering together, all of humanity. Reducing the status of women to a lower rebirth increases their suffering, and thereby increases the suffering of all humanity.
[1] Levine, N. (1988). “Women’s Work and Infant Feeding: A Case from Rural Nepal.” Ethnology. 27(3):231–251.
[2] Haddix, K. (1999). “Excess Women: Non-Marriage and Reproduction in Two Ethnic Tibetan Communities of Humal, Nepal.” Himalaya. 19 (1). Article 9.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Levine, N. (1988). “Women’s Work and Infant Feeding: A Case from Rural Nepal.” Ethnology. 27(3):231–251.
[5] Byrne, J. (2013). “Why I Am Not a Buddhist Feminist: A Critical Examination of ‘Buddhist Feminism’.” Feminist Theology 21(2): 180–194.
[6] Hamilton, S. (1996). “Buddhism: The Doctrinal Case for Feminism.” Feminist Theology 4(12): 91–104.
[7] Byrne, J. (2013). “Why I Am Not a Buddhist Feminist: A Critical Examination of ‘Buddhist Feminism’.” Feminist Theology 21(2): 180–194.
[8] Ani Lacham. Dorje Tsering Chenaktsang. 2007. Documentary.
[9] Byrne, J. (2013). “Why I Am Not a Buddhist Feminist: A Critical Examination of ‘Buddhist Feminism’.” Feminist Theology 21(2): 180–194.
[10] Campbell, J. Interview by Paul Valleley. “I Was A Tantric Sex Slave.” The Independent. 10 February, 1999. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/i-was-a-tantric-sex-slave-1069859.html
[11] Makley, C. (2002). “On the Edge of Respectability.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique. 10(3):575–630
[12] Levine, N. (1988). “Women’s Work and Infant Feeding: A Case from Rural Nepal.” Ethnology. 27(3):231–251.
[13] Ani Lacham. Dorje Tsering Chenaktsang. 2007. Documentary.
[14] Makley, C. (2002). “On the Edge of Respectability.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique. 10(3):575–630
