A Story of the First Buddhist Women with Vanessa Sasson
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- čas přidán 8. 06. 2024
- Recorded on 3/30/24
After the Buddha achieved awakening, he welcomed men to join him in his practice. One day, the Buddha’s stepmother, Mahapajapati Gotami, approached the Buddha and asked if she too - along with the women who stood behind her - might join him in the monastic life. The story becomes a bit more complicated from there.
Vanessa R. Sasson, professor of Religious Studies at Marianopolis College, is a scholar of early Buddhist narrative. She is author of several works, including Yasodhara and the Buddha and more recently The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women, which tells the story of these first women, and highlights their courage and resilience as they journeyed towards the Buddha and asked for what was not at first easily given.
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Women in the USA still do not have ERA in place. Fighting for longer than 2500 years. But the Buddha did relent and let it all play out.
Women have been vulnerable physically for far longer than Buddhas existence. Buddhists Monks lived solitary often meditating alone in the forest. Plus just because one is wearing robes does not mean they are fully enlightened. The Buddha has said that the there is nothing dearer to a man than the sound of a woman’s voice and nothing dearer to a woman than the sound of a man’s voice. Also the near enemy of love is lust. People leave the worldly life to divest themselves of the seductive power of the sensual world. So to put men and women together in a monastic situation, is to very much thicken the plot of monastic life. The Catholics have done it and there are many stories of monks and nuns defrocking to marry. Or not.
I had the same reaction to what seemed mysogonism coming from the Buddha. He was extremely lucid and most of the rules of the Viniya were developed as a result of the behavior of the unenlightened monastics. Some people even if wearing robes do not behave with common sense so rules were made. They were not all made at once. I have alway seen the Buddha as looking at human nature as a reason to decline women. Not because women were not capable but men’s reaction to women who not only distract men but put women at risk. It is a culture where women’s lives meaning in their own parents eyes unless they were married. Anyway, I do not think the Buddha was anti woman. He was not in control of everyone’s conditioning. He was wanting to keep complications in the monastic Sangha to a minimum.
Previous comment should read that women’s life traditionally in that culture and in many to this very day were seen as meaningless unless married. Women were not particularly safe even in the their families or their marriages, so living under a tree in the forest meditating may not have been very physically safe. Of course there was and is mysogeny but do think the declining of women joining the monastics was because the Buddha was mysogenistic but because the culture for women was unsafe. They would have needed as requisites pepper spray, whistles. Given how people saw unmarried women it would be a wonder if they were given alms food.