Buddhism and the Feminine voice.pdf

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2003

Buddhism and the Feminine

Voice

Gay Watson

Sharpham College, Devon, UK

This paper discusses inﬂuences of feminism on an emergent Western

Buddhism. It looks at the presentation of the feminine throughout the three

turnings of the wheel of Dharma , and advocates reception of the feminine voice

rather than a gendered feminism concerned only with the advancement of

women.

Buddhism has faced a double challenge in each culture it has entered: to

remain true to the core of its teachings and to express these in a way that

responds to the needs of the new situation. Just as Tibetan Buddhism has a

different ﬂavour from that of China and of Japan, so any emergent Western

form of Buddhism must inevitably change as it engages with the Western world.

Western science is one of the major new inﬂuences with which Buddhist beliefs

must contend and converse, and the Western emphasis on the individual brings

in another new dimension. An important third inﬂuence is, surely, feminism. A

recent plethora of books addressing a feminine approach to Buddhism would

seem to support this. Yet it is not exactly feminism that I want to address here,

more something I have begun to call the ‘feminine voice’, a voice that I believe

is as applicable to science and to Western individualism as it is to traditional

Buddhism. To listen to this voice may help move us towards the happiness that

is, as the Dalai Lama continually reminds us, what all humanity seeks.

What is the feminine voice? Immediately I fear myself entering the sinking

sands of feminist polemic, political correctness and patriarchal backlash. Many

distinctions have been suggested, and each appears to hold a speciﬁc agenda:

gender that is biological; feminist often political; and feminine a term of quality

or qualities, which brings into play the essentialist argument. Are such qualities

— indeed, is even gender — essential or constructed? From a Buddhist

perspective, obviously, I cannot espouse the essentialist argument; but I believe

that there are qualities that we may, in conventional understanding and speech,

correctly term ‘feminine’ in contradistinction to those termed ‘masculine’. I

believe that our reception of many of these ‘feminine’ qualities — indeed, our

labelling of them — have arisen from convention, society and expectation. Most

importantly, I believe they are not the exclusive property of women. Perhaps

one can envision a sliding spectrum of qualities — masculine one pole,

feminine the other — and each of us, man or woman, is placed, places

ourselves, somewhere on this scale. That these qualities are largely artiﬁcially

human-designated does not matter, that they are usually man-made and rarely

woman-made may do so. For they are the exclusive property neither of men nor

of women, but belong to both, and, I contend, need to be equally valued. That

ISSN 1463-9947 print; 1476-7953 online/03/010025-07 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/1463994032000140167

26 G. Watson

these so-called feminine qualities have been undervalued and that such values

have been used to deﬁne and to limit what is considered ‘womanly’ or ‘manly’

is the problem, not that they are designated as feminine. This has wounded

women obviously, and men less obviously but still profoundly. In a patriarchal

world we have had a hierarchy of values, through the greater valorisation of one

term — the masculine — at the expense of the other — the feminine. What we

all need and must, surely, seek now is a plurality of values, a revalorisation of

the feminine, a move to network models rather than hierarchical ones, a turn to

ways of connection and co-operation rather than competition.

So what are these ‘feminine’ qualities? I would say that they are best

described as the Yin qualities of the Taoist system, the necessary counter-

balance to Yang: receptivity as opposed to activity, listening as opposed to

discourse, being in contrast to doing, collaboration rather than competition,

connection and integration rather than analysis, and a greater attention to feeling

and intuition rather than dependence only on cognition and reason. As one

enumerates these qualities it is easy to see how devalued they have become;

how listening and reﬂection have been squeezed out in the emphasis on

discourse, on being heard. Contemporary life encourages us to be too concerned

with what we have to say to take the time to listen and reﬂect, on ourselves, our

bodies, and our feelings, to each other, to the non-human world. Similarly, we

are too busy doing to look around, to reﬂect, feel, and receive. To repeat the

words Dogen (1972, 133) said some seven hundred years ago:

To practice and conﬁrm all things by conveying one’s self to them is

illusion, for all things to advance forward and practise and conﬁrm the

self is enlightenment.

We are so concerned with the illusion, with impressing ourselves, our views and

actions onto the 10,000 things, that we cannot allow them to touch us, allow

ourselves to be enlightened. Cognitive reason rules, or attempts to rule, our

lives, accompanied by the inevitable periodic eruptions of repressed unreason,

as the ignored shadow bursts forth. Our emotions, sense of embodiment, our

intuition of our place in the environment, all are more or less ignored and

placed in thrall to our reason and our self-image. Everything else becomes their

possession, either potential or terror. From the centre of self-image and

possessed knowledge, the world is imagined. Alienated from participation,

walled in the separated and separative self, the world is out there as adversary

or theatre set.

In the battles against patriarchy, feminism has achieved so much for which

women can be grateful. My daughter undoubtedly lives in a world of less

restriction, social and legal, and greater possibility than the one I entered at

adulthood. Many battles have been won. Yet there is a paradox. That I use the

metaphor of war exposes the extent of the problem; that our very language,

which Heidegger called our house of being, is thoroughly saturated with

masculine bias. The depth of this problem is the source of the paradox.

Ironically, such gains for women have, at times, been won only through a loss

of the feminine voice, through winning by taking on the qualities of the opposed

Buddhism and the Feminine Voice 27

masculine. To become heard, the voice has had to become masculine —

sometimes strident, often combative — taking on those very patriarchal quali-

ties that have previously silenced its own. Just recently I attended an academic

conference on postmodern poetry. I expected that both poetry and the postmod-

ern would and should embrace plurality and the feminine voice, but I watched

as few women among many men in dark suits read quickly, dense intellectual

papers, with great intelligence but little warmth, no sense of embodiment nor

passion.

How does this speak to and within Buddhism? Buddhism can well converse

with postmodern theory and in some ways long foresaw it — in its concern with

difference, with inessentiality and interdependence. But how has it represented

and valued masculine and feminine qualities in its long history and its practice.

Some feminist scholars have addressed the problem; Ann Klein, Miranda Shaw

and Rita Gross have searched and researched, and written clearly and imagina-

tively in and about the feminine voice of Buddhism. Gross delineated most

clearly what she sees as disparity between theory and practice. Yet it may be

more complex. Comparative feminist reading of Buddhism reveals a hetero-

geneous picture. One recent commentator addressing the topic of Buddhist

attitudes towards women and the feminine names different approaches as

‘soteriological inclusiveness, institutional androcentrism, ascetic misogyny and

soteriological androgyny’. 1 If we can overlook the unsympathetic, and dare I

suggest very masculine, terminology, the matter is interesting. Another has

distinguished three different scholarly approaches; ﬁrst, that of a gender-free

message perverted by later monastic and misogynistic practice; second, a

developmental model that shows greater openness to the feminine in the historic

progression from Early Buddhism through the Mahayana to Vajrayana; and

third, an essentialist interpretation seeing an essential core of teaching un-

touched by later accretion or distortion of practice and interpretation. 2 I believe

we may ﬁnd some truth in each, but absolute truth in none of these approaches.

Which is perhaps how it should be, for surely from a truly feminine perspective

we should not be seeking for a position , but for the ability to acknowledge and

stay aﬂoat in the ﬂow of relationship.

Most useful is the suggestion that rather than tracking what actually happened

in the past, one may seek in Buddhism for resources for a contemporary

androgynous reading in a feminine voice, which is what Rita Gross (1993) set

forth in her study Buddhism After Patriarchy .Solet us take a brief glance at

the wounds and the resources for the feminine voice that we may ﬁnd in

Buddhism throughout the development of the teachings, which are called the

three turnings of the wheel of dharma . Gross’ own deﬁnition of feminism in

Buddhist terms, which I deeply support, is that it ‘involves the radical practice

of the co-humanity of women and men’ (1993, 127).

Buddhism, in its fundamental four truths, is concerned with suffering, its

cause and its ending, and the path to such liberation, for all humanity. Yet in

practice and in some texts we ﬁnd hideously misogynistic strands. Is this a

fundamental message, or merely a result of context? A postmodern approach

should warn us against the very idea or possibility of taking anything out of its

28 G. Watson

context, and a comparative approach will also keep us alive to the remembrance

that we bring to our study awareness not only of what we ﬁnd in the past, but

also an inevitable ﬁlter of our contemporary context and values. Attempting to

remember this, what do we ﬁnd? We certainly ﬁnd women seen as temptation;

as indeed they would be from the point of view of a monastic group of men.

For much of Buddhist scriptures are not so much the revelation and narrative

of a god, but arise from the actual working of a community, and were set out

as rules for conduct under speciﬁc circumstances. Even granting this, however,

it is difﬁcult for women to feel part of co-humanity knowing that the most

senior nun must be subject to the newest monk, that nuns may never teach

monks, and that the foundation of the order of nuns apparently caused the

Buddha to halve his expectation of the valid life of the dharma .

In terms of the teaching of early Buddhism, however, we may also ﬁnd

resource for an androgynous reading: as mentioned, the four truths are in no

way gender speciﬁc, and in the Samyutta Nikaya we ﬁnd a statement that

‘whether a woman or a man’, one can reach nirvana. Within the canon we ﬁnd

the Therigatha , the songs of the Elder Women, alongside the Theragatha , the

songs of the Elder Men. The doctrines of dependent origination, a description

of a dynamic network process rather than a static hierarchic model, are more

compatible in terms of the qualities earlier deﬁned as feminine than with those

of a patriarchal interpretation. Just the other day I was talking to a group of

students about dependent origination and emptiness. One man in the group

asked whether I thought these were perhaps concepts that were easier for

women to understand. It was a very good question and I think he may be right.

It probably is easier for women, following a more feminine logic. Rita Gross

also has carried out an interesting, and I ﬁnd convincing, argument for looking

at gender as a manifestation of ego, and thus to be dissolved according to early

Buddhist emphasis on selﬂessness (1993, 158).

With the Mahayana the general trend of doctrine is away from situated deeds

of the historical Buddha toward a more mythological and cosmic interpretation.

Here, the doctrines are not only gender free, but imbued with a strong feminine.

Emptiness is beyond all deﬁnition in ultimate non-duality; thus, gender differ-

ence becomes part of conventional relative truth while ultimate or absolute truth

is the truth of emptiness of any kind of essence, and thus of difference. The

logic of this non-duality may even be considered as a qualitatively feminine

logic; in contradistinction to a rational hierarchical masculine logic of ex-

clusion, being connective rather than competitive, concerned with relationship

and a middle way between extremes of exclusion.

The twin and equally valued pillars on which the philosophy of the

Mahayana rests are those of wisdom and compassion, often presented as

wisdom and skilful or appropriate action. Imaginatively, Prajnaparamita, the

personiﬁcation of the perfect wisdom of emptiness, is female. According to

Gross this arises from the feminine gender of the Sanskrit term prajna , and

because wisdom is the source, the mother of all Buddhas and Buddhaing.

However, another Buddhist scholar, Jose Cabezon, warns us to beware even

here of jumping to feminist-pleasing conclusions, suggesting that the patriarchy

Buddhism and the Feminine Voice 29

bearing female symbols are even more dangerous than Greeks bearing gifts. He

states that while wisdom is indeed associated with the female, this is not helpful

to the status of women, as the pre-occupation of the Mahayana centres upon

emotional state of bodhicitta as the distinguishing characteristic of the tradition.

As the ethnicity of a child follows that of her father, so the distinguishing

characteristic of the Mahayana — its ethnicity you might say — follows upon

the characteristic of the masculine. 3 Yet whatever the origin of the tradition, I

believe it may be a potential resource.

In the Mahayana literature there is a changed presence of women, perhaps

due to the greater emphasis upon the lay population away from an exclusive

monastic setting. However, here too we ﬁnd contradictions: while women may

attain enlightenment, mostly it is stated that they may not become Buddhas in

a female body. In the Lotus Sutra and the Bodhisattvabhumi we clearly ﬁnd that

a woman must be reborn as a man before reaching Buddhahood, and the same

story is continued in the Pure Land of Amitabha . However, in the Vimalakir-

tinirdesa Sutra ,weare presented with a goddess who, having caused Sariputra

to appear in her form and transformed herself into the male form of Sariputra,

denies the real existence of the characteristics of gender, whereupon the Buddha

says ‘In all things, there is neither male nor female’.

The most feminine-friendly aspect of Buddhism is found in the third turning

of the wheel and in the Vajrayana. Here the very language embodies the

feminine perspective. What is usually translated as Buddha nature is, in its

Sanskrit original, Tathagatagarbha , the womb or embryo of the Thus Gone,

which is a title for Buddha. One of the ﬁrst and most important instances of this

doctrine of the Tathagatagarbha is found in the Sutra of a woman, Queen

Srimaladevi. The importance of the feminine is further carried imaginatively by

its importance in the symbolism and ritual of this branch of Buddhism. Female

protectors, deities and dakinis are central to the Vajrayana mythology and

sadhana .Iwould mention quickly here the important position occupied by Tara

and, in Japanese Buddhism, Kuan Yin, whose transformation from the male

form of Avalokitesvara is in itself most interesting.

In more abstract form, the two pillars of wisdom and compassion from the

Mahayana becomes a dyad of space and activity — the activity is the resonance

of compassion, which becomes translated as skill in means arising from the

wisdom of emptiness. In all gendered symbolism, which is carried through a

number of pairs, bell and vajra, vowels and consonants, left and right, the

emphasis is on non-hierarchical co-operation and complementarity, the joint

manifestation of the whole.

Yet to emphasise the complexity of discussing Buddhism in feminist terms,

while womanhood in Tibetan Buddhist belief tends to hold an important place,

the very word for woman in the Tibetan language means low born; and the full

ordination for Tibetan nuns either never existed or soon fell into disuse. Again,

on the other hand, to disparage women is the last of the fourteen root downfalls

to be avoided in the Tantric initiation vows, where women are ‘the symbols of

wisdom and sunyata’.

Thus, while both androcentric and mysogynistic strands can be found

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