The Iron Age as the Reason for Buddhism - 'Oh yoga, help me use these work trowels today!' Then l'll be gone

Compare the representation of women in historical buddhism with modern day buddhism.

Buddhist women were originally less equal to men than today, but more equal relative to their contextual status in each of these worlds - relative to ‘the World’. Their representation by dharma texts, images, iconography, music, poetry and art was more empowering and liberating in an ancient, male dominated Indo-Aryan society than it is in today’s world of diversities, and it is liberation from attachments which Buddhists seek. We shall look at this representation in early Buddhism, asking if the iron age caused the rejection and funnelling of pre-Buddhist divine religions. Then we shall ask if modern Buddhism gives women more rights than this Theravada Buddhism, or if it is relatively not so effective as society in female liberation and empowerment, in the treatment of women. The conclusion shall be that the Buddha was a genius freethinker and that Theravada Buddhism was a vehicle for ancient Indian society rather than a problem to it, but that contemporary Buddhism no longer leads society in feminist thought.

Peter Harvey states that religious sexual equality connotes: equal access to religion; equal spiritual images; equal religious roles; equal opportunities; family equality; equal legal right to inherit or divorce; equal access to education; equal political right; the encouragement of the achievement of equality. He says that “These are affected by the way a culture construes the differences between men and women”. In Buddhism, a ‘right’ is a duty, Buddhism being defined by practices rather than by core beliefs because the central dharma is doctrine or code, nothing being fabricated falsely. Belief in karma, or action, where one becomes what one has done intentionally, through Sramanas by placing oneself via rebirths on the bhavachkara or wheel of cyclic existence, meant a few elevations for Indo-Aryan women. Sons did not need to perform funeral rights, the birth of a daughter was a dignity, nuns could become Arahats (becoming an Arahat is the goal of Theravada), male and female mental faculties were defined identically by the third Ablidhamma basket (loc 5153), and a Buddhist’s sex could change in life potentially:

“Each of the five personality factors is ‘not a female, not a male, not a Self, not what pertains to Self’ (Nd. II.280)”

Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, Chapter 9

But he suggests that gender equality in the Pali Sutras is indeed technically driven and is not rather a a freedom or a genuine directive to respect women. However, women were nonetheless represented in early buddhist images and practices notwithstanding.

Geoffrey Samuel in The Origins of Yoga and Tantra alludes to there existing goddess imagery from the second millennium BCE onwards, along with “a goddess cult…and/or a religious attitude to sexuality in the first millennium BCE,” informing us that temples and stupas were clad with images for bowing and meditation of fertility. Samuel believes that vegetation and goddess imagery like Gajalaksmi in the Indian Museum of Calcutta and iconography like Gandhara and Mathura were “associated with a primarily agricultural society”. The new tools of this new Indo-Agryan world demanded a greater knowledge of how to live and move ones body, or how best to ignite ones physicality. Greater awareness of the human body and mind were required, both for work and pleasure, because greed and lust were a problem which became attachments.

Temple images were complemented by the work and domestic images of the iron age because women were represented in imagery on agricultural tools such as Painted Grey Ware (PGW), Black Slipped Ware and Northern Black Polished Ware (NBPW). These propelled the new urban settlements into greater food production by greater fertility, and so Gotama reversed from asceticism to practice a more enjoyable form of yoga. Samuel says that White (2006) refutes yoga as originally an ascetic mental practice for yoga as letting the body open to “linkages between the microcosm and macrocosm”. Whereas Brahmanic yoga, coming before Buddhist yogic practices, channelled emotions and mentality through the solar orb to the Brahman god-spirit, yoga, according to the Yogasutra of Patanjali, sought to isolate you from the World, Buddhist yoga sought to release ultimate nirvana through a liberating enlightenment using the Eight-factored Path. Yoga included sexual yoga, and women doing tasks like harvesting rice, weaving and marketing were positioned through it as equal to men because both partners were intrinsic participants.

Yoga gave workers more agility, and amongst Painted Grey Ware (PGW) found 1950-52 in the Indus Valley Civilisation is that of a family corn-grinder, along with household objects and craft tools which women would have used. Children, whom women looked after, played hopscotch using trimmed PGW and likewise used it for toys. NBPW coifns were found in Alexander in 300BCE, and women were marketers. B B Lel says that PGW coincided with the Pali Sutras as well as with Vedic literature, and therefore Buddhism was its social and political movement:

“On the solid foundation laid by the Painted Grey Ware people arose the superstructure in which during fifth and sixth centuries B.C. there flourished…the great religious teachers, Mahavira and Buddha.”

B B Lal, The Painted Grey Ware Culture of the Iron Age, Conclusion

Emperors such as Asoka endorsed Buddhism, also kings, through rule-making e.g. less animal sacrifice. However, the Ablidhamma gives five extra types of female suffering to men including ‘she waits upon a man’. Nuns could not become buddhas, only through interrupted continuation by rebirth as a monk, and laywomen gave alms to monks. Abortion was not allowed by the Sutras which saw pre-birth consciousness as that of yourself in your past life, or that of your parents.

Today, Buddhist women normally are only not guilty of abortion if the mother’s life is saved. Predicted disability in an unborn child is seen as the baby’s bad karma, disrobing them of equality rights in life, and some new mothers therefore give their baby up for adoption. Modern Buddhist principles take a chimpanzee’s life just as necessary a seriously medically-ill unborn child, and socio-economic issues cannot factor in the abortion decision. Samsara renders abortion wrong, and moreover, prospective women today of a child are naturally required to ask the Sangha and family for help to decide, like Kate Lila Wheeler who reflects upon the atmosphere which prizes other people’s opinions:

“Rather comically, when I felt obsessed with the desire to have a baby, I would often consult a non-Buddhist or parent in order to glean support, then rush to find a Buddhist [for support]…Meanwhile, the buddhists were much more understanding of reasons why a person might choose not to be a parent.”

Ellison Banks Findlly, Women’s Buddhism Buddhism’s Women (2000), How a Buddhist Decides Whether or Not to Have Children, Kate Lila Wheeler

Girls are chosen to take care of their grandparents, such as Theanvy Kuoch who often had to pacify her dad’s anger because of Buddhist misogyny in the family home. Modern Tibetan Medicine utilises Buddhist principles from the rGyud bzhi or The Four Tantras of the 11th and 12th century BCE (also The Blue Beryl Treatise), seeing the Buddha as the Supreme Physician, and these principles state that the human body adjusts to external changes of state but if the body’s inner balances do not show harmony then one needs to call up an interaction with the twenty-five factors, which include the five elements, the six tastes and the secondary characteristics. When individual health disregards homeostasis then you need to see a doctor and interact with the twenty-five factors, and Buddhism seems to qualify as an extremely good communication vehicle to posit the unequivocal and immutable efficacy of medical treatment for the ill, but the first female Tibetan doctor only emerged in the early 19th century: Khandro Yangkar 1907-1973. In a modern world where female doctors are the norm, I think the enumeration of thirty-two gynecological disorders in the rGyud bzhi is not enough for women to appreciate equal access to medicine.

I sadly believe that although Buddhist women are abstractly more equal today with men than in early Buddhism, nuns are still separate to monks and women are suppressed by men, from family roots upwards: independence of mind is not encouraged and those women are shunned. A new set of creeds is required to update the Sutra’s Iron Age description of dharma to a modern digital world definition where women happily even steer men. An application of Pali texts today for laity may be criminal, and secular variables such as the nature of the marriage contract, the facility to divorce, the right to remarry, segregated sexes and the right to inherit and own or dispose of property lie hidden from today’s equalising world within its sacred texts.

Religions take because they do good, not because they philosophise - it just so happened that India’s Iron Age required someone or a body to sculpt congruent philosophies and beliefs, by practices and that is what Theravada Buddhism did. Feminist thought today supersedes contemporary female Buddhist practices and duties generally, even though Buddhism answers the question of how to live. So we must adjust it and give women both independence of mind and spirit, forwardly.

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