Is Thailand no place for female leaders?

The Nation, November 15, 2011

Bangkok's worst flooding in decades seems to have floated a lot of garbage - both the physical and verbal type.

Some superstitious minds are blaming the country’s first female prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, for bringing bad luck to the country, echoing last month’s YouTube clip which showed a controversial monk proclaiming women unfit to lead a country.To justify his claim, Phra Kasem, clutching the Thai translation of the Tipitaka, read a verse attributed to the Buddha from the Kandina Jataka: “I admonish men who, with arrow as weapon, strongly releasing it; I admonish the lands ruled by women; Indeed, beings under the sway of women are admonished by the wise.”

To play on the insult, he read another short Anguttara Nikaya passage where, according to the Thai translation, the disciple Ananda questioned the Buddha “why women neither sit in the assembly, nor undertake business, nor go out of town” with the Buddha’s reply that they were “angry, envious and weak in wisdom”.The video clip incensed many fair-minded Thais. Buddhist academic Surapot Taweesak pointed out that one cannot just look up a random passage in the Tipitaka as a definitive answer to any social issue.

He recommended that Thai monks educate themselves in the political and social reality of the day before applying the teachings of the Buddha, because while some parts like the Four Noble Truths or Dependent Co-origination are meant to be universal, others are context-specific morality teachings given to a different place (India) and time (around 2,600 years ago).

This author absolutely agrees that the Tipitaka is not a crystal ball or fanciful rambling that can be conjured up to explain everything. The Buddha clearly stated that what he taught represented only a handful of leaves within the forest. But as the Tipitaka passages cited are purported to be the Buddha’s opinion of women, the author believes it’s important to question the context in which the Buddha – who recognised women’s equal potential for enlightenment – might have said such uncharacteristically misogynistic things – if he indeed said them.

With a rudimentary knowledge of Pali, I would like to offer a contextual reading of the cited passages in this two-part article. First of all, it’s important to keep in mind that, from the very beginning, the Buddhist Canon resulted from a collective effort of an all-male monks’ assembly, reporting from memory what they personally had heard from the Buddha. Predictably, what they heard would be concerned less with secular affairs than with spiritual matters.

Sexual desire, as the main stumbling block for a celibate life, would often come up, and in such an all-male (supposedly heterosexual) circle, the word “woman” – their common denominator of sexual desire – could easily come to be shorthand for desire itself; something to be indignant at. However, the Buddha must have given similar teachings to female “monks”. And in that context one wouldn’t be surprised if he had used the word “men” to personify the sufferings of sexual desire.

Indeed, had the Tipitaka’s line of the transmission included female reciters from the start down to the present time, we might have records of “men” representing revoltingness.This Kandina Jataka was told by the Buddha to a monk feeling tempted to return to household life and his wife’s attention and pampering. What was being admonished, therefore, is actually not women per se but lust.

In such places, one must read “lust for” before “women”. The third line of the verse, as an example, should be understood as: “beings under the sway of (lust for) women are admonished by the wise”. The first line in the Thai translation is problematic. “I admonish men who, with arrows as weapon, release them in full strength.”

This doesn’t hang together grammatically or semantically with the rest. Considering that the story is about a mountain stag killed by a hunter after following a doe into a human village, a better translation for the original Pali should be, “cursed be the arrow (of desire) strongly piercing man”.

Here, the Buddha was obviously comparing the metaphorical dart of desire piercing the monk’s heart to the hunter’s arrow that killed the stag. The same sense also is conveyed by the second line. As both the text (verse) and context (story) are about men under the influence of lust, the word itthi (generally meaning “woman”) is better translated with its second meaning of “wife”. Thus the line should read, “cursed be the land overrun by the wife”, referring to any male leader who fails to keep his wife from interfering in the affairs of the state.

Again, the regressing monk who allowed his household desires to jeopardise his spiritual advancement was compared by the Buddha to a ruler who let his personal relationships interfere with his just rule. If female leaders had been the norm of the day, one would easily expect the verse to be put as “cursed be the land overrun by the husband”.

Now we turn to the second passage. Although Pali belongs to the Indo-European language family and its grammar bears astonishing similarities to Continental languages, it differs in one important aspect: the lack of indefinite and definite articles (a/an/the). As a result, it depends on the context whether the key word matugamo refers to women in general or specific individuals. The Thai language also lacks articles. To clarify, translators normally would insert words like “a”, “some”, “that”, “those” or “certain”.

Unfortunately, no such words are given here, leaving the passage as vague as in the original Pali. Without understanding of Pali grammar, a prejudiced mind is prone to read it as a blanket condemnation pigeonholing half of the world’s 7 billion people to menial jobs.But there’s a strong hint that the sutta is not a generalisation of women. It is worth noting that the passage doesn’t contain generalising words like sabbe (“all”).

Even more importantly, it hinges on a crucial part completely oblivious to Phra Kasem. Both Ananda’s question and the Buddha’s answer centred around the conditionality of hetu (“reason”) and paccaya (“condition”). Therefore, one should read the passage as concerning only some women – or men, for that matter – who are angry, jealous and weak as unfit to carry out those mentioned tasks, but by no means rules out the rest who aren’t.

This, the author argues, is the way to read the sutta without turning the Buddha into a hypocrite. This will be discussed in the second part tomorrow.

Part II: In the correct context: The Buddha was no misogynist.

November 16, 2011

In yesterday’s first part of this article, I argued that in a not-dissimilar manner, the controversial monk Phra Kasem bashed all women in high positions by citing passages from the Tipitaka without bothering to understand their linguistic and narrative context. In this second part, their situational or philosophical aspects will be discussed.

The fact that the second passage cited by Phra Kasem was named Kamboja Sutta after one of the 16 lands in the Indian subcontinent is a reminder that each of the Buddha’s discourses was given to a specific audience in a specific situation. The beginning of this sutta locates it at Kosambi, a famous city on an important trade route, of which Kamboja was a major destination. (The Thai translation glosses over “Kamboja” as “out of town”.)

Kosambi was also the scene of the most notorious crime of passion told in the Tipitaka. It was here that Queen Samavati was reportedly burned alive in her palace, along with many ladies-in-waiting, by the jealous Magandiya, another of King Udena’s queen-consorts. The incident must have been a disaster in terms of public opinion against all Kosambi women, and imaginably jeopardised whatever social status and opportunities they had hitherto enjoyed.

I therefore would like to conjecture that the statement was made by the Buddha as an observation – by no means an endorsement – of Kosambi’s social reality and prevailing prejudices against women. With this in mind, one reads Kamboja Sutta in an entirely different light: “Because some women are angry … jealous … weak in wisdom, Ananda. That’s why they don’t (get to) sit in the assembly, nor undertake business, nor go to Kamboja.”

Whether these social restrictions were applied conditionally to Kosambi women who behaved badly, or on all Kosambi women due to prevailing stereotypes – similar to that of Phra Kasem – we will never know for certain from the short sutta. However, we can be sure of what is not the case. The sutta can’t be regarded as the Buddha’s generalisation of women’s intrinsic nature – let alone his vision of women’s role in an ideal society – because that would amount to a wrecking ball to knock down the whole edifice of his own teachings.

During the Buddha’s time, Brahminism taught the existence of unchanging “soul” with intrinsic nature, and segregated people with caste and gender lines. One’s role and duty is accordingly pre-packaged and sealed from birth. Therefore, it’s virtuous for warriors to kill enemies, priests to conduct rites, merchants to trade and slaves to serve. Similarly, gender also determined one’s roles and duties. Men perform ancestral rites and conduct important businesses while women take care of households.

On the contrary, the marks of existence the Buddha recognised were not caste or gender, but dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), anicca (impermanence) and anatta (non-self). The last of these was a complete deconstruction of unchanging “soul” and rejection of the intrinsic nature of all things – most importantly of humans. If human nature were not malleable, the Buddha argued, it would be possible to become enlightened.

With centuries of Indian influence, Thai culture has inherited many Brahmanistic ideas mixed with Buddhist ones. This can be seen in the Thai word for “nature”, thammachart, which refers not only to “the way things are” but also “the way things ought to be”. Like its equivalent in pre-scientific western thought, the word does not differentiate between facts and values or between the descriptive and the normative. (For example, during the chill in March, some Thais thought the weather “unnatural” for the summer month.)

Not only did the Buddha refute fixed natures of persons, for him ethical values are determined only by the quality of a person’s intentional acts – not status (sex, caste, race, age) or conformity to the “duty” ascribed to it. Pali scholar Richard Gombrich wrote in his momentous book What The Buddha Thought, “The Buddha took the Brahmin word for ‘ritual’ [karma] and used it to denote ethical intention. This single move overturns Brahminical caste-bound ethics. For the intention of a Brahmin cannot plausibly be claimed to be ethically of quite a different kind from the intention of an outcaste. Intention can only be virtuous or wicked.”

With this paradigm-changing twist, the Buddha also struck down gender roles. A man’s intention cannot be said to be different in quality from that of a woman or a transgender. These important points were beautifully and comprehensively reiterated in Vasettha Sutta, where the Buddha proclaimed the biological unity of all human beings regardless of physical differences, including those of sex organs. Tellingly, the Buddha accepted women and men from all castes as equally capable of enlightenment.

Before using the Tipitaka to bash women, Phra Kasem should have remembered that, if anything, the Tipitaka is full of stories with deeply flawed men who committed all sorts of crimes from rape and serial murders to patricide. Not to mention the fact that the two most maligned figures in Buddhist stories were, or appeared as, male: Devadatta and Mara.

In conclusion, it’s easy to paint a negative stereotype of any group of people by cutting-and-pasting a Tipitaka passage out of context. But such practice is misleading and runs fundamentally against the Buddha’s teachings both in letter and spirit. It’s unfortunate that many Thai “Buddhists” still blindly hold on to the belief in fixed nature of men and women so as to reject women in top positions out of hand.

After all, many other countries have elected female leaders without falling off the face of the Earth. To cite some exemplary cases, Ireland’s former president Mary Robinson is widely regarded as a transformative figure for her country and was internationally applauded in her subsequent role as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her successor, Mary McAleese is also highly regarded, easily winning two presidential terms.

Meanwhile, there’s much left to be done to improve the status of Thai women, as the country ranks at 60 among 135 countries in the World Economic Forum’s recently released 2011 Global Gender Gap Report – compared to the Philippines at 8. If Phra Kasem’s video clip reveals anything, it is the pervasive sexism that allows some to publicly denigrate women – most hideously by taking the Buddha hostage.