Ayya Vimala.
With all due respect, this is outright Mana on nuns side.
Why did they became nuns?
Do they expect them to be treated as the queen?
I can’t beleive nuns are worrying about these petty things.
If I become a monk I wanted to be first in the line.
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Perhaps you need to ask 2 questions about why people ordain, in order to be balanced.
Do they expect to be treated like a king or queen? Do they expect to be treated like infectious beggars? I suggest that they expect neither of these things! But… it seems that some of the people ordaining are experiencing being treated as infectious beggars… Is this a good thing?
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Humilty is the nuber one pre-requisits to become a monk.
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Sarath, what you just wrote just kind of…sucks. Sorry.
Put yourself in the shoes of a Bhikkhuni, and imagine being treated badly, being disrespected, and being viewed as substandard. If this happened to you, how would you feel? It’s not about wanting to be treated as a queen. It’s about wanting to be treated with respect, and be treated equally, consistent with Vinaya.
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Do you think how you line up for food is such a big issue?
If I’m in the Tesco Lotus line waiting for a bowl of Khao Soi, no. If I’m a Bhikkhuni, and I’m told I can’t go on pindabaht, or I must trail behind the 8 year old nosepicker novices , yes, it might resonate with me as substandard treatment, a lack of kindfulness and respect.
If because of your family’s name, or ancestry, if you were told the only job you had in life was to clean public toilets, how would you feel? Discriminated against? It’s all a matter of context, and treating women as inferior to men is ignorant, and a violation of what I perceive to be the Buddha’s intent. If one’s actions are implicitly spitting in the eye of the Buddha, how much worse can it get?
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How about if I became a monk today.
I have to go behind as well.
Isn’t it?
Become a monk today, and you might just be Sarath in a robe. Maybe spend a year as an anagarika at a good wat, and hope that you’re allowed to progress to samanera(i) training. Spend a year or more as a samanera, and then hope that the Sangha community accepts you one day as a monk. Do what so many of today’s Bhikkhunis have done, with their training, their study and scholarship, their meditation. Understand the effort, the time the sacrifice and the devotion that these nuns have invested.
Once you have spent time, effort and devotion to this journey, then be told that you’re inferior to the child dropped off at the wat by his parents so he’ll have food and an education. Appreciate that with your strong meditation, scholarship, and Vinaya practice, you’re disrespected by monks of the likes of this one: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/breakingnews/30336364
If you became a monk today, you should walk behind the nuns, and carry the excess bags of food from the Bhikkhunis on pindabaht. You should eat last, after all of the Bhikkhunis have their food. Once you have practiced as long and as well as these Bhikkhunis, then take your proper place in line, based on seniority and merit, and not gender.
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Do you think this nose picking eight year old has the experienc, knowledge and the merits I have?
As we have never met each other, I have no opinion on this question.
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How the line is made up is PUBLIC behavior, in front of all laity, and it is a lesson. A lesson in contempt and doubt and impermanence of the Buddha’s clear explicit vinaya… It matters, as a laywoman, it hurts, it causes doubt of this oh so worldly Sangha, it causes disrespect, but not to the bhukkhunis. It causes me to wonder, are there no lay there who know their duties, who speak as the Buddha made clear was good behavior. It makes me doubt laymen, many of whom have walked away from the Holy Life so cherished by women. It makes me doubt 10 vow nuns, who are told to do terrible things and mundane things in service prohibited to ordained, because they are a hybrid invented by men who failed to study the vinaya and failed to show compassion and failed to apply the great rule and failed to see that gender is impermanence and failed to see that all humans need monastics similar to themselves.
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Not only gender everything is impermanence.
This is exactly my point.
Why we argue about petty things when we have a greater task ahead of us.
I am glad my mother did not allow me to become a monk when I was young.
I have not interest of becoming a monk in a snake pit.
Your point is important but it can be valid only in a perfect situation. By perfect, I mean being enlightened having given up all effluents. But even during the time of the Buddha there were issues involving monks and to expect that monks and nuns have no effluents particularly those relating to self issues is a tall order. This is human nature fighting for equality. Even to progress in the path everybody must respect each other as equals or follow the vinaya rules. When both these fail, then we have what Ayya Vimala describes.
With Metta
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Where did Buddha say everybody is equal?
Mana, Samana and Asamana oll are fetters.
He did not say that literally. But if you read Phenapindupama Sutta SN 22.95 you will understand what I mean.
With Metta
I know this Sutta very well.
You cant support your point with that.
You dismiss or reduce everything i said in the post you quote to “petty things”? You cherry pick one agreement and ignore all else?
This is sad.
:shakes her head, walks away from thread ::
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Because it affects how they are able to practice. Just like descrimination on the grounds of race or gender affected/affects what some people are able to do.
Perhaps you also think that the racial discrimination that used to occur in many countries (and still does in some places) was just a “petty thing”. People of certain races not being allowed to attend certain schools or universities, or be treated in certain hospitals was just a petty thing? They should have just “got over it”? Like the Bhikkhunis?
Ok, will take one at a time.
What should be is the order of lining to obtain food?
Well, of course, you can always attempt to reduce a serious systemic problem to trivialities by picking on details that, in themselves, are not particularly significant.
Why should black people in the US have been concerned about which toilet they could use, or whether or not they got a seat on a bus? Rosa Parks shouldn’t have been such a complainer…
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