Going back to the analogy of a layman venerating monks.
I always try to venerate the monks, and i don’t mind saying that they have something nice which i do not and are better off to that extent, and i revere that distinction by bowing and treating them differently.
If i felt like this was being used against me, that someone is exploiting it, then i would shut down the exploitation. I would probably scold it very harshly in contrast to veneration. And i would keep venerating the monks as before but now having made sure there are no misunderstandings because of this.
I think that if i was a nun id probably do the same and insist on upholding the garudhammas but i would not let anybody use this against me and would raise hell if they try.
As i see it, just because one venerates a distinction, it does not make one subservient or generally submissive.
For example if a wife is more intelligent & virtuous then she is a fool to give up authority but whilst leading the household it is still in her self-interest to venerate her husband.
Likewise if anagami layman is in a company of monks lacking attainments. He can still insist on venerating the monks, be most humble, considerate & polite, but there is no way he would submit to them and it won’t end well for the monks if they tried to exploit this good quality.
The problem in gender dynamics is that people are generally confused not knowing where the boundaries are and where to set the boundaries.
I find this sutta to be highly questionable, by the way. And not only me.
Ok. Men are worthy of women’s respect. Because… they are.
I have always found the sutta about “Women can’t be Brahma, Mara etc” highly questionable. Because, you know, Brahma doesn’t rule with his penis. I’m not so sure about Mara, but still.
This looks to me like a later addition by sexist monks. And, yeah, as I can see, men still LOVE IT. Because they are so special.
There is a difference between venerating a person and venerating a characteristic of a person.
For example a person from a very reputable family might get a more lenient punishment from the king on account of the man’s relatives.
The man’s last name is taken into account and is venerated, rather than the man who is ruining the social credit of his clan.
We can say the man is venerated in that he is beneficiary of the leniency but he is born into this family because of his deeds and so we can’t deny him what is his. It would be unjust even if he is a bad person we do not like.
I don’t find it questionable but i understand that people would find things like this and the garudhammas questionable in light of real mysogyny because these are things agreeable to the mysogynists and it feeds their delusion.
My point is that the problem is not the garudhammas but the mysogyny that there is because of it.
People think that because you bow to them then they are better than you and can walk allover, this is the problem imho, not the traditional etiquette & gender roles.
In many ways, if one pushes to eliminate the garudhammas because it causes much trouble, then it enforces the mysogynistic stereotypes of unruly women who want to escape the kitchen.
It’d be as if laity decided that monks get too conceited when we bow to them and so they decide to stop bowing.
Then the monks would say ‘Truly these laypeople are so lowly & corrupt they don’t even bow to us anymore’, thus it’d reinforce the delusion.
My understanding (happy to be corrected by the experts here!) is that:
The Sixteen planes of fine material existence (rupa brahma loka) have physical forms with no genitalia and no specific gender allocations
The Four planes of immaterial existence (arupa brahma loka) have no physical forms at all, hence cannot be allocated any gender
The fact that characters are depicted as male in the sutras is more likely to be SECONDARY to the sexism of the time rather than some message from the Buddha that the PRIMARY message is that men are superior and hence hold all major roles in the Universe.
The Buddha suggested it would be wise to examine everything he taught and then see if any particular thing said to be his teaching is consistent with the rest and then accept or reject accordingly…seems wise to me and what we need to do here.
The Buddha ordained women (using the same words as ordaining men)
The Buddha had chief female disciples, just as chief male
The EBT have multiple (many thousand?) female enlightened beings
The EBT have some female authors
The EBT have multitudes of verses where the Buddha reflects on judging people by their thoughts, speech and actions not other characteristics (caste gender etc)
Anything else needs to be viewed in the light of these very clear messages coming across the two plus millennia of continued sexism! What amazes me is how little sexism crept in not that some sexism crept in…
This is a misunderstanding. The Buddhas only have two chief disciples. There are many foremost disciples but only two chief disciples. There were no female chief disciples.
More likely based on what? This is much like saying that rebirth and everything magical was added to the story or that the whole legend of the Buddha is fiction.
To many people many things seem obviously wrong & suspect but this is just their opinion which contradicts many texts.
Here you appeal to things being obviously suspect & erroneous but it is only your opinion which can never be substantiated with texts held to be true.
Therefore if you hold this opinion but can not show clear substantiation based on the texts then you have essentially left the conversation based on texts held to be true and are discussing your own doctrine.
Whether it be a misunderstanding, or whether it be a correct understanding, it is the Theravādin received opinion that every Buddha’s retinue includes both a pair of aggasāvakas and a pair of aggasāvikās. In the case of Gotama Buddha the latter would be Khemā and Uppalavaṇṇā.
The earliest explicit source of this opinion is the Buddhavaṃsa in which the names of the present and past Buddhas’ alleged aggasāvikās are given. The idea also finds a certain measure of implicit (but non-probative) support in earlier texts, e.g., in the exhortation to bhikkhunīs to look upon Khemā and Uppalavaṇṇā in the same way that bhikkhus should look upon Sāriputta and Moggallāna.
I’ve never looked into the question of how widely shared the concept of an aggasāvikā / agraśrāvikā was in other Indian Buddhist schools, but I do know that it’s found in at least one, namely, the school that gave us the Mahāvastu compilation.
I wouldn’t regard the mere non-mention of aggasāvikās in the Mahāpadānasutta as probative, or even suggestive, of their non-existence.
This same sutta also relates the size of the past Buddhas’ bhikkhusanghas, but not of their bhikkhunīsanghas. It relates the names of the past regnant rājās but not the names of their consort devīs. Ought we to conclude from this that the past Buddhas had no bhikkhunīsanghas and that the regnant rājās had no devīs? Or might their non-mention be no more than conformity to some shorthand pars pro toto convention?
It took me a while to understand what you were getting at.
Are making a reference to ‘consort devi’ as ‘The Woman Treasure’?
I don’t understand why one would expect the texts to mention the harem of the king or their foremost queen/queens. Lest one would be talking about a Wheel Turning Monarch’s ‘Woman Treasure’.
Does Pali not use the masculine gender when referring to a group of both masculine and feminine components (my Pali is Kindergarten level so hope an expert will chip in!)? One of the Pali scholars can probably reference texts where we know there were Bhikkhunis present but the masculine collective noun is used, I understand this to be the case but don’t have a reference.
@Notez : Do you accept that the EBT has multiple references to the Buddha criticising Brahmans for thinking people can be judged from their position or caste or some other characteristic but says it is from the character of their thoughts, speech and actions, nothing to do with any other characteristic (e.g., sex)?
@Notez : Do you accept that the higher order realms have no sex, so any mention of them in the text in a masculine form is mere convention and nothing to do with actual allocation of sex to their form of existence?
I do not accept this. I delineate a distinction between what is in between one’s legs and one’s gender in this circumstance. I have not met Sakka but i am pretty sure i would apprehend him as a him rather than a she but not on account of him having a human organ or a lack of thereof.
There is more to being a man than having the organ.
Well…not sure where to start…or whether I even should. But two points to clarify:
Sakka is considered part of the kama loka classification of realms (not the 2 higher order classifications we were discussing, the rupa-loka and arupa-loka)
Your admission that you would apprehend him as a him is perfectly fine with me as he is a him. However, the fact that you even said that (when you thought Sakka didnt have an assigned gender as a male) is kind of the point…that you are ascribing a male gender to an authority figure. That is fine, and I have no problem with EBT referring to Brahma gods with a gender assignment when they dont have one for reasons of language or cultural norms…as long as we realise that is what it is…labels…not some statement about males vs. females that is coming from the Buddha.
What comes from the Buddha is that none of this has any relevance at all, what matters is the mind, volitional thoughts, speech and actions and eradicating the defilements in order to achieve liberation from suffering. None of that core teaching has anything whatever to do with gender, or even being human vs. not, for that matter…anyway thats my view and quite clearly you and I are not in the same universe on this
