I don’t want to offend anyone here, but to me who believes in the Buddha’s integrity and wisdom, this text is problematic and offensive to women. Thank you for posting him anyway, Ratana.
I wasn’t there in that forest grove but I imagine - as the text suggests - 30 men and 30 women having fun in a forest valley. Good friends had given their friend a prostitute - she was given, which clearly indicates she was instrumentalized. The Buddha was sitting nearby, under a tree, in meditation. Quite remarkable, given the fact that 60 people were presumably not silently sitting there a little further away. Now suddenly the entertainment was interrupted because the prostitute made off with her client’s belongings. I don’t know if she was paid fairly - I guess not, otherwise why should she steal? It could be an indication she was working in the sex industry out of poverty, not out of consent. But so the men, according to the text, are on the prostitute’s heels because she stole the belongings of the man she was offering a service. The text is not even a second considering that a woman’s honour just got stolen but never mind. Now they meet the Buddha, sitting there peacefully, and in no time these men turn from men paying/not paying for prostitution and leaving their women behind into so-called venerables . What was the timespan? And how comes the writer is not mentioning what happens to their 29 women? Are they still sitting there in the forest, cleaning up after their men? And how do they feel about the fact a woman has just been used for sex in their presence? How are they supposed to survive, now that all their hard working men in a blink of an eye became reverent monks? Maybe they’ll have to become prostitutes themselves to be able to survive if they don’t want to become nuns. Someone might want to explain this text to me but please do not mansplain it. It is clearly written by a man/ by men who had not the slightest understanding of a woman’s point of view. I know, we’re supposed to see the context of a text, which is exactly what I’m trying to do here. And I can’t believe it to have truly happened that way. If the Buddha calls such men venerables in a blink of an eye, he is not the Buddha I respect. One may call me modern, western and call me a feminist but I just notice that sexism is a widespread issue in religious texts. When men who don’t respect women read such a text, they are being strengthened in their ideas that it is okay to treat women disrespectfully, how subtile the framing might be. The least that I can do about it is saying I don’t agree with how women are being represented in this text.
5 Likes