Feminist takes on the Therigatha?

To say, “I don’t consider myself a feminist” is to exercise the freedoms, the education, the right to self-expression and self-determination that generations of feminists have fought for and that we take for granted.

Feminism just means that women deserve equal treatment. Which means if women want wear makeup, it’s up to them, just like it is for men and for non-binary folks. If you believe that it would be wrong for men to make a law prohibiting women from wearing makeup and punishing them if they do, then congratulations, you’re a feminist! :woman_cartwheeling:

The problem is discovery. Without reading them I have no idea if they say anything useful. Most academic articles are a waste of space. I’ve spent the last few days distracted from this project by writing about Halkias’ article on ritual suicide in early Buddhist (tl;dr: it isn’t real). It’s an all-too common feeling I get, sadly. I’m like, what, they let people publish stuff like this these days?

Speaking of which:

Almost everything in here is wrong.

  • not all Theris were contemporaries of the Buddha
  • Pali canon was committed to writing closer to 20BCE, not 80
  • there’s no relation between the time of writing and the time of fixing the text: this is 100% modern cultural imposition
  • the verses weren’t “reworked” over five centuries: they were collected over about two (only a few are in the late stratum)
    • I mean, many of the gathas are just a single verse: how long do they imagine people were working on one verse?
  • verses aren’t recast to fit the audience: that’s what a commentary is for
  • the “journey of the soul” (!)
  • Buddhism didn’t arise “among republics”, it arose in a region where there were both republics and monarchies
  • the republics were hardly “egalitarian”, they were governed by aristocracies
  • commentaries weren’t committed to writing in 500 CE, they were already written
  • it’s paramattha not paramatta
  • and on it goes. That’s just the first page.

Thanks, downloading it now!

This is a much more careful and satisfying study. The main focus is a comparison between the Thera and Theri-gathas. This is something I’m trying to avoid in my essay: I want to focus on the women’s verses, not see them only in light of the men’s. So this is a useful exploration of some different areas.

She has some quantitative analysis that’s interesting, especially that there is much more emphasis on the brahmins in the thera-gatha. I’m just not sure what we can infer from this, other than the obvious fact that educated brahmins were mostly male.

One thing in this study, as in most of them, they really suffer from a lack of distinction between text and commentary. I think it’s an outcome of the fact that, from Rhys Davids to Murcott, editions have published them together. But really, any analysis of gender roles that doesn’t make a clear distinction is kind of doomed. I mean, imagine taking Bible passages and a modern book of “stories from the Bible”, and discussing “gender roles of women in the Bible”.

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:person_shrugging: You asked for “Feminist takes” not “good Feminist takes” :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Maybe can use it for your intro to the Thag? :pray::slight_smile:

Oh, I know, I would just like more good ones that’s all!

Yes, good point.

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Isn’t Lokanta Vihara near Paramatta? Lokanta Vihara, Paramattha would have a nice ring to it…

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You could say that parramattha (the “final goal”) is right next door to lokanta (the “end of the world”).

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“the end of the world cannot be reached by traveling, yet it is impossible to end suffering without reaching the end of the world.” :grin::pray:

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I want to thank everyone who helped with this. Also got a bunch of references from my friend Nadine.

However I’ve been so disappointed with the quality of the scholarship that I’ve decided to can the whole idea.

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I know it’s too late, yet Women and the “Arahant” Issue in Early Pali Literature (1999), in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 15(1), by Ellison Banks Findly contains some takes on the Therīgāthā. For example:

The text itself, more over, says that the state of being a woman (itthibhāva), tied as it is to the care and nurturing of family, is one peculiarly marked by dukkha (suffering), and makes clear, in the contexts of women’s lives, that it is the very experience of pain and suffering that, properly diagnosed, will eventually lead to freedom. While the directness of discerning impermanence and consequent suffering is clear in the women’s expressions, this is not to say that it is absent in the men’s; the Theragāthā is clear throughout that pain ends with enlightenment, where there is no grief. As I have suggested, however, the men’s expressions have a greater doctrinal, and perhaps institutional, quality, while the women’s expressions most often preserve the emotional power of the moment of discovery. (p.65)

Hope this helps someone interested!

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Thanks!

It’s always the same with these analyses. Great that they highlight the voices of women, but they constantly impute things to the texts that are not there, or even things that the texts are explicitly contesting.

The whole point of the bhikkhuni order is that womanhood does not have to be tied to the care and nurturing of family.

The word itthibhāva occurs twice in the Therigatha. Once it is Mara with his sexist nonsense, before he gets put down hard by Somā. And once it is an apocryphal statement attributed to the Buddha in the verses of Kisāgotamī, which empathizes with the suffering in women’s lives. It’s not like it’s a huge theme.

This is overstepping what the texts say, assuming they refer to the verses of Kisāgotamī. Yes, they acknowledge the suffering women encounter, and yes, contemplation of that can spur one to seek awakening. But it’s essentialist and dangerous to suggest that specifically women have to suffer before they can get enlightened. There are plenty of women in the Therigatha who do not have any dramatic story of extraordinary suffering, yet they get enlightened just the same. It’s a selection bias in the reporting: focus on the dramatic.

Kisāgotamī recounts in disturbing detail the travails she has undergone. But before that, and framing the whole story, she emphasizes the importance of good friends, and how being with good friends leads to the growth of wisdom and freedom from suffering.

Nowhere does the text say that the experience of suffering itself leads to freedom. When she recounts her sufferings in the text, at no point does she actually say that they led to her awakening. That’s 100% on the reader. What Kisāgotamī is talking about, how, even with all the terrible things she went through, she was still able to find the freedom she longed for because of the support she found in others.

Consider where she speaks how the domestic life is so terrible for some women that they kill themselves or kill their husbands. Is this an experience that led to her awakening? Obviously not!

The point of Kisāgotamī’s verses is that, no matter what horrible things you might have been through, if you encounter good friends who can lead you to the Dhamma, you can still find peace. She tells the story in the context of her experiences as a woman, but she’s not saying that women have to suffer before they can find peace. It’s an important distinction!

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Maybe also too late, but there’s so much good in Rita Gross’s book, Buddhism After Patriarchy, including the chapter “Sakyadhita, Daughters of the Buddha: Roles and Images of Women in Early Indian Buddhism,” which has some very good feminist analysis of the Thig.

Also Kathryn Blackstone, Women in the Footsteps of the Buddha: Struggle for Liberation in the Therigatha. I don’t have a pdf of the book, but it’s the developed version of her thesis.

Chakraborty, “‘Radical Grace’: Hymning of ‘Womanhood’ in Therigatha

Olivia, “Learning from the Therīgāthā” in Sati Center Journal, Vol 1 (2011)

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