hello. i’m reading a text where it’s stated that in the Jātaka tales the Buddha is never born as a woman, only as a man. And also, as if the Buddha said that the dharma was shaken after accepting women
I’ve read some Jātakas before, but I can’t clearly remember whether this is actually the case. Is this statement accurate? I can share the full passage if helpful, but I’ll highlight the specific sentence in bold. It comes from a course “Religious Symbols of the World”
This Buddha statue may look embarrassing.
The same is true with Buddhism.
Although Buddhism treated women revolutionarily better in comparison to other contemporary religious groups in India, male-centered thoughts still remained.
According to the Jataka, the Buddha was born and gained enlightenment through many past lives.
But during this long past, Buddha was never once a woman. He was always a male.
And though Buddhism accepted women in the Sangha, there was a lot of resistance.
In some records, it is reported that when Buddhism accepted women in the Sangha, Buddha’s dharma was retreated. It is recorded that the Buddha himself said so.
In the Theravāda version of the Jataka tales, but Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā reports a Mūlasarvāstivāda Avadāna in which the Bodhisattva is reborn as a woman 500 times.
Maybe I read the question wrong. I thought it was a question about past buddhas being women, rather than buddhas to be being women. Apologies if I misread
This is indeed the case in the Jataka collection of the Pali canon (where, strictly speaking, only the verses are part of the actual canon, while the corresponding prose stories have been passed down as commentary). Even worse: Many Jataka stories show a very misogynistic tone!
However we should keep in mind that the Jataka collection has been integrated into the Buddhist canon several centuries after the Buddha. Most of the stories have been taken from orally transmitted folk tales, many of them depict political and social realities from a time even before the Buddha. They have been given a Buddhist framework and with that adopted into the canon. So we cannot say this is what the Buddha taught (and especially not what he taught about women, which is decidedly different in the early texts!).
There are blurbs to every collection. Click on the one of the Jatakas to expand it, and you’ll find some information about the collection.
Yes, there is this account about the ordination of his step mother Mahapajapati who, according to this account, was the first nun. The story is told both in the Anguttara Nikaya and in the Vinaya:
AN8.51:26.1:
“Ānanda, if ladies had not gained the going forth from the lay life to homelessness in the teaching and training proclaimed by the Realized One, the spiritual life would have lasted long. The true teaching would have remained for a thousand years. But since they have gained the going forth, now the spiritual life will not last long. The true teaching will remain only five hundred years.
But as has already been pointed out, this is likely late.
why is that? this is one of the dark parts of buddhism? (i just saw questionable statements called by this term)
unable to understand morality or truth.
thanks for the answer. it’s ukrainian, just auto-translation somehow did it. in general the site doesn’t work well in other languages, and I’m also surprised that it turned out like this
