Erin A. McCarthy1
This chapter focuses on women’s bodies in Buddhism and works toward revalorizing that tradition.2 My aim in bringing Buddhist philosophy into conversation with contemporary feminist philosophy is to advance both fields and advance their aim to relieve suffering in the world. Traditionally, with its tendency toward dualistic thinking, Western philosophy has marginalized the body and deemed it inferior to mind. Much feminist philosophy critiques this sort of dualism, so it makes sense to turn toward nondualistic traditions – such as those in Buddhism I shall discuss – for ways to rethink body so as to make it non‐limiting for women.
Links between feminism and Buddhism date back almost to its birth. Although the Buddha initially refused to ordain women, expressed a general reluctance to do so, and imposes extra precepts and eight heavy rules on female monastics, the fact remains that in the end he did ordain women and stated unequivocally that they can attain enlightenment. He did this at a time when women could not be fully ordained as monastics in most other religions. While there are legitimate grievances to be raised about the way in which the Buddha treated women, his decision to ordain women was radical and speaks to a deep, abiding openness and sense of equality in the tradition.
This is not to suggest that Buddhism has been immune to patriarchy. Women have been viewed as inferior, simply by virtue of being women, in Buddhism as elsewhere. The prevailing misogyny of Indian culture at the time of the Buddha did not disappear when he declared that women too could become enlightened. And it is important not to romanticize Buddhism or view nondualism as a panacea. We cannot ignore the women whose names have been left off the lineage charts, the women whose work was and continues to be invisible. Nor can we ignore the way women’s questions down the centuries have been marginalized in Buddhist traditions – as they have been in the West.
Although feminism has a good deal to teach Buddhism, the opposite is also true – that they are congenial, rather than antithetical. Viewing Buddhism from the standpoint of feminism can help free it from its patriarchal past and allow it to face up to the harmful things that have been said or done in the Buddha’s name, and recover the openness which the Buddha expressed. My goal, in other words, is to reappropriate the past – to perform what Rita Gross terms a feminist revalorization of Buddhist tradition. As Gross states: “To revalorize is to have determined that, however sexist a religious tradition may be, it is not irreparably so. Revalorizing is, in fact, doing that work of repairing the tradition, often bringing it much more into line with its own fundamental values and vision than was its patriarchal form” (Gross 1993, 3). This requires the sort of praxis that inspires both Buddhism and feminism – putting ideas into action, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and returning to refashion theory over and over again to ensure it is truly liberating. It is in this spirit that this chapter attempts to revalorize the views of women’s bodies in Buddhism in light of contemporary feminist philosophy.
Although, philosophically, Buddhism maintains that the enlightened body is beyond gender, the tradition has invariably presented the enlightened body as male. As Miriam Levering points out, “As in the case of the God of Western theology, sophisticated Buddhists knew that buddhas were in some sense beyond gender, yet they said repeatedly that a male body presented him best to the human imagination, and many would certainly have been startled by a reference to the Buddha as female” (Levering 1997, 137). So the Buddha’s decision to fully ordain women notwithstanding,
the door was still left open to speculation about the limitations of the “female nature,” a theme prominent in the androcentric and misogynist views that were to become increasingly characteristic of the tradition as the monastic order became more institutionalized and male dominated in the first several centuries following Sakyamuni’s death.
(Sponberg 1992, 12–13)
There is no shortage of literature – particularly in early Buddhism – that states unequivocally that in order to become enlightened one must first possess a male body. The Sutra on Changing the Female Sex states, for example:
If women can accomplish one thing (Dharma), they will be freed of the female body and become sons. What is that one thing? The profound state of mind which seeks enlightenment. Why? If women awaken to the thought of enlightenment, then they will have the great and good person’s state of mind, a man’s state of mind, a sage’s state of mind… If women awaken to the thought of enlightenment, then they will not be bound to the limitation of a woman’s state of mind. Because they will not be limited, they will forever separate from the female sex and become sons.
(Paul 1981, 65)
Diana Paul argues that in one sense this was liberating for women, for a woman
could free herself from her sexual nature without postponing her becoming a Bodhisattva until rebirth as a man. She was no longer biologically determined by her body, not a victim of her bodily needs… She emerges from her sexual identity as a female by mentally becoming a man in this lifetime.
(Paul 1981, 66)
However, Paul argues that this is ambiguous: “innate psychological characteristics of maleness and femaleness are denied philosophically since females can change into males psychologically. Yet the male symbol is still ranked higher than the female, and women have to exert more effort to overcome their physical needs” (Paul 1981, 67). Even when women are said not to require transformation into the male form, they still aren’t equal as women. Equality attaches only to men.
In the early sutras we also find women ranked lower than men because of their female form, that is, their embodiment as women. Consider the following from the Aṅguttara Nikāya:
Monks, I see no other single form so enticing, so desirable, so intoxicating, so binding, so distracting, such a hindrance to winning the unsurpassed peace from effort…as a woman’s form. Monks, whosoever clings to a woman’s form – infatuated, greedy, fettered, enslaved, enthralled – for many a long day shall grieve, snared by the charms of a woman’s form… Monks, a woman, even when going along, will stop to ensnare the heart of a man; whether standing, sitting or lying down, laughing, talking or singing, weeping, stricken or dying, a woman will stop to ensnare the heart of a man. … Verily, one may say of womanhood: it is wholly a snare of [the Tempter,] Mara.
(Sponberg 1992, 20)
On the one hand, the Buddha is cautioning against desire and attachment and thereby underlining his teachings on the five skandhas – that what we consider to be our “self,” including the form (rūpa) in which we find ourselves embodied in this lifetime, is not permanent and so ought not to be an object of attachment. On the other hand, the passage goes beyond saying that monks should not be attached to the form of women to imply that woman’s form itself is evil – that there is something inferior, perhaps inherently bad, about women’s bodies. The image of woman as a temptress entrapping men is nefarious. The claims about the form of woman, her rūpa, quickly give way to generalizations about what it is to be a woman: posing a threat to man no matter what she is doing: sitting or lying down, laughing, talking or singing, weeping, and so on. As Alan Sponberg points out:
Although the early Mahayana reaffirmed the basic principle of soteriological inclusiveness with its universalization of the bodhisattva path, a religious ideal it held open to all – men and women, monastic and lay – this rejection of institutional androcentrism did not entail a corresponding rejection of ascetic misogyny.
(Sponberg 1992, 21)
Sponberg goes on to cite several examples from the Mahāyāna Maharatnakata which express the view that: “Women can ruin the precepts of purity”; women are more detestable than the dead dog or snake; “Because of them one falls into evil ways. There is no refuge”; and so on (Sponberg 1992, 21–22). This shifts somewhat, however, as the Mahāyāna concept of emptiness develops. According to Sponberg,
in their attempt to reaffirm the early principle of soteriological inclusiveness some factions of the Mahayana were inspired to develop that original principle toward a much more actively egalitarian view, an affirmation of nondualistic androgyny, which had strong roots in the newly emerging Mahayana philosophy of emptiness.
(Sponberg 1992, 24)
Take, for example, the Vimalakīrti Sūtra. After Sariputra asks an enlightened goddess living in the house to change out of her female state (form) and into a male state, assuming any woman would naturally want to do so if she could, we read:
“No,” said Shariputra. “Phantoms have no fixed form, so what would there be to change?”
The goddess said, “All things are just the same – they have no fixed form. So why ask why I don’t change out of my female form?”
At that time the goddess employed her supernatural powers to change Shariputra into a goddess like herself, while she took on Shariputra’s form. Then she asked, “Why don’t you change out of this female body?”
Shariputra, now in the form of a goddess, replied, “I don’t know why I have suddenly changed and taken on a female body!” The goddess said, “Shariputra, if you can change out of this female body, then all women can change likewise. Shariputra, who is not a woman, appears in a woman’s body. And the same is true of all women – though they appear in women’s bodies, they are not women. Therefore the Buddha teaches that all phenomena are neither male nor female.”
Then the goddess withdrew her supernatural powers, and Shariputra returned to his original form. The goddess said to Shariputra, “Where now is the form and shape of your female body?”
Shariputra said, “The form and shape of my female body does not exist, yet does not not exist.”
The goddess said, “All things are just like that – they do not exist, yet do not not exist. And that they do not exist, yet do not not exist, is exactly what the Buddha teaches.”
(Watson 1997, 90–91)
We notice here that the goddess refuses to transform herself into a male body because all forms are ultimately empty, so there is no “female body.” The goddess mocks Sariputra for clinging to form. Whether one is in a female or male body is immaterial, as she so deftly illustrates by switching bodies with him. The goddess has no need to embody a male form to demonstrate her enlightened state. Our outward embodiments are impermanent and empty – from the perspective of an enlightened being, one’s form is immaterial so focusing on the supposed necessity of being embodied in male form to be enlightened is, as she so effectively demonstrates here, nonsense.
Jump ahead several centuries and we see the effect of this emphasis on emptiness regarding attitudes toward women in the work of medieval Japanese philosopher Dōgen.
While at first glance it may seem odd to draw on a thirteenth‐century Zen master to promote the aims of contemporary feminism, Dōgen’s views about women, as I have urged elsewhere, are feminist.3 He does not think that by virtue of being women, women are any less capable of attaining enlightenment than men. Nor does he think that women’s bodies are the cause of the downfall of monks on the path to enlightenment, or are inherently impure or evil. In contrast to the “Eight Garudhammas” or eight heavy rules – the special rules the Buddha put in place when he established the female monastic order which say that when monks and nuns are together, monks are always above nuns – Dōgen writes:
If you encounter someone who maintains the great dharma, having received the acknowledgment – “You have attained my marrow” – whether the person is a pillar or a lantern, a buddha, wild fox, demon, man or woman, you should keep your body and mind on the zazen seat and attend to the person even for immeasurable eons.
(Dōgen 2010, 73)
Anyone who clings blindly to rules and regulations – even those attributed to the Buddha – does not, according to Dōgen, truly understand the Buddha way. He admonishes them, calling them “foolish people [who] have neither seen nor heard the buddha way” (Dōgen 2010, 74). Further challenging the notion that the most junior monk is senior to the most senior nun, he says:
It is an excellent custom of study that when a nun has attained the way, attained dharma, and started to teach, monks who seek dharma and study join her assembly, bow to her, and ask about the way. It is just like finding water at the time of thirst.
(Dōgen 2010, 74)
Rather than treat nuns as inferior Dōgen says monks seeking enlightenment should acknowledge and learn from teachers regardless of their gender. If a nun has attained enlightenment, she ought to be bowed down to – the physical form of a teacher in no way diminishes their knowledge of the dharma. Dōgen is unequivocal in his belief that what is important is the understanding of the dharma, not gender. Later, alluding to the Lotus Sūtra in which a half‐dragon/half‐girl who is seven years old attains enlightenment, he says:
Even seven‐year‐old girls who practice buddha dharma and express buddha dharma are guiding teachers of the four types of disciples [monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen]; they are compassionate parents of sentient beings.
(Dōgen 2010, 77–78)
Another powerful expression of Dōgen’s feminism in Shōbōgenzō could easily be read as a commentary on the contemporary objectification of women. As if in response to the view of women expressed in early Buddhist scripture, and prevalent in the Japan of his time, he says bluntly and unequivocally: “Those who are extremely stupid think that women are merely the objects of sexual desire and treat women in this way. The Buddha’s children should not be like this” (Dōgen 2010, 79).
Dōgen also challenges the belief that women need to be embodied as men before they can attain enlightenment. He says:
[T]hose who are called laity in Song China are people who have not left their households. Some of them are married and have their abodes. Others are celibate but may still have much worldly concern. However, monks with cloud robes and mist sleeves visit laypeople who have clarified dharma, bow to them, and inquire about the way, just as they do to masters who have left their households. They should also do so to accomplished women and even to animals.
(Dōgen 2010, 77)
Dōgen makes it clear that women are fully capable not only of attaining enlightenment as women, but also of being dharma teachers of monks, whether or not they have chosen the monastic path.
In “Twining Vines,” discussing the transmission from Bodhidharma, the first Patriarch of Zen, to his students – one of whom was the nun Zongchi – Dōgen again disputes the notion that women’s bodies are in themselves impure or in need of transformation in order to be enlightened. He first states:
Investigate these words of Bodhidharma: You have attained my skin…flesh…bones…marrow. These are the ancestor’s words. All four students had attainment and understanding. Each one’s attainment and understanding is skin, flesh, bones, and marrow leaping out of body and mind; skin, flesh, bones and marrow dropping away body and mind. Do not see or hear the ancestor with a limited understanding of these statements.
(Dōgen 2010, 480)
Dōgen puts all of Bodhidharma’s students on the same level – including Zongchi to whom Bodhidharma said “You have my flesh” – admonishing those who think that “skin and flesh are not as close as bones and marrow” (Dōgen 2010, 480). He has no time for those critics who claimed that the transmission that Zongchi received was somehow lesser than that received by Bodhidharma’s other students. For him, Zongchi is on the same level as the other three male disciples.
Given the ways in which women’s bodies were viewed in Buddhism, Dōgen’s remarks are especially significant. He insists Zongchi’s body is not an impediment to her enlightenment, not a barrier to her understanding. Nor was it necessary for her to transform into a man physically or psychologically in order to be enlightened – even though, as we know, Dōgen views the body as an integral part of practice‐enlightenment: “Reflect that the teaching of the oneness of body and mind is always being expounded in the buddha dharma” (Dōgen 2010, 15). When Bodhidharma says to Zongchi “You have my flesh” it is especially significant since it implies her flesh is Bodhidharma’s flesh. In her embodied female form, in her very body, to paraphrase Hakuin, she had Bodhidharma’s flesh, she was a buddha.4 For Bodhidharma, and for Dōgen, the body of a woman on the path was in no way tainted. It was equally capable of enlightenment without having to erase its difference as a woman.
As Watsuji Tetsurō explains it in Purifying Zen: Shamōn Dōgen, “To reject women’s salvation is to throw away half of humanity. This cannot be called compassion” (Tetsurō 2011, 87); and “All people deserve to be treated equally because all of them can take this body‐mind, which is no different from rice or flax or bamboo or bulrushes, and make it a receptacle of the Dharma” (Tetsurō 2011, 88).
Dōgen’s teachings about women are representative of his radical nondualism – Zen’s “not one, not two.” Ultimately in Zen, both body and mind drop off, and the enlightened being is said to be beyond gender. However, Zen’s nonduality means that one’s gender does not simply get discarded. As Taigen Dan Leighton explains:
Dōgen’s nonduality is not about transcending the duality of form and emptiness. This deeper nonduality is not the opposite of duality, but the synthesis of duality and nonduality, with both included, and both seen as ultimately not separate, but as integrated.
(Leighton 2004, 35)
The “with both included” is particularly of interest for feminist philosophy. Too often, woman’s subjectivity is subsumed by man’s subjectivity in the guise of oneness or universality, and difference gets left out entirely. By contrast, the nonduality we find in Dōgen and Zen holds open a space for difference, without falling prey to the harmful dualisms that place one gender (or race, or class, or sexuality) in a position of power or privilege over another. Iris Marion Young describes the harm dualistic thinking can do as follows: “the ‘feminine’ signifies a relational position in a dichotomy, masculine/feminine, where the first is more highly valued than the second, and where the second is partly defined as a lack with respect to the first” (Young 2005, 5). Here Young echoes Simone de Beauvoir’s contention that woman as subject is a lack, defined only as “not man.”5 Young explains that
[this] dichotomy lines up with others that have a homologous, hierarchical logic, such as mind/body, reason/passion, public/private, hard science/soft science, and dozens of other value laden dichotomies whose discursive application has practical effects in personal lives, workplaces, media imagery, and politics, to name only a few social fields.
(Young 2005, 5)
We have already seen how this hierarchical logic affected women in Buddhism – especially in its early phases – and how Dōgen’s Zen rejects this hierarchical logic. To illustrate what revalorization through a comparative feminist philosophical lens looks like, we now turn to one of the most pervasive images in Buddhism – that of maternal imagery, with a focus on the maternal body.
It is a puzzling contradiction that the same female body identified in early scripture as impure, disgusting, vile, and a burden to be overcome, is also what makes one of the most pervasive symbols of enlightenment in Buddhism possible – the maternal body. As Reiko Ohnuma points out in her book Ties That Bind: Maternal Imagery and Discourse in Indian Buddhism:
Symbolically, motherhood was a double‐edged sword, sometimes extolled as the most appropriate symbol for buddhahood itself, and sometimes denigrated as the most paradigmatic manifestation possible of the attachment to the world that keeps all benighted beings trapped within the realm of rebirth. Motherhood was a lightning rod, a privileged symbol used in an iconic fashion to stand for both the best and the worst.
(Ohnuma 2012, 5)
Early Mahāyāna introduces the Tathāgatagarbha or Buddha womb teaching. (Tathagata means the enlightened one, or the thus come one, and garbha is Sanskrit for womb). As Leighton explains it:
According to the Śrīmālā Sutra, … this womb of buddhas is the basis, support, and foundation of the world of samsara, the conditioned realm of suffering… The whole world is depicted as a womb, nurturing the development and emergence of new buddhas, but this imagery is also reversed in Tathagatagarbha theory inasmuch as garbha can mean both womb and embryo. So the awakening buddha is also like a womb giving birth to the awakened land of a buddha field, the realm of environment constellated simultaneously with a buddha’s awakening.
(Leighton 2007, 16)
In the excerpt below, for example, woman’s body is the metaphor for the ideal for bodhisattvas – as the place in which the “world’s light of saving grace” is found:
“I see with my Buddha eye
That in the bodies of all beings
There lies concealed the buddhagarbha…”
“I see that all kinds of beings
Have a buddhagarbha hidden by kleśas.”
“I see that all beings
Are like infants in distress.
Within their bodies is the tathāgatagarbha,
But they do not realize it.
So I tell bodhisattvas,
‘Be careful not to consider yourselves inferior.
Your bodies are tathāgatagarbhas;
They always contain
The light of the world’s salvation.’ ”
(Grosnick 1995, 96–101)
The womb of the Buddha is within every body, in fact is every body, the sutra tells us. Notice it is not the seed, not the sperm, as we might expect of a tradition with patriarchal tendencies, but the womb. The whole of this lengthy sutra, directed to male monastics, is focused on something that is unique to women’s embodiment. For it is by virtue of containing the “womb of the buddhas” that bodies themselves contain “the world’s light of saving grace.” True, this view is hard to square with calling the vagina, the pathway to the womb, “the mouth of poisonous black snakes” or “charcoal pits of blazing fire,” but if we read the passage above through contemporary lenses we begin to see how we might revalorize it and use it to support and advance feminism in the tradition.
Leighton writes:
The buddha womb is the container of potential buddhas and is endowed with the capacity to give birth to buddhas. Similarly, the world of a spiritual text is a womb that can give birth, through the agency of interpretation, to a multiplicity of awakening and healing meanings. So one can see sutras themselves as wombs of buddha, available to give birth to awakening teachings and insights. And in the other direction, in accord with the reversible meaning of garb as both womb and embryo, awakened interpretation can thus create (or re‐create) the sutra as an awakening buddha field.
(Leighton 2007, 17)
Either way – garbha as womb or embryo – it is only woman’s body that makes this metaphor possible.
Bringing feminist philosophy into the conversation as we have done here, revalorizing the texts, recovering women’s bodies to see them also as sources of enlightenment is one among the multiplicity of “awakening and healing meanings” that can emerge from texts such as these. Yet, we must proceed with caution. As Laura Green observes, feminist philosophers who wish to revalorize the maternal body this way face a dilemma:
The question seems to be one of conceptual comportment: what would it mean, philosophically, to take the female embodied self – particularly in its capacity for birthing as norm – whilst at the same time resisting any claim to “authenticity”? Furthermore, how might this be achieved without turning “woman” into a utopian, sentimentalized and abstract category, and one which is somehow also “unknowable”?
(Green 2011, 145)
This, in fact, is what seems to have happened in the Buddhist tradition. Once the maternal body is deliberately disconnected from real women and their experience, it is turned into an abstract category for men – almost something mysterious, rather than being a source of valorization for women. For example, in the Tathāgatagarbha Sutra cited above, we also find this passage:
“It is like an impoverished woman
Whose appearance is common and vile,
But who bears a son of noble degree
Who will become a universal monarch.
Replete with seven treasures and all virtues,
He will possess as king the four quarters of the earth.
But she is incapable of knowing this
And conceives only thoughts of inferiority.”
(Grosnick 1995, 101)
The suggestion here is that despite the fact that the woman grew the king, carried and nourished him in her body for nine months, she remains inferior, indeed an ignorant vessel. Her value and capability is dismissed and she is common, vile, and ignorant, as though she had nothing to do with bringing him into the world.
Bringing a feminist philosophical perspective into conversation with Buddhist philosophy, particularly its nondualism, opens a way forward to not get stuck in any one conceptualization of feminine or masculine, as Dōgen urges, but to still acknowledge difference and the lived experience of being in differently sexed bodies. This can ensure that we neither end up essentializing women, or making women so abstract and universal that the concept becomes mysterious and unknowable. As noted, Dōgen’s nondualism is a helpful starting point. Re‐reading the way maternity is characterized in this sutra and in other Buddhist texts allows us to extend our thinking, allowing us to conceive of the maternal as extending beyond the bearing of children. We can explore how woman might make or find meaning in this expanded, enlightened notion of maternity whether or not she actually bears children, and how this reimagined maternity might liberate or enlighten all sentient beings. By revalorizing this notion – recognizing that comments such as those in the sutra above, for example, are at least not telling the whole story, if not simply false, reintegrating women’s voices into the tradition, and calling out the misogyny and patriarchy – Tathāgatagarbha becomes a metaphor that includes women and the creative maternal dimension rather than excluding them.
And where does this creative maternal dimension come from – what is it about women that can give birth? The womb. It needs to be empty, and it empties itself every month, in order to create life; sometimes it is closed, sometimes it is open – mostly, we can say, it is not quite closed and the womb is the source for all (human) beings in the world. Furthermore, it is a place where mother and child, self and other are intimately interconnected but at the same time where each maintains its difference. French philosopher Luce Irigaray writes about this alternative to dualistic subject–object relations as the “placental economy.” In this model, “the mother’s self and the other that is the embryo” manage to negotiate the space of the same (the maternal body) and the other (the embryo), the “difference between the ‘self’ [maternal body] and other [embryo] is…continually negotiated” (Irigaray 1993, 41). Drawing on the Buddhist concept of emptiness (śūnyatā), Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro’s explanation of absolute nothingness sounds strikingly similar to the placental economy – a place wherein there is deep interdependence and yet difference is maintained. As Bret Davis explains it:
The alterity of the other person is thus recognized not by way of penetrating laterally through the walls of the ego, but rather by way of passing through an opening in one’s own depths. I paradoxically encounter the irreducible exteriority of the other person in the depths of myself; I discover that others are always already in me. This inclusion of alterity is not a reduction of the other to the self; to the contrary, it is an originary expropriation of the self. In its innermost depths the self is exposed to alterity, and so to know oneself is to be open to others.
(Davis 2014, 318–319)
This space of nothingness, this space of wisdom, of prajñā, where the other is in me, can be symbolized as womb – its emptiness a place in which two come together as one without either subsuming the other. It is in this nothing, this emptiness, where we find the ground of all distinctions and at the same time discover the nonduality of self and other. As I read them, Irigaray and Nishida both conceptualize the kind of emptiness that Buddhism maintains is the source of all creation, the source of enlightenment, the Tathāgatagarbha.
In closing, I’d like to turn from texts to an image. I suggest that we read the ensō, the iconic Japanese Zen symbol of emptiness, as womb. The ensō is sometimes closed, sometimes open, source of life and creativity, and each one is unique. As John Daido Loori explains: “On the one hand it is just a circle painted with one brushstroke, in a single breath. On the other hand, it is the representation of the totality of the great void” (Loori 2007, xii). And it is that emptiness – of the womb, of the ensō – that is the source of all life and out of which everything is born. It is the source, we might say, of the maternal creative dimension which, if we bring feminist philosophy together with Buddhism, belongs to everyone.
If we bring together the image of the ensō with feminist philosophical thought and with the revalorizing of women’s bodies and the maternal in Buddhism as I have suggested here, we can begin to revalorize women’s bodies in the tradition in a way that is liberatory. Imagined this way, the maternal creative dimension of being, the Tathāgatagarbha, is inherent in all beings, and we honor its roots, its source in the female body rather than forgetting, denying, repressing, or universalizing it out of existence. After this re‐reading, this revalorizing, anyone can look at women’s bodies and see a concrete exemplar worthy of emulation regardless of gender. At the same time, the female body becomes worthy of our esteem rather than disgust. And finally women can see in the ensō the source of the saving grace of all beings in themselves.