THAI BUDDHISM AND PATRIARCHY

THAI BUDDHISM AND PATRIARCHY

by Ouyporn Khuankaew

In my eyes, Buddhism in Thailand has been very patriarchal, institutionalized, and corrupted. The control by the state, the failure of rural development, modernization and consumerism have all contributed to the current state of Thai Buddhism. But one thing that has never been mentioned, even by progressive monks, Buddhist male scholars or activists, is patriarchy within Buddhism itself.

We do not have ordination for women in Thailand. Since Thai nuns have not been recognized legally or socially as ordained women, their status is the lowest of all women, because they do not belong to any category of women, either within the lay or monastic community.

The patriarchy of Thai Buddhism also contributes to prostitution, a problem that makes Thailand popular in the international news headlines; a point which will be discussed later.

In Thai culture, it is a tradition for all Thai men to be ordained, usually before they get married, in order to pay gratitude to their parents (especially their mother since she herself cannot be ordained). By having a son ordained, it is believed that the parents can cling to the yellow robe of their son and reach heaven after their death. This ordination is usually temporary, in which men are allowed to leave their jobs with pay for three months in order to fulfill their duty to be monks. It is also believed that monkhood for three months will purify their minds so that they will be good family leaders once they are married.

Whereas rural boys have access to education and resources through the monkhood, girls do not have the same opportunity because there is no ordination for women. To pay gratitude to parents, in particular, to provide economic security, they have very few choices - to become a maid, a factory worker or a prostitute. Because boys repay gratitude to their parents by being ordained in their youth, they fulfill their duty early in life. A girl's way to repay gratitude to her parents is usually to take care of them when they are old.

Because rural development programs in the past thirty years have failed to improve the lives of the farmers, and in fact have driven them into more debt and suffering, girls often have no way to access resources to help take care of the family. In rural areas such as my community, when the signs of rural development failure came to light, girls such as my sisters and her friends were the first group who left our village with the hope of earning money to help alleviate the suffering of the family. The first group of young women who left my village went to work as house maids, and a few of them ended up in brothels as a result of sexual abuse from the male members of the households in which they were employed.

The North has become famous for prostitution. In the past ten years, girls as young as eight have been sold by parents and the money used to pay debts, to send her brothers to school, to build a new modern house or to buy a pickup truck for her family. This epidemic has spread to the Northeast where the suffering hits the rural poor the hardest. Pattaya, a famous beach and resort town two hours southeast of Bangkok, is full of girls from the Northeast, many earning their living as sex workers. In the past ten years, young Thai women have also gone overseas to be prostitutes despite the risk of their own lives because the financial return is higher than at home.

The number of prostitutes in Thailand is almost equal to the number of monks. If young, rural girls could be given the same opportunity as the boys to enter a monastic life, they would have access to education and at the same time be able to repay spiritual gratitude to their parents. These opportunities could provide girls and women with proper monastic education and spiritual guidance so they can become important spiritual guides for the rural folks, particularly other women and girls. Due to male dominance within Thai Buddhism, however, girls and women have been deprived of such an opportunity. Consequently, they have been victims of different forms of violence against girls and women, such as domestic violence, rape and forced prostitution.

Most monks today do not enter monkhood based upon the faith of wanting to learn and practice the Buddha's teachings in order to get rid of their own suffering and help ease the suffering of other sentient beings (especially the desire to be a spiritual guide in return for all of the support that the people give them). It is very common in rural areas, particularly in the North, to see monks disrobe after years of comfortable living while accumulating material resources and knowledge at the expense of community and monastic resources, and to then go on to get married almost immediately. This is the main reason why Buddhism, for many years now, has failed to function in its traditional role as the source of spiritual guidance for the Thai population.

Nowadays in the North, the rural villagers tolerate monks who break their discipline (vinaya) by drinking or having illicit sex, because they need a monk to perform Buddhist ceremonies such as funerals and the temple's religious events. Those who are devoted to real Buddhism have to go visit the Northeastern forest monks who mostly live in caves or in an isolated temple situated near the forest. One of my sisters has been very supportive to some of these forest monks, after many years of merit making to several monks in our area. She told me that she found out only after many years of reading Buddhist books that the monks in our area are not really monks. After she found out how real monks should behave and practice, she tried to convince some monks and villagers in our area to invite the forest monks to live in the local temples. Her attempt failed because the local monks told her that those monks are not the same tradition as ours.

When Buddhism today functions only ceremonially and the monks' role is mainly to perform such ceremonies, the rural folk turn to other spirits and superstitions for hope and refuge. These folk, such as many of my neighbors, have suffered economically, spiritually, and psychologically as a result of drastic social changes in the past 30 years. Now, the ways in which the local people turn to the spirits are not for the same reasons. In the past, it was for worship in the sense of showing gratitude and respect to the unknown higher power. Today, people go to fraudulent monks, shamans and shamanesses, trees and statues (including Buddha images) for luck to win the lottery, for curing difficult illnesses, and for protecting their children who have gone to sell their labor in big cities or foreign countries. Rural women suffer more because their sons and husbands turn to alcohol to cope with their suffering. Many women in my village have now become the major income earners of the household as a result of alcoholism that is widespread in most rural communities over the past ten years.

Buddhism and Domestic Violence

Last month I received a letter from a member of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship asking my opinion about the role of Buddhism and monks in domestic violence, particularly in Southeast Asia such as Thailand. She asked questions such as "Does woman go to ask help from a monk when her husband beats her; do monks teach men not to beat their spouses; or do monks in general talk about violence against women." After I answered her questions, the issue still lingered in my mind.

I grew up in a community that 25 years ago was sustained spiritually, economically and socially by Buddhist and local cultures. My father was a very devoted Buddhist. In the old days, the rural folk would separate their wealth into three portions: one for the future, one for their day to day living and one for the temple. After we sold our harvest, my father often gave half of our money to the temple. We were not happy because not having a land of our own we were one of the most destitute families in the village. In his free time if he was not hang around with other folks, he would go visit the temple's abbot.

I never asked my father how he practiced Buddhism or if he took the five precepts of the lay person. He was one of the most generous people I have ever known in my life. He did not drink , but he had over thirty wives. My mother said sometimes he had three other women while living with my mother.

Although we were very poor, the most suffering thing for us, my mother and the six children, was the violence of my father. When we did not have rice to eat, my mother would walk with a wooden basket on her hip asking our neighbor to borrow rice for the next days. When my father beat us and threatened my mother, we did not know where and who to go for help. Because of such violence, my oldest sister ran away from home when she was 13, before I was born, and she did not return until 15 years later. This has been the reason why I have always believed that violence against women is the worst form of violence because it can happen everyday, at any moment in your own home, and most of the time by the one you love.

For people who grew up with control and violence from our fathers, brothers or our partners, it is common that when we could make sense of the experience, we knew it was not the proper thing and we want to change the situation. When I was young the only thing I could figure out to help the situation was telling my mother not to take care of my father when he was sick so that he would die and then we all would have peace. When I was about 14, I managed to stand up for my sister who was abused by her husband who lived in our house.

I have wondered for the past years if the reason I was not attracted to Buddhism during my adolescence and early adult years results from the patriarchy within the Buddhist tradition. I wonder why I was unable to receive any refuge and support from the traditional Buddhist culture - peace, non-violence and harmony - when I experienced domestic violence within my own family.

Working with Buddhist Groups

I began to go back to my feminist work after I returning from a visit to Ladakh in mid 1995. My visit coincided with the fifth International Buddhist Women's Conference (Sakyadhita). There I learned for the first time about the unbelievable suffering of Buddhist nuns. I realized how much Buddhism has ignored the role of women in its institutions. When I came back home I started looking for Thai nuns and did a leadership training for them. After the nuns, I wanted to move on to work with the monks, knowing that they are part of the oppressive system toward women because of their roles in the system. In order to work on gender issues with a monk's group as a woman who is not a Buddhist scholar, I had to look for an alliance which was impossible among the Thai monks. Finally I found an American monk who said he was a feminist in America before he came to Thailand. By then he was already involved in a network of monks who work on different social issues. Because of his power, support and interest, I could stand for the first time in front of the monks and nuns to do a gender workshop in mid 1996.

The activity I did was to have a monk and a nun sit in pairs and to have the both of them respond to each other about the same three questions. The nuns spoke first with the monks just listening, and then they changed roles. The three questions were: "As a woman what are my obstacles?"; "As a nun what are my obstacles?"; and "If we would work together, what kind of support would I need from you?". After that we asked everyone's feelings. One monk said he felt like a dam had opened and a strong flow of water of emotions had come pouring out. Another monk said he felt uncomfortable and intimidated having a nun sitting and talking to him face to face. Most monks said it was the first they had a chance to learn about the suffering of the nuns, although some of them watch the nuns working around their temple. The nuns said they felt released. One of the nuns said she felt like talking to her brother. Most nuns said the experience helped them to be able to talk to the monks without fear.

A year later I did another process with monks and nuns during a workshop on teaching Dhamma through experiential learning. One young monk who attended the workshop in 1996 came to me and said, "During that gender workshop last year, I was so angry to see you standing in front of the room above the monks and teaching us. Who were you to teach us? I was even more angry when you forced me to sit and to just listen to the nun talking. Today I want to apologize for thinking toward you in that way. The gender workshop did help me learn how to relate to women. Now I can talk to women without having fear." (The Thai Theravada tradition is the most strict about relations between monks and women. Monks cannot touch women and cannot talk to a woman alone in a private area. Many monks misinterpret that women are enemies to their spiritual liberation, so they feel they have to stay away from them).

One of the nuns who participated in the same workshop said to me during a social action trainers workshop that I co-facilitated a year and a half later, "Although we come from the same town, I did not talk to you during the whole the workshop because I thought that as a lay woman you had no right to teach us monks and nuns. When my eyes were opened later on I realized how ignorant I was to not see that you were trying to help us understand our own problems."

Since 1996 in every workshop I facilitate or co-facilitate on conflict resolution, non violence, community and team building, leadership, training for social action trainers or project management, gender is the one topic that I incorporate into the workshop content. If I am asked to do a workshop outside my circle, I will not take the job if the organization is not interested in letting me include gender in their workshop. In general, I will spend about half a day on the issue itself. Since our training style is based on an emergent design, however, whenever the gender issue comes up, we will deal with it even though it is not during the time that we have planned to work on the issue. For example, during an activity that monks and nuns had to work together to cross a toxic river, it was obvious that monks liked to make the decisions and to lead the activity. Therefore, during the reflection we asked the group how they felt about the gender issue expressed in the activity.

For a women's group, such as nuns, we will do a leadership training with them first before we put them in the same workshop with the monks. When doing a workshop with monks and nuns, we try to involve lay men and women in the same event. Since monks and nuns' lives are usually quite isolated from the secular world, in this way they can be exposed to the social problems in lay society, especially gender issues. This is the approach I have been using in Thailand, Cambodia and India.

More Challenges

The greatest challenge to my spiritual practice is almost every time that I encounter a situation to work with high status monks or highly educated or experienced men who have suffered from patriarchal systems. Particularly for monks, to do an experiential activity makes them feel uncomfortable, especially when they have to do it with women. Expressing feelings or hearing women talk about their feelings makes them uncomfortable. For them, showing feelings makes it seem that they are not good monks because they are still effected by worldly defilement. As an ordained person, they are supposed to maintain equanimity to whatever happens around them. One time during a workshop in Cambodia, a few monks got up and left the session when one of the women started crying while talking about her suffering during the Pol Pot regime. One monk scolded her to stop crying.

Another challenge of working with monks and male Buddhist scholars is that they think they are the authorities to speak about Buddhism because they know more that everybody else. One time a well educated monk who is known for his preaching refused to join in a half an hour gender workshop. But after the activity was done, he wanted to preach to the group about Buddhism saying that in Nirvana, the state of enlightenment, there is no gender so we do not need to talk about gender issues.

In a situation like the above, it is the patience, understanding and compassion cultivated through Buddhist practice can help me continue with the process. When I was able to just listen to that monk expressing his ideas, his fear, and his uncomfortableness without getting angry, without trying to defend my experience and opinion, without trying to argue back to convince him to see the same thing I saw, and without feeling fear or loosing face for not being a good facilitator, I can experience the transformation inside myself which I never felt before when I was involved in feminist work in the early 1990s. I used to think that I would teach them something but at the end I myself have learned so much. This learning takes place only when I can prevent my ignorance from blocking me to listen and see things as they are. Without spiritual practice, I will not have compassion, patience, peace of my own mind and especially hope to change the situation.

For my own work, whether I call it feminism or gender, it has to have spiritual practice as a foundation because otherwise I will fall into a trap that I want the men to get out. I do feminist work through Buddhist practice and I practice Buddhism through feminist work.

In conclusion, I see that the issue of social transformation, such as feminism and Buddhism, relates directly with personal transformation. It made sense to my life to see the two things go hand in hand. Through socialization I realized how many layers of ignorance I had accumulated. Filling my head with information, such as theories, concepts and methodologies, and then having intellectual discussions is not enough to help transform my own suffering into peace, harmony and hope. If I cannot find ways to transform myself into what I advocate to others and society at large, it is impossible for me to experience the real awakening.

Ouyporn Khuankaew serves on the INEB Executive Committee and is the coordinator for the INEB's Women's Project