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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.
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