Orange
Revolution: Thailand’s Female Monks Fight for
Recognition
Ruth Carr
August 25, 2016 News
Deeply
Although female monks, or
bhikkhunis, were part of Buddha’s original vision, Thailand’s
clergy won’t allow them to become fully ordained. Now a 72-year-old
abbess is leading the movement to give women back their rightful
place within the religion.
As dawn breaks across
Thailand, it brings with it one of the country’s most important and
revered traditions. Clad in bright orange robes, barefoot and with
their heads shaven, male monks make their morning rounds, receiving
alms in return for simple blessings. The sight is so familiar to
people in Thailand and around the world, it’s become
iconic.
But in Nakhon Pathom, from
the sanctuary of a monastery set behind a busy highway about 30
miles (48km) west of Bangkok, one particular group of monks has
long been denied the respect and recognition given to the men in
orange. Now its members are rattling the country’s religious cages
in the hopes of reviving an ancient tradition and, more
importantly, regaining their legitimacy.
Songdhammakalyani Monastery
is one of Thailand’s few all-female
monasteries. Its abbess, the Venerable
Dhammananda, 72, (formerly named Chatsumarn Kabilsingh) was the
first Thai bhikkhuni, or female monk, to be fully ordained in the
Theravada tradition, the most widely practiced form of Buddhism in
the country. Her late mother, the Venerable Voramai Kabilsingh, was
Thailand’s first female monk of the modern era.
Dhammananda and the
smattering of female monks like her around the country are seen as
troublemakers by the country’s clergy – insurgents intent on
destroying the all-male monastic status quo. During Buddha’s time
2,500 years ago and for several hundred years after, bhikkhunis
were present right across Sri Lanka and India, and were considered
equal to their male counterparts. But by the 11th century,
political turmoil and reports of sexual violence had effectively
killed off the tradition of female Buddhist monks. Brandishing
embedded ideas about gender roles and the strict rules around the
requirements for ordination, officials decided that women shouldn’t
be wearing monks’ robes.
Dhammananda’s mother had
made it part of her mission to push back against the prejudices
that had stripped female monks of their rights. And now Dhammananda
is carrying on the fight – and causing controversy – as she and her
fellow bhikkhunis try to restore women to their rightful place in
the country’s spiritual identity.
“When the Buddha was
enlightened, and he established the Buddhist religion, he described
the four pillars of the faith: bhikkhu, bhikkhuni, laymen and
laywomen. This was very clear in his mind and it is written in the
historical texts,” says Dhammananda. “So it is not about equality
as such, it is about what’s right. We are shareholders of the faith
and simply upholding Buddha’s original vision.”
In Thailand, the full
ordination of female monks is outlawed. Dhammananda had to go to
Sri Lanka to be fully ordained, and she’s currently only allowed to
perform first-level ordinations on women. But the ban on fully
ordaining women comes down to a technicality. Under the dharma
rules upheld by Thailand’s governing Buddhist council, only an
unbroken lineage of bhikkhunis can be fully ordained. Since such a
lineage no longer exists, the council argues that the bhikkhunis
have no claim to monastic legitimacy. Officially, the practice of
fully ordaining a woman can result in a fine or, at worst,
imprisonment, but it rarely comes to that. Instead, bhikkhunis are
tolerated, but considered illegitimate.
For a long time,
Dhammananda wasn’t even going to be a monk. “Growing up, people
assumed that I would follow in my mother’s path, but I didn’t like
to be told what to do,” she says. “I married, had three sons and I
was very happy. My life was full.” She earned a PhD in philosophy
and Buddhism, became an accomplished author and hosted a
long-running TV talk show on the dharma teachings.
Then in 1983, while at a
conference at Harvard University on women, religion and social
change, Dhammananda was struck by the idea that her specialized
knowledge of how integral women had been to Theravada Buddhism
obliged her to act on it. “It was then that I came to a realization
that I am the only one in Thailand who has all this information
about Theravada bhikkhunis, about what is right and what is wrong
and how to support them, but I’m not doing anything. I’m just
sitting comfortably and that’s shame on me,” she says. “So I knew
that the only way I could really make change was to become a
bhikkhuni myself and set the example.”
But even after her
lightbulb moment at the Harvard conference, Dhammananda took 17
years to transition into a monk. Since Buddhist monks are not
allowed to touch members of the opposite sex, she knew that
starting that journey would mean pulling away from her three sons.
“So I waited for them to grow up, I had to make sure that they were
on their right path. Now, they tell me they are very proud,” she
says. “My eldest son said he sacrificed his mother for the
Buddha.”
Dedicating her life to
Buddha also meant divorcing from her husband. “Well of course he
was resistant,” she says. “But he has a younger wife now, so he is
okay.”
It’s 6 a.m. and the village
around Songdhammakalyani Monastery is springing to life. At a
ramshackle street stall, pots of soups and curries are being laid
out, while a disheveled couple whiz past on a motorbike. On the
veranda of a modest house, an elderly couple wait, surrounded by
offerings of fresh fruit, small cartons of milk and freshly boiled
rice. As the bhikkhunis approach on their morning alms round, the
couple prostrate themselves, flat to the floor, their palms pressed
together firmly above their heads. The monks recite a small
blessing and graciously take the offerings.
It wasn’t always this way.
Dhammananda says when she was first ordained, only one or two
houses would give the women offerings. “It was not uncommon to pass
by households that would turn around as we approached, they could
not face us,” she says. “They were only used to giving alms to the
male monks, not female. But I would just bless them as I passed and
hoped that one day maybe they would understand. Now people are much
more open and supportive, so things have changed.”
But there is still
resistance. Dhammananda says she and her fellow bhikkhunis will
keep up their steady, peaceful struggle until they are standing
side by side with male monks, the way Buddha had always intended.
“My strength comes from my academic background and a deep
understanding of what I am doing and that what I am doing is
correct according to the text,” she says. “People can attack from
any corner, but I can always say, ‘Go back to the text, please look
up this line or this page and you will see what the Buddha
said.’”