Thailand: Is this really no place for
female leaders?
The Nation by Paisarn Likhitpreechakul
2011-11-15
Some superstitious minds are
blaming the country's first female prime minister, Yingluck
Shinawatra, for bringing bad luck to the country, echoing last
month's YouTube clip which showed a controversial monk proclaiming
women unfit to lead a country.
To justify his claim, Phra
Kasem, clutching the Thai translation of the Tipitaka, read a verse
attributed to the Buddha from the Kandina Jataka: I admonish men
who, with arrow as weapon, strongly releasing it; I admonish the
lands ruled by women; Indeed, beings under the sway of women are
admonished by the wise.
To play on the insult, he read
another short Anguttara Nikaya passage where, according to the Thai
translation, the disciple Ananda questioned the Buddha why women
neither sit in the assembly, nor undertake business, nor go out of
town with the Buddha's reply that they were angry, envious and weak
in wisdom.
The video clip incensed many
fair-minded Thais. Buddhist academic Surapot Taweesak pointed out
that one cannot just look up a random passage in the Tipitaka as a
definitive answer to any social issue. He recommended that Thai
monks educate themselves in the political and social reality of the
day before applying the teachings of the Buddha, because while some
parts like the Four Noble Truths or Dependent Co-origination are
meant to be universal, others are context-specific morality
teachings given to a different place (India) and time (around 2,600
years ago).
This author absolutely agrees
that the Tipitaka is not a crystal ball or fanciful rambling that
can be conjured up to explain everything. The Buddha clearly stated
that what he taught represented only a handful of leaves within the
forest.
But as the Tipitaka passages
cited are purported to be the Buddha's opinion of women, the author
believes it's important to question the context in which the Buddha
- who recognised women's equal potential for enlightenment - might
have said such uncharacteristically misogynistic things - if he
indeed said them. With a rudimentary knowledge of Pali, I would
like to offer a contextual reading of the cited passages in this
two-part article.
First of all, it's important to
keep in mind that, from the very beginning, the Buddhist Canon
resulted from a collective effort of an all-male monks' assembly,
reporting from memory what they personally had heard from the
Buddha. Predictably, what they heard would be concerned less with
secular affairs than with spiritual matters. Sexual desire, as the
main stumbling block for a celibate life, would often come up, and
in such an all-male (supposedly heterosexual) circle, the word
woman - their common denominator of sexual desire - could easily
come to be shorthand for desire itself; something to be indignant
at.
However, the Buddha must have
given similar teachings to female monks. And in that context one
wouldn't be surprised if he had used the word men to personify the
sufferings of sexual desire. Indeed, had the Tipitaka's line of the
transmission included female reciters from the start down to the
present time, we might have records of men representing
revoltingness.
This Kandina Jataka was told by
the Buddha to a monk feeling tempted to return to household life
and his wife's attention and pampering. What was being admonished,
therefore, is actually not women per se but lust. In such places,
one must read lust for before women. The third line of the verse,
as an example, should be understood as: beings under the sway of
(lust for) women are admonished by the wise.
The first line in the Thai
translation is problematic. I admonish men who, with arrows as
weapon, release them in full strength. This doesn't hang together
grammatically or semantically with the rest. Considering that the
story is about a mountain stag killed by a hunter after following a
doe into a human village, a better translation for the original
Pali should be, cursed be the arrow (of desire) strongly piercing
man. Here, the Buddha was obviously comparing the metaphorical dart
of desire piercing the monk's heart to the hunter's arrow that
killed the stag.
The same sense also is conveyed
by the second line. As both the text (verse) and context (story)
are about men under the influence of lust, the word itthi
(generally meaning woman) is better translated with its second
meaning of wife. Thus the line should read, cursed be the land
overrun by the wife, referring to any male leader who fails to keep
his wife from interfering in the affairs of the state.
Again, the regressing monk who
allowed his household desires to jeopardise his spiritual
advancement was compared by the Buddha to a ruler who let his
personal relationships interfere with his just rule. If female
leaders had been the norm of the day, one would easily expect the
verse to be put as cursed be the land overrun by the
husband.
Now we turn to the second
passage. Although Pali belongs to the Indo-European language family
and its grammar bears astonishing similarities to Continental
languages, it differs in one important aspect: the lack of
indefinite and definite articles (a/an/the). As a result, it
depends on the context whether the key word matugamo refers to
women in general or specific individuals.
The Thai language also lacks
articles. To clarify, translators normally would insert words like
a, some, that, those or certain. Unfortunately, no such words are
given here, leaving the passage as vague as in the original Pali.
Without understanding of Pali grammar, a prejudiced mind is prone
to read it as a blanket condemnation pigeonholing half of the
world's 7 billion people to menial jobs.
But there's a strong hint that
the sutta is not a generalisation of women. It is worth noting that
the passage doesn't contain generalising words like sabbe (all).
Even more importantly, it hinges on a crucial part completely
oblivious to Phra Kasem. Both Ananda's question and the Buddha's
answer centred around the conditionality of hetu (reason) and
paccaya (condition). Therefore, one should read the passage as
concerning only some women - or men, for that matter - who are
angry, jealous and weak as unfit to carry out those mentioned
tasks, but by no means rules out the rest who aren't.
This, the author argues, is the
way to read the sutta without turning the Buddha into a
hypocrite.