Whose nirvana? Tibetan buddhist nuns in north India

Off Our Backs, Mar 1994 by Aukerman, Maren

whose nirvana? tibetan buddhist nuns in north india

Many women (myself included) find Buddhism an attractive alternative to undoubtedly patriarchal religious traditions in the West. Figures such as the Tibetan Dalai Lama combine a concert for justice with creative resistance in ways we might be able to adapt to our own feminist priorities. In our search for alternative collective histories or herstories it has become fashionable to bash Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity, but call Buddhism a nonsexist religion.

The Buddhism I have observed in the monastic Tibetan tradition, however, fails to reflect to egalitarian slant I had hoped to find there. During a year of research on women's religious communities in Asia, I spent several months at Tibetan Buddhist nunneries in the Himalayas of northern India. It became increasingly clear that in many formal and informal ways nuns get less than their share. I do not mean to suggest that my examination of Tibetan Buddhism was complete, and I certainly would not argue that every Buddhist tradition shares all these aspects of institutional sexism. I suspect, however, that our eagerness to find balm in the East with Buddhism may itself be orientalist.

ordination/remuneration

Some Tibetan nuns cited a desire to avoid marriage as their initial motivation to enter monastic life. Tenzing Chodon, a thirty-one-year-old nun who grew up in South India, described how the domestic violence she witnessed growing up made her certain she did not want to marry. She knew "nothing" about religion, but ran away north to join a nunnery simply because it was the one visible option other than marriage. Her practice as a nun has brought a strong religious commitment, but for her that came later.

Most women who become nuns, however, already start with a strong religious focus. In fact, I was told that women who enter monastic life are often more religiously committed than corresponding men, since it is tradition for Tibetan families to send one son to be a monk, whether or not he is religiously inclined. Daughters, by contrast, often have to fight or break with their families to win the right to enter a nunnery; often their religiosity is not respected.

But those who choose to join nunneries cannot be fully ordained within the tradition the way monks can be. The discrepancy is based on the fact that the lineage of full nuns died out centuries ago, which again was presumably the result of lay gender bias. In popular culture it is considered more meritorious to donate to a monk than to donate to a nun; as a result nunneries are comparatively underfunded even today. (To their credit, a few Tibetan lamas are making an effort to combat the merit myth, but with limited success so far.) One of the nunneries I visited was so short on funds and bedspace that many of the nuns had to live outside the compound on their own. Those who couldn't afford to do this had to be turned away.

Furthermore, monks are frequently invited to travel abroad an give teachings there. Thus they have the opportunity to collect large donations and gifts. This has negative as well as positive effects on the monks, some nuns suggested, because when religious teaching is turned into a business the spiritual aspects often fall short. Nuns seldom have the chance to go abroad or teach, so they do not face that temptation much.

Since they cannot fully ordain, Tibetan nuns adhere to the same 36 precepts followed by novice monks. Technically, then, the most senior nun is still considered a novice, and lower in rank than a junior monk. Most monks refuse to recognize recent attempts to resurrect a full nun's lineage (which involves adhering to more precepts than the full monk's lineage requires). Those nuns with the full ordination are still treated as inferiors by the monks.

learning, leaders and enlightenment

It is not surprising, then, that women are seldom accepted as spiritually realized, and there are no women currently recognized as Tibetan lamas (teachers who orally transmit and interpret sacred texts). Since women lack the training to become their own religious leaders, most Tibetan nunneries are under the rotating leadership of a male lama who acts as abbot.

Until recently, Tibetan nuns were provided little religious instruction at all. Monks were taught complex dialectics, philosophy, and meditation, while nuns were limited to devotional aspects of the religion such as chanting and praying. Even now, monks have much more selection in the kind of religious education they will get. Nunneries (to the extent that they get higher teachings at all) usually end up the male religious teachers spared by a monastery. The nuns have to be grateful to get anyone, even though the ones sent are not always gifted scholars or teachers.

All the nuns with whom I spoke believed that men and women have equal spiritual capabilities, and several suggested that Tibetan monks are frequently materialistic, proud and less spiritually dedicated than nuns. As an example, I was told how three nuns and nineteen monks went together to a religious ceremony in a different town. The nuns were simply dressed. But the monks wore ornate long-sleeved shirts, even though ordained Tibetans are to be sleeveless, "and it wasn't even cold weather." Moreover, the monks were anxious to show off their belongings from a recent trip abroad, "with a camera dangling on this side and a tape recorder on that side."