Speech for Outstanding Buddhist Women Award

Speech for Outstanding Buddhist Women Award
on “the Promotion of the Status of Women”
Yifa
2003

I would like to thank the international committee of Buddhist scholars and the Association for the Promotion of the Status of Women for giving me this award, and I send my regrets for being unable to attend. I am glad that there are organizations that are dedicated to the promotion of women’s work, and that the Association has seen fit to honor the work of Buddhist women by so honoring me.

The role of women in Buddhism has long been a controversial topic. Indeed, at the very outset, the Buddha’s disciple Ananda brought up the issue of whether women could be followers of the Buddha when he challenged the Buddha to allow women to join the order. The Buddha hesitated, but finally allowed women to join. However, the smell of inauthenticity has hung around women in Buddhism (as it has in many other religions) for many centuries.

Nevertheless, that smell is what it is—a smell, insubstantial, unwarranted, and I think increasingly being recognized as part of the whiff of patriarchy that has permeated all dealings between men and women in all of the religious traditions of the world. What the Buddha really wanted is perhaps difficult ultimately to determine, and we should recognize that all of us are embedded within our social contexts and the times we live in. In addition, many of the early texts regarding the role of women are fragmented and scattered, the result perhaps of carelessness on the part of scholars through the centuries who have deemed women’s lives less important to preserve than men’s.

Yet the texts that remain to us are far from discouraging. The early Theravadan text, the Therigatha (6-3rd centuries BCE), features the lives of 73 women who became nuns. They came, as did the male followers of the Buddha, from many different social and economic backgrounds—but we are told that all 73 of them achieved enlightenment. The Mahayana text, the Srimaladevi, concerns one historical lay woman, who was a queen, who achieved realization. In the text, the Buddha is recorded as preaching a special sutra for Srimaladevi, and predicting that she would become a Buddha in the future. Wei-Tishi, a queen whose husband was imprisoned and starved by their son, carried food to the king and prayed to the Buddha. After the Buddha appeared and preached The Sutra of Contemplation on Amitabha Buddha to her, she achieved realization.

Within the history of Buddhism as well, women play an important role in charitable, cultural, and educational endeavors—something that remains true today. Increasingly, women are becoming more and more visible as practitioners and carriers of the Dharma. In my particular order, Humanistic Buddhism, women are prominent in secular and spiritual life.

It is clear to me that the future of Buddhism—as for many other world religions—will be substantially shaped by how prominent a role women are given in its propagation. The need for Buddhist teachers is not—indeed, cannot be—confined to men, let alone only male monastics. There is an enormous demand among all peoples and all nations to hear the simple and beautiful words of the Buddha and to incorporate them into their lives. We have seen through the ages that women not only can make a contribution to the spread of religions, but can be leaders—and I feel humble to be accorded such a status with this honor. I hope to continue that work, and my fervent wish is that more women will join me.

Thank you.

Venerable Yifa is the abbess of the Greater Boston Buddhist Culture Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is on the standing committee of the International Buddhist Progress Society, Fo Guang Shan. She is on the faculty of Hsi Lai University in Hacienda Heights, California, where she teaches on Chinese Buddhism. A native Taiwan, and winner of an Outstanding Young Person Award in 1997, she has a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale University, where her specialization was the Buddhist monastic code. She is the author of Safeguarding the Heart: A Buddhist Response to Suffering and September 11 (Lantern Books, New York: 2002) and The Origins of Buddhist Monastic Codes in China (Hawaii University Press, Honolulu: 2002).