mother or mistress but never a monk: Buddhist notions of female gender in rural Thailand

TLDR

Gender notions in Buddhist Thailand are rooted in fundamental assumptions about reality and the Buddhist worldview, and while both men and women confront attachment, the expressions of this tension differ between genders. The paper argues that Thai Buddhist culture does not place women in a religiously inferior status relative to men. Keywords: gender imagery, images of women, sex roles, Buddhism, Thailand.

Abstract

Notions of gender have a givenness for most people as they are rooted in fundamental assumptions about the underlying meaning of reality. In Buddhist Thailand, gender notions can be shown to derive from sources that formulate a Buddhist world view. In this paper it is maintained, contrary to the argument of some scholars, that Thai Buddhist culture does not relegate women to a religiously inferior status relative to men. Rather, both males and females who understand the world in Buddhist terms face the same problem of attachment to the world, although the characteristic tension between worldly attachment and orientation toward Buddhist salvation is expressed for females in gender images that are different than those for males . [gender imagery, images of women, sex roles, Buddhism, Thailand]