Thai Buddhism and Patriarchy
In my eyes, Buddhism in Thailand has been very patriarchal, institutionalized, and corrupted. The control by the state, the failure of rural development, modernization and consumerism have all contributed to the current state of Thai Buddhism. But one thing that has never been mentioned, even by progressive monks, Buddhist male scholars or activists, is patriarchy within Buddhism itself.
We do not have ordination for women in Thailand. Since Thai nuns have not been recognized legally or socially as ordained women, their status is the lowest of all women, because they do not belong to any category of women, either within the lay or monastic community.
The patriarchy of Thai Buddhism also contributes to prostitution, a problem that makes Thailand popular in the international news headlines; a point which will be discussed later.
In Thai culture, it is a tradition for all Thai men to be ordained, usually before they get married, in order to pay gratitude to their parents (especially their mother since she herself cannot be ordained). By having a son ordained, it is believed that the parents can cling to the yellow robe of their son and reach heaven after their death. This ordination is usually temporary, in which men are allowed to leave their jobs with pay for three months in order to fulfill their duty to be monks. It is also believed that monkhood for three months will purify their minds so that they will be good family leaders once they are married.
Whereas rural boys have access to education and resources through the monkhood, girls do not have the same opportunity because there is no ordination for women. To pay gratitude to parents, in particular, to provide economic security, they have very few choices - to become a maid, a factory worker or a prostitute. Because boys repay gratitude to their parents by being ordained in their youth, they fulfill their duty early in life. A girl's way to repay gratitude to her parents is usually to take care of them when they are old.
Because rural development programs in the past thirty years have failed to improve the lives of the farmers, and in fact have driven them into more debt and suffering, girls often have no way to access resources to help take care of the family. In rural areas such as my community, when the signs of rural development failure came to light, girls such as my sisters and her friends were the first group who left our village with the hope of earning money to help alleviate the suffering of the family. The first group of young women who left my village went to work as house maids, and a few of them ended up in brothels as a result of sexual abuse from the male members of the households in which they were employed.
The North has become famous for prostitution. In the past ten years, girls as young as eight have been sold by parents and the money used to pay debts, to send her brothers to school, to build a new modern house or to buy a pickup truck for her family. This epidemic has spread to the Northeast where the suffering hits the rural poor the hardest. Pattaya, a famous beach and resort town two hours southeast of Bangkok, is full of girls from the Northeast, many earning their living as sex workers. In the past ten years, young Thai women have also gone overseas to be prostitutes despite the risk of their own lives because the financial return is higher than at home.
The number of prostitutes in Thailand is almost equal to the number of monks. If young, rural girls could be given the same opportunity as the boys to enter a monastic life, they would have access to education and at the same time be able to repay spiritual gratitude to their parents. These opportunities could provide girls and women with proper monastic education and spiritual guidance so they can become important spiritual guides for the rural folks, particularly other women and girls. Due to male dominance within Thai Buddhism, however, girls and women have been deprived of such an opportunity. Consequently, they have been victims of different forms of violence against girls and women, such as domestic violence, rape and forced prostitution.
Most monks today do not enter monkhood based upon the faith of wanting to learn and practice the Buddha's teachings in order to get rid of their own suffering and help ease the suffering of other sentient beings (especially the desire to be a spiritual guide in return for all of the support that the people give them). It is very common in rural areas, particularly in the North, to see monks disrobe after years of comfortable living while accumulating material resources and knowledge at the expense of community and monastic resources, and to then go on to get married almost immediately. This is the main reason why Buddhism, for many years now, has failed to function in its traditional role as the source of spiritual guidance for the Thai population.
Nowadays in the North, the rural villagers tolerate monks who break their discipline (vinaya) by drinking or having illicit sex, because they need a monk to perform Buddhist ceremonies such as funerals and the temple's religious events. Those who are devoted to real Buddhism have to go visit the Northeastern forest monks who mostly live in caves or in an isolated temple situated near the forest. One of my sisters has been very supportive to some of these forest monks, after many years of merit making to several monks in our area. She told me that she found out only after many years of reading Buddhist books that the monks in our area are not really monks. After she found out how real monks should behave and practice, she tried to convince some monks and villagers in our area to invite the forest monks to live in the local temples. Her attempt failed because the local monks told her that those monks are not the same tradition as ours.
When Buddhism today functions only ceremonially and the monks' role is mainly to perform such ceremonies, the rural folk turn to other spirits and superstitions for hope and refuge. These folk, such as many of my neighbors, have suffered economically, spiritually, and psychologically as a result of drastic social changes in the past 30 years. Now, the ways in which the local people turn to the spirits are not for the same reasons. In the past, it was for worship in the sense of showing gratitude and respect to the unknown higher power. Today, people go to fraudulent monks, shamans and shamanesses, trees and statues (including Buddha images) for luck to win the lottery, for curing difficult illnesses, and for protecting their children who have gone to sell their labor in big cities or foreign countries. Rural women suffer more because their sons and husbands turn to alcohol to cope with their suffering. Many women in my village have now become the major income earners of the household as a result of alcoholism that is widespread in most rural communities over the past ten years.
Buddhism and Domestic Violence
Last month I received a letter from a member of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship asking my opinion about the role of Buddhism and monks in domestic violence, particularly in Southeast Asia such as Thailand. She asked questions such as "Does woman go to ask help from a monk when her husband beats her; do monks teach men not to beat their spouses; or do monks in general talk about violence against women." After I answered her questions, the issue still lingered in my mind.
I grew up in a community that 25 years ago was sustained spiritually, economically and socially by Buddhist and local cultures. My father was a very devoted Buddhist. In the old days, the rural folk would separate their wealth into three portions: one for the future, one for their day to day living and one for the temple. After we sold our harvest, my father often gave half of our money to the temple. We were not happy because not having a land of our own we were one of the most destitute families in the village. In his free time if he was not hang around with other folks, he would go visit the temple's abbot.
I never asked my father how he practiced Buddhism or if he took the five precepts of the lay person. He was one of the most generous people I have ever known in my life. He did not drink , but he had over thirty wives. My mother said sometimes he had three other women while living with my mother.
Although we were very poor, the most suffering thing for us, my mother and the six children, was the violence of my father. When we did not have rice to eat, my mother would walk with a wooden basket on her hip asking our neighbor to borrow rice for the next days. When my father beat us and threatened my mother, we did not know where and who to go for help. Because of such violence, my oldest sister ran away from home when she was 13, before I was born, and she did not return until 15 years later. This has been the reason why I have always believed that violence against women is the worst form of violence because it can happen everyday, at any moment in your own home, and most of the time by the one you love.
For people who grew up with control and violence from our fathers, brothers or our partners, it is common that when we could make sense of the experience, we knew it was not the proper thing and we want to change the situation. When I was young the only thing I could figure out to help the situation was telling my mother not to take care of my father when he was sick so that he would die and then we all would have peace. When I was about 14, I managed to stand up for my sister who was abused by her husband who lived in our house.
I have wondered for the past years if the reason I was not attracted to Buddhism during my adolescence and early adult years results from the patriarchy within the Buddhist tradition. I wonder why I was unable to receive any refuge and support from the traditional Buddhist culture - peace, non-violence and harmony - when I experienced domestic violence within my own family.
Here Comes Feminism
My understanding of women problems in our society was put into the context of structural violence against women during the time I was working on my master's thesis. I studied feminist theories and used them to analyze the Thai government's policies, their implementation and the implications of the development program for rural women.
During my years studying education in a non-formal graduate program, I worked in a bilateral rural development project that aimed to promote the use of appropriate communication and educational media for the hill tribe groups in the Northern Thailand. My role was to conduct training for the government concerning the development of the media and to support them to integrate women's issues into their normal program. I remember visiting a very remote hill tribe community situated near the Thai -Burma border. At night we held a meeting with the women's group asking through a translator about their concern. Most women were so scared about the contraceptive devices that the government forced them to use. They told me about all kinds of side effects that happened to them. They wanted them to be taken out of their bodies but the health worker was not around because he had 16 villages to take care of. It was the first time I realized that in our society most existing contraceptive devices were targeted to women.
Thailand responded to the first UN Decade for Women's Development by designing a package for the development of rural area women. This model used the housewives group. This is a top down and patriarchal approach drawing housewives groups in rural areas to be part of the government administrative system. In recent years, it has become a strong support base for local politicians.
The main content of the program was to teach women to be better wives and better mothers. Every group of women had to wear the traditional Thai attire and got together whenever there was a call from the authorities. The women who did not participate in the program were considered unmodernized. My sister was one of them . When I asked her later on she said that she did not think the housewives group meant development. They were no concrete programs for women to do and sometimes the group ended up drinking and dancing together after they finished attending the function. Since my sister did not drink, she had less interest to join the group gathering.
Around the same time, I was also involved with NGOs and academics that worked to help women who worked in the Northern Industrial Estate situated south of Chiang Mai. By that time, a few young women had died of sickness caused by chemicals they were exposed to while working day and night in a company that produced electronic goods. In one of my independent studies, I decided to create a training course to train hill tribe people in my hometown about the hazards from the chemicals widely used in their strawberry fields. Many women in those villages had already experienced the affects of chemical use on their health because they spent longer hours than their husbands working in the field. Witnessing the three groups of women who suffered from development programs made me commit to working on women's issues.
Early Thai feminism is seen as an imported movement of women who want to fight against men in order to be equal to them. So when you talked about being a feminist, you received a reluctant and doubting kind of look even from women. I used to be aggressive and sometimes angry when I had to defend why we need to change the situation regarding the roles of women. Often time this did not work and I ended up with more anger and resentment at myself. I was disappointed with some feminist academics who graduated with Ph.D.'s from the West. They lead the movement in different areas but still worked within the same hierarchical culture that they advocated to dismantle. This kind of movement did not touch the issues of class and race. I realized later on that kind of approach was probably passed down from the early American feminist movement. This movement represented only white middle class women and used only their experience to speak for all other women.
Because feminism has been seen as westernized and aggressive, it was rejected especially among the NGOs and even among the academics. For Thai women to speak loudly, confidently and especially aggressively was not acceptable because it went against the image of a good appropriate woman who is supposed to be listen well and be polite.
The negative reaction to feminism and the disappointment I felt from upper class feminists early on were reasons why I moved away from the mainstream feminist movement. I did not know how to speak about women's issues in a way that I myself did not end up feeling hurt, angry and full of regret.
How about Gender?
A few years after that, I heard that the movement had changed to use the term "gender issue", a situation that addresses both men and women and how they both can work together to change their behavior and attitudes for a healthier relationship.
I recently discussed with a close friend who is working with a funding agency that urges NGOs to integrate gender in their program about the reaction to this new term. She said that so far the NGOs have managed to create gender training for their staffs and the communities that they are working with. A real challenge for her office is to push the NGOs to put gender into practice, especially within their own office working environments. The villagers, she said, has less of a challenge because they are experiential based learners. They did not discuss and argue with each other much once they saw the point. Many times men and women made jokes to each other during the workshops. It has been more a challenge to the NGOs who like to discuss, argue and come to a conclusion.
What we saw in common as an obstacle to gender issues is that the method and approach has to go beyond the head level, beyond concepts and intellectual discussion in order to make people understand. The method that touches only at the head level will not transform people. At most it can make people believe what they have heard or discussed, but their personal behavior will not change. Transformation happens at the heart level.
My Personal Transformation
1. Buddhist Practice
Buddhist culture, despite its suppression of women, has been the foundation of my life. When I finally found the right practice and committed myself to it in 1994, it helped turn my feelings of anger, frustration, resentment and despair into compassion, loving, forgiving and hopefulness. These negative feelings largely resulted from the drastic changes in my personal life growing up in a rural area and being exposed to violence, rapid social changes during the past three decades, and my efforts in social activism to address the resulting problems. Without this spiritual practice, I would not be able to do the kind of work I have been doing for the past few years.
One of the most interesting experiences for me was to participate in the different meditation courses that we organized from time to time at the Ashram (a Buddhist grassroots organization). One day I went home and talked to my mother, trying to convince her to meditate. Then one morning while I was eating breakfast, I watched my mother roll a local cigarette from her knee down to her ankle. At that moment I realized that my mother was meditating because her mind was with her body, fully with the present moment and she looked very peaceful and beautiful. I realized that the rural folk have been living a life of meditation. Each day when they go work on the farm with their feet bare, they expose themselves to the earth, the wind, the sunshine and the water. Their life and nature is closely connected.
It was people like me who needed to practice meditation - people who use so much of our heads thinking and analyzing, not having our minds and our bodies together, and not letting ourselves feel the energy of things around us. One day I asked a monk who taught me meditation that if the idea of meditation is to build awareness so that we can be fully present with each moment, then isn't pulling grass and watering vegetables also meditation. He smiled and said yes. I then told him that I was very lucky to be born as a farm girl. My favorite work has always been vegetable gardening on a tiny piece of land next to the canal that my family illegally used for many years. I felt gratitude for the kind of life I have had because it became a foundation for my inner peace and joy, something I could not imagine having if I had been born as a city girl.
2. Feminist Practice
In early 1995 I participated in a gender workshop facilitated by George Lakey, a director of Training for Change in Philadelphia. (George Lakey and Karen Ridd, a non violence activist from Canada, taught me about the experiential training method.) After one of the experiential activities one of our male participants cried and said he did not want to be what his father and society wanted him to be - that is, to be tough and to be a leader and most of all not to fail. When he was young his father did not allow him to cry saying that he would not be a real man if he showed his weakness.
During that workshop and others, I felt for the first time that I finally knew what was missing in my earlier feminist work.
Later that year I started to co-facilitate different workshops with George Lakey and two other colleagues. The main reason I committed to work with them was that the training style we used has a holistic approach to social issues. It combines the head, the heart and the hands together, something I had heard of but had not seen done in an effective and practical manner. George Lakey and Karen Ridd, another facilitator, are very committed to work on gender issues in every workshop they facilitate and also in their personal life. My struggle before I met them has been that I met many interesting male social activists and academics who were really committed to work for social change, but they are not interested in gender issues. When I met an activist or an academic feminist, I still found that they did not have other methods to address gender issues in an effective way, and especially that they were not interested in spiritual practice..
During that time I also realized that my anger and rejection toward men were the result of the painful relationship with my father that was never resolved even after his death. That ignorance continued on in my unconscious for many years in the form of continuous dreams. After I found a Tibetan Buddhist text that shows the way to resolve that karma through meditation, I practiced continuously for more than a year together with talking and crying with my counselor. It was only after this practice that I finally was able to connect to my father. This experience has taught me that if I cannot heal and transform myself from my own ignorance, it is very difficult trying to transform other people. The spiritual practice helped me cultivate compassion, love, forgiveness, understanding and the way of letting go of things, especially my anger. This is the most important thing for my work on gender issues.
Gender Through Experiential Learning
The gender issue is about power. Working on gender has to be in a way that allows people to be in touch with their own power, to see the way they use that power with other people, and to understand what are the consequences of such power use. When we put gender in the context of power, it is not confined to only sex because women can be just as abusive as men when they use power in the wrong way. When talking about power, we then touch a core point of human beings, the ego of our own self.
Gender issues have to be explored through an experiential learning process, not just reading, discussing and creating activities for women's development. It is more important as a learning process for men and women to grow together, not to get an end result. In my workshops, this requires building safety, trust, and equal respect for everyone's unique experience. In order to build a safe container, people need time and a process of experiential learning activities, not just a workshop filled with a series of activities.
In an experiential gender workshop, it is important to make everybody feel safe and trustworthy because when we go beyond the head to the heart level we touch the vulnerability of people. We are trained not to show our vulnerability because that may show our true selves. Men are unfortunate because most cultures do not train them to be in touch with their own feelings, especially the sad ones. Expressing bad feelings, particularly through crying, means that they are soft, weak and sensitive. If one's heart is not soft and sensitive how can one feel and sense others' feelings and pain? Showing feelings is showing one's own vulnerability. Being vulnerable is risky and people do not like taking this risk, especially when they do not know what we will come about after the risk is taken. Yet risk must be taken if one wants to learn to grow and transform.
For me the gender issue is like spiritual development in that there has to be commitment to practice on a day to day basis, in the work place and at home, with men and women we are related. In my experience working with some progressive Buddhist male scholars and activists in the past five years, I have noticed that it is very difficult for them to listen to the feelings of the women they work with, because most women work on administrative and secretarial levels and that kind of role puts them in a position to just listen. If these powerful men themselves are not aware of the obstacles that block them from seeing their own ignorance, it is very difficult for self transformation, even if they believe and speak about the importance of the role of women. This is because talking and believing is still at the head level. People need to open their hearts to listen to what the hearts of other people are telling them so that real understanding, love and compassion can arise.
.What Does the Heart Level Give Us?
It is common that every human being wants to be loved and accepted. If gender issues are expressed in such a way that one group is blamed for the suffering of the other group, even if it is the truth, it does not bring people together.
I like the way Buddhism says every human being has Buddha nature. When we realize that each human being, woman or man, has Buddha nature but at times is was blocked by her or his ignorance, then our hearts will be opened to listen, to love, to forget and to forgive others and ourselves. If women and men can get over our own ignorance and help each other discover and nurture Buddha qualities within ourselves then we will not end up with rejection and separation.
Working with Buddhist Groups
I began to go back to my feminist work after I returning from a visit to Ladakh in mid 1995. My visit coincided with the fifth International Buddhist Women's Conference (Sakyadhita). There I learned for the first time about the unbelievable suffering of Buddhist nuns. I realized how much Buddhism has ignored the role of women in its institutions. When I came back home I started looking for Thai nuns and did a leadership training for them. After the nuns, I wanted to move on to work with the monks, knowing that they are part of the oppressive system toward women because of their roles in the system. In order to work on gender issues with a monk's group as a woman who is not a Buddhist scholar, I had to look for an alliance which was impossible among the Thai monks. Finally I found an American monk who said he was a feminist in America before he came to Thailand. By then he was already involved in a network of monks who work on different social issues. Because of his power, support and interest, I could stand for the first time in front of the monks and nuns to do a gender workshop in mid 1996.
The activity I did was to have a monk and a nun sit in pairs and to have the both of them respond to each other about the same three questions. The nuns spoke first with the monks just listening, and then they changed roles. The three questions were: "As a woman what are my obstacles?"; "As a nun what are my obstacles?"; and "If we would work together, what kind of support would I need from you?". After that we asked everyone's feelings. One monk said he felt like a dam had opened and a strong flow of water of emotions had come pouring out. Another monk said he felt uncomfortable and intimidated having a nun sitting and talking to him face to face. Most monks said it was the first they had a chance to learn about the suffering of the nuns, although some of them watch the nuns working around their temple. The nuns said they felt released. One of the nuns said she felt like talking to her brother. Most nuns said the experience helped them to be able to talk to the monks without fear.
A year later I did another process with monks and nuns during a workshop on teaching Dhamma through experiential learning. One young monk who attended the workshop in 1996 came to me and said, "During that gender workshop last year, I was so angry to see you standing in front of the room above the monks and teaching us. Who were you to teach us? I was even more angry when you forced me to sit and to just listen to the nun talking. Today I want to apologize for thinking toward you in that way. The gender workshop did help me learn how to relate to women. Now I can talk to women without having fear." (The Thai Theravada tradition is the most strict about relations between monks and women. Monks cannot touch women and cannot talk to a woman alone in a private area. Many monks misinterpret that women are enemies to their spiritual liberation, so they feel they have to stay away from them).
One of the nuns who participated in the same workshop said to me during a social action trainers workshop that I co-facilitated a year and a half later, "Although we come from the same town, I did not talk to you during the whole the workshop because I thought that as a lay woman you had no right to teach us monks and nuns. When my eyes were opened later on I realized how ignorant I was to not see that you were trying to help us understand our own problems."
Since 1996 in every workshop I facilitate or co-facilitate on conflict resolution, non violence, community and team building, leadership, training for social action trainers or project management, gender is the one topic that I incorporate into the workshop content. If I am asked to do a workshop outside my circle, I will not take the job if the organization is not interested in letting me include gender in their workshop. In general, I will spend about half a day on the issue itself. Since our training style is based on an emergent design, however, whenever the gender issue comes up, we will deal with it even though it is not during the time that we have planned to work on the issue. For example, during an activity that monks and nuns had to work together to cross a toxic river, it was obvious that monks liked to make the decisions and to lead the activity. Therefore, during the reflection we asked the group how they felt about the gender issue expressed in the activity.
For a women's group, such as nuns, we will do a leadership training with them first before we put them in the same workshop with the monks. When doing a workshop with monks and nuns, we try to involve lay men and women in the same event. Since monks and nuns' lives are usually quite isolated from the secular world, in this way they can be exposed to the social problems in lay society, especially gender issues. This is the approach I have been using in Thailand, Cambodia and India.
More Challenges
The greatest challenge to my spiritual practice is almost every time that I encounter a situation to work with high status monks or highly educated or experienced men who have suffered from patriarchal systems. Particularly for monks, to do an experiential activity makes them feel uncomfortable, especially when they have to do it with women. Expressing feelings or hearing women talk about their feelings makes them uncomfortable. For them, showing feelings makes it seem that they are not good monks because they are still effected by worldly defilement. As an ordained person, they are supposed to maintain equanimity to whatever happens around them. One time during a workshop in Cambodia, a few monks got up and left the session when one of the women started crying while talking about her suffering during the Pol Pot regime. One monk scolded her to stop crying.
Another challenge of working with monks and male Buddhist scholars is that they think they are the authorities to speak about Buddhism because they know more that everybody else. One time a well educated monk who is known for his preaching refused to join in a half an hour gender workshop. But after the activity was done, he wanted to preach to the group about Buddhism saying that in Nirvana, the state of enlightenment, there is no gender so we do not need to talk about gender issues.
In a situation like the above, it is the patience, understanding and compassion cultivated through Buddhist practice can help me continue with the process. When I was able to just listen to that monk expressing his ideas, his fear, and his uncomfortableness without getting angry, without trying to defend my experience and opinion, without trying to argue back to convince him to see the same thing I saw, and without feeling fear or loosing face for not being a good facilitator, I can experience the transformation inside myself which I never felt before when I was involved in feminist work in the early 1990s. I used to think that I would teach them something but at the end I myself have learned so much. This learning takes place only when I can prevent my ignorance from blocking me to listen and see things as they are. Without spiritual practice, I will not have compassion, patience, peace of my own mind and especially hope to change the situation.
For my own work, whether I call it feminism or gender, it has to have spiritual practice as a foundation because otherwise I will fall into a trap that I want the men to get out. I do feminist work through Buddhist practice and I practice Buddhism through feminist work.
In conclusion, I see that the issue of social transformation, such as feminism and Buddhism, relates directly with personal transformation. It made sense to my life to see the two things go hand in hand. Through socialization I realized how many layers of ignorance I had accumulated. Filling my head with information, such as theories, concepts and methodologies, and then having intellectual discussions is not enough to help transform my own suffering into peace, harmony and hope. If I cannot find ways to transform myself into what I advocate to others and society at large, it is impossible for me to experience the real awakening.
Ouyporn Khuankaew serves on the INEB Executive Committee and is the coordinator for the INEB's Women's Project.