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IV. Women in Thai Buddhism
There are a wide range of issues and experiences that one must consider in order to understand the role of women in Thai Buddhism. During my time in Thailand, I met women who represent a considerable number of these different choices and experiences. Khun Sanitsuda, the award-winning journalist for the Bangkok Post and Samaneri Dhammananda, a philosophy professor at Thammasat University and the first Thai woman to be ordained as a monk in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism, both represent the options for high profile success that are available to women in Thailand. They have, because of their education and middle-class status, become able to see themselves as women who are not victims of a patriarchal system but as reformers of the tradition. I met Mae Chi (mothers in white) who are the equivalent of nuns within the Thai Buddhist system. At temples such as Wat Doi Suthep in Chiangmai, they can be seen selling items to pilgrims in order to support the temple. They hardly smile or look you in the eye. In the forest temple of Phra Paisal, two mae chi live in the forest and cook and clean for the monks. One of the mae chi, Gulab, made a point of telling us that she is undertaking this life because she wants to. The popular image of the mae chi is that they are women who could not make it otherwise in the "real world." They are poor, physically handicapped, less attractive to men and, therefore, find in the temple a kind of haven. Mae chi Gulab flashed us her smile and vehemently denied that this is the reason for her service. She left Bangkok to join Phra Paisal because she believes in the work he is doing to reform the Sangha in Thailand and to preserve the biodiversity of the northeastern region. The Mae Chi have several organizations that work on their behalf. One of these groups has just opened the first university for Mae Chi in Thailand. Mae Chi, on the whole, have been discriminated against with regard to education. They are not allowed to matriculate at the Buddhist universities with the monks, for instance. While they are not accepted as clerics, and are, therefore denied education and other financial perks that come from the state, they are however deemed to be "religious" to the extent that they are not allowed to vote and because they, like the monks, are thought to have rejected worldly life. Other Mae Chi, such as Mae Chi Sansenee, are bringing the Mae Chi into a different kind of public light. Mae Chi Sansenee is a former top beauty queen in Thai society who came to prominence earlier in the 1980's because of her beauty and her public affair with a high profile, married politician. After a while, she gave up this life and took on the white robes of the Mae Chi, in outright defiance of the stereotype that only unattractive and weak women would hide behind the robes. She created a paradise of a retreat center out of abandoned land on the outskirts of Bangkok and spends her time educating the middle-class, via television shows and magazine production, about the value of meditation for self exploration, stress-release, and social advancement. She speaks in defiance of women such as Samaneri Dhammananda who believe that the monkhood should be opened to the ordination of women. Another Mae Chi, Prathin, puts her energy toward the first school for poor Buddhist girls in Ratchaburi Province. There she directs young women in an education that provides general curriculum along with nonformal training in various vocations: cosmetology, sustainable farming, sewing, Thai massage, flower arranging, etc. In the northern village of Ba Muang Gra, I met women who worked side by side with their husbands and sons and daughters in the field, who could wield a machete just as easily as any man, and who saw in themselves a strength to endure the hardships that come from nearly subsistence level farming life. Some of their daughters were dead to HIV/AIDS or "missing," presumably gone into the cities to find another kind of life, perhaps prostitution, sometimes bringing money home to their families to support them in a style they would not otherwise be capable of living. Their young daughters attended a school in the village that went to the sixth grade, many of them discontinuing their education at that point to engage in some sort of commerce. Non-governmental organizations such as FEDRA, offer a non-formal school not far from that village to enable girls such as these the opportunity to go to school beyond the sixth grade. All expenses are paid for, thanks to a wealthy female patron from Bangkok, and a few more years of time are bought, a few skills offered to the girls, to enable them to have a few more options beyond prostitution and the drug trade. Schools such as these are rare. 1 in 70 women in Thailand is engaged in prostitution and HIV/AIDS is rampant, particularly among women in the heterosexual population and growing among young children ages 14-19.
Interspersed among these women--the business women, revolutionaries, nuns and farming women--I met numerous women who work and "make do" in the society without much attention to the particular plight of women: Pau the woman tuk-tuk driver in Chaingmai and Kaeng the translator from Payap University, a Christian woman who tries to integrate Buddhist practice within her own life, are two women who won my heart during my visits. They are resilient, hard-working, kind and eager to improve their condition in life. This is the fate of most Thai people. They wish to be upwardly mobile, to give to themselves and their families the opportunities that a more materialistic life can afford, to raise themselves up from the poverty of their grandparents. Religion must, in such a situation, address this real need for release from poverty and fear, otherwise it is an irrelevant institution.
-The Condition of Thai Women -Buddhist Teachings About Women -The Wife of the Buddha -Ordination of Thai Women Monks -Prostitution |
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