What is the Buddhist attitude to women?

 ~ By Ajahn Jayasāro ~

First and foremost, women are viewed as human beings subject to birth, old age, sickness and death: beings prone to suffering and with the ability and opportunity to transcend it. The Buddha made it very clear that the capacity for enlightenment is not gender-based. It is present by virtue of a human birth and women are viewed as having the same spiritual potential as men.

In light of this view of their spiritual capacity, the Buddha gave women who wished to devote themselves wholeheartedly to his training the opportunity to become monastics. He spent a great deal of time teaching women, both monastic and lay, and did not keep back any teachings from them on the grounds of their sex.

But the Buddha’s assertion of women’s spiritual equality did not lead him to advocate radical changes in the male-dominated social order. He reserved his social criticism for what seemed to him its most pernicious feature: the caste system. Interestingly, in the Sangha, the area in which the Buddha did have the power to establish conventions governing relationships between men and women, he did not opt for equality. The Buddha established relations between the two monastic orders such that the nuns’ order, established after that of the monks, was considered its younger sibling. The Buddha judged that this kind of mild hierarchy, guarded against abuse by the built-in checks and balances of the Vinaya discipline, was the best way to govern renunciant communities, and the one most acceptable to society at large.

(From “Without and Within, The Buddha” by Ajahn Jayasaro)

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To read the ebook, please visit ‘Without and Within', by Ajahn Jayasaro:

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For other teachings by Ven. Ajahn Jayasāro, please visit the Panyaprateep Foundation website.