Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo: Bhikkhuni
Tenzin Palmo has made a vow that she finds almost startling in its stubbornness: she will keep returning, through however many rebirths it takes, to reach enlightenment in a woman's body. She describes feeling, at birth, as though she had landed in the wrong one. That feeling softened over the years. These days she speaks of her female rebirth with gratitude, partly because she sees so much that still needs doing on behalf of women.
Her feminist activism has brought her a certain fame, but she is hardly working alone. Equal footing inside the monastic community is something a number of women are pushing toward. And the idea that this is some modern invention gets the history backward. Khandro Rinpoche, a female lama in the Tibetan tradition, put it this way: when people raise the subject of women and Buddhism, they tend to treat it as novel, as if it only matters because we live in modern times and more women now practice the Dharma. That is not what is happening. The female sangha has existed for centuries. Nothing new is being grafted onto a 2,500-year-old tradition; the roots were always there, and they are simply being brought back to life.
Consider how it began. When Siddhartha Gautama established Buddhism, women were not part of the monastic order at first. Maha Pajapati, the aunt who raised him after his mother died, followed him once he began teaching and asked to be ordained. His answer was that the time was wrong, that admitting women would cause the dharma to be lost. Pajapati did not accept the refusal quietly. Together with the Buddha's wife and several other women, she followed the Buddha and his disciples, and it was after Ananda, the Buddha's closest companion, interceded that the women were finally permitted to ordain. They were held to a longer list of precepts than the men.
One belief took hold early: that enlightenment could not be reached in a female body. The debate over that claim has never fully settled. Plenty of practitioners and scholars read it less as doctrine and more as a reflection of the era, a product of the conditions under which Buddhism first spread.
The word for a fully ordained woman in monastic Buddhism is bhikkhuni; the men are bhikkhus. Both are bound by the Vinaya, the body of rules governing monastic life. The women carry more of those rules, and tradition has long ranked them beneath the monks regardless of age or seniority. A monk ordained yesterday could be treated as the superior of a nun who has studied for decades, on the basis of sex alone. Even the most beautiful of religions, it seems, makes room for this.
That picture is shifting, and quickly, thanks in part to figures like Tenzin Palmo. The Dalai Lama has spoken up for women in Buddhism over the years as well. At a 2007 conference he suggested that a world with more women among its leaders might see less war. He did not frame it as an attack on men. His point was about difference, and about the balance that appears when both are genuinely represented, which at present they are not.
Palmo keeps company with other remarkable women on this front. Cheng Yen, a nun, founded the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation. Pema Chodron lectures widely, publishes books, and has reshaped how people picture a Buddhist nun. Go back far enough and the women are still there: Buddhamitra, a nun of the first century, raised images of the Buddha in several cities. Such women have always been present, and they are gaining ground now in part because many monks have taken up the fight against sexism beside them. Palmo's own root guru is a fine example; he was the one who urged her to open a nunnery.
Try naming a religion, a culture, or a society with no trace of sexism in it. It is close to impossible. The form is usually misogyny, though not always, and treating it as a war to be won is probably the wrong instinct. Better to see an opening for change. Palmo was among the first Western women ordained in her lineage, and she has since helped dozens of others become ordained and educated. She has built a nunnery, written books, and bound herself by oath to reach liberation as a woman. Monks across the world are helping to empower nuns, which puts Buddhism, oddly enough, out in front on this.
- Kate Mattes