Kate Lila Wheeler

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Not just cute animal stories

May 15, 2018 by klwheeler

dn11022-1_566I love the Jataka stories.  They express the Buddhist tradition’s sensitivity toward all beings, all forms of life.  They transmit other meaningful values, like compassion and self sacrifice.They are also the root of Aesop’s fables and Kipling’s Just So Stories that I read and loved as a girl.
I learned from my friend and fellow teacher Larry Yang that these apparently simple stories are the most common theme for Buddhist discourses in Thailand and Laos.  Recently Sylvia Boorstein spoke about one of the Jatakas in a talk of hers, and I was happy about it.

But it also reminded me that even as a girl, I’d noticed — and it bugged me — that the future Buddha is always a male in the Jatakas — king of the deer, king of the monkeys — so I decided to look into the issue today.  Here’s the material I found…with a couple of sources at the bottom.

Jatakas are adapted from even more ancient Indian folk tales, as we might guess.  Consistent maleness may have been a sort of convenience (haha) to lend continuity, helping the protagonist remain recognizable and prominent from life to life.  (I just read Coyote Buddha, a novel co-written by my friends Keith Kachtick and Camilla Figueroa where one of the plot twists relies on the reader’s not recognizing the heroine and hero in their next rebirth — but don’t let me spoil it for you).   But there are Jain stories involving multiple rebirths that do include gender switches.

Apparently as Jatakas were used more and more in service of the Buddhist faith,  they were more and more about the Buddha’s previous lives than just about wonderful, wise animals.  The anti-female bias became more and more pronounced.  It’s partly because of prevailing social attitudes toward female leadership; also specifically Buddhist attitudes about women threatening monks’ celibacy.  Seemingly there’s a notion, too, that a future Buddha’s karma has to be the very best quality karma!  So he can’t be reborn as a woman.

One male scholar exclaimed in 1992 that the Jatakas are the most blatantly misogynistic group of Pali texts.  After they were incorporated into the Pali canon, they seem to have influenced things for the worse, at least in the sense that they promoted tradition’s male dominant tendencies.

Of course this trend may be mirroring larger scale social shifts and movements in gender relations, but as a bad scholar who isn’t getting a doctorate in this, may I kvetch that I think it more likely revolves around the monks feeling threatened by women?

In the article below, a good friend, Ven. Analayo explores, with apparent heart-fire, several versions of a Jataka story about a woman who can’t even receive the certain prediction that she will become a Buddha in the future while in a female body, even though she gives dana to a Buddha, which is normally a good karmic career move to start your progress toward Buddhahood.   In the most sympathetic version — this is pretty hilarious — she jumps off a building to get rid of the female body, but the earth suddenly becomes a cushion, and she doesn’t die, but she needs to be transformed into a man before the previous Buddha can tell her she will eventually reach full enlightenment.    This seems to make it clear that at least one male ally wanted women to be encouraged to achieve the ultimate goal.
And of course I am hanging on to what’s lovely about the Jatakas; they are wiser about speciesism than about gender.
dn11022-2_350
https://www.buddhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de/pdf/5-personen/analayo/buddha-princess.pdf
https://www.buddhismuskunde.uni-hamburg.de/pdf/6-woman-in-buddhism/2015-e-learning/wib11.pdfM
Images from New Scientist
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11022-new-squirrel-like-rodent-discovered-in-peru/

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