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Blessings of the bhikkhuni

Dhammananda has been in the Thai Buddhist monkhood for 12 years - a bhikkhuni, as the ordained women are known, in a country where Buddhism remains a male bastion. The Lord Buddha endorsed the monastic ordination of women, but Thailand's Sangha Council will accept no female order.

Nevertheless, over the years, Dhammananda - through her religious activities and writings - has inspired quite a few women to devote themselves to the lifestyle. She firmly believes they can share in nirvana. There are currently about 35 bhikkhunis in the country.

"It's a small number but we're spreading out - we have bhikkhunis in 10 provinces now," says Dhammananda, who's based at the Songdhammakalyani Monastery in Nakhon Pathom. She divides her time between her religious commitments and writing a book about the history of bhikkhunis in Thailand and another about the process of being ordained.

"I need to go back to Sri Lanka to get more information," she tells The Nation.
Dhammananda entered the world of the bhikkhunis after presenting a paper on their future prospects at a 1983 Harvard University conference on women, religion and social change. She was preparing for her master's degree at the time.

"That conference marked a turning point in my life. I realised that I needed to be more than an academic to bring about change. So I became an activist and started a newsletter, which helped me connect with bhikkhunis. I had no idea that I'd be ordained one day as a monk. Now, since we're sprouting like mushrooms everywhere, it dawned upon me that I have to write our own history."

Earlier this year 78 bhikkhunis and samaneree - female Buddhist novices - assembled at the temple, she notes. "So I think we need to bring out a book like this, not just for bhikkhunis in Thailand, but for all bhikkhunis since the Buddha's time."

Dhammananda acknowledges that bhikkhunis have had a habit of losing their way on the Buddhist path and then returning. She wore the robes of a novice for two years before being ordained as a monk, in a ceremony presided over by five male and five female monks. It took place not in Thailand but Sri Lanka, since there weren't enough female monks here to perform the rituals.

Entering the second cycle of her monkhood, Dhammananda reckons change is coming slowly to the female order. "When I step out of my temple, people watch my every move. More and more women believe it's all right to be ordained. They go to Sri Lanka for ordination the same way I did, and come back to establish themselves in their temples in the provinces."

The path to Buddhahood is particularly difficult for women but possible nevertheless, she affirms. Like the monks of Theravada Buddhism in general, Dhammananda rises early to pray and meditate before going on her morning alms rounds. Twelve years ago two monks followed her to collect all of the people's offerings as she made her rounds.
These days she's followed by a carriage to transport the huge amount of offerings from devotees.

"If you understand the Buddhist teachings, it's not hard to be a bhikkhuni," she says. "I'm just doing my job as a bhikkhuni.
People are overjoyed to see me during my morning rounds. The amount of food we receive is unimaginable, and more and more. I feed 40 people on Sundays with the offerings received."

Dhammananda finds time to visit remote villages, run social activities, conduct sermons and give lectures at home and abroad.

She's involved in a project to grow trees in Koh Yor in Songkhla at the moment, while at the same time teaching a group of students from Norway at her temple. While her busy schedule serves to illustrate her devotion, she's often encountered strange reactions. Unlike her male counterparts, Dhammananda is not allowed to change the title on her ID card from Mrs to Bhikkhuni.

"It's funny when you look at my ID card bearing my image with a shaven head and the title Mrs, when I'm a monk! The ID card still goes by 'Mrs so and so'.
The officials at my district office told me they need a computer code to change my title. 'And how do you get the code?' 'You have to go to a particular department to get permission, then permission from the Sangha Council.' And the Sangha said, 'We do not yet accept the female order.'"

Those who question her religious path are mostly senior Buddhist monks with "high positions", she says.

"This is a part of our culture that hasn't been questioned for a long time. But we shouldn't be unhappy about it. Otherwise it becomes negative energy working against us. Buddha talks about change. This also has to change.

You should not be fighting against the structure unhappily. Because the structure is created by us, by people, we should come around and try to get the right understanding across while confirming to them that this lifestyle is good for you, your daughter, mother and wife. The door will open slowly. Nothing happens overnight."

Dhammananda's message for those who don't understand the world of bhikkhunis is this: "You need to tell them that you're happy. Once the message gets across, people will see that this lifestyle is good for women. Only a few women can walk this path, but it's open and possible because the Buddha gave us the opportunity. You feel so proud and happy to be able to carry out the heritage."

- The Nation

The Taboo of Enlightenment

Do we really believe we can awaken? Stephan Bodian talks with popular lay teacher Adyashanti.

How did this solitary investigation finally bear fruit? It was actually quite simple. One morning I sat down to meditate, and I heard a bird call outside the window. From my gut, I felt a question arise that I had never heard before: Who hears this sound? Immediately the whole world turned inside out and upside down, and I was the bird and the sound and the hearing of the sound, the cushion, the room, everything. It’s not that I as a separate self merged with everything. It was just a pure seeing that everything is one, and that I am that. Unlike other kenshos, this one unfolded with no emotion whatsoever.

Then, in the middle of the experience, something—or rather, nothing—woke up out of the oneness. I knew that I was everything in manifestation, however subtle or dense, and yet I was also total emptiness, empty of even the experience of emptiness, and suddenly everything was seen to be a dream. There was a deeply felt kinesthetic sense of being everything and at the same time nothing. I knew with my whole being that who I really was wasn’t even the oneness, it was the emptiness prior to the oneness, forever awake to itself. This knowing has never changed or faded in any way.

This "knowing" you talk about is traditionally called enlightenment. As you know, enlightenment has been both idealized and trivialized in the West. How would you define it? Enlightenment is awakening from the dream of being a separate me to being the universal reality. It’s not an experience or a perception that occurs to a separate person as the result of spiritual practice or cultivated awareness. It doesn’t come and go, and you don’t need to do anything to maintain it. It’s not about being centered or blissful or peaceful or any other experience. In fact, enlightenment is a permanent nonexperience that happens to nobody. The separate person is seen through, and you realize that only the supreme, universal reality exists, and that you are that.

The joke is that you are now and have always been what you are seeking. Everybody is already the supreme reality, Buddha-nature, or Christ consciousness, except that most of us are asleep to this fact.

Full article.

Whose Buddhism is Truest?

No one’s—and everyone’s, it turns out.
Long-lost scrolls shed some surprising light.

Linda Heuman

Two thousand years ago, Buddhist monks rolled up sutras written on birch bark, stuffed them into earthen pots, and buried them in a desert. We don’t know why. They might have been disposing of sacred trash. Maybe they were consecrating a stupa. If they meant to leave a gift for future members of the Buddhist community—a wisdom time capsule, so to speak—they succeeded; and they could never have imagined how great that gift would turn out to be.

Fragments of those manuscripts, recently surfaced, are today stoking a revolution in scholars’ understanding of early Buddhist history, shattering false premises that have shaped Buddhism’s development for millennia and undermining the historical bases for Buddhist sectarianism. As the implications of these findings ripple out from academia into the Buddhist community, they may well blow away outdated, parochial barriers between traditions and help bring Buddhism into line with the pluralistic climate of our times.

Full article.

The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism

by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Many Westerners, when new to Buddhism, are struck by the uncanny familiarity of what seem to be its central concepts: interconnectedness, wholeness, ego-transcendence. But what they may not realize is that the concepts sound familiar because they are familiar. To a large extent, they come not from the Buddha's teachings but from the Dharma gate of Western psychology, through which the Buddha's words have been filtered. They draw less from the root sources of the Dharma than from their own hidden roots in Western culture: the thought of the German Romantics.

[...]

However, when we compare these expectations with the original principles of the Dharma, we find radical differences. The contrast between them is especially strong around the three most central issues of spiritual life: What is the essence of religious experience? What is the basic illness that religious experience can cure? And what does it mean to be cured?

The nature of religious experience. For humanistic psychology, as for the Romantics, religious experience is a direct feeling, rather than the discovery of objective truths. The essential feeling is a oneness overcoming all inner and outer divisions. These experiences come in two sorts: peak experiences, in which the sense of oneness breaks through divisions and dualities; and plateau experiences, where — through training — the sense of oneness creates a healthy sense of self, informing all of one's activities in everyday life.

However, the Dharma as expounded in its earliest records places training in oneness and a healthy sense of self prior to the most dramatic religious experiences. A healthy sense of self is fostered through training in generosity and virtue. A sense of oneness — peak or plateau — is attained in mundane levels of concentration (jhana) that constitute the path, rather than the goal of practice. The ultimate religious experience, Awakening, is something else entirely. It is described, not in terms of feeling, but of knowledge: skillful mastery of the principles of causality underlying actions and their results, followed by direct knowledge of the dimension beyond causality where all suffering stops.

The basic spiritual illness. Romantic/humanistic psychology states that the root of suffering is a sense of divided self, which creates not only inner boundaries — between reason and emotion, body and mind, ego and shadow — but also outer ones, separating us from other people and from nature and the cosmos as a whole. The Dharma, however, teaches that the essence of suffering is clinging, and that the most basic form of clinging is self-identification, regardless of whether one's sense of self is finite or infinite, fluid or static, unitary or not.

The successful spiritual cure. Romantic/humanistic psychology maintains that a total, final cure is unattainable. Instead, the cure is an ongoing process of personal integration. The enlightened person is marked by an enlarged, fluid sense of self, unencumbered by moral rigidity. Guided primarily by what feels right in the context of interconnectedness, one negotiates with ease — like a dancer — the roles and rhythms of life. Having learned the creative answer to the question, "What is my true identity?", one is freed from the need for certainties about any of life's other mysteries.

The Dharma, however, teaches that full Awakening achieves a total cure, opening to the unconditioned beyond time and space, at which point the task is done. The awakened person then follows a path "that can't be traced," but is incapable of transgressing the basic principles of morality. Such a person realizes that the question, "What is my true identity?" was ill-conceived, and knows from direct experience the total release from time and space that will happen at death.

When these two traditions are compared point-by-point, it's obvious that — from the perspective of early Buddhism — Romantic/humanistic psychology gives only a partial and limited view of the potentials of spiritual practice. This means that Buddhist Romanticism, in translating the Dharma into Romantic principles, gives only a partial and limited view of what Buddhism has to offer.

Full essay.

A Western woman thrust a brochure into my hand outside Siam Paragon yesterday. It turned out to be advertising a "thudong" walk (on rose petals) by 1500 Dhammakaya monks and novices from their temple in Pathum Thani to Wat Paknam, ending on April 6 with the presentation of a 1-ton gold statue. The walk has been named "The Light of Peace."

Already, a senator is complaining that it may violate monastic ethics and has asked the Office of National Buddhism to rule on whether it disrespects Buddhism. But the ONB says it is proper, "and the promotion of the temple's reputation is considered an added benefit."