[Buddha-l] Re: Contemporary issues of monastic Buddhism.

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sun, 2005-07-10 at 17:16 +0700, C S wrote:

> I wonder how gender issues were handled within the Sangha in the
> Buddha's time.

A good place to begin your research on this topic is a collection of
essays edited by José Ignacio Cabezón, entitled <cite>Buddhism,
Sexuality and Gender</cite> (SUNY Press, 1992). Cabezón also wrote the
introduction to a collection of essays entitled <cite>Religion,
Homosexuality and Literature,</cite> also published in 1992. I don't
have either of these books in hand, but I seem to recall that Leonard
Zwilling contributed the the work on Buddhism and gender. Zwilling has
done work on the semantics of various terms used in canonical Buddhist
texts. If you look up several key terms in a modern dictionary, they are
usually rendered as "eunuch" or "hermaphrodite." Zwilling argues that
more careful exploration of how the terms are used suggest that they may
in fact refer to what some people today call homosexuals.

Just this past summer the folks at the summer seminar in Buddhism
sponsored by University of New Mexico were treated to a lecture by a
Buddhist nun (a Californian-born Caucasian in Tibetan robes) who said
that homosexuality was forbidden by the Buddha because it is
"objectively" unwholesome and harmful both to the homosexual and to
society at large. It is always fascinating to watch the reactions of
students who are obviously predisposed to like Buddhism because they
think it is "cool" when they hear a Buddhist authority, especially one
born and educated at a definitely "cool" place like California, saying
the sorts of things one might expect to hear from some decidedly
"uncool" source such as Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell. The tendency is
for most students to lose their cool.

-- 
Richard Hayes