There was a Buddhist belief in medieval Japan
that a woman couldn’t reach enlightenment,
she had to transform into a man or be reborn as a man first.
The Buddhist community had some lively discussions on this.
Nuns were in the discussions, which is interesting,
what did they think about all this talk of growing a pp?
For a long time, Buddhist monks had a creative writing class
and a common prompt was “how to lose female friends.”
One popular idea was that a buddha had 32 special features on his body,
one of which was a well sheathed penis,
it’s tucked deep in its sheath.
A buddha’s peenuts is not erect,
it’s lodged inside like a shy Diglett,
because a buddha has self control.
But this is a problem for women because
if buddhas have pp’s and women don’t got no pp’s,
women can’t be buddhas.
Now there was a counter to the pp argument,
but it was hard to grasp.
Anti-pp arguers claimed that the main point
of Buddhism was that nothing was permanent,
all things were fleeting, so things like peenutses
and secks and gender were temporary too.
They had no true meaning or reality.
Therefore people were neither male nor female.
Someone wanted extra credit in their philosophy class.
There were a bunch of different views on the
woman problem actually, let’s look at them.
One view was that women were enemies to men.
They were impure because they always had smelly unclean things
flowing out of their bodies. They were greedy, jealous, and lustful.
One Buddhist leader said you could approach lightning bolts and snakes carefully,
but you should never approach women.
Escape was hopeless once in a woman’s grasp.
Comparing women to snakes was common.
Of all the weaknesses,
they said the weakness for women was the worst.
Now this was pretty extreme, and wrong.
Boba tea is the worst weakness.
This snake women view was mostly preached to other monks, not the public.
Monks couldn’t do the secks, so they had to be scared into abstinence.
The road to celibacy is paved with cobblestones of fear.
Now monks had mothers, and mothers were women.
How did they deal with their mothers being evil?
Monks were actually super worried about this
and many of them did religious activities to
make up for how s--tty they thought their moms were.
Doing things for the temple
reduced the bad karma for their mothers, to help mommy on the way to salvation.
Now there was a less extreme view, a more popular one.
Women were not enemies,
just lesser humans who couldn’t reach enlightenment. Phew.
Monks preached this view to the public, especially when talking to women.
People were born women because they racked
up enough bad karma in their previous lives.
This sounds bad, but it meant you could do things to collect good karma
and be reborn as a man after you died.
The best way to do this was to copy Buddhist scriptures.
People thought words were kinda magical.
When you copied Buddhist teachings,
you transferred the teachings and a part of
you onto the page, combining them,
blending them into a smoothie of you and holy letters.
Women, especially nuns, often copied scriptures that mentioned
the problems with the female body, hoping to become a man in the next life.
That’s cool, but we can do better.
There was a view that women could transform into men
without even waiting for the next life.
Followers of this view believed that
being a man or a woman was a state of mind, not of body.
Manly qualities were things like courage, intelligence, and wisdom.
Someone who had walked far on the Buddhist path was a great manly person.
How was this better for women? Because a woman could become a man
just by having those manly qualities and by practicing faith.
A woman who understands and practices Buddha’s teachings? That’s a man.
And a man who sucks at Buddhism? That’s a woman.
Gender meant spiritual understanding.
So there was a more positive view of women:
women were mothers of buddhas.
Some people were like, wait mothers were women,
and those who reached enlightenment all came from their mothers.
So although women’s bodies were unclean,
they must have contained some pure essence that could grow into a buddha.
When a mother gave birth, she put into her bebe an inner buddha, allowing it a tiny
possibility of becoming enlightened, which the kid will probably squander.
Also, buddhas often used a human body to communicate with humans.
Since women birthed these bodies, they allowed buddhas to do their jobs helping
people reach enlightenment. So you could say that
without women there would be no enlightenment.
Since women had this pure essence within them, they’re not totally impure.
They could get rid of the impure parts through Buddhist practice
and they could become enlightened without even changing into men.
Now there were female monks at the time, nuns.
What did nuns think about all this talk of them being dirty and inferior?
There were writings from nuns who believed that women could become
enlightened without changing into men, but they made their arguments indirectly.
They ignored all those negative views. Didn’t even try to argue against them.
Instead, they wrote about famous historical women,
women who even the monks admired.
Like nuns wrote about the Empress Kōmyō 光明皇后,
who was an influential woman in the imperial court in the past.
By medieval times, she was already a legendary figure.
She spent her life spreading Buddhist teachings and was credited with founding
a bunch of famous temples.
Hard for a monk to poop on the founder of his temple.
Nuns described Kōmyō as having purity like
ice and jade, and having absolute faith.
They promoted the idea that she was a bodhisattva,
or a version of the famous bodhisattva Kannon.
The nuns were saying in their writings, “Hm…so maybe you can
be a woman and enlightened at the same time. Curious.”
Now being reborn as a woman was not that bad,
but if you gained enough bad karma, you could be reborn into the worst,
most hopeless places in the cosmos:
the 8 Buddhist hells.
Click here to learn about that.
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