Buddhist Women and Social Justice: Ideals, Challenges, and Achievements

9. Buddhism, Women, and Caste: The Case of the Newar Buddhists of the Kathmandu Valley

Chapter 9 Buddhism, Women, and Caste: The Case of the Newar Buddhists of the Kathmandu Valley DAVID N. GELLNER It is natural for modern observers and interested Western Buddhists to ask, “How did caste get into Buddhism?” It is perhaps equally natural for scholars of Buddhism, and especially for an anthropologist, to be tempted to deconstruct this question by asking more questions: What is caste? What is Buddhism? It would be easy to argue, and easier still to insinuate, that neither Buddhism nor caste has an unchanging essence across all the ages and in all the regions where it has appeared. It is tempting, in other words, for specialists to refuse to answer the question, to reject it as anachronistic, and to bury their heads in the texts and their notes. I shall resist this temptation and attempt to answer the question in the spirit in which it was put. CASTE IN BUDDHISM We can take “caste” to refer to hereditary, ranked, and endogamous groups. Castes resemble the ethnic groups of the modern world, except that they are hierarchically ranked. They normally share a language, both in the literal and the extended senses, and form a single social system. Before the twentieth century, all the societies in which 155 Buddhism spread were hierarchical to a greater or lesser extent. They may not have had as many subdivisions as South Asia, but they all had hereditary, ranked “estates” of some sort. It is well known that the monastic orders of Sri Lanka are divided on the basis of caste and that, traditionally, the lowest castes were excluded from Buddhist temples.1 The marginalization of the burakumin in Japan, an outcaste group that is considered polluted and polluting, may have had something to do with Buddhist influence. In Tibetan societies, there are hereditary castelike groups. Some Hindu polemical texts responded to Buddhist attacks on Brahmanical claims to spiritual preeminence by saying, in effect, “You, too, accept caste; you do not accept low caste people or slaves into your monasteries.” Hierarchy existed in all Buddhist countries. Did Buddhism change the way the caste system operated? Richard Gombrich describes how a very large number of the Buddha’s teachings, as recorded in the Pāli canon, represent a reworking—a sometimes satirical, but always fundamental and revolutionary reworking—of the brahmins’ religious ideas.2 This applied as much to caste as to anything else. Caste status was no guarantee of spiritual worth. It is correct that Brahmanical texts stress that true brahmin status required good character,3 but the sociological significance of this doctrine was very different from the seemingly similar Buddhist teaching. The Hindu stress on good character reflected intra-Brahmanical debate about different ways of seeking status, but it did not undermine, in their eyes, the superior entitlements of all brahmins over all non-brahmins. Thus Buddhist parts of South Asia were caste societies because all South Asian societies were caste societies; but it is possible to argue that where Buddhism was prominent this made a small but significant difference to the severity with which caste principles applied in everyday life. Despite this difference between Hinduism and Buddhism, and contrary to the picture of the Buddha that is dear to many modernist Buddhists, it is not really plausible to assert that the Buddha was interested in social reform. Perhaps he would have been interested in social reform had he been alive today, but it remains true that social work by monks or nuns, worthy though it is, is a modernist adaptation of traditional Buddhist practice. At the time of the Buddha, caste was a fact of life. There were many grades of social status, including despised outcastes. Some of these people found their way into the Saṅgha. Most of the Buddha’s followers 156 DAVID N. GELLNER were brahmins or kshatriyas. In theory, no distinctions were to be made inside the Saṅgha. But the fact that caste consciousness carried over during the Buddha’s time is evident in the responses given (in the Tittira Jataka) to the Buddha’s question, “Who should have the best quarters, the best water, the best food?” Some replied, “Monks of the brahmin caste” and others, “monks of the kshatriya caste.”4 From this, Yuvaraj Krishnan concludes that the Buddha “accepted the caste system among laypeople as a fact of life.” Furthermore, he taught that their status in the next life, as well...