Back Transdisciplinarity and the Unity of Knowledge: Beyond the Science and Religion Dialogue

Skip Navigation Links
Home
Agenda
Participants
Information
Culture
Prado
Toledo
Photos
Contact
   
Go Back
A Feminist Exegesis of Non-Self: On Classical Buddhist Understanding of Personhood and Identity
By Hsiao-Lan Hu

Buddhism and feminism appear to be two very different strains of thought. One originated in ancient Northeast India and the other gained momentum in the modern West. Traditional Buddhist discourses have rarely tended to the issue of gender except in a handful of Mahāyāna scriptures1 whose authenticity is questioned by some Theravādins, while Western feminists often too easily label Buddhism as just another patriarchal religion that is inevitably sexist and oppressive to women. More than twenty years ago, however, Rita M. Gross pointed out three similarities between Buddhism and feminism: both begin with life experiences and stress experiential understanding, both evince the will and courage to go against the grain and see beyond the conventional points of view, and both explore the ways in which habitual and conventional patterns of thinking and behaving operate to block basic well-being of people and cause great suffering.2 A fourth similarity was added some years later: both speak of liberation, albeit the definitions of liberation may seem different.3

Classical Buddhist teachings and recent feminist theories inspired by Foucault and poststructuralism further converge on the constructedness of individuals. One of the most widely known and possibly the most perplexing teachings of Buddhism is the teaching of Non-Self (Pāli: anattā; Sanskrit: anātman), which seems to categorically negate the existence of individual persons and thereby deny the efficacy or necessity of moral actions taken by individual persons. Coincidentally, one of the contemporary feminist theories that draw the most critical attention is the theory of the social constructedness of the subject with its concomitant negation of complete autonomy. Yet Buddhism, especially early Buddhism and Theravāda Buddhism, places much emphasis on self-control and individual moral responsibility, which is reflected in the Buddhist teachings regarding kamma. And contemporary feminist theorists argue the lack of autonomy does not dissolve moral agency. The consonance between these two strains of thought is more than just intellectually stimulating. They provide an exegetical framework as well as a basis of critique for one another. The Buddhist teaching of Non-Self may be easier to comprehend with the assistance of the feminist analysis of the constructedness of gender identity, which has been curiously overlooked in the traditional discourses of Buddhism, a tradition “so dedicated to noticing and reflecting on habitual patterns of conventional ego.”4 The classical Buddhist analysis with regard to the relations between person construction, attachment, identity, and dukkha (Sanskrit: duhkha; unsatisfactoriness, existential anguish, suffering), along with its emphasis on moral discipline and mental training, in return, may provide different perspectives and contribute much to contemporary feminist theories and social practices. This paper expounds the teaching of Non-Self by employing the analysis of the Five Aggregates on the one hand, and the feminist analysis of gender identity and subject formation on the other.

Five Aggregates: The Constitution of Individual “Self”

Buddhism is well known for its radical assertion of anattā, the negation (“an-”) of “attā” (Sanskrit: ātman). With the word “attā” commonly translated as “self” or “soul” in English, this core Buddhist teaching, it seems, reads “No Self” or “No Soul.” The translation of “attā” as “self” or “soul,” though not completely incorrect, is highly misleading. In the ancient Indian usage, “attā” means neither “self” in the sense of an individual person with his/her unique combination of life experiences and characteristics, nor “soul” in the sense of mental-spiritual functioning of an individual person. Anattā thus does not mean that no person exists, or that all beings exist only as bodies with no mental-spiritual dimension left after bodily death. Both nihilism (natthika-vāda or natthika-diţţhi; the view that no person exists) and annihilationism (ucchedavāda or uccheda-diţţhi; the view that a person exists only as a body and perishes completely at the breakup of the body) are rejected by the Buddha. Such views deny the validity of ethics and are called “pernicious views” in the Nikāya-s, the early Buddhist texts.5 The Buddhist teaching of anattā negates “Attā” (or, in Sanskrit, “Ātman”) only in the sense of eternal, never-changing, independently-existing innermost “Self-Essence” of all beings. In the Upanişads this is identical with Brāhman, the permanently existing Ultimate Reality (Sanskrit: sat), Pure Consciousness (Sanskrit: chit) and Bliss (Sanskrit: ananda). This eternalist view of “Self” is also called a “pernicious view,”6 and it is this peculiar definition of “Self” — “permanent, stable, eternal, not subject to change”7 — that the Buddha refutes. The Buddha’s teaching of Non-Self is frequently summarized in the Nikāya-s in these two succinct sentences: “What is impermanent is suffering. What is suffering is not attā.”8 “Self” (Ātman), by the Upanişadic definition, is eternal bliss, and any individual person, being subject to change and subject to suffering, simply does not match this definition.

Instead, Buddhism teaches that a person and his/her consciousness interdependently co-arises with the given phenomena in the world and therefore cannot be unchanging or stay uninfluenced by life experience. The twin central teachings of Buddhism, Non-Self and Interdependent Co-Arising, are the same concept stated from two different angles. In response to “the eternalist view” (sassatavāda) of “Self,” Non-Self is taught, and in response to nihilism and annihilationism, Interdependent Co-Arising is emphasized. Individual persons and their consciousness do arise and therefore are not entirely non-existent, but they exist only in relation to their bodies, to other selves, and to all non-self entities in their surroundings.9 Nicholas F. Gier and Paul Kjellberg put it this way: “You wouldn’t be the person you are if your family, friends, and acquaintances all weren’t the people they are, if you hadn’t had the experiences you’ve had, lived in the society you live in, and so on.”10 This relational existence is subject to change: “the physical bodies change; feelings, beliefs, desires, and intentions all change; consciousness is intermittent; and our selfconceptions change over time. None of the things we can point to as the self remains the same.”11 Individual persons co-arise with, and are contingent on, their surroundings, and therefore do not exist as unchanging, permanent, blissful pure consciousness that is separate from, and independent of, worldly phenomena.

While rejecting both of the extremes of nihilism and eternalism, in the early texts the Buddha seemed to be more concerned with refuting the eternalist view than the nihilist view. The eternalist “Self” was compared to a lump of foam on a river, a water bubble during rain, a mirage, a plantain trunk, and a magical illusion.12 The counter-eternalist teaching of Non-Self is further elaborated through breaking personhood down to the Five Aggregates and then stating that a person is neither identical with any one of the Five Aggregates, nor an independent spiritual entity possessing the Five Aggregates, nor containing the Five Aggregates, nor being contained by any one of the Five Aggregates.13 All of these views are called “identity views” because they are considered conducive to, and reinforcing, egocentric clinging. They lead to unsatisfactoriness or outright suffering (Pāli: dukkha; Sanskrit: duhkha).

The meaning and scope of the Five Aggregated have to be understood to see the subtleties of the teaching of Non-Self and the ways in which this teaching is highly morally demanding. In the classical Buddhist understanding, an individual person is understood in terms of the Five Aggregates: the entity we consider “self” is a psycho-physical compound of material forms (Pāli/Sanskrit: rūpa), sensations (Pāli/Sanskrit: vedanā), perceptions (Pāli: saññā; Sanskrit: samjñā), volitional constructions (Pāli: saņkhāra; Sanskrit: samskāra), and consciousness (Pāli: viññāņa; Sanskrit: vijñāņa). David J. Kalupahana expounds, “Rūpa or material form accounts for the function of identification; vedanāor feeling and saññāor perception represent the function of experience, emotive as well as cognitive; saņkhāraor disposition stands for the function of individuation; viññāņaor consciousness explains the function of continuity in experience.”14

What is noteworthy is that in the ancient Indian perspective (orthodox teaching of Brāhmanism as well as the “heterodox” teachings of Buddhism and Jainism) there are six senses, and the term rūpa refers to both of the sense organs and their respective sense-objects. Mind is treated as one of the sense organs alongside the ordinary five sense organs of eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin. Serving as the objects of these six sense organs, otherwise termed “internal sense bases,” are the six classes of “external sense bases”15: that which can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched and felt, and that which can be cognized. With mind being considered a sense organ, virtually all phenomena in the world can be considered the “external sense bases” for the mind. Virtually all phenomena in the world can be considered mind-objects since they can all be processed in one way or another by the mind. Colors, for example, are objects for the eyes, and yet the difference between two colors may be an object for the mind. Thus considered, “external sense bases” encompasses not only concrete objects with physical dimensions, but also abstract entities without physical dimensions, such as languages, philosophies, histories, social conventions, cultural norms, political institutions, and the sentiments involved in interpersonal relationships in the past, the present, or the future.16 That is to say, the Pāli/Sanskrit word rūpa is better rendered “material and socio-cultural forms” or “material and symbolic forces” than simply “material forms,” given that the word rūpa actually encompasses both the abstract and the concrete, the mental and the physical, the internal and the external, while the word “material” in quotidian English usage does not usually include mind or mind-objects.

Another one of the Five Aggregates whose complexity is not readily discernible in its English translation is saņkhāra. This term is variously translated as “mental formations,” “mental proliferations,” “dispositions,” “volitions,” or “volitional constructions.” The various translations themselves are puzzling since in English it is difficult to consider mental formations, dispositions, and volitions to be in the same category. Etymologically, the word saņkhāra means “put together,” and Pāli scholar Bhikkhu Bodhi explains, “saņkhāras are both things which put together, construct, and compound other things, and the things that are put together, constructed, and compounded.”17 On account of the references to “things that are put together, constructed, and compounded,” saņkhāra is translated as “mental formations” or “mental proliferations;” on account of the references to “things which put together, construct, and compound other things,” the same word is rendered “dispositions” or “volitions.” A person’s disposition and volition both result from the things that have been put together and affect the ways in which things are being put together. In other words, one’s dispositions and volition shape the ways in which one’s thoughts are formed, and the thoughts formed in turn mold one’s dispositions and volition.

Corresponding to and co-arising with the six senses and their respective sense-objects are six classes of sensation, six classes of perception, six classes of volitional constructions, and six classes of consciousness: eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, nose-consciousness, tongue-consciousness, body-consciousness, and mind-consciousness.18 As fire always burns on fuel, consciousness is always consciousness of some material or symbolic forms. The fire that burns on gasoline is not identical with the fire that burns on a match — they may differ in temperature and color and duration and extension, albeit they are both fire and both burning. In the same way, consciousness varies from one class of rūpa to another, from one event to another, from one round of “mental formations” to another, from one individual person to another, albeit different kinds of consciousness are all abstract mental functioning of individual persons.

It says in the Samyutta Nikāya: “When there is name-and-form (Pāli/Sanskrit: nāma-rūpa), consciousness comes to be; consciousness has name-and-form as its condition.”19 In this passage the term nāma is used to refer to the Aggregates other than rūpa and consciousness, i.e. sensations, perceptions, and volitional constructions. Sometimes, however, it seems that nāma encompasses only sensations and perceptions, for in the “Twelve Links of Interdependent Origination” volitional constructions are discussed separately from nāma-rūpa: “With ignorance as condition, volitional constructions come to be; with volitional constructions as condition, consciousness comes to be; with consciousness as condition, nāma-rūpa comes to be…”20 The discrepancy between the above two usages of nāma shows saņkhāra’s affinity with sensations and perceptions but at the same time indicates that it functions in a different way and is far more important. Like sensations and perceptions, saņkhāra is a kind of nāma. It is a kind of “internal” mental functioning that depends on the “external” sense-objects to exist. Yet saņkhāra, being constructive as well as constructed, is much more complex. In fact, among the fifty-two “mental factors” (cetasikas) enumerated in the Pāli Abhidhamma, the aggregates of sensations and perceptions each count as one mental factor, and yet the aggregate of saņkhāra is further divided into fifty mental factors, including greed, delusion, hatred, mindfulness, malleability of consciousness, compassion, appreciative joy, and so on.21 Saņkhāra can put together existing sense-objects to form new mind-objects that are prior-to-now non-existent in the socio-cultural realm, and then the newly formed mind-objects are fed to consciousness just as the existing mind-objects are. One’s consciousness, in turn, affects the ways in which s/he senses and perceives rūpa, thereby also affecting the mental formations to come. That is, besides the material and symbolic forces that one is exposed to (rūpa), one’s consciousness is also influenced by the functioning of one’s nāma, especially saņkhāra. The constructive aspect of saņkhāra accounts for individuation. It accounts for the fact that people exposed to the same rūpa do not necessarily have the same personality or consciousness.22

A person’s consciousness does not exist independently or eternally and is subject to change when new phenomena are experienced. Moreover, it is not unified or monolithic, for in response to every situation multiple consciousnesses would co-arise. Multiple mind-consciousnesses co-exist at the same time, and the outlook of one’s personality depends on which consciousness is most consistently prompted to him/her by the things and people in his/her surroundings, as well as by his/her own “mental formations” and “dispositions.” The preceding and ensuing experiences, together with the concomitant mental formations, may consistently prompt a person to choose to identify with one particular consciousness, or they may support the choice for a while and then lean toward a different choice, or they may feed into multiple possibilities at the same time and allow them to compete with each other. At any rate, it is possible that the choice changes frequently and rapidly, for consciousnesses are constantly arising with every single contact between the “external sense bases” and “internal sense bases” as well as every single “mental formation”: “Just as monkey roaming through a forest grabs hold of one branch, lets that go and grabs another, then lets that go and grabs still another, so too that which is called ‘mind’ and ‘mentality’ and ‘consciousness’ arises as one thing and ceases as another by day and by night.”23 A person may be consistently prompted with a certain consciousness and identify with it for a certain period of time, and then may choose, or be prompted by further life experiences, to identify with a different consciousness some time later.

The Buddhist theory of the Five Aggregates points to the conditionality of personhood. An individual person is, and continues to be, a product of socio-cultural conditionings and his/her life experiences, the latter being affected by his/her own dispositions/volition/mental formations. A person as such is socially constructed as well as mentally constructed. Traditional Buddhist discourses elaborate abundantly on the process of mental construction but somehow come short in explicating the sociality of existence and its implications. Human existence is always social, and to be a person is to become a person in a matrix of social forces. What one holds onto as the identity of the self does not come into existence without the material and symbolic forces that have been suggesting and reinforcing it. An identity as such is not permanent and does not stay static. It is subject to change, and it changes when new experiences arise or when new situations prompt new ways of putting together old experiences. The Buddhist teaching of Non-Self, at least in its classical sense, merely denies the idea of permanently-existing, never-changing individual self-essence that is abstractly defined (by the most privileged stratum in society) and uninfluenced by worldly phenomena or day-to-day experiences. In the next section, I will further illustrate the meaning and social implications of the Buddhist teaching of Non-Self, of seeing an individual person as a process, by looking at the constructedness of gender identity.

Seeing “Non-Self” through the Making of Gender Identity

As Gross observes, there is something curiously illogical in many Buddhists’ understanding and acceptance of the central Buddhist teaching of Non-Self: “while most Buddhist do not believe in the existence of a permanent, abiding self, their attitudes and actions nevertheless indicate that they do believe in the real existence of gender.”24 When the issue of gender is raised in Buddhist communities, people often appeal to the idea that the Buddhist Dhamma transcends gender, thereby either dismissing gender justice as a petty samsāric concern that is irrelevant to the ultimate Buddhist goal of nibbāna and “unfettered mind,”25 or defensively denying and willfully ignoring the persistent gender discrimination, gender stereotypes, and rigid assignment of gender roles in both of the voluminous traditional Buddhist texts and the day-to-day operation of Buddhist institutions.26 Karma Lekshe Tsomo also observes that in modern Buddhisms when the issue of gender inequality arises, “The most common attitude is to ignore the problem altogether, dismiss it, deny it, and trivializes it.”27 The central teaching of Non-Self, the lack of eternal, unchanging, self-existing essence, is invoked from time to time in response to various kinds of contentions and disputes, but it is rarely remembered when conventional gender roles are described, expected, and even imposed.

That is, theoretically, the Buddhist Dhamma transcends gender. In everyday life, however, it often seems it is gender that transcends the Dhamma, for the Dhamma is supposed to cover every aspect of Reality/Existence but somehow is hardly ever applied to gender. This reluctance to acknowledging the existence of gender discrimination within the Buddhist traditions, Gross rightly notes, “is a more destructive and dangerous form of opposition to gender equality than outright opposition to egalitarian reforms,”28 for it precludes the possibility of reform by making it impossible to even bring up the topic of reform.

Most Buddhists seem to be familiar with the theory of the Five Aggregates and its relation to the teaching of Non-Self: a person is impermanent and subject to change because s/he is constituted of material forms (rūpa), sensations, perceptions, volitional constructions, and consciousness. Many also seem to be familiar with the notion that there are six sense organs and mind is considered one of them. Few, however, grasp how much is encompassed within the term rūpa, especially when it comes to the sense-objects for the mind. This lack of understanding may have resulted from the common but rather misleading rendering of the term rūpa as “material forms” on the one hand, and on the other hand from the unfamiliarity with ancient Indian thought from which Buddhism sprang. Should the scope of the aggregate rūpa be properly understood, there would be no justification for excluding gender from the consideration of identity construction and the concomitant attachment to the identity constructed. After all, the aggregate rūpa does include the sense organ of the mind and the sense-objects for the mind, and what, if not sense-objects for the mind, are the social conventions and prescriptions that strongly suggest, support, impose, and reinforce gendered identities and gendered behaviors through gendered colors, toys, chores, career ambitions, postures, uses of language, etc.?

The cultural scripts about genders are certainly a form of rūpa, and the Buddhist teaching of an individual identity being constructed and subject to change is consonant with poststructuralist feminist analysis of gender formation. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman under cultural compulsion, poststructuralist feminist Judith Butler observes in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,

Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender.29

Gender is produced through repeated bodily performances of the cultural scripts that define masculinity and femininity. Since the beginning of their existence in human societies, people are systematically inculcated with, and disciplined to perform, certain behaviors and roles that are supposedly appropriate for their anatomical characteristics. The compulsory repetition of bodily performances of gender norms has a materializing effect and “congeal[s] over time,” for the gender norms repeatedly performed by the body are thereby inscribed on the body, which is an integral part of a person’s self-identity. Since gender norms are inscribed on the body and thus become part of the person, gender is not like an outfit that can be taken off at will. That is, gender is not something that can be undone or changed with just one alternative performance because it is not created once and for all with one socially-prescribed performance. Still, gender “has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality,”30 nor is it a “substance” that is necessitated by anatomical characteristics. It appears to be substantive and “natural” because the body has been compelled by social expectations and cultural conventions to perform the various gender-specific acts over and over again, and the very repetition results in the illusion of an abiding “gender core.”31

Some colors are associated with, and used on, girls, while some other colors are associated with and used on boys. It is very common, in the United States at least, for people to put baby boys in blue clothes and bassinets, and baby girls, in pink. When I was a child in Taiwan, the colors red, pink, and orange were commonly considered as “girly colors,” while the colors green and blue were called “boyish colors.”

Children learn their gendered identities through toys as well. Girls are still commonly given dolls or items of sedentary and domestic nature to play with, while boys are often encouraged to play with toy cars, trains, airplanes, tanks, guns, robots equipped with weapons, and generally items that are mobile and/or destructive. Supposedly girls do not like to move about, and supposedly they like to play house, imagining being wives and mothers and enjoying the imaginary cleaning, cooking, and taking care of other members in the family.

The assignment of household chores is frequently gendered as well, if boys are expected to do chores at all. In Taiwan and other Chinese societies, some parents expect only girls to help out with chores, while some others train their boys to perform tasks that require a little more physical strength, such as mopping the floor. In the United States, in families that do expect both boys and girls to do household chores, girls are more likely to be assigned more “domestic” chores such as tasks in the kitchen or tasks related to caring and nurturing, while boys are more likely to be expected to take on chores of higher mobility such as taking out the trash, mowing the lawn, shoveling the snow, etc.32

As an extension of the gendered assignment of household chores, jobs are frequently gendered, and boys and girls are often encouraged to envision their future careers according to cultural conventions. Some occupations are still strongly associated with the female gender, such as nurses and teachers for the very young, although the male monopoly of certain occupations, such as doctors, scientists, and politicians, is gradually breaking down.

Boys are encouraged to take up physical space, running around and sitting with their arms stretching out and legs wide open. If, in the process of using their bodies, they are a little disruptive and destructive, they are “just being boys.” Their postures are rarely corrected except when their parents grow concerned with their spinal formation and tell them not to slouch. Girls, on the other hand, are allowed a lesser range of postures and bodily movements, especially in areas where population density has been high for many centuries and space has been quite limited, such as coastal cities in China and Taiwan. They are taught “lady-like” behaviors from very early on, such as sitting with their legs together or crossed.33 The perceptions of “lady-like” postures, however, vary across cultures and generations, too. For instance, Chinese and Taiwanese girls have also been taught to be “lady-like,” but people of older generations consider it impolite, for both males and females, to sit with their legs crossed.34 More Westernized younger generations commonly take sitting with legs crossed to be “lady-like.”

“Lady-like” behavior commonly includes using soft voice and polite wording. Popular books in the field of gender communication, such as Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, while having the effect of reinforcing gender stereotypes, are indicative of the extent to which men and women have been socially conditioned to use language differently. Women have generally been socialized to be more polite by using more words and in less direct forms, while men have generally been socialized to use short, direct imperatives. This gendered expectation with respect to language is particularly salient in Japanese-speaking environment, where for each sentence there are several different forms showing different levels of respect. People of lower status have to use the form(s) showing greater respect, which means that, to be recognized as a person capable of using the Japanese language, one has to accept one’s social status in relation to one’s interlocutor. Women are generally expected to use the form(s) of the higher respect level(s), no matter who their interlocutors may be. The forms showing higher respect levels typically involves longer sentence constructions and therefore more syllables, which indirectly forces women to articulate. In many cultures, women have also been socialized to use a wider range of tones and be more dramatic with their intonations. In tonal languages the social expectation of “feminine tones” generally translates to soft and high voices. In general, a girl is expected to completely steer away from foul language, and yet a boy is “just being a boy” if he curses or makes a reference to some bodily functions that are conventionally considered “gross.” The common tolerance of boys’ being “gross” with language and activities is extended to their hygiene and appearances. Boys who are neat and clean may even be teased for being “feminine.” By contrast, girls are more likely to be expected to maintain a higher level of physical cleanness.

The cultural scripts of gender as discussed above are objects for the sense organ of mind and therefore are encompassed by the term rūpa. These rūpa as discussed above may be “put together” (saņkhāra) and become part of one’s “disposition” (saņkhāra), and, further, that which has been put together becomes the fuel for one’s mind-consciousness. Through the mind-objects in the forms of subtle hints and explicit injunctions about acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, one learns what it means to be of a certain gender and is socialized to act out a certain gender according to the norms in a certain society, such as wearing “feminine” clothes and using courteous language. If these mind-objects are consistently presented to a person, the mind-consciousness of a gendered identity would repeatedly arise and, overtime, s/he is likely to take it for granted and identify with it. Through repetition, the performance of gender norms congeals, resulting in the illusion of substance and becoming a part of the person’s identity. Cultural scripts of genders, being everywhere and repeatedly presented, shape the ways in which people behave and see themselves.

However, as mentioned above, with every situation, multiple consciousnesses may co-arise, some of which may be clashing with each other or dissonant with one’s gender identity under cultural conventions. It is possible that, upon detecting the incoherence, one would choose to identify with something different and, concomitantly, behave differently. A girl may have been socialized to accept the gendered assignment of chores in the household, but she may also have been inculcated with the modern ideology of equal rights. The common dependence on “women’s work” and the simultaneous devaluation of it, once perceived, may ferment doubt about the unequal workload in the family and even stimulate resistance to the gendered division of labor in general. A girl may have learned more dramatic intonation through imitation and on account of the social expectation and encouragement she experienced, and yet she may also have detected the occasional contempt or ridicule for the “girly” tones coming from boys and adult men. She may decide to continue using the tones that she is familiar with, or she may become more monotonal in the hope of avoiding ridicule or placing herself on equal footing with the boys around her. It is at moments like this that one can see that gender, as a part of a person’s self-identity, is socially conditioned rather than an innate precondition. It is a process rather than a substance, a becoming through a series of culturally sanctioned behaviors rather than a predetermined “natural” state of being that one is born with and that stays unaffected by life experiences.

That gender is not “natural” can be seen when one considers the cultural variations of the societal prescriptions for the ways in which genders should be performed.35 The association between a certain gender and a certain group of colors, for example, is culturally and historically variable. At earlier times in Chinese culture, the color red was associated with good fortune and was certainly used on wealthy men. My mother, however, gets intensely uncomfortable with my brother wearing red, and so do most of the Taiwanese and Chinese people of her and her parents’ generations because the color red had been associated with the female gender. In fact, once in a Buddhist temple in Philadelphia I was lectured by a Chinese woman somewhat older than my mother that I should wear more pink and red instead of black. “Wearing black makes one look like a guy, and wearing red makes one look like a girl,” she said, completely oblivious to the fact that, at that moment, I was sitting right next to a Tibetan monk who, like most Tibetans, favors the color red and wears red all the time. Among the colors that were called “girly colors” when I was little, my brother is comfortable with red and orange, but not pink. The Taiwanese men of an even younger generation, by contrast, no longer consider the color pink off-limits.

That gender is a set of conditioned acts becomes especially salient when two persons of the same biological gender in the same society can be conditioned to perceive and act out their gender in different ways due to their different economic or social classes. Some of my better-to-do female friends in Taiwan habitually buy clothes that are pleasing to their eyes but may be inconvenient for their everyday bodily motions, and they often attribute that habit of choosing beauty over functionality to the “natural” dictates of their female gender. My mother and some other women who have had to perform physical labor to make a living, by contrast, do not appreciate the kind of clothes that would limit their bodily motions or make them too self-conscious when they toil. Besides, their limited resources have accustomed them to opt for the type of clothes that allow them to function throughout the whole day. That is, they do not really pay much attention to separating work clothes from fun clothes, or sportswear from sleepwear, for they have neither the money nor the energy to buy and maintain all those different clothes for such different occasions.

Like upper-class women, lower-class women may attempt to mimic what they see in mass media, which all too often broadcast Euro-American Caucasian beauty standards, including fashions and the body type that is used to demonstrate those fashions. As a result, along with trendy attires, they may consider white skin to be more feminine and more beautiful, which is reflected in the plethora of skin-whitening cosmetic products on the market throughout East Asia. For women laborers, however, the demand of functionality and low maintenance usually outweighs the concern for the “feminine beauty” defined by the Western-dominated global market culture. After all, for women in subtropical areas who do not work indoors, Caucasian-like white skin is extremely high maintenance, if not utterly unattainable. Likewise, women laborers may conform to other societal gender expectations for females in Taiwan, such as being soft and yielding to (male) authority figures. But the reality of their working-class life has generally trained them to be tough and to tackle most tasks by themselves, including lifting heavy objects, for which most of my better-to-do female friends would predictably enlist help from men.

Neither the choice of “feminine” clothes nor the habitual recourse to men’s help is the inalterable substance of the female gender.36 Females who do not perform these acts may be judged less “feminine” by those whose material surroundings and social upbringing have systematically created a narrow way of perceiving “femininity.” For example, a Taiwanese friend of mine, who is from a wealthy, well-connected, and highly Westernized family with both parents speaking fluent English, once expressed her conviction that it was “not feminine” for women to own no pajamas and sleep in T-shirts. She did not put into consideration that, for one thing, women of poor families do not deem it worthwhile to buy clothes made especially for sleep, and for another, the use of pajamas is a Western import. Social stations affect one’s cultural exposures, which affect one’s perception and definition of genders. Gender consciousnesses, like any other kind of consciousnesses, depend on the material and socio-cultural rūpa to arise.

The Buddhist teachings of Interdependent Co-Arising and Non-Self reject the notion of a permanent “Pure Consciousness” completely detached from worldly phenomena. An individual’s ways of perceiving and conducting oneself are shaped by one’s life experiences, which are composed of and conditioned by one’s socio-cultural surroundings, and one’s saņkhāra. As such, Buddhist thinking does not, and logically cannot, support the idea that one’s “nature” is determined at birth by one’s physical characteristics. With regard to the purported inherent caste distinctions, for example, the Buddha taught that brāhmins were not born superior to all other social classes. It was by means of their definition of nobility, their propaganda of their naturally endowed characteristics, and their privileged upbringings, that they appeared to be superior. The superiority is the work of their socio-cultural becoming, not the inherent state of their being.37 Contained in the Buddha’s teaching is a call to critically reexamine the assumptions about the self-existent, unchanging qualities of social groups, especially when those qualities have been defined, prescribed, and propagated by the social group that is currently occupying the uppermost rung of the social hierarchy. The same kind of critical reexamination can and should be applied to the social grouping of genders. Gendered identity, like class identity, is conditioned, subject to change, and in lack of self-essence.

Subject Formation and Cultural Delimitation

It is noteworthy that the word rūpa, besides denoting mind and mind-objects, does refer to the material circumstances and the physical makeup of individual persons. Societal norms and cultural conventions surely provide abundant sense-objects for the mind, which is the most powerful amongst the six sense organs. Yet a person cannot relate to the world without a physical body (part of rūpa), and the matrix of socio-cultural norms and conventions (also part of rūpa) have already prescribed the proper ways of interacting with a body. They have in fact circumscribed the meanings of a body. That is, as much as a person’s contact with his/her socio-cultural world is mediated through his/her body, his/her body can play a crucial role in forming his/her consciousness and self-identity. In addition, the bodily features and functions themselves may also serve as objects for the mind, which means that, according to the analysis of the Five Aggregates, the physical makeup of a person may affect his/her personality and consciousness (or, more precisely, consciousness-es). At the same time, though, each person has developed his/her own way of putting things together (saņkhāra) and therefore the same bodily functions do not necessarily fuel the same consciousnesses (and different bodily functions do not necessarily fuel different consciousnesses). In other words, it is the co-arising and interconditionality of physical existence, social constructs, and mental constructs that accounts for an individual.

One must live in society dependent on a physical body, and one can only apprehend body and materiality through the conventions in one’s society, particularly the conventional treatments of the type of body one has. One learns through societal views and expectations how to perceive one’s body, and to like it, or hate it, or attach meanings to it, or alter the appearance of it, in the hope of measuring up to societal standards. In the framework of the Five Aggregates, the body is acknowledged as a constituent of a person, although it does not necessarily determine a person. It is because of a body that one can live and think and function in a society, and it is because of this particular body that exists in this particular socio-cultural environment in this particular time that one is conditioned to live and think and function in these particular ways.

The values and norms of a society often seem natural or normal to its subjects precisely because those values and norms have been inscribed on the bodies of the subjects. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault draws on Jeremy Bentham’s concept of panopticon and delineates the ways in which the socio-cultural norms, which vary from culture to culture and greatly depend on the dominating power, become such a seemingly integral part of a person that they are simply considered normal or even “natural.” Through a series of apparently innocent subtle arrangements concerning details in life,38 people’s minds as well as bodies are trained to act in conformity with the existing norms in society. Foucault observes that schools, through activities that have to be taken in a certain sequence and through grouping students into different grades, are clearly marking the direction of progress and hence elevating a certain set of norms. School teachers, by making students do seriated exercises repetitively according to a minutely partitioned time-table, examining their progress and ranking their performances up against one another’s, and punishing them for not moving towards the pre-designated direction in a pre-assigned pace, are serving as the disciplinarians who make the students’ bodies accustomed to the regulations imposed, make those imposed regulations appear to be normal and natural, and thereby make students voluntarily continue to be disciplined by the normalized regulations. Students’ bodies and minds are thus meticulously programmed, disciplined, and contained in a pre-drawn frame so that they are useful to the administrative power and can be used by it. Social workers, doctors and nurses, factory supervisors and company managers, and police and soldiers, are similarly using the instruments of hierarchical observations, normalizing judgments, and examinations39 to exert their disciplinary powers in different aspects of people’s lives. Individuals are incessantly watched and disciplined to conform to the norms that, once recognized as such, make further societal disciplines easy and invisible. Thus the gazes of power are internalized, “automatic docility”40 is achieved, and possibilities of rebellions and dissent are checked before they can even emerge. The network of disciplinarians, which Foucault associates with modern states, domesticates the masses and hides domination behind the pursuit of that which is normal and natural.

According to Judith Butler, however, the uniformity-creating constraints do not start with modern state, and people have been conditioned to unreflectively discipline themselves long before the emergence of what Foucault sees as modern disciplinary institutions. Rather, social living itself exerts the conditioning and disciplinary effects upon any individual born into it. Various cultural discourses and tropes have conditioned individual subjects to think, speak, and act in certain ways. Take language for example, “the subject has its own ‘existence’ implicated in a language that precedes and exceeds the subject, a language whose historicity includes a past and future that exceeds that of the subject who speaks.”41 Any individual, from the “beginning” of one’s life, or even before it, is configured by the language that carries conventionally-established concepts and collectively-recognized meanings, by the historical usages of that language, and by the socio-cultural circumstances in which that language has been used.

The concepts, meanings, usages, and socio-cultural circumstances reflected in that language are formed as a result of, in Butler’s word, sedimentation. In the same way that sediments of earth are formed because a large amount of sand is repeatedly brought over by water to the same place and allowed to accumulate and solidify, socio-cultural conventions are formed because people are acting and reacting in certain ways over and over again. A particular social convention, such as dressing baby girls in pink or allowing boys to be disruptive and aggressive, is in place because people repeat it, generation after generation, though not entirely without variation. Being able to function and be recognized as a functioning subject in any society necessarily means carrying the weight of the tradition and internalizing to a large extent those sedimentations of that society.42 By the same token, cultural contours and social institutions, as sedimentations of what people have spoken and done prior to the present moment, also precede, exceed, constitute and condition the subject.

As a means of appreciating and further unpacking Butler’s insight with regard to social sedimentations, I would like to provide some observations on the differences between the conventions of the English language and those of the Chinese language, in conjunction with the manifested differences in assumptions and behaviors in the respective social groups. To denote a time or a place in the English language, one moves from the smaller units to the larger ones. The building that houses the Religion Department of Temple University, for example, is located in 1114 West Berks Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. In this sequence, one first identifies the smallest unit, i.e. the street number “1114,” and then moves up to the next smallest unit, the “west” segment of the street, which is a part of a bigger unit, i.e. the whole “Berks Street.” One then identifies the city of Philadelphia, in which the street is located, and then the state of Pennsylvania, in which the city is located, and then finally reaches the largest unit in this sequence, the country in which the state is located. In the Chinese language (in fact, in most East Asian languages), to denote the same location one would identify the country first, and then the state, and move down to the street name, the segment of the street, and finally the street number. That is, one moves from the larger units to the smaller ones. The contrast also appears in personal names: in East Asian cultures the family name takes precedence over the individual given name, whereas in English-speaking societies the individual given name is the “first name.”

The linguistic conventions in Chinese and other East Asian cultures embed an individual person (smaller unit) in a larger social unit and encourage a certain level of self-effacement vis-à-vis that larger social unit. By contrast, the conventions of the English language suggest the importance of individuals as the fundamental unit that requires attention. Individual subjects are so important in the English-speaking environment that they form an indispensable part of the sentences, and situations are created for their names to be repeated by as many people as possible. Most streets and shops in the United States, for example, are named after individuals. In conventional Chinese usage (in fact, in the usage of most East Asian countries), by contrast, only a minority of streets and shops are named after individuals. With the exception of modern-day dictators, sycophantic politicians, and some self-absorbed individuals, Chinese people generally do not find it favorable for individual names to be repeated over and over, and the proper names bearing significance for the larger units (the whole town, the whole village, the whole clan, etc.) are preferred over the given names of individuals. The majority of streets and shops are so named that they either signal some common goals (such as “success,” “peace,” “universal love,” etc.), or describe the features of the locality (such as its historical significance, its natural attraction, or its most well-known produce), or commemorate the shop owner’s ancestry or the common origin of the people on the same street. In some less urbanized and less Westernized areas in China, people still conventionally refer to individual children and their own siblings (“smaller units”) by their positions in their respective families (“larger units”), such as “the third boy of the Yang family,” “the second one in my family,” and “my oldest sister.”

In the Chinese language the subjects, especially in the forms of pronouns, are often dropped; in the English language the subjects cannot be dropped, and the first person singular pronoun “I” even has to be capitalized. One would not be considered as being able to use the English language if one constantly “forgets” the grammatical subjects in place, and one may appear awkward, strange, or even adversarial and rude, if one always uses the subjective nouns and pronouns when speaking Chinese. To honor someone in the English language one names a thing or a person after him/her. To show respect for someone in the Chinese language, one avoids directly speaking his/her name. Most Chinese people do not name their children after their parents, contrary to the common practice of English-speaking people. Many do not use the pronoun “you” when speaking to people of higher social status. In the late imperial period, one would even have had to drop a stroke from a character if that character was also part of the name of an honorable person. Namelessness, however, does not necessarily signify high social status. It simply indicates that the individual is identified through his/her position in the larger social unit or completely absorbable to the larger social unit. Before modern times, for example, Chinese girls were generally not given individual names but were simply referred to by their family names. My grandmother on my father’s side was simply referred to as “[the one] of the family name Yao” in official documents as well as on my (paternal) family’s ancestral tablet. Honorable persons were not directly named because they were their larger social units — the emperor represented the whole state, and the patriarch represented his whole family. Individuals at the very top and the very bottom were both absorbed into their larger social units and rendered nameless. At the same time, relational terms, rather than individual names, are often used to address relatives in the Chinese language. There are at least twelve different Chinese terms for the English word “cousin.” A cousin on one’s maternal side of the family is different from a cousin on one’s paternal side, and a cousin born to a brother of one’s father is termed differently from a cousin born to a sister of one’s father. One would also need to know if the cousin is male or female, younger or older than oneself. One needs to correctly identify a cousin’s age, gender, and position in the extended family before one can correctly address him/her. And by being told to address any cousin in a particular way, a child is also learning to position oneself in relation to that cousin. Knowing the relation is far more important than knowing the individual name.

With the linguistic conventions mentioned above, it is not difficult to understand why (individual) humility is often extolled as a virtue in Chinese cultures, while (individual) pride seems to be very important part of life in the modern-day English-speaking cultures, as reflected in the frequently used expressions, “I am proud of you” or “you must be proud.” The East Asian linguistic principle of larger units enveloping and taking precedence over smaller units is also mirrored people’s communication patterns. Researchers of speech communication and business negotiation have long described East Asian communication pattern as “high-context,” “collectivist,” characterized by the interdependent view of the self, and oriented toward social relationships and nebulous general atmosphere. American business negotiation, by comparison, is “low-context,” “individualistic,” characterized by the independent view of the self, and focusing on specific personal goals.43 Language constitutes the persons who use it in the sense that it suggests and promotes a certain way of thinking of the self and relating to each other as well as to the larger society.

In Buddhist terms, as the rūpa for the mind, socio-cultural conventions supply the raw materials from which the consciousnesses of the individuals embedded in those conventions are made. Different people may “put together” (saņkhāra) the rūpa in different ways and thus may have different dispositions and may further choose to continue putting things together in those ways. That is, the rūpa do not determine the individual consciousnesses and socio-cultural conventions do not determine the ways in which people think and perceive their environment and relate to each other. Yet the rūpa does limit the possibilities of the ways in which individual consciousnesses take shape. With the raw material of iron, one may make a chair or a weapon, but the possibility of making ceramics is precluded. Thus Butler contends, “The one who acts…acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints from the outset.”44 In order to be understood as a speaker of a certain language, not only does one have to follow the grammatical rules of that language, but one has to conform to the cultural assumptions and values carried in the customary usages of that language. In the same way, one has to incorporate the conventions and norms in his/her society and manifest them in his/her actions in order to be recognized as a part of that society, to be considered culturally competent. To survive in a certain culture, one has to be socialized with, and constrained by, that which the culture takes for granted and renders normal, which also means that one is never really completely autonomous but has to operate within the parameters of cultural norms. One’s speeches are citations of what has been conventionally said, and one’s actions are performances of what has been conventionally done in the socio-cultural milieu.

Recent feminist analyses provide a more nuanced language with which the classical Buddhist teachings of Non-Self and Five Aggregates can be clearly expounded. A person and a person’s identity are constituted through the surrounding material and symbolic forms to which s/he is repeatedly exposed, including gender norms. Likened to food in many early Buddhist texts, the material and socio-cultural reality is not “something ‘out there,’ cleanly and neatly separable from our observing consciousness. Rather it is in us, of us,” shaping and limiting our existence.45 The ways in which one thinks, speaks and acts are, and always will be, conditioned by the material and socio-cultural circumstances, and in this regard one does not have an eternal, changeless “Self” that is above, or operating independently of, the matrix of rūpa in which one is embedded. Both personhood and identity are processes and are in continuous construction and reconstruction.



Works Cited

Primary Sources

Dialogues of the Buddha, Vols. 2 and 3, translated from the Pāli of the Dīgha Nikāya by Thomas William Rhys Davids and Caroline Augusta Foley Rhys Davids. London: Pāli Text Society, 1956-1966.

The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Dīgha Nikāya, translated from the Pāli by Maurice Walshe. Boston, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 1995.
Further Dialogues of the Buddha, translated from the Pāli of the Majjhima Nikāya by Lord Chalmers. London: Pāli Text Society, 1956-1966.

The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya, 2nd edition, translated by Bhikkhu Ñāņamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 2001.

The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya, translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 2002.

A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma: Pāli Text, Translation and Explanatory Guide of the Abhidhammattha Sangaha of Ācariya Anuruddha, 1st BPS Pariyatti edition, Pāli text originally edited and translated by Mahāthera Nārada, translation revised by Bhikkhu Bodhi, introduction and explanatory guide by U Rewata Dhamma and Bhikkhu Bodhi, Abhidhamma tables by U Sīlānanda. Onalaska, Washington: Pariyatti Press, 2000.

Secondary Sources

Adair, Wendi L., Tetsushi Okumura, and Jeanne M. Brett. “Negotiation Behavior When Cultures Collide: The United States and Japan.” Journal of Applied Psychology 86.3 (June 2001): 371-385.

Alcoff, Linda Martín. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” In Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity, edited by Judith Roof and Robyn Wregman, pp. 97-119. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Arunachalam, Vairam, James A. Wall, Jr., and Chris Chan. “Hong Kong Versus U.S. Negotiations: Effects of Culture, Alternatives, Outcome Scales, and Mediation.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 28.14 (1998): 1219-1244.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

___. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Daly, Herman E., and John B. Cobb, Jr. For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1989.

Duncan, Simon, and B. Pfau-Effinger, eds. Gender, Economy and Culture in the European Union. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Eisenstein, Zillah R. “Developing a Theory of Capitalist Patriarchy and Socialist Feminism.” In Capitalist Patriarchy: The Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah R. Eisenstein, pp. 5-40. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1979.

Faure, Bernard. The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Forsberg, Gunnel. “The Difference That Space Makes: A Way to Describe the Construction of Local and Regional Gender Contracts.” Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift-Norwegian Journal of Geography 55: 161-165.

Foucault, Michél. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, 2nd edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Gier, Nicholas F., and Paul Kjellberg. “Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will: Pali and Mahayanist Responses.” In Freedom and Determinism, edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and David Shier, pp. 277-304. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2004.

Gross, Rita M. “Buddhism and Feminism: Toward Their Mutual Transformation.” Eastern Buddhist 19, Nos. 1 and 2 (Spring 1986): 44-58 and 62-74.

___. Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.

___. “The Dharma of Gender.” Contemporary Buddhism 5.1 (May 2004): 3-13.

Hall, Edward Twitchell. Beyond Culture. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1976.

Harvey, Peter. “The Mind-Body Relationship in Pali Buddhism: A Philosophical Investigation.” Asian Philosophy 3.1 (March 1993): 29-41.

Hofstede, Geert, and Michael Harris Bond. “The Confucius Connection: From Cultural Roots to Economic Growth.” Organizational Dynamics 16.4 (Spring 1988): 5-21.

Holmes, Prue. “Problematising Intercultural Communication Competence in the Pluricultural Classroom: Chinese Students in a New Zealand University.” Language and Intercultural Communication 6.1 (2006): 18-34.

Kalupahana, David J. The Principles of Buddhist Psychology. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Kumar, Rajesh. “Communicative Conflict in Intercultural Negotiations: The Case of American and Japanese Business Negotiations.” International Negotiation 4.1 (1999): 63-78.

Lee, Kam-hon, Guang Yang, and John L. Graham. “Tension and Trust in International Business Negotiations: American Executives Negotiating with Chinese Executives.” Journal of International Business Studies 37 (2006): 623-641.

Levering, Miriam L. “The Dragon Girl and the Abbess of Mo-Shan: Gender and Status in the Ch’an Buddhist Tradition.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 5. 1 (1982): 19-35.

Macy, Joanna. Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1991.

Marcoux, Jean-Sébastien. “Body Exchanges: Material Culture, Gender and Stereotypes in the Making.” Home Cultures 1.1 (2004): 51-60.

Markus, Hazel Rose, and Shinobu Kitayama. “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion and Motivation.” Psychological Review 98.2 (1991): 224-253.

McClintock, Sara. “Gendered Bodies of Illusion: Finding a Somatic Method in the Ontic Madness of Emptiness.” In Buddhist Theology: Critical Reflections by Contemporary Buddhist Scholars, edited by Roger R. Jackson and John J. Makransky, pp. 261-274. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2000.

Mead, Margaret. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: Morrow, 1935.

Mrozik, Susanne. “Materialization of Virtue: Buddhist Discourses on Bodies.” In Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, edited by Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St. Ville, pp. 15-47. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

Peach, Lucinda Joy. “Social Responsibility, Sex Change, and Salvation: Gender Justice in the Lotus Sūtra.” Philosophy East and West 52.1 (January 2002): 50-74.

Saddhatissa, Hammalawa. Buddhist Ethics. Boston, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 1997.

Schuster, Nancy. “Changing the Female Body: Wise Women and the Bodhisattva Career in Some Mahāratnakūtasūtras.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 4.1 (1981): 24-69.

Sponberg, Alan. “Attitudes Toward Women and the Feminine in Early Buddhism.” In Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender, edited by José Ignacio Cabezón, pp. 3-36. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1992.

Stoller, Robert. Presentations of Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Tsomo, Karma Lekshe. “Family, Monastery, and Gender Justice: Reenvisioning Buddhist Institutions.” In Buddhist Women and Social Justice: Ideals, Challenges, and Achievements, edited by Karma Lekshe Tsomo, pp. 1-19. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2004.

Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality.” In The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophers, edited by Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young, pp. 51-70. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989.



Endnotes

1 For examples, see Bernard Faure in The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 119-42; Lucinda Joy Peach, “Social Responsibility, Sex Change, and Salvation: Gender Justice in the Lotus Sūtra,” Philosophy East and West 52.1 (January 2002): 50-74; Miriam L. Levering, “The Dragon Girl and the Abbess of Mo-Shan: Gender and Status in the Ch’an Buddhist Tradition,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 5.1 (1982): 19-35; and Nancy Schuster, “Changing the Female Body: Wise Women and the Bodhisattva Career in Some Mahāratnakūtasūtras,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 4.1 (1981): 24-69. Also see Rita M. Gross’ discussion of the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa Sūtra in “The Dharma of Gender,” Contemporary Buddhism 5.1 (May 2004): 5-7.

2 Rita M. Gross, “Buddhism and Feminism: Toward Their Mutual Transformation, Part I,” Eastern Buddhist 19.1 (Spring 1986): 47-49; Rita M. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 157.

3 Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy, pp. 130-132.

4 Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy, pp. 128 and 158; “Buddhism and Feminism,” 49-50; “The Dharma of Gender,” 6.

5 For examples, see Samyutta Nikāya III.99, 109 (Khandhasamyutta) and III.206-207 (Diţţhisamyutta); Dīgha Nikāya i.55-57 (Sāmaññaphala Sutta). See also Majjhima Nikāya i.402 (Apaņņaka Sutta) and i.515-518 (Sandaka Sutta).

6 Samyutta Nikāya III.99 and 182-183 (Khandhasamyutta), 204-205 (Diţţhisamyutta). See also Majjhima Nikāya i.130-131 (Alagaddūpama Sutta) and i.256-257 (Mahātaņhāsankhaya Sutta).

7 Samyutta Nikāya III.204-205 (Diţţhisamyutta).

8 For examples, see Samyutta Nikāya III.22 and 45 (Khandhasamyutta).

9 See Peter Harvey, “The Mind-Body Relationship in Pali Buddhism: A Philosophical Investigation,” Asian Philosophy 3.1 (March 1993): 31. Also see Nicholas F. Gier and Paul Kjellberg, “Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will: Pali and Mahayanist Responses,” in Freedom and Determinism, edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and David Shier (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2004), pp. 288-9.

10 Gier and Kjellberg, “Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will,” p. 291.

11 Ibid.

12 Samyutta Nikāya III.140-143 (Khandhasamyutta).

13 For examples, see Samyutta Nikāya III.3-5, 16-18, 20-21, 46, 96-99, 102 (Khandhasamyutta); and III.196 (Rādhasamyutta).

14 David J. Kalupahana, The Principles of Buddhist Psychology (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 20-21.

15 Samyutta Nikāya IV.7-15 (Salāyatanasamyutta), and V.426 (Saccasamyutta). The words “external” and “internal” here obviously do not indicate absolute demarcation, for they are expediently used only to explain the function of senses, which only occur when the “external sense bases” and the “internal sense bases” are in contact or, in Gier and Kjellberg’s words, when “the inner flows into the outer and the outer flows into the inner.” See Gier and Kjellberg, “Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will,” p. 282.

16 In the Pāli Abhidhamma, six kinds of objects are considered mental objects: sensitive matter, subtle matter, consciousness, mental factors, Nibbāna, and concepts. While the consciousnesses of the other five sense organs pertain only to the present, the mind-consciousness can cognize an object of the past, the present, or the future. See A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma: Pāli Text, Translation and Explanatory Guide of the Abhidhammattha Sangaha of Ācariya Anuruddha, 1st BPS Pariyatti edition, Pāli text originally edited and translated by Mahāthera Nārada, translation revised by Bhikkhu Bodhi, introduction and explanatory guide by U Rewata Dhamma and Bhikkhu Bodhi, Abhidhamma tables by U Sīlānanda (Onalaska, Washington: Pariyatti Press, 2000), pp. 135-7.

17 Bhikkhu Bodhi, “General Introduction,” in The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya, translated from the Pāli by Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 2000), p. 45.

18 For examples, see Samyutta Nikāya III.60-61, 63-64, 102-103 (Khandhasamyutta).

19 Samyutta Nikāya III.104 (Khandhasamyutta).

20 For examples, see Samyutta Nikāya II.28, 70, 78, and 95 (Nidānasamyutta). Bhikkhu Bodhi explains, “only when consciousness is present can a compound of material elements function as a sentient body and the mental concomitants participate in cognition.” Bhikkhu Bodhi, “General Introduction,” in The Connected Discourses of the Buddha, p. 48. Alternatively, nāma is understood by some to include consciousness as well. For example, Therāvadin scholar Hammalawa Saddhatissa asserts, “nāma-rūpa should be understood as the particularity or determinate character of individual things” and can be used as a synonym for individual beings. Hammalawa Saddhatissa, Buddhist Ethics (Boston, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 1997), pp. 5-6. In the early Upanişads, the term nāma-rūpa is used to refer to the things of common experiences, as opposed to the Absolute Reality of Brāhman.

21 A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma, p. 26. For a list of the fifty-two mental factors, see ibid., p. 79.

22 It is doubtful that any two persons are ever exposed to the exact same rūpa. Two siblings growing up in the same family, for example, are not necessarily treated in the same way by their parents, and they certainly do not treat each other in the same way they are treated by each other. This goes beyond the scope of this paper.

23 Samyutta Nikāya II.95 (Nidānasamyutta).

24 Gross, “The Dharma of Gender,” 4.

25 Gross, “The Dharma of Gender,” 3.

26 Ibid., 7. It is not uncommon for Buddhist communities to divide needed labor and volunteer work along gender lines and, in effect, impose and reinforce stereotypical gender attributes. Alan Sponberg finds that the “soteriological inclusiveness” in early Buddhism is compounded with “institutional androcentrism” and “ascetic misogyny.” Alan Sponberg, “Attitudes Toward Women and the Feminine in Early Buddhism,” in Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender, edited by José Ignacio Cabezón (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 3-36. Susanne Mrozik also notes that in the South Asian Buddhist traditions virtues are still strongly associated with the male body, despite the talk about the “ultimate” irrelevance of bodily distinctions. Susanne Mrozik, “Materialization of Virtue: Buddhist Discourses on Bodies,” in Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler, edited by Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St. Ville (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 34-5.

27 Tsomo, “Family, Monastery, and Gender Justice: Reenvisioning Buddhist Institutions,” in Buddhist Women and Social Justice: Ideals, Challenges, and Achievements, edited by Karma Lekshe Tsomo (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 9-10.

28 Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy, p. 117; “The Dharma of Gender,” 11. Similar concerns are shown by Mrozik in “Materialization of Virtue,” p. 35; Tsomo in “Family, Monastery, and Gender Justice,” p. 2; Sara McClintock in “Gendered Bodies of Illusion: Finding a Somatic Method in the Ontic Madness of Emptiness,” in Buddhist Theology: Critical Reflections by Contemporary Buddhist Scholars, edited by Roger R. Jackson and John J. Makransky (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2000), p. 261; and Faure, The Power of Denial, pp. 119-42.

29 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 43-4.

30 Ibid., p. 173.

31 The idea “gender core” was discussed by Robert Stoller in Presentations of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 11-4, and was referenced by Butler in Gender Trouble, p. 32.

32 The gendered assignment of household chores not only suggests the division of genders and reinforces gender roles, but also affords the male gender more physical mobility and financial resources since childhood: boys can earn some pocket money by mowing the lawn or shoveling the snow for their neighbors, but no one would really hire girls in the neighborhood to do the dishes. Even when girls and women are hired as maids for household maintenance, their contributions are commonly deemed less valuable and, as a result, they may work longer hours and still earn less money. “A sexual division of labor,” Zillah Eisenstein observes, “...divides men and women into their respective hierarchical sex roles and structures their related duties in the family domain and within the economy.” Zillah Eisenstein, “Developing a Theory of Capitalist Patriarchy and Socialist Feminism,” in Capitalist Patriarchy: The Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah R. Eisenstein (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1979), p. 27.

33 Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophers, edited by Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 53-6.

34 In fact, one of the unwritten but much reinforced internal rules of the Taiwan-based International Tzu-Chi (Compassionate Relief) Foundation is that no volunteer, male or female, may sit with their legs crossed if they are wearing the Tzu-Chi uniform. That unwritten rule was laid down by Master Chengyen herself.

35 In as early as 1935, Margaret Mead’s anthropological work finds that the temperaments between and among sexes to be malleable and culturally variable. See Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New York: Morrow, 1935). Recent European studies show that, even in a comparatively homogeneous part of the world as Europe, gender constructions and gender relations vary from locality to locality, intertwining with the local community’s economy, politics, religion, culture, and even space. See, for example, Gunnel Forsberg, “The Difference That Space Makes: A Way to Describe the Construction of Local and Regional Gender Contracts,” Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift-Norwegian Journal of Geography Vol. 55: 161-5; Simon Duncan and B. Pfau-Effinger, eds, Gender, Economy and Culture in the European Union (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

36 In a ethnographical study on moving in Montréal that deliberately leaves out the factor of social class, Jean-Sébastien Marcoux finds that handling heavy objects is often done by men in a paternalistic manner and so in effect becomes a privilege of men and boys, while most of the work relegated to women, such as sorting, packing, and cleaning, is unappreciated. He also finds that this gendered division of tasks is developed and reinforced relationally — while women tend to either voluntarily stay away from, or be intimidated out of, physical tasks in the presence of men, they, especially younger ones, do not hesitate to handle heavy objects in the absence of men. Jean-Sébastien Marcoux, “Body Exchanges: Material Culture, Gender and Stereotypes in the Making,” Home Cultures Vol. 1, Issue 1 (2004): 51-60.

37 See Majjhima Nikāya i.284 (Cūla-Assapura Sutta), ii.85-6 (Madhurā Sutta), ii.128-30 (Kaņņakatthala Sutta), ii.148-153 (Assalāyana Sutta), and ii.178 (Esukāri Sutta).

38 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, 2nd edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 139.

39 Foucault, “The Means of Correct Training,” in Discipline and Punish, pp. 170-194.

40 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 169.

41 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p. 28.

42 Coincidentally, in explaining the “grammar” of the market, Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr. also make a similar reference to language: “Individuals are free to try to communicate in whatever ways they wish. But to succeed they have to conform to certain community conventions. The result is not a Tower of Babel, but an amazingly well-ordered structure, as is evident in the grammar of any language. No one designed a language, not even the French Academy. Yet language has an order and logic that would appear to have been the product of rational planning.” See Daly and Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 44.

43 Rajesh Kumar, “Communicative Conflict in Intercultural Negotiations: The Case of American and Japanese Business Negotiations,” International Negotiation 4.1 (1999): 63-78; Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98.2 (1991): 224-253; Edward Twitchell Hall, Beyond Culture (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1976). “Americans tend to reduce a complex negotiation problem into its several parts or issues, then discuss one at a time, settling each before moving on to the next. … Alternatively, the normative Chinese approach is to discuss all issues at once without apparent focus or order.” Kam-hon Lee, Guang Yang, and John L. Graham, “Tension and Trust in International Business Negotiations: American Executives Negotiating with Chinese Executives,” Journal of International Business Studies 37 (2006): 626. See also Prue Holmes, “Problematising Intercultural Communication Competence in the Pluricultural Classroom: Chinese Students in a New Zealand University,” Language and Intercultural Communication 6.1 (2006): 18-34; Wendi L. Adair, Tetsushi Okumura, and Jeanne M. Brett, “Negotiation Behavior When Cultures Collide: The United States and Japan,” Journal of Applied Psychology 86.3 (June 2001): 371-385; Vairam Arunachalam, James A. Wall, Jr., and Chris Chan, “Hong Kong Versus U.S. Negotiations: Effects of Culture, Alternatives, Outcome Scales, and Mediation,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 28.14 (1998): 1219-1244; Geert Hofstede and Michael Harris Bond, “The Confucius Connection: From Cultural Roots to Economic Growth,” Organizational Dynamics 16.4 (Spring 1988): 5-21. Literature abounds in the correlation between cultural values and communication patterns, but few researchers have specifically link cultural values to linguistic principles.

44 Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 16. Likewise, feminist scholar Linda Martín Alcoff likewise remarks, “the options available to us are socially constructed, and the practices we engage in cannot be understood as simply the results of autonomous individual choice.” Linda Martín Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” in Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity, edited by Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 101.

45 Joanna Macy, Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 58.



Published 2008.05.22
 

1616 Walnut Street, Suite 1112, Philadelphia, PA 19103 USA  |  Voice: + 1 484.592.0304 Fax: +1 484.592.0313   |   Email  |  Privacy Policy