Ayya Yeshe: "What Made Me a Feminist"
In speaking about how to respond as a Buddhist to the ongoing conflict in Myanmar, Ayya Yeshe opened up during our recent podcast discussion about her own lessons upon the spiritual path. In the following excerpt, she describes the conditions that led her to becoming a feminist, as well as a socially engaged Buddhist practitioner.
“All of the sexual misconduct, sexual harassment of women in the Dharma, has just really made me, turned me into a feminist!”
“Honestly, I didn't start out as a feminist. But I was constantly treated like a second-class citizen [as a Buddhist nun]; I was more or less told to feel ashamed because I was a woman and that it was my bad karma to be a woman! I felt oppressed and depressed. It took me a while to see the invisible glass ceiling, like when you see males are continuously treated with respect and given access to resources. The Tibetan lamas would sit there eating food people had offered, and the Western monastics, who were running the Dharma center, didn't receive anything. And they had to pay rent and work in lay jobs to stay in the center, even though they were the ones really doing most of the work to run the center. It made me question why.
Why was I expected as a woman to do all this unpaid labor and my contribution wasn't respected? And one day a Tibetan lama just said to me straight up, ‘Pray to be reborn as a man, because being a woman is an obstacle to liberation.’ All of the sexual misconduct, sexual harassment of women in the Dharma, has just really made me, turned me into a feminist! It has made me see that we are not yet equal. And that is not the point of Dharma. The point of Dharma is not just social justice, but without social justice, someone reaching their human and awakened potential is difficult.
As we can see in Myanmar, without human rights, when there are bullets flying past you, when you're under threat of death, just for speaking the truth; as we saw with the nun, Saccavadi, who was put in a prison camp and terrorized just for the crime of being a Bhikkhuni, without human rights without basic equality, spiritual practice becomes very difficult. For too long, women have been the main supporters of the Dharma, running centers, donating food, keeping the monasteries going, coming to teachings. They haven't had a dignified place in the fourfold sangha, which is not okay! I mean, in the Axial Age, the Buddha accepted that women had the capacity for awakening. So why? And then, he treated them as human beings in an age where they were considered chattel. Why 2,600 years later, are we still struggling to have our spiritual capacity and our opportunity for practice be acknowledged? So, it was by necessity that I became a socially engaged Buddhist! It was because I literally had nowhere to live as a nun! I was constantly a second-class citizen as a woman. I saw all around me, half the world living on $3.25 per day, and 40,000 kids dying from hunger every day.
I thought if the Buddha was here - like in Bodhgaya, where the Buddha got enlightened, there is an apartheid, if you like, an economic apartheid. There are the marble-enclosed, air-conditioned monasteries for international Buddhists and there is the real world that the descendants of the Buddha live in, which for the majority, is a world of vicious poverty, heat degradation, desperation, and hunger. And there's a barbed wire fence and soldiers with guns in between - and I thought if the Buddha was here, which side of the fence would he be on? So, it’s just you start practicing; your heart opens. And you look all around you and you see there are beings suffering. So how can you do nothing? My question is, how can you not be a socially engaged Buddhist? To be honest, with the way the world is?”