Upasika Kee Nanayon and the Social Dynamic of Theravadin Buddhist Practice by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
From the Introduction to the
book
"An Unentangled Knowing: The Teachings
of a Thai Buddhist Lay Woman"
Published in 1995
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Upasika Kee Nanayon, also known by her
penname, K. Khao-suan-luang, was
arguably the foremost woman Dhamma teacher in twentieth-century Thailand.
Born in 1901 to a Chinese merchant family in Rajburi, a town to the west of Bangkok, she was the
eldest of five children -- or, counting
her father's children by a second wife, the eldest of eight.
Her mother was a very religious woman and taught her the rudiments of Buddhist practice, such as
nightly chants and the observance of
the precepts, from an early age. In
later life she described how, at the
age of six, she became so filled with fear and
loathing at the miseries her mother went through in being pregnant
and giving birth to a younger sibling
that, on seeing the newborn child for
the first time -- "sleeping quietly, a little red thing with black, black hair" -- she ran away from
home for three days. This experience, plus the anguish she must have
felt when her parents separated,
probably lay behind her decision, made when she was still quite young, never to submit to what she saw
as the slavery of marriage.
During her teens she devoted her spare time
to Dhamma books and to meditation, and
her working hours to a small business to support her father in his old age. Her meditation progressed well enough that
she was able to teach him meditation,
with fairly good results, in the last
year of his life. After his death she
continued her business
with the thought of saving up enough money to
enable herself to live the remainder of
her life in a secluded place and give herself fully to the practice. Her aunt and uncle, who were also interested
in Dhamma practice, had a small home
near a forested hill, Khao Suan Luang
(RoyalPark Mountain), outside of Rajburi, where she often went to practice.
In 1945, as life disrupted by World War II had begun to return to normal, she gave up her business,
joined her aunt and uncle in moving to
the hill, and there the three of them began a life devoted entirely to meditation. The small retreat they made for themselves in an abandoned monastic dwelling
eventually grew to become the nucleus
of a women's practice center that has flourished to this day.
Life
at the retreat was frugal, in line with the fact that outside support was minimal in the early years. However, even now that the center has become well-known and
well-established, the same frugal style
has been maintained for its benefits in subduing greed, pride, and other mental defilements, as well as for
the pleasure it offers in unburdening
the heart. The women practicing at the
center are all vegetarian and abstain
from such stimulants as tobacco, coffee, tea,
and betel nut. They meet daily
for chanting, group meditation, and
discussion of the practice. In
the years when Upasika Kee's health was
still strong, she would hold special meetings at which the members would report on their practice, after which
she would give a talk touching on any
important issues that had been brought up.
It was during such sessions that
most of the talks recorded in this volume
were given.
In the center's early years, small groups
of friends and relatives would visit on
occasion to give support and to listen to Upasika Kee's Dhamma talks. As word spread of the high standard of her
teachings and practice, larger and
larger groups came to visit, and more women
began to join the community. When
tape recording was introduced to
Thailand in the mid-1950's, friends began recording her talks and,
in 1956, a group of them printed a
small volume of her transcribed talks
for Distribution. By the
mid-1960's, the stream of free Dhamma
literature from Khao Suan Luang -- Upasika Kee's poetry as well as
her talks -- had grown to a flood. This attracted even more people to her center and established her as one of the
best-known Dhamma teachers, male or
female, in Thailand.
Upasika Kee was something of an autodidact. Although she picked up the rudiments of meditation during her
frequent visits to monasteries in her
youth, she practiced mostly on her own without any formal study under a meditation teacher. Most of her instruction came from books -- the Pali Canon and the works of
contemporary teachers -- and was tested
in the crucible of her own relentless honesty.
Her later teachings show the
influence of the writings of Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, although she transformed his concepts in
ways that made them entirely her
own.
In the later years of her life she
developed cataracts that eventually
left her blind, but she still continued a rigorous schedule of meditating and receiving visitors
interested in the Dhamma. She passed away quietly in 1978 after entrusting
the center to a committee she appointed
from among its members. Her younger
sister, Upasika Wan, who up to that
point had played a major role as supporter and
facilitator for the center, joined the community within a few
months of Upasika Kee's death and soon
became its leader, a position she held
until her death in 1993. Now the
center is once again being run by
committee and has grown to accommodate 60 members.
Much has been written recently on the role of
women in Buddhism, but it is
interesting to note that, for all of Upasika Kee's accomplishments in her own personal Dhamma
practice and in providing opportunities
for other women to practice as well, socio-historical books on Thai women in Buddhism make no
mention of her name or of the community
she founded. This underscores the
distinction between Buddhism as
practice and mainstream Buddhism as a socio-historical phenomenon, a distinction that is important
to bear in mind when issues related to
the place of women in Buddhism are discussed.
Study after study has shown that mainstream
Buddhism, both lay and monastic, has
adapted itself thoroughly to the various societies into which it has been introduced -- so
thoroughly that the original teachings
seem in some cases to have been completely distorted. From
the earliest centuries of the tradition on up to the present,
groups who feel inspired by the
Buddha's teachings, but who prefer to adapt
those teachings to their own ends rather than adapting themselves
to the teachings, have engaged in
creating what might be called designer
Buddhism. This accounts for the
wide differences we find when we
compare, say, Japanese Buddhism, Tibetan, and Thai, and for the variety of social roles to which many women
Buddhists in different countries have
found themselves relegated.
The true practice of Buddhism, though, has
always been counter-cultural, even in
nominally Buddhist societies. Society's main aim, no matter where, is its own
perpetuation. Its cultural values are designed to keep its members
useful and productive -- either
directly or indirectly -- in the on-going economy. Most
religions allow themselves to become domesticated to these values by stressing altruism as the highest religious
impulse, and mainstream Buddhism is no
different. Wherever it has spread, it
has become domesticated to the extent
that the vast majority of monastics as well
as lay followers devote themselves to social services of one form
or another, measuring their personal
spiritual worth in terms of how well
they have loved and served others.
However, the actual practice enjoined by
the Buddha does not place such a high
value on altruism at all. In fact, he
gave higher praise to those who work
exclusively for their own spiritual welfare than to those who sacrifice their spiritual welfare
for the the welfare of others
(Anguttara Nikaya, Book of Fours, Sutta 95) -- a teaching that the mainstream, especially in Mahayana
traditions, has tended to
suppress. The true path of
practice pursues happiness through social
withdrawal, the goal being an undying happiness found exclusively within, totally transcending the world, and
not necessarily expressed in any social
function. People who have attained the
goal may teach the path of practice to
others, or they may not. Those who do
are considered superior to those who
don't, but those who don't are in turn
said to be superior to those who teach without having attained the goal themselves. Thus individual attainment, rather than
social function, is the true measure of
a person's worth.
Mainstream Buddhism, because it can become
so domesticated, often seems to act at
cross-purposes to the actual practice of Buddhism. Women sense this primarily in the fact that
they do not have the same opportunities
for ordination that men do, and that they tend to be discouraged from pursuing the opportunities
that are available to them. The Theravadin Bhikkhuni Sangha, the nuns'
order founded by the Buddha, died out
because of war and famine almost a millennium ago, and the Buddha provided no mechanism for its
revival. (The same holds true for the Bhikkhu Sangha, or monks'
order. If it ever dies out, there is no way it can be revived.) Thus the only ordination opportunities open to women in Theravadin
countries are as lay nuns, observing
eight or ten precepts.
Because there is no formal organization for
the lay nuns, their status and
opportunities for practice vary widely from location to location.
In Thailand, the situation is most favorable in Rajburi and the neighboring province of Phetburi, both
of which -- perhaps because of the
influence of Mon culture in the area -- have a long tradition of highly-respected independent nunneries. Even there, though, the quality of instruction varies widely with the
nunnery, and many women find that they
prefer the opportunities for practice offered in nuns' communities affiliated with monasteries,
which is the basic pattern in other
parts of Thailand.
The opportunities that monasteries offer
for lay nuns to practice -- in terms of
available free time and the quality of the instruction given -- again vary widely from place to
place. One major drawback to nuns' communities affiliated with
monasteries is that the nuns are
relegated to a status clearly secondary to that of the monks, but
in the better monasteries this is
alleviated to some extent by the
Buddhist teachings on hierarchy:
that it is a mere social convention,
designed to streamline the decision-making process in the community, and based on morally neutral criteria so
that one's place in the hierarchy is
not an indication of one's worth as a person.
Of course there are sexist monks who
mistake the privileged position of men
as an indication of supposed male superiority, but fortunately nuns do not take vows of obedience and are
free to change communities if they find
the atmosphere oppressive. In the better
monasteries, nuns who have advanced far
in the practice are publicly recognized by
the abbots and can develop large personal followings. At present, for instance, one of the most active Dhamma
teachers in Bangkok is a woman, Amara
Malila, who abandoned her career as a medical doctor for a life in a nun's community connected with
one of the meditation monasteries in
the Northeast. After several years of
practice she began teaching, with the
blessings of the abbot, and now has a healthy
shelf of books to her name. Such
individuals, though, are a rarity, and
many lay nuns find themselves relegated to a celibate version of a housewife's life -- considerably freer in
their eyes than the life of an actual
housewife, but still far from conducive to the full-time practice of the Buddhist path.
Although the opportunities for women to
practice in Thailand are far from
ideal, it should also be noted that mainstream Buddhism often discourages men from practicing as
well. Opportunities for ordination are widely available to men, but it is a
rare monk who finds himself encouraged
to devote himself entirely to the practice.
In village monasteries, monks
have long been pressured to study medicine so that they can act as the village doctors or to
study astrology to become personal counselors. Both of these activities are forbidden by
the disciplinary rules, but are very
popular with the laity -- so popular
that until recent times a village monk who did not take up either
of these vocations was regarded as
shirking his duties. Scholarly
monks in the cities have long been told
that the path to //nibbana// is no
longer open, that full-time practice would be futile, and that a life devoted to administrative duties, with
perhaps a little meditation on the
side, is the most profitable use of one's monastic career.
On top of this, parents who encourage their
sons from early childhood to take
temporary ordination often pressure them to disrobe soon after ordination if they show any
inclination to stay in the monkhood
permanently and abandon the family business.
Even families who are happy to
have their sons stay in the monkhood often discourage them from enduring the hardships of a
meditator's life in the forest.
In some cases the state of mainstream Buddhism
has become so detrimental to the
practice that institutional reforms have been
attempted. In the Theravada
tradition, such reforms have succeeded
only if introduced from the top down, when senior monks have
received the support of the political
powers that be. The Canonical
example for this pattern is the First
Council, called with royal patronage in
the first year after the Buddha's passing away, for the express purpose of standardizing the record of the
Buddha's teachings for posterity. During the days of absolute monarchy, reforms
that followed this pattern could be
quite thorough-going and on occasion
were nothing short of draconian.
In more recent years, though, they
have been much more limited in scope, gaining a measure of success only when presented not as impositions but
as opportunities: access to more reliable texts, improved standards
and facilities for education, and
greater support for stricter observance of the
disciplinary rules. And, of
course, however such reforms may be
carried out, they are largely limited to externals, because the attainment of the Deathless is not something
that can be decreed by legislative
fiat.
A modern example of such a reform movement
is the Lay Nun Association of Thailand,
an attempt to provide an organizational
structure for all lay nuns throughout the country, sponsored by Her Majesty the Queen and senior monks in the
national hierarchy. This has succeeded chiefly in providing improved
educational opportunities for a
relatively small number of nuns, while its organizational aims have been something of a failure. Even though the association is run by highly educated nuns, most of the nuns I
know personally have avoided joining it
because they do not find the leaders personally inspiring and because they feel they would
be sacrificing their independence for
no perceivable benefit. This view may be
based on a common attitude in the
outlying areas of Thailand: the less
contact with the bureaucratic powers at
the center, the better.
As for confrontational reforms introduced
from the bottom up, these have never
been sanctioned by the tradition, and Theravadin history has no record of their ever succeeding. The only such reform mentioned in the Canon was Devadatta's
attempted schism, introduced as a
reform to tighten up the disciplinary rules.
The Canon treats his attempt in
such strongly negative terms that its memory is still very much alive in the Theravada mind set, making
the vast majority of Buddhists
reluctant to take up with confrontational reforms no matter how reasonable they might seem. And with good reason: Anyone who has to fight to have his/her ideas accepted
inevitably loses touch with the qualities
of dispassion, self-effacement, unentanglement with others, contentment with little, and
seclusion -- qualities the Buddha set
forth as the litmus test for gauging whether or not a proposed course of action, and the person proposing
it, were in accordance with the
Dhamma.
In addition, there have been striking
instances where people have proposed
religious reforms as a camouflage for their political ambitions, leaving their followers in a
lurch when their ambitions are thwarted. And even in cases where a confrontational
reformer seems basically altruistic at
heart, he or she tends to play up the social
benefits to be gained from the proposed reform in the effort to win support, thus compromising the relationship
of the reform to true practice. Experiences with cases such as this have
tended to make Theravadin Buddhists in
general leery of confrontational reforms.
Thus, given the limited opportunities for
institutional reform, the only course
left open to those few men and women prepared to break the bonds of mainstream Buddhism in their
determination to practice is to follow
the example of the Buddha himself by engaging in what might be called personal or independent reform: to reject the general values of society, go off on their own, put up with
society's disapproval and the hardships
of living on the frontier, and search for whatever reliable meditation teachers may be living
and practicing outside of the
mainstream. If no such teachers exist,
individuals intent on practice must
strike out on their own, adhering as closely as they can to the teachings in the texts -- to keep
themselves from being led astray by
their own defilements -- and taking refuge in the example of the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha in a radical
way.
In a sense, there is a sort of folk wisdom
to this arrangement. Anyone who would
take on the practice only when assured of comfortable material support, status, and praise --
which the Buddha called the baits of
the world -- would probably not be up to the sacrifices and self-discipline the practice inherently
entails.
Thus from the perspective of the practice,
mainstream Buddhism serves the function
of inspiring individuals truly intent on the
practice to leave the mainstream and to go into the forest, which
was where the religion was originally
discovered. As for those who prefer to stay in society, the mainstream meets
their social/religious needs while at
the same time making them inclined to view those who leave society in search of the Dhamma with some
measure of awe and respect, rather than
viewing them simply as drop-outs.
What this has meant historically is that
the true practice of Buddhism has
hovered about the edges of society and history -- or, from another perspective, that the history
of Buddhism has hovered about the edges
of the practice. When we look at the
historical record after the first
generation of the Buddha's disciples, we find
only a few anecdotal references to practicing monks or nuns. The only
teachers recorded were scholarly monks, participants in
controversies, and missionaries. Some people at present have taken the silence
on the nuns as an indication that there
were no prominent nun teachers after
the first generation of disciples.
However, inscriptions at the
Theravada stupa at Sanci in India list nuns among the prominent donors to its construction, and this would have
been possible only if the nuns had
large personal followings. Thus it seems
fair to assume that there were
prominent nun teachers, but that they were devoted to meditation rather than scholarship, and that
-- like the monks devoted to meditation
-- their names and teachings slipped through the cracks in the historical record inasmuch as true
success at meditation is something that
historians are in no position to judge.
So, for the period from Canonical up to
modern times, one can only make
conjectures about the opportunities for practice open to men and women at any particular time. Still, based on observations of the situation in Thailand before Western
influences made themselves strongly
felt, the following dynamic seems likely:
Meditation traditions tend to
last only two or three generations at most.
They are started by charismatic
pioneers willing to put up with the
hardships of clearing the Buddhist path.
Because the integrity of their
efforts takes years to be tested -- not all pioneers are free from delusion and dishonesty -- their role
requires great sacrifices. In fact, if
large-scale support comes too early, it may abort the movement.
If, over time, the pioneers do embody the practice faithfully, then as word of their teachings
and practices spread, they begin to
attract a following of students and supporters.
With the arrival of support, the
hardships become less demanding; and as life
softens, so does the practice, and within a generation or two it
has deteriorated to the extent that it
no longer inspires support and
eventually dies out, together with any memory of the founder's teachings.
In some cases, before the tradition dies
out, its example may have a reforming
influence at large, shaming or inspiring the mainstream at least temporarily into becoming more
favorable to true practice. In other cases, the practice tradition may
influence only a limited circle and then
disappear without a ripple. For those
who benefit from it, of course, the
question of its historical repercussions is of
no real consequence. Even if only
one person has benefited by realizing
the Deathless, the tradition is a success.
At
present in Thailand we are watching this process work itself out in several strands, with the major
difference being that modern media have
given us a record of the teachings and practices of many figures in the various meditation traditions. Among the monks, the most influential practice tradition is the Forest
Tradition, which was started against
great odds at the end of the last century by Phra Ajaan Sao Kantasilo and Phra Ajaan Mun
Bhuridatto, sons of peasants, at a time
when the central Thai bureaucracy was very active in stamping out independent movements of any
sort, political or religious. We have no direct record of Ajaan Sao's
teachings, only a booklet or two of
Ajaan Mun's, but volume upon volume of their
students' teachings. Among women,
the major practice tradition is Upasika
Kee Nanayon's. Although she herself has
passed away, the women at her center
still listen to her tapes nightly and keep her
teachings alive throughout society by printing and reprinting books
of her talks for Distribution.
Both traditions are fragile: The Forest Tradition is showing signs that its very popularity may soon lead to
its demise, and the women at Khao Suan
Luang are faced with the problem of seeing how long they can maintain their standard of practice without
charismatic leadership. On top of
this, the arrival of the mass media -- and especially television with its tendency to make image
more consequential than substance, and
personality more important than character -- is sure to change the dynamic of Buddhist mainstream
and the practice, not necessarily for
the better. Still, both traditions have
at least left a record -- part of which
is presented in this book -- to inspire
future generations and to show how the Buddhist path of practice
may be reopened by anyone, male or
female, no matter what forms of
designer Buddhism may take over the mainstream and inevitably lead
it astray.
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