Women under the Bo Tree Buddhist nuns in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Nur Yalman's book, Under the Bo Tree (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), focused on Buddhist social structures in Sri Lanka. Playing on that title, I shall explore gender and social structures that have been challenged or reversed in Buddhist Sri Lanka. In 1983, on holiday in Sri Lanka, I met some extraordinary Buddhist women who had challenged contemporary notions of gender and social structure: they had exchanged their white sans for orange robes. In doing so, they had usurped the monks' sole claim to monastic legitimacy. As acting members of a self-declared monastic community, these women have become necessary components of contemporary Buddhist society. I wondered what it would be like to live cloistered as they did, what Buddhist monks and laity thought of such women? Moreover did these cloistered women's views on Buddhism differ from those of monks? When I returned to America, I discovered that very little had been written on the robed Buddhist women I had met in Sri Lanka though much had been written on Buddhist monks. In order to fill that lacuna, I slowly began translating Pali texts that were relevant to the topic of Buddhist female monasticism; texts that helped me link the Buddhist classical tradition with living practice. I then returned to Sri Lanka to conduct a field study of the women I had met in 1983. That study and those translations have evolved into the account that I offer below. My study of cloistered Buddhist women in Sri Lanka is somewhat timely; historians of religion over the past few years have produced many studies that focus on the religious experience of women. There are too many to list, yet among them are: Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987; Thomas Cleary's edited Immortal Sisters: Secrets of Taoist Women (Boston: Shambala, 1989); Frederique Apffel Marglin's Wives of the God-king: The Rituals of the Devadasis of Puri (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Fatima Mernissi's Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). All these books address what it means for a woman to be religious; they discuss why women's religious experiences are often different from those of men; and they debate how women express their religiosity. My study enters these discussions and debates; in the pages that follow I explore what it means for a woman to devote her life to religion. This study focuses upon Buddhist women in Sri Lanka, particularly those who have revived and reinvented an ancient Buddhist vocation for women, namely monasticism. Like monks, they plant near their cloisters a sapling of the Bo tree. Tradition alleges that the Buddha sat under such a tree when he attained enlightenment; thus the tree symbolizes both Buddhist and clerical affiliations. For Buddhist cloistered women, however, the Bo tree symbolizes much more. It is believed that a woman much like them made an arduous journey in the third century, BCE, from north India to Sri Lanka with a branch of the Bo tree. She then arranged for it to be planted in Anuradhapura, and according to tradition that very tree continues to thrive. Like the Bo tree that survives despite conditions that have been prohibitive for its growth, women in contemporary Sri Lanka continue to choose the monastic life despite the protests of their families. They devote their lives to Buddhism and live near or under the Bo trees of Sri Lanka.