ThesisFinal

Mallikā’s Hermeneutics: A Feminist Revalorization of the Jātaka Stories
A Thesis
Presented to
The Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics
Reed College
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Bachelor of Arts
Sienna M. Lyon
May 2015

Approved for the Division
(Religion)
Kristin Scheible

Acknowledgments
I am eternally grateful to everyone who made this thesis possible.
A million thanks to my advisor, Kristin, for always being present and devoting
time, care and patience to me and my research. And thank you to the whole Scheible
family for your generosity and hospitality.
A most heartfelt thank you to my parents who have always had confidence in
me; I love you both so much. Mom, you push me every day to be a better person and
for that, I will always be grateful. Dad, thank you for always keeping me entertained,
from guac updates to your selfies, you know how to make me smile. Besos, abrazos y
un montón de gratitud a Pam for supporting me through college and always checking
in even during busy times. Thank you to my beloved matriarchs—Baba and
Grammy—for providing me with powerful role models.
Thank you Reed College— staff and faculty—for guiding me along on this
sometimes difficult, but ultimately rewarding, process of growth.
I want to especially thank all my bros in the Sports Center. Frank, Cyrus, Tate,
Ward, Todd and Michael—you all have given me more than you can imagine. You are
more than just the place I get my paycheck, you’re my home away from home and a
solid family I know I can always count on.
Sweet kisses to Hudson and River for being so fuzzy and adorable, and thank
you Lorraine for letting me walk them. Thank you Pat for always stopping to talk with
me.
To “Black Empress” for indulging my insanity, let’s never get stuck in 116° heat
again. To Becca my wife, lover and friend. To Mariu for always chillin’, actin’ dumb
with me. To Simon, Fred, Isabel and Alina for being my best friends and taking the
time to keep in touch even though we’re worlds away. And to all of my other friends
who I love dearly and have been there through thick and thin—Miranda, Grace,
Kathryn.
Jr—You’re an amazing person, a beautiful soul and a special friend. Thank you
for being my rock through everything. Not even “The Rock” himself could come close
to the wondrous feats you’ve performed, jabroni.

And, thank you to Bonnie for swooping in when I needed you with your
immense support and advice in all matters. You’re an inspiration!

Table of Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................... 1

Defining Terms............................................................................................................... 6

Objective, Summary, and Defining the Scope.............................................................. 10

Guiding Question(s).................................................................................................. 11

Chapter 1: Towards A Feminist Buddhist Hermeneutics........................................... 15

Hermeneutics ................................................................................................................ 15

Introduction............................................................................................................... 15

Defining Hermeneutics ............................................................................................. 15

Hermeneutical Frameworks and Uses in Interpretation............................................ 17

Constraints on Interpretation..................................................................................... 20

Building the Methodology ........................................................................................ 22

Contextualizing Women in Early Buddhism................................................................ 23

Introduction............................................................................................................... 23

Social Atmosphere.................................................................................................... 25

Attitudes Toward Women......................................................................................... 26

Female Monastic Order............................................................................................. 30

Buddhist Hermeneutics................................................................................................. 32

What Makes Buddhist Texts Unique? ...................................................................... 32

The Buddhist Hermeneutical Attitude ...................................................................... 33

Orienting Towards a Buddhist Belief System .......................................................... 37

Genre, Ethics and Literary Analysis............................................................................. 38

Genre......................................................................................................................... 39

Understanding Jātakas .......................................................................................... 39

Why Jātakas? ........................................................................................................ 40

Ethics and Literary Analysis..................................................................................... 43

The Buddha, Bodhisatta and Buddhist in Ethical Dialogue ................................. 44

Plot, Story, Ethics and Sub-Ethics........................................................................ 47

Chapter 2: Mallikā.......................................................................................................... 51

Mallikā, Branch Stories, and Religious Rhetoric ......................................................... 52

Mallikā and the Buddha................................................................................................ 54

Mallikā and her Husband.............................................................................................. 55

Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 56

Chapter 3: Sambula Jātaka ........................................................................................... 59

Introduction................................................................................................................... 59

Summary....................................................................................................................... 60

Devoted Wife, Ascetic Wife......................................................................................... 61

Dynamic Beauty ........................................................................................................... 64

A New Feminine Ideal (Without the Pressure)............................................................. 66

Chapter 4: Sujāta Jātaka and Bhallātiya Jātaka......................................................... 67

Introduction................................................................................................................... 67

Summary of the Sujāta and Bhallātiya ......................................................................... 68

Sujāta Jātaka.............................................................................................................. 68

Bhallātiya Jātaka ....................................................................................................... 69

The Golden Dish and Contextual Relativity................................................................. 71

Mapping Spiritual and Societal Relationships.............................................................. 73

Chapter 5: Kummāsapiṇḍa Jātaka............................................................................... 77

Introduction................................................................................................................... 77

Summary....................................................................................................................... 78

Universality of Perfections ........................................................................................... 80

Mallikā as an Emblematic Laywoman.......................................................................... 82

Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 84

Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 85

Bibliography.................................................................................................................... 91

Abstract
A religion often perceived as egalitarian and welcoming of all individuals regardless of
gender or class, Buddhism actually contains many instances of overt misogyny and
sexism in its literary corpus. Such attitudes and depictions of women prove
problematic for female Buddhists because the textual sources apparently fail to
provide complex female characters that are emblematic of, or inspirational for, both
lay and monastic women’s experiences in the Buddhist tradition. Furthermore, an
androcentric perspective (one that primarily considers male experience) has
perpetuated male religious experience of these texts, and ignored or silenced the
female experience. In the Theravāda Buddhist tradition, the popular and didactic past
life stories of the Buddha, the Jātaka stories, contribute to such misogynistic attitudes.
This project, working in the lineage of feminist religious scholars who have called for a
‘revalorization’ of religious texts to recover the female experience, develops a new
hermeneutics, or lens, through which to approach these texts to extract meaning that
might otherwise go unnoticed. This hermeneutic considers factors that may have
influenced the misogynistic structures of these texts— social history, genre, literary
features—in order to formulate a radical feminist hermeneutics of suspicion that is
sensitive to, and incorporates traditional Buddhist reading methods. This
hermeneutics further proposes to view the Jātaka stories through a single female
character, Mallikā, whose nuanced character works as a gynocentric lens through
which we can understand the complexities of other female characters in the Jātaka
stories. This project applies these lenses to a selection of Jātaka stories to offer an
alternative reading to the typical androcentric approach that retains key Buddhist
precepts and proves emblematic of the female experience.

This thesis is dedicated to my wonderfully supportive mom and dad, and to the sweet
little hummingbird that kept showing up in the window next to my thesis desk.

Introduction
Buddhism is often assumed to be an egalitarian religion because its core concepts
emphasize the collapse or even non-existence of dualities, and because it explicitly
promotes non-harm and the eradication of suffering in all realms of human experience.
Women were invited, albeit reluctantly, into the saṅgha (monastic community) at the very
outset of the tradition, in a radical upheaval of the then-dominant Brahmanical caste and
gender structure, an occurrence often touted as evidence for Buddhism’s egalitarian
inclination. But the lived reality, historically and literarily rendered, is that widespread
uncertainty towards and condemnation of the feminine exists throughout the Buddhist
tradition. In the Theravāda Buddhist tradition of South and Southeast Asia, the practice
of ordaining women into the saṅgha died out about 1,000 years ago. While women
Buddhists have continued to participate in the Theravāda tradition, they do so as marginal
members of the virtuosi, in alternative paths to that of a fully ordained bhikkhunī (nun). It
is difficult to reconcile the fundamental Buddhist tenets of equality with the exclusion of
these women from the saṅgha; the reality is that many women remain barred from
accessing a soteriological position on the basis of their gender.
Women’s practical contribution to the Buddhist tradition, even in the absence
of their ordination, has always been consistent and notable. An 1888 report on the
religious atmosphere of Sri Lanka speaks of women’s influence on the island: “the
greatest force of Lankan Buddhism is not the Bo-Tree, the priesthood, the wealth of
temple lands, or even in the sacred books. The dominant force for Buddhism in the
Island is Woman.”1
In recent years, there has been a notable resurgence of women
desiring ordination into the Theravāda monastic tradition.2
In modern day Sri Lanka
there are far more Buddhist women than men participating in temple life, and yet
1
“The Wesleyan Mission Report,” cited in The Buddhist (1889): 295, quoted in Tessa
Bartholomeusz, “The Female Mendicant in Buddhist Sri Lanka,” in Buddhism, Sexuality
and Gender, ed. Jose Ignacio Cabezon. (New Yorks: State University of New York Press,
1992), 46.
2
In Sri Lanka, it is estimated that 5,000 women have joined the clergy. (Bartholomeusz,
“The Female Mendicant,” 37)

2
membership into the monastic order remains unattainable for these women.3
Women
have been and continue to be a remarkable force in the Buddhist tradition. Yet, with
the exception of some very recent success in Sri Lanka, women of the Theravādan
tradition remain unable to achieve full ordination; generally, attitudes towards women
in Buddhism remain, at best, traditionally conservative, but more often are
dangerously sexist.
This attitude towards women prevails in many of the texts that support and sustain
the tradition, including the Pali canon, the very heart of the Theravāda tradition. There
exists what Alan Sponberg terms an “apparent ambivalence” towards women evident in
even the earliest layers of the tradition, stating that “various antifeminine attitudes
certainly are evident in many early Buddhist texts,” but that these antifeminine attitudes
are often accompanied by the positive assessment of women.4
This ambivalence towards
women is also found in the canonical Jātaka stories, a compilation of 547 stories of the
Buddha’s past life births contained in the earliest stratum of the Khuddaka Nikāya, a
collection of texts within the Sutta Piṭaka (sermon collection) at the heart of the canon. In
some stories women are heroines whose virtue and devotion to the Buddha saves the day;
in other stories the Buddha tells that the nature of women is that they are deceitful and
manipulative. For example, in the Ucchanga Jātaka, the Buddha tells a story of a woman
who “was the means of saving three persons from peril.”5
In a polar opposite Jātaka, the
Kunala Jātaka relates a piece of wisdom in an exceptionally backhanded compliment:
… one should not put trust in women nor praise them. As earth is
impartially affected towards all the world, bearing wealth for all, a
home for all sorts and conditions of men (good and bad alike), all-
enduring, unshaken, immovable, so also is it with women (in a bad
sense).6
3
Bartholomeusz, “The Female Mendicant”, 37.
4
Alan Sponberg, “Attitudes Toward Women and the Feminine in Early Buddhism,” in
Buddhism, Sexuality and Gender, ed. Jose Ignacio Cabezon (New York: State University
of New York, 1992), 3.
5
E.B. Cowell, ed., Chalmers, Robert, trans., “Ucchanga Jātaka,” in The Jātaka: or Stories
of the Buddha’s Former Births (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1895), 165.
6
Cowell, “Kunala Jātaka,” in The Jātaka, 225.

3
Stories like the Jātakas at the core of the Buddhist tradition function didactically,
conveying the Buddha’s teaching; what are women in the tradition to learn about their
religion from this ambivalent and diverse handling of their femininity in texts? As
female Buddhists negotiate their path towards enlightenment, either as laywomen or
as ordained bhikkhunīs, what texts are available for them to understand their
experiences as female Buddhists? How might their feminine approach to these texts
alter the way the texts can be understood? What voices and ethical lessons can we
recover when we approach these texts with a reading other than an androcentric one?
In order to answer some of these questions, in this project I will develop and
exercise a feminist hermeneutics, a lens through which we can focus on and
understand the experiences of women in the Jātaka stories. Reading the Jātaka stories
with a feminist lens will not force heretical meanings onto these texts, rather it will
open a new window through which we can look at the actions of the characters in
these texts differently. For millennia these texts have been taught and retaught in
different ways to different audiences. This project’s seemingly revolutionary approach
to reading is really no different from the multiple exegeses Buddhists have practiced
since the departure of the Buddha. It is simply another interpretive layer, one
informed by feminist values and methods, just another valence of traditional Buddhist
reading practices. Indeed, Buddhist hermeneutics explains that texts are multivalent in
presentation and expected audience; they have no uniform way with which to
approach them. Texts were not written for a single audience, so they should not be
read from a single perspective. And, yet, that has been precisely what has happened in
scholarship—we read these texts with an authoritative androcentric lens and do not
consider how the story might change if we assume a feminist lens. How much more of
the Buddha’s intention might we uncover if we read these texts with a feminist lens?
During the end of the twentieth century the relevance of women’s religious
experiences gained traction in the discipline of religious studies. It became evident
especially within academia, as well as within some lived religious traditions, that
privileged white men had been dictating the historical narrative. For many years,
prominent historians had effectively written women out of the religious historical
record regardless of the role women actually played in religious traditions. And, in the
case of colonialism, these historians often literally changed religious traditions by

4
forcing their own religious beliefs on those they colonized. The story of women in
religion has generally been left out of the realm of study unless, as Rita Gross notes, it
is tacked on as a special, separate chapter briefly acknowledging women’s religious
roles.7
But, with renewed interest in the experiences of women that accompanied the
women’s rights movements of the late-20th
century, the discipline of religious studies
has seen substantial development. As Miriam Peskowitz explains, feminist scholars
engage in a dialectical method of discourse to question both individual and societal
presuppositions about sex and gender “in order to find and practice increasingly
powerful ways to explain, to interrupt, and to re-imagine the very powerful cultures of
gender and sexuality in which we live.”8
An essential component to feminist studies of
religion is the development of new theoretical models with which to extract new
meanings from religious artifacts. María Pilar Aquino says of these frameworks:
Articulated in light of a commitment to justice, integrity and the
well-being of all women, these models should provide the
conceptual tools necessary to interpret, critique and advance
women’s practices for liberation.9
Feminist studies in religion seek to deconstruct male privileging hierarchies and
frameworks that we as societies and individuals have perpetuated and with which we
have become complacent.10
Unsurprisingly, there has been significant pushback against the demand to
address sexism in the study of religious traditions. Scholars justify their hesitance to
address this issue through proclaiming a desire to remain etically objective. Elizabeth
Schüssler Fiorenza addresses this response in her feminist hermeneutics of the New
Testament, saying that the study of anything that has happened in the past is
7
Rita Gross, Feminism and Religion (Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1996), 89.
8
Miriam Peskowitz, “Roundtable Discussion: What’s in a Name? Exploring the
Dimensions of What ‘Feminist Studies in Religion’ Means,” in Feminism in the Study of
Religion, ed. Darlene Juschka (New York: Continuum, 2001), 386.
9
María Pilar Aquino, “Roundtable Discussion: What’s in a Name?,” 390.
10
There is extensive critical scholarship on the issue of feminist studies in religion that
is important to consider, but is outside the scope of this project. For more on this topic
see Feminism in the Study of Religion: a Reader, edited by Darlene M. Juschka (New York:
Continuum, 2001).

5
inherently subjective because it looks at a past state of being from a present state of
being.11
She further critiques the scholarly tendency to remain “objective”:
it must be asked whether the reluctance of scholars to investigate the
present topic [scholarship on women] might be sustained by an
unconscious or conscious refusal to modify our androcentric grasp of
reality and religion rather than by a legitimate concern for the
integrity of biblical-historical scholarship.12
Scholars cannot remain ‘objective’ about something that requires a subjective
perspective. And, indeed, since admitting both the scarcity of records of women’s
religious experiences and the proper treatment of those records when acquired, there
has been a wave of movements towards ending the sexism of the discipline and
refiguring religions to be more reflective of women’s religious experiences.
Rita Gross calls this refiguring of religions “revalorizing,” which she describes
as “working with the categories and concepts of a traditional religion in the light of
feminist values.”13
The idea of revalorizing sexist aspects of religious traditions is
central to this exploration, and Gross offers a comprehensive clarification of the need
for this revalorization. She says of revalorizing religion:
This task is double-edged, for, on the one hand, feminist analysis of
any major world religion reveals massive undercurrents of sexism
and prejudice against women, especially in realms of religious
praxis. On the other hand, the very term ‘revalorization’ contains an
implicit judgment. To revalorize is to have determined that, however
sexist a religious tradition may be, it is not irreparably so.
Revalorizing is, in fact, doing that work of repairing the tradition,
often bringing it much more into line with its own fundamental
values and vision than was its patriarchal form.14
“Revalorizing,” acknowledges that there is a perspective missing in the tradition, and
suggests that readers hold a piece of the puzzle for making the tradition whole again.15
11
Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, (New York: Crossroad Publishing,
1998), xlvii.
12
Ibid., xlvii.
13
Rita Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of
Buddhism, (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 3.
14
Ibid., 3.
15
In the feminist movement in religion, the idea of revalorization opposes the idea that
because many religious texts are believed to be prophetic or divinely inspired, any re-

6
In the context of textual analysis, revalorizing, then, is an active process of re-reading
with feminist values in mind.
I will argue in this project that the way we can come to terms with the fact that
societies have operated immersed in these sexist systems, and the way we can modify
these traditions to be more inclusive, is through a realization that most of the
components of these patriarchal societies—the literature, religions, history—do not
require a sexist reading. Certainly, there are a number of ways to read a text, orthodox
and heterodox, none of which is necessarily more “right” than another, but some of
which open up a text to a broader and more inclusive interpretation. I believe that
reading the Jātaka stories with a categorical moral or soteriological framework
undermines the complexity of the text and classifies the text as a misogynist piece of
work, an appellation I do not believe the Jātaka tales deserve.
Defining Terms
In challenging the sexism implicit in the study of religions through an exegesis
of the Jātaka stories, there are several key terms that must be clarified at the outset of
the project. As the project progresses, terms will arise that require definition, but some
important terminology is foundational. These preliminary terms are feminism,
misogyny, androcentrism, and patriarchy. I take the definition of these terms primarily
from the scholars who employ them in their work, and who have refined the
understanding of these terms through years of research.
Feminism, as Katherine K. Young points out, can refer to either the political
movement in general or theoretical opinion in particular.16
The term was born out of
the 19th
century political movement that fought for women’s right to vote, and it is
reading or revalorization of them is impossible. There is also the idea that these texts
are too fully immersed in patriarchal systems to be “cleansed” of their sexist attitudes.
Among scholars this distinction is delineated as “reformists” (those who desire to
transform religion from within) and “revolutionaries” (those who seek to develop new
feminist forms of religion). (Carol P. Christ, “The New Feminist Theology: A Review of
the Literature,” Religious Studies Review III:4 (October 1977): 203-12, cited in Gross,
Feminism & Religion, 107.
16
Katherine Young, edit., Feminism and World Religions, (New York: State University of
New York Press, 1999), 1.

7
based on the basic idea of promoting the interests of women in society.17
The premise
of feminism is that women have been systematically disadvantaged and discriminated
against in various areas of society because of their gender identity. Feminism identifies
a problem with the traditional definitions of gender in society that link strength,
capability, and rationality with masculinity and frailty, superstition, and helplessness
with femininity. Feminism says that there is a problem with gender norms in society
that encourage the hyper-masculinity of men and promotes the hyper-sexualizing of
women. Feminism says that not only have women suffered from these obtuse gender
dynamics, but so too have men. While women are traditionally discouraged from such
things as pursuing careers in science and math, remaining childless and asserting their
physical presence, men have simultaneously been discouraged from solo childrearing
and expressing themselves emotionally. As Young remarks, “Feminism, in other
words, is all about power relations between the sexes.”18
According to feminism, the
disparity in power between the sexes exists in all realms of society, and only once we
acknowledge its presence can we begin to rectify its damages. Young notes that
feminism has begun to take shape in religious groups through a “call for women’s
inclusion in liturgical or theological language, education, leadership, ritual, and
symbolism.”19
In this thesis, feminism or a feminist approach primarily entails a
turning away from traditional gender roles, a movement towards promoting feminine
experience, and a criticism of how texts might reinforce the traditional misogynistic
attitudes toward women.
In Misogyny, his exploration of the origins of the phenomenon, David Gilmore
establishes a coherent definition of misogyny. He describes misogyny as:
an unreasonable fear or hatred of women that takes on some palpable
form in any given society. Misogyny is a feeling of enmity toward
the female sex, a ‘disgust or abhorrence’ toward women as an
undifferentiated social category…. Misogyny, then, is a sexual
17
Ibid., 2.
18
Ibid., 2.
19
Ibid., 2.

8
prejudice that is symbolically exchanged (shared) among men,
attaining praxis.20
Misogyny is the active hatred of women; it is a mentality that prevails among many men,
and sometimes women, in society regardless of how aware they are of their prejudices. It
involves the idea that women and their femininity are responsible for the uncontrollable
sexual urges of men that lead to rape and reinforces the notion that women are the ‘lesser’
gender whose origins lay in the workings of the devil or some other evil force.21
Misogyny is the idea that women’s bodies are polluting and should be avoided at all
costs.22
Misogynistic ideas are harbored by men, and ubiquitous in societies throughout
the world, and they are some of the most dangerous ideas that can lead to the rape and
murder of numerous women.23
In scholarship, including all disciplines, theories, approaches to textual analysis, a
tempered form of misogyny presents itself as androcentrism. Androcentrism is a method
of interpretation that promotes misogyny by excluding women from the conversation.
Rita Gross, one of the leaders in the fight toward eradicating androcentric approaches
within academia, defines it as “a mode of consciousness, a thought-form, a method of
gathering information and classifying women’s place in the (male-identified) ‘scheme of
things.’”24
She breaks down the defining characteristics of androcentric scholarship
further, explaining the three central characteristics as follows: (1) A collapsing of the
male norm and the human norm, “In fact, recognition that maleness is but one facet of
human experience is minimal or non-existent.”25
(2) ‘Maleness’ has so fully ingrained
itself as the only ‘human’ experience that, “…it follows that the generic masculine habit
of thought, language, and research will be assumed to be adequate.”26
(3) And, because
women have generally been left out of the discussion:
20
David Gilmore, Misogyny: The Male Malady, (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 9.
21
Ibid.,57-8
22
Ibid., 48.
23
Ibid., 2.
24
Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy, 22.
25
Ibid., 295.
26
Ibid., 295.

9
women ‘per se’ must sometimes be mentioned in accounts of
religion….because they deviate from these norms when women, ‘per
se,’ are mentioned, androcentric thinking deals with them only as an
object exterior to ‘mankind,’ needing to be explained and fitted in
somewhere, having the same epistemological and ontological status
as trees, unicorns, deities, and other objects that must be discussed to
make experience intelligible. Therefore, in most accounts of religion,
females are presented only in relation to the males being studied,
only as objects being named by the males being studied, only as they
appear to the males being studied.27
Androcentric scholarship dismisses the female experience and collapses it with the
male experience.
Androcentrism itself is a part of, but distinct from, the patriarchal society out of
which it arises. Rita Gross defines patriarchy as, “the social and institutional form that
usually goes with androcentrism. As is clear, patriarchy involves a gender hierarchy of
men over women. Men control, or at least like to think that they do.”28
Patriarchy is the
social system that reinforces sexism and, subsequently, androcentrism. In order to
challenge the patriarchal society out of which interpretations of the Jātaka stories as
misogynistic arose, this project promotes a liberation theology. This project
understands the term as used by Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in her work on feminist
biblical hermeneutics, In Memory of Her.29
For Schüssler Fiorenza, all liberation
theology:
willingly or not, is by definition always engaged for or against the
oppressed. Intellectual neutrality is not possible in a world of
exploitation and oppression. If this is the case, then theology cannot
talk about human existence in general or about biblical theology in
particular without critically identifying those whose human existence
27
Ibid., 296.
28
Ibid., 22.
29
Schüssler Fiorenza explains liberation theology in the context of three other models
of biblical interpretation. These other models include the doctrinal approach, the
positivist historical exegesis, and the dialogical-hermeneutical interpretation. For
Schüssler Fiorenza, these other models prove insufficient once we, as scholars, admit
that we cannot and should not maintain historical objectivity when revalorizing
women’s roles in the past. More information about the insufficiency of these other
models can be found in Schüssler Fiorenza’s introduction to her work In Memory of
Her.

10
is meant and about whose God the biblical symbols and texts
speak.30
Within Buddhism, this means explicitly defining the intended audience (male/female,
lay/monastic) of canonical texts and reassessing soteriological implications (e.g., who is
able to attain enlightenment and what the path towards enlightenment looks like for
different individuals) of Buddhist precepts. In the context of this project, this liberation
theology reflects itself in the project’s intention to explicitly uncover and reverse some
of the damage caused by misogyny, androcentrism, and patriarchy in depictions of
women within canonical sources.
Objective, Summary, and Defining the Scope
This project aims to develop a feminist hermeneutical framework with which
to approach the Jātaka stories in order to offer a new lens through which to imagine
the historical and contemporary soteriological role of women in the Theravāda
tradition. In order to carry out this task, I will incorporate several different approaches
to text and tradition in order to revalorize the Jātaka stories with a feminist
perspective. To begin with, I will (1) establish a working feminist hermeneutics that is
appropriate and applicable to the Buddhist Theravāda tradition. I will ensure its
relevance by examining the historical status of women in the tradition, exploring
existing feminist hermeneutical models, and looking to current scholarship that
reimagines Theravāda Buddhism with a positive feminist lens. I plan to then (2) apply
my hermeneutics to a selection of the Jātaka stories in order to (a) assess the existing
utility of the stories for a feminist reading of Buddhist ethics, (b) critically examine
stories whose misogyny and violence towards women place them at odds with a
gynocentric reading, and (c) revalorize these stories in a new light that will prevent
them from losing their place in the tradition as critical feminist hermeneutics is
adopted.31
Looking into the past and critically re-examining text and other phenomena
outside of the patriarchal society from which they arose has great implications for the
30
Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 6.
31
Gynocentrism is defined as the focus on the feminine, or an examination in which
the experiences of the women are central.

11
modern development of the Buddhist tradition. For, as Rita Gross comments in her
groundbreaking work Buddhism After Patriarchy, “A past for Buddhist women that is
both accurate and usable will be a combination of re-orientation to the familiar and
discovery of the unfamiliar.”32
Conscientious of a more interconnected world, women Buddhists and scholars
are beginning to question the traditionally patriarchal nature of the society in which
we presently and historically have lived.33
In recent years, many women, representing
voices from a variety of religious traditions, have questioned the highly androcentric
nature of the literature of existing popular religions such as Christianity and
Buddhism. It is a crucial time in the discipline of religious studies to challenge
prevailing norms of androcentrism that have traditionally maintained that women
have played little role in religion, and that the role they have played has been so
insignificant as to not merit scholarship. An important component of feminist
liberation theology is developing a revalorization of the historical presence of women
within that tradition to uncover the role they have played, and continue to play. I do
not seek to manipulate the Buddhist tradition so that it might have an unnatural,
feminist appendage. Rather, I view this project as a feminist rehabilitation that engages
in dialogue with the tradition in order to offer egalitarian methods for extracting
meaning from texts. And to offer a way for Buddhism to be a tradition not
compromised by misogynist attitudes, but one cognizant, appreciative, and respectful
of the diversity of its adherents.
Guiding Question(s)
The single most important question this project intends to answer is how can a
feminist hermeneutics aid in the reading of the Jātaka stories as a female-empowering
text? This means two things. Do women have emblematic characters they can look to
for role models? And, can they receive the same religious ethical precepts from these
female characters? Following from that initial question, we ask, what better
understanding can we garner from the Jātaka stories if we approach them with a
feminist hermeneutics? In order to uncover the answers to these questions, we will
32
Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy, 18.
33
I identify as a scholar in this matter, not as a Buddhist.

12
look at several different areas of study that impact the process of knowledge, including
preparing oneself to read, reading, and understanding what one has read.34
The first chapter of this project will focus on building a new Buddhist
hermeneutical method. To challenge the androcentrism implicit in most approaches
to extracting meaning from text, I will build my own hermeneutics, a way of
approaching these texts that opposes the traditional androcentric lens. Creating a
hermeneutics involves understanding what hermeneutics is, what kinds of
hermeneutical models exist already, and what the theoretical basis is for this project’s
hermeneutics. Having answered these questions in the first part of the first chapter, the
hermeneutical model will be developed in the latter half of the chapter. The following
three sections cover the questions of the traditional reception of knowledge in
Buddhism, the historical and social context of these texts, and the role of ethics in
genre and literary analysis.
With regard to the question about the reception of knowledge in Buddhism, I
ask: How has Buddhist hermeneutics traditionally impacted a devotee’s reception of
knowledge from a text? What does knowledge or understanding look like in
Buddhism? And how might Buddhist hermeneutical methodologies have impacted the
construction of a text? Achieving a basic understanding for the environment out of
which these texts arose will clarify the historical and social context of these texts. This
project does not attempt to construct a historical narrative from evidence in the Jātaka
stories; rather, it asks what the social context was like during the writing of these
stories such that their depiction of women is so overtly misogynistic. What
developments have occurred in the history of these texts that may have influenced
different readings of these stories, or alterations (additions/ removals) to the stories?
Finally, how does ethics play a role in genre and literary analysis to perform ‘work’ on
34
Attentive intention prior to an action, mindfulness during action, and reflection after
action are together advocated throughout the Pali canon and advocated for Buddhist
hermeneutics. See, for example, “Ambalatthika-rahulovada Sutta: Instructions to
Rahula at Mango Stone” (MN 61), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro
Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013,
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.061.than.html.

13
its reader? How does a text perform an ethical function on an individual? What are
methods of literary analysis that encourage alternative readings of texts? What are the
various ways ethics are conveyed in these texts?
Having answered these theoretical questions, and primed ourselves for
approaching the Jātaka stories, the next chapter addresses the character of Mallikā.
Mallikā is a crucial character in the Jātaka stories, so much so that this thesis argues
that her character functions as a hermeneutics with which Buddhist women could
approach all female characters in the Jātaka stories. Understanding Mallikā’s life, her
branch stories, and her nuanced character completes our hermeneutical model. What
kind of devotee was Mallikā? Who was she in her past lives? What about her character
makes her the one through whom we should read and understand these texts?
We then look at the Jātaka stories in which Mallikā is involved, and apply our
new feminist hermeneutics lens established in chapter one to her stories. We look at
four of Mallikā’s stories—the Sambula Jātaka, the Sujāta and Bhallātiya Jātaka, and the
Kummasapinda Jātaka—to see how a feminist hermeneutics allows us to have an
alternative, gynocentric reading of these stories. How does the character of Mallikā in
these stories act as an emblematic role model for female Buddhists? Is her character
more multifaceted, less misogynistic, and relatable if we read these stories without an
androcentric lens? Can we still understand Buddhist ethics through her character, like
we can through male characters?
In the conclusion, it is asked what the relevance of this study is to women
Buddhists. How can a feminist hermeneutics challenge mainstream, androcentic
opinions on the feminine body’s soteriological relevance? How might this
hermeneutical process influence and impact further revalorizations of Buddhist texts?
And, how could this study be improved or changed?

Chapter 1: Towards A Feminist Buddhist
Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics
Introduction
A text continues to offer material worthy of interpretation years beyond its
creation, and the availability of a text to interpretation does not diminish the further it
is removed from its historical origins. While original authorial intentions and
meanings become more difficult to decipher as a result of the passage of time and the
change of social landscapes, the project of attempting to uncover meaning from or
achieve an understanding of a text becomes no less possible to undertake. In an
academic setting, the approach to receiving meaning from a text is called
hermeneutics. In this chapter we ask ourselves what is hermeneutics, what does
hermeneutics tell us about interpretation, and are there constraints on interpretation
and what are they?
Defining Hermeneutics
Conceptually, hermeneutics is “a tradition of thinking or of philosophical
reflection that tries to clarify the concept of verstehen, that is, understanding” that asks
the scholar “what is it to make sense of anything, whether a poem, a legal text, a
human action, a language, an alien culture, or oneself?”35
A hermeneutic is a way, (a
methodology, framework, theory, or belief system) with which one approaches an
object in order to receive meaning from it or achieve an understanding of it.36
Paul
35
Gerald Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, (Connecticut: Yale University Press,
1992), 1.
36
Because this project deals specifically with text, from here on out I will speak of
hermeneutics as dealing with textual objects with the understanding that texts are not
the only objects with which hermeneutics deals.

16
Ricoeur describes hermeneutics as “the theory of the rules that preside over an
exegesis—that is, over the interpretation of a particular text or of a group of signs that
may be viewed as a text.”37
Texts written millennia ago and readers attempting to
retrieve meaning from them in modernity are met with the difficulty of
“distanciation—the distance in time, culture, world view, language, or whatever—
between the author of the text and its reader.”38
Hermeneutics connects these two
disparate worlds each with distinct signs, social norms, and ideals. It does so through a
dismissal of the possibility of objectivity, an acceptance of historicity, and the
appreciation that the multitude of human ‘individualities’ means that understanding
may not be about uncovering a ‘truth’ but, instead “is an ongoing critical reflection in
which we see ourselves and what matters to us in the light of the text, even as we see
the text in the light of ourselves and our interests.”39
Understanding, as this project
conceives of it, is of the ontological sort and follows the Heideggerian notion that, as
Gerald L. Bruns explains it:
the way to understand understanding would not be through
conceptual clarification and the construction of theories; rather, one
can hardly not understand it, because it discloses itself most
powerfully in its disruption or when it withholds itself, as when we
find ourselves in a strange land or suffer alienation or exclusion.40
This idea of an ontological hermeneutics is in opposition to the idea of a
transcendental hermeneutics that conveys the Husserlian theory that “understanding
is of ideal entities called meanings rather than of minds”41
and that these meanings are
indivisible and untouchable during reproduction, such as in mathematical proofs.42
Hermeneutics does not apply frameworks or critiques in order to explain the nature of
a text; rather, it tries to start with the nature or subject of the text in order to
understand the intention of the text. Having understood some of the general outline of
37
David Stewart, “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Literature and Theology 3.3 (1989):
296, accessed March 3, 2015, http://www/jstor/org/stable/23924920.
38
Ibid., 297.
39
Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, 11.
40
Ibid., 3.
41
Ibid., 2.
42
For more on ontological versus transcendental hermeneutics, see Bruns,
Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern: introduction.

17
what comprises hermeneutics, can we answer the question of what hermeneutics tells
us about interpretation? What theories on the matter are relevant to this examination?
Hermeneutical Frameworks and Uses in Interpretation
The question of the appropriate approach to hermeneutics has accompanied
the discipline of hermeneutics since its inception. Van A. Harvey, in his Encyclopedia of
Religion entry entitled “Hermeneutics,” acknowledges that, even as recent renewed
interest in hermeneutics has somewhat streamlined the discussion, there remains,
nonetheless, “little agreement concerning how hermeneutics is conceived or how the
discipline should proceed.”43
The diversity of voices arising out of the discipline has
led to a multitude of different opinions and theories on the approach and purpose of
hermeneutics.44
There are three primary hermeneutical theories or concepts that are
relevant to this examination, including the approach of an ontological understanding
of meaning and a tri-partite hermeneutics of suspicion, a radical hermeneutics of
experience, and a hermeneutics of revision.
Paul Ricoeur, the first, and most well known proponent for a hermeneutics of
suspicion, suggested with his theory that a certain amount of doubt is the most
appropriate initial approach to a text. This doubt is not a doubt about the validity of
the text, but a suspicion that the initial reading of a text may not reach the intended
meaning. A hermeneutics of suspicion challenges the reader to reconsider their first
response to and understanding of a text, and asks them to look deeper into the text for
meaning. It asks the reader to check his subjectivity and, as Geoffrey D. Robinson
explains, “walk the fine line between a call for objectivity (grounded in some way in
the text), and yet at the same time [seek] to remain “open” to what the text may have to
43
Van A. Harvey, “Hermeneutics,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit:
Macmillan Reference, 2005), 3930.
44
An in-depth study of the various theoretical approaches to hermeneutics and their
attending theorists is beyond the parameters of this examination, and is honestly not
particularly relevant to the production of a new hermeneutic. Hermeneutics
acknowledges that there is no one perfect approach to understanding, and this project
realizes, similarly, that it will be impossible to create a flawless hermeneutic in the
confines of this examination.

18
say.”45
This hermeneutic encourages the reader not to lose sight of the text in her
subjectivity and not to become uncritical in her objectivity, it challenges the text to
speak for itself in dialogue with its reader. Clearly, then, this hermeneutics opposes a
hermeneutics of faith; a hermeneutics that says one must have faith in the meaning of
a text. A hermeneutics of suspicion suits a project with radical or liberation ideologies;
many liberation theologies have emerged out of a hermeneutics of suspicion.46
In
relation to this thesis, a hermeneutics of suspicion forms the backbone of the feminist
revalorization of the Jātaka stories. But, once an approach of suspicion has been
established, once preconceived notions are sufficiently brought into question, there
needs to be a framework with which to reconstruct meaning.
In order to build on this hermeneutic of suspicion, we will construct meaning
using a radical hermeneutic of experience and a hermeneutic of revision. Experience
holds such a crucial place in the journey of understanding because, as Bruns so
eloquently explains:
it is the existence of human subjects within a temporal order that
cannot itself be objectified the way empirical data can, because one
can never stand outside of temporality and observe it as it goes by…
Rather one can enter into it only in reflection, and of course what
one encounters then is not experience itself but only the mediating
constructions produced by experiencing subjects.47
Experience, in narrative, cannot stand outside of temporality or become an objective
fact, and understanding cannot occur in a state of objectivity. When we read we always
read in time and construct; that is, we come across these constructed remnants of
experience in a time frame that considers both the temporal meaning of our present in
relation to the authorial past. We “live through what is understood” when we retrieve
meaning from a text.48
This experiential nature of the hermeneutic is made ‘radical’ by
a rejection of a romantic hermeneutics. Romantic hermeneutics is an act of retrieval
“in which something original or originary gets transmitted or reproduced.”49
It is the
45
Geoffrey Robinson, “Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutic,” Presbyterion 23.1 (1997): 43,
accessed April 21, 2015, ISSN 0193-6216.
46
Ibid., 52.
47
48
Ibid., 181.
49
Ibid., 215.

19
“purist” hermeneutics in which the original experience is conveyed in its entirety, lived
through, and restored by the reader.50
A radical experiential hermeneutics rejects the
ability of experience to be pristinely conveyed through text and reminds the reader
that, while she may live the constructed experience of text, she does so in the confines
of her own subjectivity and temporality. A radical experiential hermeneutics holds
great potential for women hoping to see themselves and their experiences in the
characters of the texts they read.
It is with these modern lived experiences that we begin to understand the
hermeneutic of revision. A hermeneutic of revision says not that we should revise what
a text objectively says, but, rather, that we should revise the construction of our
subjectivity in looking at text. Alice Collett puts forth a hermeneutics of revision in her
work “Historio-Critical Hermeneutics in the Study of Women in Early Buddhism,”
proposing that “Shifting attention to the, often detailed, accounts of the lives of these
women [in text], and by so doing drawing attention to (potentially) female experience
can add new dimensions to the debate.”51
Collett’s revisionist hermeneutics requires a
revision of our traditional, male-centric, gynophobic approach to textual material,
saying, “certain texts, historically, have been over-emphasised and over-studied” and
“alongside this, certain themes have also prevailed.”52
When not only the same texts
are in circulation, but these texts expound the same attitudes towards women as the
attending themes, then we have become too immersed in our own subjectivity and
must revise our method of interpretation. We no longer walk the fine line between
objectivity and subjectivity that Ricoeur talked about if we look at text with the same
lens and preconceptions that we always have. A revisionist hermeneutics asks that we
change our lens to examine different characters in different stories, effectively leaving
our tired preconceptions at home. This does not ask us to find anything that is not
already in the text, but to look at what is already there in a different light and make
active revisions to our methodologies.
50
Ibid., 214.
51
Alive Collett, “Historio-Critical Hermeneutics in the Study of Women in Early Indian
Buddhism,” Numen 56 (2009): 113, accessed April 21, 2015, doi: 10.1163/156852708X373276.
52
Ibid., 107.

20
Constraints on Interpretation
There reaches a point in hermeneutics when the question of limitations arises.
Nietzsche saw this problem with his hermeneutical dilemma. As Bruns outlines it:
if understanding always moves within horizons where it is not
possible to determine things as such, once for all, or in a way that a
change in perspective will not require us to revise, then there can be
no such thing as understanding; rather, everything is simply
interpretable otherwise in every direction and without end.53
What a nightmarish interpretative mess. Gadamer addresses this issue by citing
Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity, which “shifts the question of understanding
from the theoretical plane of seeing from a perspective to the practical plane of
involvement and participation in an ongoing action.”54
This means that we search less
for what the text means in itself and we look more towards “how we stand with respect
to it in the situation in which we find ourselves.”55
Our perspective on finding truth and the fitting together of varying narratives
also plays an important role in limiting interpretation. If we approach what Bruns calls
“the question of too many narratives” with the mindset that narrative is a form of truth
expression, then, as scholars and readers, we approach text with the idea that only one
true story exists.56
Searching for truth in a text, we come across the problem that “there
can be only one true story, and that the proliferation of narratives would (as indeed it
does) undermine the truth claim of any one of them.”57
When narrative becomes truth,
the job of the hermeneut becomes a battle between true and false rather than a
liberating process of understanding. Instead of orienting the narratives in our texts
towards truth, Bruns proposes that we orient them towards freedom, moving away
from the competitiveness inherent to a goal of truth.58
In this movement towards
approaching text with the goal of freedom, Bruns adopts Gadamer’s interpretation of
53
54
Ibid., 9.
55
Ibid., 9.
56
Ibid., 255-6.
57
John MacCumber, Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, Reason (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press), pp. 12. cited in Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, 256.
58
Ibid., 256.

21
phronesis, which is seen not as control but as a responsiveness.59
Phronesis is the
construction of understanding through the openness to experiences. As, Bruns
explains the matter “Having too many narratives would be like having too many
experiences: one cannot imagine what it would mean to reach such a point…”60
An
openness to more experiences allows the individual to form a more nuanced
understanding of the matter under examination. John MacCumber sees the function
of narrative connecting as “a rope rather than a chain; there is no more need for
different narratives to harmonize fully with one another than there is for all the
strands of a rope to twist in the same direction at the same point.”61
Searching for
freedom in text means adopting an approach of rationality and critical thinking that
individual approaches are not at odds with other individual journeys towards freedom
in text, but instead ultimately lead to a sort of utopian hermeneutics. For Bruns, this
utopian hermeneutics looks like the utopia Georgia Warnke outlines as differing
groups “confronting one another dialectically and undergoing internal
transformations (for better or worse) as a consequence.”62
If we look more at ourselves and our circumstances as what affects the
historical narrative of a text, then we see that the confines to hermeneutics lies in
checking our own presuppositions and objectives before approaching a text. This is
not to discourage us from acting on these aims, but instead encourages us to be more
careful and detailed about making explicit what we hope to receive from a text, what
our methodology is in approaching the text, and what we aim to do with the
knowledge that we have acquired. In this examination, we have made it explicit that
we hope to receive a feminist understanding of the Jātaka stories during our reading of
them. Our methodology is one that presumes a hermeneutics of suspicion, a radical
hermeneutics of experience, a hermeneutics of revision, and an ontological
understanding of meaning in order to develop a feminist critical hermeneutics. With a
feminist understanding of these texts we seek to provide an interpretation that allows
female Buddhists to find stories emblematic of their religious experiences, and
challenge the belief of the inferiority of the feminine body in attaining enlightenment.
59
Ibid., 259.
60
Ibid., 259.
61
Ibid., 256.
62
Ibid., 262.

22
A text remains constantly open for interpretation, but that does not mean that
textual interpretation is absurd or impossible because of the multiplicity of available
interpretations. Rather, it means that we must take even more care when developing
the framework for approaching textual interpretation, especially when that text lies at
the heart of a religious tradition’s literary canon. So, in rejection of Nietzsche’s
hermeneutic dilemma of an endless horizon of interpretation, I will argue that these
Jātaka stories do not exist to convey a single truth; rather, they exist to perform a
function on a reader through interpretation, and re-interpretation, asking what that
function is on a reader approaching the stories with a feminist lens?
Building the Methodology
In further creating this feminist hermeneutics, building on the hermeneutical
assumptions previously established, we ask what we should understand conceptually
and historically about these texts before we begin to exegete them. Van A. Harvey
outlines the three primary conceptual issues handled by hermeneutics. He includes
“the nature of text, what it means to understand a text, how understanding and
interpretation are determined by the presuppositions and beliefs (the horizon) of the
audience to which the text is being interpreted.”63
These three concepts will frame my
own approach to developing a hermeneutic for the Jātaka stories, though I will switch
up the order in which I approach these starting with existing presuppositions and
beliefs (historical contextualization), moving to what it means to understand a text
(Buddhist hermeneutics), and finishing with the nature of text (genre). In assessing
presuppositions and beliefs, I will ask what life was like for Buddhist women, how that
environment has changed, and develop an understanding for the prevailing attitude
towards women, so as to better understand the external influences on these texts. In
considering what it means to understand a text, I will ask what it means in the
Buddhist religious tradition to interpret a religious text. What are Buddhist beliefs
regarding the availability of a text to interpretation? How do precepts in Buddhism
impact the manner in which text is constructed and presented for interpretation? As
we begin to understand the origin of these stories and the traditional hermeneutic
63
Harvey, “Hermeneutics,” Encyclopedia of Religion, 3930.

23
used to approach them, I want to then ask, what is the work of a text? What are the
different levels—ethically and religiously—from which a text, and specifically these
texts, can do work on an individual?
Contextualizing Women in Early Buddhism
Introduction
In the most basic, foundational Buddhist understanding of karma, one has been and will
be born into disparate bodies (male and female), in differing ontological conditions as a
result of the cycles of rebirth in saṃsāra.64
The inevitability that any one persona might
be reborn as a woman should provide a level playing field for men and women in
Buddhism. Yet in Buddhist canonical texts and, generally, in the lived history of
Buddhism, women and the feminine have played a controversial and polarizing role.
Women and their actions in Buddhist texts tend to be ignored, undermined, or even
outright condemned, with little regard for supposed Buddhist egalitarian attitudes towards
all life.
As we will see, significantly, some canonical texts exist in which women are
emblematically virtuous, encouraged to pursue their Buddhist practice, and even have
their actions lauded as exemplary for male devotees. Because few texts specifically
detailing the historical influence of female Buddhists exist, most of what scholars have
learned about attitudes towards women has come from canonical sources, such as the
Jātaka stories. As depictions of women in these texts are generally varied and
inconclusive, how are Buddhists supposed to approach women and the feminine
within their tradition? Alan Sponberg calls the varied attitudes towards women
evident in these texts a “rich multivocality,” rejecting the idea that Buddhist attitudes
towards women are ambivalent.65
Sponberg discourages the need to justify the varied
attitudes towards women, instead looking at this multivocality as indicative of
historical attitudes towards women, offering insight into how women have
participated in the tradition. He explains:
64
For explanations of these terms see the next chapter, “Buddhist Hermeneutics.”
65
Sponberg, “Attitudes Toward Women and the Feminine,” 3.

24
…rather than seeking a doctrinal reconciliation or justification for
this inconsistency of views in the literature, instead we must seek to
understand the social and intellectual dynamics of the early
community of Buddhists that led to such a discordant juxtaposition
of views.66
Often the multivocality in these texts comes not from other characters, but
directly from the Buddha himself. We see such multivocality in the story of
Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī, the Buddha’s aunt who raised him after the passing of his
mother. The order of the nuns, previously nonexistent, was created through the efforts
of Mahāpajāpatī.67
Five years after the Buddha attains enlightenment, Mahāpajāpatī
approaches the Buddha to ask for ordination for both herself and other women,
saying, “It would be good, Lord, if women were allowed to go forth from the home to
the homeless life under the doctrine and discipline proclaimed in the Tathagata.”68
The Buddha tells Mahāpajāpatī, “Don’t set your mind on women going forth…!,” but
Mahāpajāpatī persists despite her sorrow at the Buddha’s response.69
Eventually,
Ānanda intercedes, and conveys Mahāpajāpatī’s request to the Buddha three times
before he finally agrees to allow ordination for women with the caveat that the women
follow eight “strict rules.”70
In this situation, the Buddha seems to be representing a
variety of different perspectives on the issue of women becoming ordained, remaining
openly didactic to the matter; he stays true to his own teachings, while retaining a
practicality. Without playing the devil’s advocate, or at the very least considering other
points of view, discussion would not be as dynamic as it needs to be to discover ‘truth.’
Appreciating the historicity of the participation of women in the Buddhist
tradition is particularly relevant for a feminist revalorization. If we can lay the
foundation for understanding historically what misogynistic attitudes have existed and
how they have colored the depictions of women in these texts, it becomes easier to
appreciate the existence of other, more feminist attitudes towards women.
Contextualizing Buddhist women in history involves asking three related questions.
66
Ibid., 4.
67
Reiko Ohnuma, Ties That Bind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 94.
68
Horner, I.B., trans. “Cullavagga” in The Book of the Discipline (Vinaya Pitaka), London:
H. Milford/Oxford University Press, 1938-66. cited in Ohnuma, Ties That Bind, 95.
69
Ibid., 95.
70
Ibid., 96.

25
What does existing scholarship tell us about the social atmosphere in which Buddhism
arose, what does Buddhist social history look like? Once Buddhism was established in
society, what were responses to lay women in the tradition? And, what were responses
like towards female monastics?
Social Atmosphere
Buddhism erupted in an environment of rapid social transformation in India.
The eastern Gangetic valley was undergoing rapid urbanization and new ideas about
personhood and individuality began to arise, opposing the hegemonic Brahmanical
culture.71
With agricultural surpluses and the introduction of money and organized
trade, the economy was flourishing.72
New technologies like iron smelting were being
invented and significantly altering the social landscape, making agriculture and
organized warfare easier, as well as changing the nature of urban culture.73
Richard
Gombrich remarks that at this time there were “the beginnings of what one might call
states.”74
As a part of this social change, there was a move towards a more open society
in rejection of closed communities, which increased “the individual’s power to choose
and hence doubt about choosing rightly.”75
Sponberg notes that “the effect of such
social transformation was at once both traumatizing and liberating” and was
responsible for creating an ideological vacuum out of which new ideologies and
religions arose.76
All of this rapid development and transformation allowed prevailing
social structures, such as the Brahmanical caste system and its gender ideologies, to be
challenged.
As a result of this openness and ability of new ideologies to play with gender
and caste identities, women played a substantial, essential, and unique role in the
foundation of the early Buddhist community.77
Not only did women participate in
71
72
Richard Gombrich, Theravāda Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to
Modern Colombo (New Yorks: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 2001), 51.
73
Sponberg, “Attitudes Toward Women and the Feminine,” 4-5.
74
Gombrich, Theravāda Buddhism, 51.
75
Ibid., 58.
76
77
Ibid., 5.

26
early Buddhist communities, they played respected roles and were occasionally
teachers with their own followers.78
In the Therīgāthā, the collection of poems by the
early women elders located within the same section of the canon as the Jātakas, we see
evidence of the involved role women played in the early saṅgha. Women elders in the
Therīgāthā relate soteriological achievements, convey key Buddhist principles, and
generally express what life was like pre and post ordination. Take, for example, the
experience of the female renunciant Mittakalī whose verse in the Therīgāthā speaks of
her experiences:
Although I left home for no home/ and wandered, full of faith,/ I
was still greedy/ for possessions and praise.// I lost my way./ My
passions used me, and I forgot the real point of my wandering life./
Then as I sat in my little cell,/ there was only terror./ I thought—this
is the wrong way,/ a fever of longing controls me.// Life is short./
Age and sickness gnaw away. I have no time for carelessness/ before
this body breaks.// And as I watched the elements of mind and body/
rise and fall away/ I saw them as they really are./ I stood up./ My
mind was completely free./ The Buddha’s teaching has been done.79
Clearly, these women were able to not only participate in the life of the saṅgha, but
were also perceived as capable of both recognizing their earthly attachments and
achieving enlightenment through rejection of those attachments. As a revolutionary
religious movement, challenging prevailing social structures, Buddhism attracted the
attention of those marginalized by society. However, as tends to be the case with
revolutionary social or religious movements, Buddhism soon had to adapt to societal
pressures if it intended to become a cultural mainstay.
Attitudes Toward Women
Once Buddhism became established within Indian society, the role of women
became less drastically revolutionary, and tended to conform to social norms of the
time that identified lay women principally in relation to their male kin (as mother,
daughter, wife). I.B. Horner notes that before the Buddhist epoch, “the status of
78
Ibid., 6.
79
Susan Murcott, The First Buddhist Women: Translations and Commentary on the
Therīgāthā (California: Parallax Press, 1991), 54-5.

27
women in India was on the whole low and without honour.”80
Even those women who
conformed to conventional gender roles established by Brahmanical society were met
with distain for their gender. Women were essentially outcastes in society.
Nonetheless, Buddhism still provided liberating roles for Buddhist laywomen that
challenged the constraints of traditional Brahmanical social roles.
In Brahmanical society, daughters were perceived as inauspicious, wives were
little more than subservient child-bearers, and widows had limited autonomy and
were returned to their father or sons after the death of their spouse.81
Buddhism,
although it did not upend these gender roles, returned a sense of relevance and
distinction to them—daughters were no longer a bad omen, wives were allowed more
voice in whom they married and given greater domestic authority, mothers were
greatly honored and held “unassailable” positions, and widows were allowed more
autonomy.82
Because women were no longer thought of as possessions of the men in
their lives, they had more freedom to explore their own aims within these gender roles:
“Under Buddhism, more than ever before, she was an individual in command of her
own life until the dissolution of the body, and less of a chattel to be only respected if
she lived through and on a man.”83
Buddhism returned status and importance not only
to the existence of and domestic roles performed by the laywoman, but also to her
relevance as a spiritual and religious human being. Moreover, in a move radical for the
time, Buddhist women were provided an option for salvation outside of traditional
family roles; salvation could occur for women not only in traditional social roles, but
also as renouncers of society, making women soteriologically relevant in all areas of
human existence.
This spiritual and religious relevance is termed by Sponberg “soteriological
inclusiveness.” He uses this term to describe the earliest, most fundamental attitude
toward women in Buddhism saying:
Buddhism in its origins above all else was a pragmatic soteriology, a
theory of liberation that sought to free humanity from suffering, first
80
I.B. Horner, Women Under Primitive Buddhism (India: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers,
1989), 1.
81
Ibid., 1.
82
Ibid., 3.
83
Ibid., 3.

28
by thoroughly analyzing the fundamental human predicament and
then by offering a practical method or path for eliminating the
afflictions, cognitive and dispositional, that are perpetuated as greed,
hatred, and delusion.84
Soteriological inclusiveness details the early Buddhist belief that any person,
regardless of sex or caste, can attain liberation and that not only can everyone attain
liberation, but he or she follows the same path to do so.85
Significantly, soteriological
inclusiveness does not imply equality between the sexes, but instead proposes that all
people should be included regardless of social standing or gender identity.
Soteriological inclusiveness retains a conceptual ambiguity between the existence of
biological gender and socially constructed gender roles. As inclusive as soteriological
inclusiveness is, it does not negate the fact that sex and gender distinctions exist;
rather, it expresses the opinion that gender differences are insignificant on the path
toward salvation.86
Sexual identity continued to be “biologically differentiated in a
way that caste was not,” and the fact that “sexual identity is as much socially
constructed as it is biologically given” continued to be overlooked within Buddhist
circles.87
The retention of the notion of gender as solely biologically generated becomes
problematic when we note later, less inclusive Buddhist attitudes toward women. In
fact, Sponberg directly links the lack of conceptual differentiation between social and
biological gender with later misogynistic and androcentric attitudes toward women.88
As Buddhism became increasingly institutionalized in the years following the
Buddha’s death, Buddhist attitudes toward women shifted as the Buddhist community
had to decide what to do with the repercussions of soteriological inclusiveness. After
the Buddha’s death, the Buddhist community tended towards cenobitic monasticism,
which proved difficult to negotiate as these communities attempted to reconcile a
desire to maintain a gendered separation between the monks and nuns for the sake of
propriety with a hesitance to allow autonomy and self-regulation to a group of
84
85
Ibid., 8-9.
86
87
Ibid., 11.
88
Ibid., 11.

29
women.89
Stemming from these developments, two detrimental attitudes toward
women arose within the saṅgha —institutional androcentrism and ascetic misogyny.90
Institutional androcentrism is characterized as:
the view that women indeed may pursue a full-time religious career,
but only within a carefully regulated institutional structure that
preserves and reinforces the conventionally accepted social
standards of male authority and female subordination.91
As Buddhism transitioned towards cenobitic communities, regulatory structures had
to be implemented to control the lives of the monks. In response to public concern
over women’s inclusion in the monastic order and in an effort to retain monetary
support, the common belief among male monks was that female monastics had to be
protected and controlled by a social structure; nuns regulating themselves was
unthinkable, even though many groups had been doing so at the time of this
impasse.92
As a result, monks assumed authority over the female order, creating an
androcentric institution in the process. This institutional androcentrism was later
responsible for the dying out of the female monastic order and also contributed to the
attitude of ascetic misogyny.
Ascetic misogyny is an even more visceral rejection of the feminine than
institutional androcentrism, and almost entirely opposes the idea of soteriological
inclusiveness. Sponberg attributes this attitude to prejudices inherited from Indian
culture and original cosmogonic beliefs.93
Ascetic misogyny approaches women as
active agents of chaos and encourages monks to avoid women and condemn the
feminine.94
Such an approach to women does not support their ability to achieve
soteriological aims. Some Buddhists acknowledged the harms of misogyny, and
recognized further that “fear of the feminine, and misogyny, generally, is itself a form
89
Ibid., 13.
90
These terms are developed by Alan Sponberg in “Attitudes Toward Women and the
Feminine,” and this work can be consulted for a more extensive examination of these
terms’ origins and significance.
91
92
Ibid., 17.
93
Ibid., 19.
94
Ibid., 19.

30
of clinging and bondage.”95
Due to the extremity of ascetic misogyny and its obvious
negative effects, it was often conceded by many Buddhists that such an attitude was
contradictory to Buddhist principles.96
And, yet, although ascetic misogyny was born
out of discordant interests at the time, and even as much as the attitude of ascetic
misogyny was challenged within the tradition, it nonetheless prevailed and became
embodied in contemporaneous texts.
Female Monastic Order
Before the decline of the women’s monastic movement, they were a vibrant
community.97
During the early days of Buddhism, bhikkhunīs were abundant in the
saṅgha and perceived as powerful Buddhist figures. Well versed in Scripture and the
particularities of the Dharma, women were able to achieve full ordination and become
teachers of the Dharma.98
Bhikkhunīs played important roles in religious and social
activities and the saṅgha played such an integral part in society that in 10th
century Sri
Lanka the king built the nuns a new monastery.99
The Buddhist notion of
soteriological inclusiveness was, for the most part, enacted upon and accepted in the
first centuries after Buddhism became institutionalized. However, Tessa
Bartholomeusz, commenting on Sri Lankan nuns, notes that after the 10th
century and
until the 19th
century, limited records exist suggesting nuns of any type existed in Sri
Lanka during this time period.100
A similar dearth of evidence of existence is found in
other countries as well.
Attitudes towards nuns shifted dramatically during the intermediate years
between the early years of Buddhism and the 20th
century, reflecting more of the
institutional androcentrism and ascetic misogyny outlined before. Negative attitudes
toward women during this time period have impacted how women were allowed to
express themselves religiously and how women’s spirituality was written about.
Consequently, it has also colored perceptions of what Buddhism prescribes for
95
Ibid., 23.
96
Ibid., 23.
97
A nun in the monastic order is known as a bhikkhunī.
98
Bartholomeusz, “The Female Mendicant in Buddhist Sri Lanka,” 38.
99
Ibid., 39.
100
Ibid., 41.

31
laywomen and female monastics. This fact is especially salient in the struggle of
women in the last hundred years to gain re-ordination into the Theravāda tradition.
Buddhists, men and women alike, cite scripture that prevents women from joining the
saṅgha or achieving full ordination, while it remains evident that such prescriptions
result from attitudes of institutional androcentrism and ascetic misogyny and not the
original philosophy of the Buddha.101
Since the Theravāda bhikkhunī lineage ceased to exist, women have had to work
around the limitations to their ordination imposed on them by scriptural authority
(the Vinaya Piṭaka clearly articulates what is necessary for a nuns’ saṅgha) and
tradition by finding other means of fulfilling their desire for renunciation. While some
women do not desire full ordination, many other women have pursued renunciation
as maechees or tila shin.102
Suzanne Mrozik remarks that:
The proliferation of female forms of renunciation—however this
might complicate the contemporary bhikksuni movement—
demonstrates that Buddhist women have a long history going back to
Mahāpajāpatī of not taking ‘no’ for an answer.103
Buddhist women want to have the ability to participate as completely as the men in
their religious tradition. In doing so, they are met with significant backlash as they
struggle for their right to renunciation that has been taken away from them under the
auspices of centuries of institutionalized androcentrism and ascetic misogyny.
101
For more on the female mendicant in Buddhist Sri Lanka see Tessa Bartholomeusz
“The Female Mendicant in Buddhist Sri Lanka.”; Karma Lekshe Tsomo, Daughters of
the Buddha. New York: Snow Lion Publications, 1988.; Susanne Mrozik. “A Robed
Revolution: The Contemporary Buddhist Nun’s (Bhiksuni) Movement.” Religion
Compass 3.3 (2009): 360-78.
102
Susanne Mrozik, “A Robed Revolution: The Contemporary Buddhist Nun’s
(Bhiksuni) Movement.” Religion Compass 3.3 (2009): 365-6, accessed April 21, 2015. doi:
10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00136.x.
103
Ibid., 366.

32
Buddhist Hermeneutics
What Makes Buddhist Texts Unique?
In the wake of the Buddha’s enlightenment and subsequent departure from the
world, Buddhists have had to grapple with where religious authority will reside. Before
the Buddha’s departure, he tells his loyal devotee, Ānanda, that it is the Buddha’s
teachings that shall become the teacher in his imminent and enduring absence:
And the Lord said to Ānanda: ‘Ānanda, it may be that you will think:
“The Teacher’s instruction has ceased, now we have no teacher!” It
should not be seen like this, Ānanda, for what I have taught and
explained to you as Dhamma and discipline will, at my passing, be
your teacher.104
This pronouncement gives direct and absolute authority to texts attributed to the
Buddha and his teachings. Reading and understanding Buddhist texts, then, is an act of
not only comprehension, but also of coming in contact with the Buddha’s ethical
message, and becomes of the utmost importance for those hoping to internalize and gain
insight into the Buddha’s teachings.
However, attributing ultimate authority to texts poses a number of problems for
Buddhists. In the modern age, Buddhist devotees number in the millions—expecting each
individual to have the same response to a text is unreasonable and unlikely.105
Phra
Prayudh Payutto notes that when it comes to interpretation of Buddhist teachings, “in
some cases, two people may take opposing sides and both be able to cite statements from
the canon to support their ideas.”106
Even those devotees alive in the years immediately
following the Buddha’s departure could not have possibly reached a consensus on what
each message in these texts meant. That impossibility is in part due to the fact that the
104
Maurice Walshe, trans. The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha
Nikaya (Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 269-70.
105
According to the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs at Georgetown
University there are 470 million adherents to Buddhism, 125 million of which identify
as Theravāda Buddhists. http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/essays/demographics-
of-buddhism
106
Phra Prayudh Payutto, Buddhadhamma: Natural Laws and Values for Life, trans. Grant
A. Olson (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 37.

33
Buddha’s teachings were tailored to fit different people in different places on the path
towards enlightenment. As Donald Lopez remarks, “just as a physician does not prescribe
the same medicine to cure all maladies, the Buddha did not teach the same thing to
everyone.”107
As a result of the tailoring of these teachings, and to the benefit of the
spread of the tradition, the Buddhist canon is voluminous and wide reaching.108
Each
teaching of the Buddha’s was not intended to have the same significance for each
devotee—the Buddha had a different teaching for each devotee “based on [his or her]
interests, dispositions, capacities, and levels of intelligence.”109
In fact, it would be
incorrect to assume that a single interpretation of a Buddhist text was the most correct or
most useful, because, while it might be applicable to one individual’s circumstances, it
would be wholly inappropriate for someone else’s.
Additionally, the fact that the Buddha acknowledged and intended to speak to a
diverse audience through his texts means that for the Buddhist tradition, or those in the
academy, to propose a single, concrete hermeneutical framework is antithetical to the fact
that the Buddha created these texts to cater to different frameworks. Instead of proposing
a single hermeneutics or framework for reading, Buddhist hermeneutics proposes a
mentality, or attitude to assume when approaching Buddhist texts. Anyone can use this
attitude because instead of forcing one to view things from an external lens, it allows the
individual to cultivate a lens that is both personal and religious.
The Buddhist Hermeneutical Attitude
What attitudes, or hermeneutical frameworks, do Buddhists assume when they
approach canonical texts, knowing that the texts both hold the coveted teachings of the
Buddha, and are intentionally broad and accessible to a diverse audience? And, with this
in mind, what prevents Buddhist texts from becoming, as Lopez calls them “contentless
107
Donald S. Lopez, Buddhist Hermeneutics (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
1988), 2.
108
Lopez suggests that the expansive size of the Buddhist canon may be one of the
reasons that, when compared to Jewish and Christian traditions, there has been a relative
lack of Buddhist hermeneutical frameworks generated. This seems like a plausible
suggestion. (Lopez, Buddhist Hermeneutics, 2.)
109
Ibid., 3.

34
forms to be filled by interpretations projected by [the Buddha’s] followers?”110
There are
a couple interconnected Buddhist notions that build off one another to form the most
proper Buddhist mentality for approaching texts. The formation of an attitude toward
texts mimics the change in attitude on the path toward enlightenment, also called the
Middle Path. It begins with confidence (saddhā), progresses to reason (diṭṭhi) and leads to
proper knowledge (sammā-ñāṇa). In other words, Buddhist hermeneutics is a
hermeneutics of suspicion that requires a critical intellect in order to gain access to a
universal knowledge.
Phra Prayudh Payutto comments on the Buddhist path toward enlightenment in
the Buddhadhamma that, “Most ordinary people must learn by depending on the
suggestions and teachings of other people.”111
This includes dependence on the
suggestions of texts, and thus, the first step of the path begins by assuming a faith or
confidence in the process and the teachings.112
This is a confidence that the process and
teachings hold an outcome that the individual trusts to be worthwhile. Payutto remarks
that this confidence may be established through “an initial satisfaction with the teachings,
perhaps based on their reasonable nature, or being satisfied that the teacher meets the
student’s needs.”113
In this context, confidence is not “based on feelings, or mere
emotion,” for this is the “kind of blind belief that should be eliminated or at least
corrected.”114
This emotional confidence, akin to faith in other traditions, should be
avoided in favor of a confidence that resembles “belief rooted in reason.”115
So too
should confidence that leads to egoism or selfishness be avoided.116
With a reason-based
confidence, the individual does not blindly accept the first answer pretending to be
“Truth,” but instead, accepts the journey toward Truth, questioning and challenging
answers that arise on the way. Payutto describes it: “the confidence of Buddhism supports
inquiry and the search for reason,” and rejects “[i]mploring people to believe, forcing
110
Ibid., 5.
111
Payutto, Buddhadhamma, 199.
112
Ibid., 199.
113
Ibid., 199.
114
Ibid., 200.
115
Ibid., 200.
116
Ibid., 202.

35
people to believe established “truths,” or threatening people in order to induce belief...”117
This confidence is similar to a hermeneutics of suspicion, which challenges textual
meaning, but nonetheless believes that there is some sort of meaning to be extracted from
text.
The next step in Buddhist hermeneutics is reason, which is closely linked with,
and maintains a check on, confidence. Reason means trusting one’s own intelligence.
When one assumes an attitude of confidence it “does not mean acceptance or surrender
without respect for the value of your own intelligence.”118
Intelligence, or one’s ability to
reason, keeps confidence in check and requires that one assess one’s own experiences in
light of those recorded in texts.119
When one approaches the world and their tradition
with reason, she does “not [believe] in nor [cling] to ideas that have been handed
down.”120
Reason means being critical, and accruing knowledge from an array of sources,
even those seemingly unrelated to one’s religious tradition, to critique the doctrine or
texts of that tradition. Payutto lays out five steps relevant to reason:
1) Establish a way of looking at the world according to reason; not
believing in or clinging to ideas that have been handed down (similar to
the message of the Kalama Sutta).
2) Become a guardian of truth (saccanurakkha): that is, being a person
who enjoys listening to the principles, theories, teachings, and various
views of different people and groups with an open mind, without
making hasty judgments about the things that have yet to be established
as fact, and not simply clinging to the things known to be correct and
true.
3) Once you have heard the various theories, teachings, or views of others,
consider the merits of their reasons according to your own wisdom; see
if the person explaining these theories, teachings, or views is earnest,
unbiased, and has sufficient wisdom for you to have confidence in these
117
Ibid., 201.
118
Ibid., 212.
119
Ibid., 199.
120
Ibid., 202.

36
teachings; and test their truths through the application of your own
reasoning.
4) Consider the ideas you have accepted, think about them carefully, and
test them with reason until you are certain that they are correct and true,
until you can completely accept their rationale and put them into
practice in order to test their validity,
5) If doubts still remain, investigate them in an unbiased manner with
wisdom, not with the pride of selfishness, and test their reasoning until
no doubts remain. This way confidence will be certain and bear the
greatest fruits.121
Ideally, a reason-based confidence will result in wisdom. Eventually confidence and
reason will fall away, because their continued presence means that wisdom has not yet
been attained.122
Wisdom is only the attainment of knowledge, not the achievement of
liberation or enlightenment.123
And, actually, receiving this wisdom is a smaller part of
what occurs during the grander dharmic progresses, a concept we shall explore in depth
shortly. However, once one has attained wisdom, it becomes the lens through which they
view the world.
A large part of Buddhist hermeneutics involves the devotee finding her place both
within the Buddha’s teachings and among other devotees. As Lopez explains it:
Those who are not yet enlightened must interpret. The Buddhist
exegete suffers from a displacement, an absence; he did not sit in the
circle at the feet of the Buddha and hear the doctrine that was
intended especially for him. Now the Buddha is gone, the audience
is gone; now the teaching must be the teacher. The exegete is
constantly in search of his place in the absent circle, and his
hermeneutics provide the compass.124
In the absence of the teacher, everyone actively reading becomes a hermeneut.
Significantly, however, no one takes on the activity of interpretation in isolation, and
there is great importance and many benefits to reap from having a ‘spiritual friend.’
121
Ibid., 202-3.
122
Ibid., 221.
123
Ibid., 199.
124
Lopez, Buddhist Hermeneutics, 9.

37
Payutto terms teachers, advisors, etc. ‘spiritual friends’ (kalyāṇa-mitta) and says that their
importance lies in being “prepared with the proper qualities to teach, suggest, point out,
encourage, assist, and give guidance for getting started on the Path of Buddhist
training.”125
With a spiritual friend, the devotee puts herself in conversation with other
perspectives on Buddhist precepts, and in this way, broadens her knowledge, critically
reflects on her own understandings, and becomes closer to reaching enlightenment.
Essentially, Buddhist hermeneutics is a hermeneutics of suspicion predicated on the
notion what is found in texts can be contradictory, morally wrong, or inapplicable to
one’s circumstances, and that the job of the hermeneut is to be suspicious of proposed
“Truths,” have confidence in her own intelligence, and work toward uncovering the true
teaching of the Buddha, the Dharma.
Orienting Towards a Buddhist Belief System
There are three important concepts in the Buddhist belief system that must be
clarified before this project continues. Dharma, karma and saṃsāra play fundamental
roles in Buddhist philosophy and ideology.
Saṃsāra is the cycle of rebirths that every unenlightened individual, human
and non-human, is born into. In saṃsāra we are born and reborn into ‘innumerable’
lives that are human, animal and godly.126
Because of saṃsāra and each individual’s
many rebirths in past lives, “the law of averages dictates that most beings one comes
across, however one may dislike them now, have at some time been a close relative or
friend, so that lovingkindness towards them is appropriate.”127
In this way, saṃsāra is
integral to Buddhist ethics, especially applied in the practice of treating others fairly.
Karma is the principle or law that dictates the spiritual (and concomitant
physical) progress of an individual within the successive lives of saṃsāra. As Peter
Harvey notes, “The movement of beings between rebirths is not a haphazard process
but is ordered and governed by the law of karma, the principle that beings are reborn
according to the nature and quality of their past actions; they are ‘heir’ to their
125
Payutto, Buddhadhamma, 224.
126
Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, history and practices (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 32.
127
Ibid., 38.

38
actions.”128
Karma is action, and actions, both good and bad, and the idea that these
actions have natural consequences that may come to fruition in either this life or the
next, or whose consequences we are presently dealing with in this life. Harvey explains
that the consequences of these actions are not “seen as ‘rewards’ and ‘punishments’,
but as simply the natural results of certain kinds of action.”129
Consequences for one’s
good or bad intentional actions can be meted out either as rebirth with physical
ailments or high social status; rebirth as a man (good) or a woman (bad); rebirth in
heaven or hell.130
As Harvey describes the traditional metaphor, karma is like a seed,
and with each action we plant, we will reap the fruit of that action.131
That does not
mean, however, that when we encounter a negative situation there is nothing that can
be done about it; instead an individual should aim and act to make the best of the
situation.132
Dharma is a complicated, hard to define concept. Dharma is the essence of
Buddhism and it embodies the “eternal truths and cosmic law-orderliness discovered
by the Buddha(s), Buddhist teachings, the Buddhist path of practice, and the goal of
Buddhism, the timeless nibbāṇa (Skt. nirvāṇa).”133
Dharma comprises everything from
the precepts, tenets, and teachings that guide devotees towards relinquishing
attachments and achieving enlightenment, to the actual conceptual reality these
artifacts hope to express. As Grant Olson notes, “The term dhamma can mean truth,
phenomena, principles, righteousness, good acts, morality, or the ‘body’ of the
teachings of the Buddha.”134
Essentially, it is the teaching and what is taught.
Genre, Ethics and Literary Analysis
In this section of the developing hermeneutics, we ask ourselves: What does it
mean to understand a text? Literary analysis challenges scholars to uncover the
128
Ibid., 39.
129
Ibid., 39.
130
Ibid., 39.
131
Ibid., 40.
132
Ibid., 40.
133
Ibid., 2.
134
Payutto, Buddhadhamma, 49. Footnote: Grant Olson.

39
intended work of a text and a reader’s response to structural, technical elements of the
text. Generally, literary analysis hopes to reveal more how literary elements function
together to evoke a response, than what knowledge the author intended to convey.
Literary analysis encapsulates a wide variety of approaches to retrieving
understanding about a text, including examining tropes of genre, or looking at the use
of literary devices such as hyperbole, narrative structure, setting, onomatopoeia, and
symbolism. Particularly relevant to this examination is genre and the incorporation of
ethics into characteristic techniques of genre. I will argue that to “understand” the
Jātakas means to understand them within their genre and within the ethics conveyed
by that genre’s literary techniques.
Genre
The Buddhist canon is expansive and comprises a multitude of different
literary genres, all of which require different hermeneutical approaches. For the ease
of developing a hermeneutics, but also for reasons of formal structure, this project
focuses on the genre of the Jātaka. This focus begs two questions: What are the
Jātakas? And, why focus on them?
Understanding Jātakas
The Jātaka stories are typically understood to be within the genre of fables and
fairy tales, and their style and content reflects their similarity with these other genres.
The Jātaka stories provide prominent yet accessible ethical and soteriological
messages, or lessons, based around the past lives of the Buddha, and their
simultaneous accessibility to a reader and connection to the Buddha has led to their
popularity in the Buddhist canon. Oskar von Hinüber says of the Jātakas, they are “one
of the most important collections of such tales to have spread over large parts of Asia
and Europe far beyond Buddhism.”135
And, Naomi Appleton describes them as “hugely
popular in Buddhist countries, where they are drawn upon in sermons, festivals, and
rituals, and commonly reproduced in children’s books as well as literary works for
135
Oskar von Hinüber, A Handbook of Pali Literature (Germany: Walter de Gruyter &
Co., 1996), 58.

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