I put a vote in for covering the stepmother / aunt / foster mother of the historical Buddha who basically bullied him into ordaining her as a nun and including women in monasteries.
There’s a tendency to try to cover up Buddhism’s misogyny, especially these days with Buddhist-modernism running rampant in the West. What most people hear is that the Buddha was unusually accepting of women (and maybe he was for his time), but they gloss over all his misogyny, or the fact that he was essentially forced into accepting women by a woman rather than being so open-minded that he included women from the start.
Yeah, there’s a lot of misogyny buried in Buddhism. It’s very much a product of its times and modern westerners who venerate Buddhism as any kind of model piss me off as a result. It’s pretty clear these faux-Buddhists have never read anything past maybe the Heart Sutra.
I put a vote in for covering the stepmother / aunt / foster mother of the historical Buddha who basically bullied him into ordaining her as a nun and including women in monasteries.
There’s a bit on this here: https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/9905/why-the-buddha-didnt-originally-allow-ordination-of-women
There’s a tendency to try to cover up Buddhism’s misogyny, especially these days with Buddhist-modernism running rampant in the West. What most people hear is that the Buddha was unusually accepting of women (and maybe he was for his time), but they gloss over all his misogyny, or the fact that he was essentially forced into accepting women by a woman rather than being so open-minded that he included women from the start.
Yeah, there’s a lot of misogyny buried in Buddhism. It’s very much a product of its times and modern westerners who venerate Buddhism as any kind of model piss me off as a result. It’s pretty clear these faux-Buddhists have never read anything past maybe the Heart Sutra.
A lot of Western white women who are into yoga and alternative medicine are also “into Buddhism” and could use a history lesson, lol