Do what makes you happy

The Buddha lists discipline as one of the six paramitas, or transcendent actions, that help us move toward enlightenment. It's not one that most people are eager to talk about. Discipline brings up fears of shame, blame, and deprivation. Buddhist teachers say it's not so. In the Shambhala teachings, it's said that discipline bring joy.

New scientific research agrees.

The research, published in the Journal of Personality, concludes: "Self-control positively contributes to happiness through avoiding and dealing with motivational conflict."

Time reports:

Through a series of tests — including one that assessed 414 middle-aged participants on self-control and asked them about their life satisfaction both currently and in the past — and another that randomly queried volunteers on their smartphones about their mood and any desires they might be experiencing, the researchers found a strong connection between higher levels of self-control and life satisfaction. The authors write that “feeling good rather than bad may be a core benefit of having good self-control, and being well satisfied with life is an important consequence.”

Additionally, self-control appears to be linked to mood: Those who reported more self-control experienced fewer bad moods. But that's not because they denied themselves things they wanted.

This didn’t appear to linked to being more able to resist temptations — it was because they exposed themselves to fewer situations that might evoke craving in the first place. They were, in essence, setting themselves up to happy. “People who have good self-control do a number of things that bring them happiness — namely, they avoid problematic desires and conflict,” says the study’s co-author Kathleen Vohs, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota.

 Not only does the study confirm the value of discipline, it also supports the Buddhist idea of renunciation. The precepts, or guidelines, laid out by the Buddha for those who aspire to enlightenment, recommend refraining from a number of unwholesome behaviors: Lying, killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, and inebriation.

For monastics, those are rules, and violations can result in dismissal (although different traditions look at them with more or less strictness). For lay people, they are guidelines for measuring whether conduct is beneficial.

They also can be read as promoting the opposite actions: Tell the truth, be sober so that you can stay mindful, don't take advantage of others.

By giving up certain behaviors, we make space for good choices -- or, to quote the study's author, to do the things that bring us happiness.

Building a Patriarchy on the Fields of Alaya

Buddhism, at its base, is genderless. The Buddha taught to both men and women, and he taught them the same techniques to achieve liberation from suffering. Heck, many representations of the Buddha are androgynous and open to interpretation.

But since that time Buddhists have built a lot of male-dominated structures on that base.

…For too long in the West, and I am sure in the East, gross misogyny has existed in the Buddhist world, a misogyny so deep that it has allowed the disrespect and abuse of women and nuns in our own time, and not only throughout history, and not only in Asia. The misogynistic abuse is not only in terms of the usual gender issues related to who has responsibility and authority (women usually don’t have much, if any), but it is as well expressed through mistreatment of women, through sexual boundary violations of women, and the psychological abuse of women…Roshi Joan Halifax in an essay on sexual abuse by Zen teachers

Originally an oral tradition, Buddhism was filtered through hundreds of years of society before any of it was written down. So it's difficult even to determine what could be attributed to the historical figure and what was added by subsequent interpreters. The Vinaya, the rules that govern the conduct of monks and nuns, has 227 rules for monks and 311 for nuns in the Theravadan tradition.

Innovators can take a new idea only so far. The Buddha went against the stream by teaching to beings from all castes, men and women. He was radically egalitarian for his time. But a lot of Buddhist institutions stayed stuck in that time when it comes to gender roles.

Rita M. Gross says that "Buddhism is feminism" because both ask us to look closely at what we take for granted and determine whether it is valid. Buddhism offers innumerable (although someone probably has made a numbered list) ways to deconstruct thoughts about the self, about relationships, about the environment, about thoughts themselves with the aim of realizing their fluidity. If we do so, it's taught, we'll realize the truths of emptiness, impermanence, and non-self.

Likewise, feminism asks us to look at the ways that our ideas about gender limit us and the ways we see ourselves and our roles in the world. Does this job have to be done by a woman? Does writings presume male = normal?

Using either form of analysis, I believe, we'll arrive at a place where we are innately limitless and free. Our nature -- buddha or human -- is luminous and full of possibilities. Our concepts and society's norms are what hold us back.

Unfortunately, for 2,500 years, that has included sangha, the community of Buddhist practitioners, and the various institutions that kept Buddhism alive. Under the Eight Special Rules set down when the Buddha agreed to ordain women as nuns, the most senior nun ranks below the least-senior monk. Roshi Joan has said that the lineage in which she teaches stretches back through 82 lineage holders -- and she is the first woman since Prajnaparamita, the female deity at the top.

Halifax, Gross, Lama Tsultrim Allione, and others have written about the difficulties they've encountered in practicing as women. When she realized -- at a time that she needed to hear about examples of women practitioners -- that there was a dearth of stories, Allione went to Tibet to track them down and wrote a book, "Women of Wisdom." Allione, an emanation of Machig Labdron, teaches Labdron's chod practice and is creating a female lineage with practices she'd received from women or developed herself.

Stories are important because of what they communicate. When men are writing the stories and they write only the stories of men from a male-normative point of view (that assumes women's stories are included in those with male characters and pronouns), women become invisible. And when women are not seen or heard in a tradition that values lineage and history, women have to fight to be seen and heard in their own time. That's made more difficult in traditions where teachers are revered and what might be seen as inappropriate is transmuted to "teaching" or "crazy wisdom."

The large amount of discussion, both within communities and in the larger world, about sex scandals in which male teachers had widely acknowledged, decades-long histories of poor behavior (much of which qualifies as criminal) with female students has brought needed attention to the larger issue of gender inclusiveness in Buddhism. Or it can do that, if we act responsibly and look not just at the actor and the acted-upon but at the environment in which the actions took place and the complicity of others in ignoring what they saw or dismissing women's complaints.

Danny Fisher writes on Patheos:

Every time one of these scandals breaks, we talk about the power differential, appropriate relationships between teachers and students, and everything else but misogyny. We don’t want to believe that it has crept into Buddhism and our individual communities, I think. We want to believe we’re better than that.  

And we are.

But we are part of a tradition that has built a patriarchy on the fields of Alaya, the fundamental openness and pure awareness that is our natural state. We're also part of a tradition that recognizes emptiness and impermanence, that was intended to be fluid and adaptive. Halifax notes that more women are being given transmission and empowered (by male teachers) to teach. The situation is changing.

Although it has not been typical for women to have positions of authority within traditional Buddhism, in our time, we are seeing a dramatic and positive change for women in all Buddhist orders. For example, I believe there are more women roshis (Zen masters) in the United States than there are in Japan. In the United States, more and more women find themselves head of monasteries and Buddhist institutions. And women are setting policies in place that guarantee practitioners ethical treatment, honor families, insure democratic processes in their organizations, and are dedicated to environmental justice and social engagement.

That women are receiving transmission in our era is an extraordinary shift away from a patriarchal religion toward a religion that honors gender parity, and practices what it preaches about inclusivity. This bodes well for Buddhism and all religions, as women have much to contribute to the psycho-social body of religion, as well as the philosophy, ethics, and practices that ground religious institutions.

 While we celebrate those advancements, it would be wrong to take them as a sign that all is well and we can go from here. We need to look at ourselves and our organizations, with clarity and compassion, and examine what constructs or thoughts we may hold that place limits based on gender. And work to liberate them so that we may free others.

May all beings dwell in equanimity, free from attachment and aversion.

Women in Buddhism: From the beginning

March is Women's History Month. Friday, March 8, is International Women's Day.

How many women in Buddhist history can you name -- not contemporary practitioners, but historical figures?

Unless you've made a deliberate effort to study this subject, you probably can't get to five..

We don't know the stories of women in Buddhism, and this is a problem.  We like stories. That's how we build culture; that's how we communicate norms. And when the norms are told by men and about men, we're getting only half the story.

Roshi Joan Halifax says that she's the 82nd person in her lineage -- and the first woman.

That is not because there are no women. Their stories were simply not deemed worthy of recording by the people who kept the records. The stories are there. I'm going to tell some. If you know of some, tell me more.

Interestingly enough, there is a record of the earliest Buddhist women to wake up (reach enlightenment), the Therigatha.

The following account is from "The First Buddhist Women: translations and commentary on the Therigatha" by Susan Murcott.

The first woman of note is Mahapajati Gotami, the Buddha's aunt, who raised him after his mother, Maya, died seven days after he was born. After Siddhartha became enlightened -- and the Buddha -- she became one of his lay followers. Other women came to her for advice, support, and direction.

After her husband died and her son became a monk, she became a woman on her own, cut off from the connections that brought her identity and security. Other women -- members of Siddhartha's harem who lost their status when he went out on his own and women whose husbands abandoned them to become monks -- came to her. The Therigata says the number was "more than 500," which means a great many. "The longing of these women became their spiritual aspiration," writes Murcot.

It is reported in the Cullvaga that Mahajapati went to the Buddha, "stood at a respectful distance," and said:"It would be good, Lord, is women could be allowed to renounce their homes and enter into the homeless state under the Dharma and in the discipline of the Tatagatha. He replied: "Enough, Gotami. Don't set you heart on women being allowed to do this."

This happened twice more. Then the Buddha moved on to Vesali, and the women, dressed in Saffron robes, followed him, 150 miles, walking barefoot. Ananda saw Mahajapati outside the hall. He went to the Buddha:

"Pajapati is standing outside under the entrance porch with swollen feet, covered with dust, and crying because you do not permit women to renounce their homes and enter into the homeless state. It would be good, Lord, if women were to have permission to do this."

The Buddha gives the same answer he gave to his aunt, and this exchange also happens twice more.

Then Ananda takes a new approach. He asked if women can become enlightened. The Buddha says yes. So Ananda says, "If women are able to realize perfection and since Pajapati was of great service to you -- she was your aunt, nurse, foster mother; when your mother died she even suckled you at her own breast -- it would be good if women could be allowed to enter into homelessness."

The Buddha then agrees, provided the women accept the Eight Special Rules.which relegated them to secondary status. "(1) A nun who has been ordained even for a hundred years must greet respectfully, rise up from her seat, salute with joined palms, do proper homage to a monk ordained but that day." The Buddha later made an exception for six monks who lifted up their robes and showed their thighs to the nuns, according to the Vinaya, indicating that only monks deserving of respect should be treated with respect. Later, Mahajapati asked the Buddha to eliminate the gender distinction and go solely by seniority, with novice monks bowing to more senior nuns. He rejected that request.

Pajapati died at 120. When she was very sick, she asked that the Buddha come to her. He died -- although the rules forbid a monk from visiting a sick nun. When she died, is said, miracles occurred that were equaled only by those that took place when the Buddha died.