Siladhara

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A siladhara is a Theravada Buddhist female monastic established by Ajahn Sumedho at Chithurst Buddhist Monastery, England. [1] In 1983, he obtained permission from the Sangha in Thailand, to give a ten-precept pabbajja to the women, making them officially recognized female renunciants trained in the Ajahn Chah lineage. The reasons for its establishment are due to the historical loss of the bhikkhuni (nun's) ordination in Theravada Buddhism, limiting renunciation for female Theravadins to ad-hoc roles such as the thilashins and maechis, neither of which garner respect from the Theravada community as genuine renunciates.

Theravada Branch of Buddhism

Theravāda is the most commonly accepted name of Buddhism's oldest extant school. The school's adherents, termed Theravādins, have preserved their version of the Gautama Buddha's teaching in the Pāli Canon. The Pāli Canon is the only complete Buddhist canon surviving in a classical Indian language, Pāli, which serves as the school's sacred language and lingua franca. For over a millennium, theravādins have endeavored to preserve the dhamma as recorded in their school's texts. In contrast to Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna, Theravāda tends to be conservative in matters of doctrine and monastic discipline.

Ajahn Sumedho American Buddhist philosopher

Luang Por Sumedho or Ajahn Sumedho is one of the senior Western representatives of the Thai forest tradition of Theravada Buddhism. He was abbot of Amaravati Buddhist Monastery, UK, from its consecration in 1984 until his retirement in 2010. Luang Por means Venerable Father (หลวงพ่อ), an honorific and term of affection in keeping with Thai custom; ajahn means teacher. A bhikkhu since 1967, Sumedho is considered a seminal figure in the transmission of the Buddha's teachings to the West.

Chithurst Buddhist Monastery Theravada Buddhist Monastery

Cittaviveka, popularly known as Chithurst Buddhist Monastery, is a Theravada Buddhist Monastery in the Thai Forest Tradition. It is situated in West Sussex, England in the hamlet of Chithurst between Midhurst and Petersfield. It was established in 1979 in accordance with the aims of the English Sangha Trust, a charity founded in 1956 to support the ordination and training of Buddhist monks (bhikkhus) in the West. The current abbot, since 2014, is Ajahn Karuniko.

Contents

History

Ajahn Sumedho enlisted Ajahn Sucitto to train the nuns from 1984 to 1991. By 2008, siladharas were trained in the discipline of more than one hundred precepts, including rules based on the patimokkha of the bhikkhuni order. The order waxed and waned throughout its brief history, peaking at around 14, mostly living at Amaravati Buddhist Monastery.

Ajahn Sucitto British Buddhist monk

Ajahn Sucitto is a British-born Theravada Buddhist monk. He was, between 1992 and 2014, the abbot of Cittaviveka, Chithurst Buddhist Monastery. He was born in London, and was ordained in Thailand in March 1976. He returned to Britain in 1978 and took up training under Ajahn Sumedho at the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara. In 1979 he was one of the small group of monks, led by Ajahn Sumedho, who established Cittaviveka, Chithurst Buddhist Monastery, in West Sussex. In 1981 he was sent up to Northumberland to set up a small monastery in Harnham, which subsequently became Aruna Ratanagiri. In 1984 he accompanied Ajahn Sumedho in establishing Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in Hertfordshire. In 1992 he was appointed abbot of Cittaviveka. On October 26, 2014, he resigned the post, but intends to continue teaching as before.

Amaravati Buddhist Monastery

Amaravati is a Theravada Buddhist monastery at the eastern end of the Chiltern Hills in South East England. Established in 1984 by Ajahn Sumedho as an extension of Chithurst Buddhist Monastery, the monastery has its roots in the Thai Forest Tradition. It takes inspiration from the teachings of the community's founder, the late Ajahn Chah. Its chief priorities are the training and support of a resident monastic community, and the facilitation for monastic and lay people alike of the practice of the Buddha's teachings.

Status

The siladhara order is formally considered a community junior to that of the bhikkhu order of fully ordained men. Over the last twenty years, many siladhara have therefore sought full bhikkhuni ordination with commensurate privileges, recognition and responsibilities enjoyed by male monastics. Making full ordination available to women a cultural issue with significant implications for the welfare of young girls living in poverty in Asian countries where Theravada Buddhism is prevalent, especially Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Sri Lanka. [2] Speaking of Thailand, Lynne Hybels writes, "Young men in desperately poor families such as those in Chiang Rai can bring honor to their families by becoming monks, but girls are expected to provide financially. Traffickers understand this vulnerability, prey on it, and easily lure girls into life in the brothel." [3]

Bhikkhu male Buddhist monk

A bhikkhu is an ordained male monastic ("monk") in Buddhism. Male and female monastics are members of the Buddhist community.

Thailand Constitutional monarchy in Southeast Asia

Thailand, officially the Kingdom of Thailand and formerly known as Siam, is a country at the centre of the Southeast Asian Indochinese peninsula composed of 76 provinces. At 513,120 km2 (198,120 sq mi) and over 68 million people, Thailand is the world's 50th-largest country by total area and the 21st-most-populous country. The capital and largest city is Bangkok, a special administrative area. Thailand is bordered to the north by Myanmar and Laos, to the east by Laos and Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the west by the Andaman Sea and the southern extremity of Myanmar. Its maritime boundaries include Vietnam in the Gulf of Thailand to the southeast, and Indonesia and India on the Andaman Sea to the southwest. It is a unitary state. Although nominally the country is a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, the most recent coup, in 2014, established a de facto military dictatorship under a junta.

Cambodia Southeast Asian sovereign state

Cambodia, officially the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country located in the southern portion of the Indochina peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is 181,035 square kilometres in area, bordered by Thailand to the northwest, Laos to the northeast, Vietnam to the east and the Gulf of Thailand to the southwest.

The Five Point Declaration

After years of debate and dispute, Ajahn Sumedho issued a "Five Point Declaration" concerning women's roles and rights in the Amaravati monastic community. [4] [5] This affirmed the traditional privileges and seniority of bhikkhus over female monastics. The edict holds that while some teaching and management responsibilities are shared between the two orders according to capability, the siladhara order is unequivocally junior to that of the monks.

The "Five Point declaration" is considered to be discriminatory against women. [6] [7] Some monastics and scholars also consider it to be an inaccurate interpretation of the Vinaya and other texts [8] [9] similar to the Three-Fifths Compromise in the United States Constitution or other codified examples of discrimination such as coverture. Many female monastics living at Amaravati at the time left the monastery citing discrimination and an inaccurate understanding of compassion on the part of Amravati leadership. [10]

Vinaya regulatory framework for the sangha based on the Vinaya Pitaka

The Vinaya is the regulatory framework for the sangha or monastic community of Buddhism based on the canonical texts called the Vinaya Pitaka. The teachings of the Gautama Buddha can be divided into two broad categories: Dharma "doctrine" and Vinaya "discipline".

The Three-Fifths Compromise was a compromise reached among state delegates during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention. Whether and, if so, how slaves would be counted when determining a state's total population for legislative representation and taxing purposes was important, as this population number would then be used to determine the number of seats that the state would have in the United States House of Representatives for the next ten years. The compromise solution was to count three out of every five slaves as people for this purpose. Its effect was to give the Southern states a third more seats in Congress and a third more electoral votes than if slaves had been ignored, but fewer than if slaves and free people had been counted equally. The compromise was proposed by delegate James Wilson and seconded by Charles Pinckney on June 11, 1787.

Coverture was a legal doctrine whereby, upon marriage, a woman's legal rights and obligations were subsumed by those of her husband, in accordance with the wife's legal status of feme covert. An unmarried woman, a feme sole, had the right to own property and make contracts in her own name. Coverture arises from the legal fiction that a husband and wife are one person.

Several siladharas from this group founded a community in the United States. [11] Along with numerous other women in recent years, these former siladharas have taken full bhikkhuni ordination. [12] [13]

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References

  1. ↑ Ajahn Sucitto 2007.
  2. ↑ Diab 2012, p. 62.
  3. ↑ Hybels, Lynne. "Protecting the Innocent". Sojourners.
  4. ↑ http://west-wight-sangha.blogspot.com/2010/03/more-on-nun-ordinations-at-amaravati.html
  5. ↑ "Where We Are Now". Forest Sangha News. 19 November 2009. Retrieved 12 June 2016.
  6. ↑ http://www.leighb.com/nuns.htm
  7. ↑ http://awakeningtruth.org/blog/?p=38
  8. ↑ https://sujato.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/the-five-points/
  9. ↑ http://blogs.dickinson.edu/buddhistethics/2013/06/24/the-revival-of-the-bhikkhuni-order-and-the-decline-of-the-sasana/
  10. ↑ Weinberg, Thannisara Mary. "Ground Between" (PDF). Present Magazine. Alliance for Bhikkhunis. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-07-26. Retrieved September 2010.Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
  11. ↑ http://saranaloka.org/
  12. ↑ http://www.dhammawiki.com/index.php?title=Bhikkhuni_ordination
  13. ↑ http://www.bhikkhuni.net/news/

Bibliography

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