What roles may women assume in Buddhism?
Answers
Buddhism preaches to love all the beings including yourself, your parents, friends, monks, the old, animals and even your enemies. So in that terms, Buddhism tells to show kindness and love to all the beings in the world. That very sentence tells that Buddhism injects equality.
However, the Buddhist way of looking into equality is a bit deep. In order to understand equality and inequality, one should understand the dharma of cause and effect.
The major fact that you should understand is that there is equality in this cosmos. There is perfect equality for everyone. In Buddhism, what you get, what you are, what you feel, depends on the karma that you possess. If equality is to exist, everyone should be doing equal karma. If that happens then yes, theoretically equality will occur with time, but this is not practical. Some people do good, some people do bad. Depending on this good and bad, the people will one day reap the good and the bad.
The resulting life of a person who did good gets and what the life which the person who did bad gets will never be equal. Because you reap what you sow. In other words you get what you gave. So isn’t there equality?
Let us take an example. If person A did good, and if person B did bad, person B is likely to have miserable life and person A is most likely to have a luxurious life. Now this inequality the human eye sees, really an inequality? It is not, they asked for it, they got it. If person B had done good and if person A had done bad, then person A will have a miserable life and person B will have a luxurious life. There are no one favored. Just beings subjected to a universal law. But we humans, do not recall all our past lives, hence we do not remember why we do not have what others have and why what we do not have is available to some in excess. Hence people argue about racism, gender equality, social class, governments etc. But if you look deep enough who’s fault is it? It is not the race, nor the gender nor the social class nor the government, its our karma and our karma only. We got an inequality or any misfortune because we decided to do volitional actions (karma) that leads to these misfortunes.
If one is born black and enjoys life or if one is born a female and enjoys life as a queen then congratulate and thank yourself for the good karma you did and continue to do good.
If one is born black and suffers life due to racism or if one is born a female and is abused, then blame nothing but yourself and learn from the mistakes and do good.
Explanation:
Women in Buddhism is a topic that can be approached from varied perspectives including those of theology, history, anthropology and feminism. Topical interests include the theological status of women, the treatment of women in Buddhist societies at home and in public, the history of women in Buddhism, and a comparison of the experiences of women across different forms of Buddhism. As in other religions, the experiences of Buddhist women have varied considerably.