What does it mean to be a Buddhist nun in Ladakh?
By Vibha Arora

Gender is a significant faultline in Buddhist societies as in Hindu or Islamic one’s, yet there is a lacuna of studies following a gender perspective. This is succinctly encapsulated by the Zanskari local idiom such as ‘women are seven lifetimes behind men’ and ‘no Buddhist in her right mind desires a female body’. It gives me pleasure to report and review Kim Gutschow’s seminal study “Being a Buddhist Nun: The struggle for enlightenment in the Himalayas” which was awarded the prestigious 2005 American Ethnological Society’s Sharon Stephens Book Prize (See http://www.music.columbia.edu/~cecenter/AES/awards2005.html).

The Buddhist monks and nuns comprise about 2 per cent of the total population of Zanskar. All the nine nunneries of Zanskar are practitioners’ of the Gelugpa sect that maintains the highest standards of celibacy and asceticism in Mahayana Buddhism. Gutschow’s study is path breaking in highlighting the gender inequalities that deny status, independence, and perpetually subordinate and marginalize the Buddhist nuns. Buddhist women can never become monks or be ordained due to the ideology of purity and pollution: “the fire of asceticism may burn off temporary pollution, but it cannot erase the permanent stigmata of female impurity”.

The monograph offering a nun’s eye view of Buddhism concludes by documenting the reforms demanded by the Buddhist nuns, their struggle to get patronage for their nunneries and to make themselves independent. It draws upon Kim’s extended fieldwork in the physically challenging conditions of Zanskar and Ladakh in India between 1991 and 2001 (thirty-nine months). She explains how Buddhist monastic practices reinstate the social hierarchies that the Buddha had disdained: “nuns remain subject to the authority and surveillance of monks throughout a religious life that is supposedly dedicated to transcending gender and other social hierarchies”. On the one hand, women are regarded to be dangerous on account of their potent sexuality and fertility as menstruating and childbearing bodies, while on the other hand they are the symbolic vessel of the group’s honor and constantly in danger of being defiled by sexual desire.

In Zanskar, the lay and monastic realms are not discontinuous as indeed Buddhist monasticism is structured around a gendered division of labour and the dualities of sex as the lay communities are. Zanskari nuns are distinguished from female renuciates who live at home and do not perform any public rituals. For comprehending lay patronage, which sustains Buddhist monasticism she uses politico-economic ideas such as ‘the Buddhist economy of merit’, ‘Buddhist monastery as a wealthy corporation (biggest landowners and functions as a treasury and venture capital firm)’ and ‘the traffic in women’. These enable her to highlight the regulated and continuous exchange between the laity and the monastery, and the politico-economic and the religious functionaries of Zanskar.

Kim forcefully argues in her monograph that the community of Buddhist nuns comprises an alternative society and not an anti-thesis of society. Families exchange women with the nunneries in order to earn merit and simultaneously ensure the promise of their productive services. As a nun, a girl may have access to ritual knowledge, peers, and pilgrimages which take her beyond the boundaries of the village and the provincial monasteries yet she is tied indissolubly to her natal families and village in her role as a productive labourer on the family farms and monastic estates. Thus the Buddhist nuns play a critical mediating role between the monastery and the laity by performing ritual services and serving monks and the society while earning merit for their families and the community while performing productive labour in the fields. The traffic of women between the household and the monasteries and the sacred and the secular realms is clearly evident with these nuns “trapped within the traffic in women as the average bride.

The power and status of Buddhist monasticism and the subordination and subjection of nuns is critically revealed by the politico-economic factors that underlie village religious practices and the monastic organization. Gutschow argues that the core of village religion centers on purification, the appeasement of worldly spirits and worship of compassionate otherworldly Buddhist deities. Nuns and monks take vows to abstain from worldly pursuits but nuns end up working as domestic servants. The Buddhist economy of merit cannot assure the nuns of a livelihood or provide funds for their periodic rituals. Nuns earn generalized merit for the entire community and not pragmatic rituals that would assure them patronage. In contrast Buddhist monks perform a wide range of rituals of a soteriological, instrumental and propitiatory nature to ensure the fertility, prosperity and health of the individual and the community while engaging in tantric meditations, which confer status and power assured funding for periodic rituals and the monastery. The contrast between the Buddhist monasteries that function and exist as corporations with its rich endowments in land, wealth, and treasures stands in shocking contrast with the impoverishment of the nuns and penury of their nunneries: the nuns often do not even get two square meals a day. Often these nuns are forced to earn their livelihood as domestic servants and farm labourers. They hold servile and peripheral position such that even the most spiritually accomplished nun stands below a male novitiate. Ultimately all nuns are subject to the spiritual authority of monks.

The position of Buddhist nuns in Zanskar is comparable with the householder lamas among Nyingma Buddhists of Sikkim among whom I conducted my doctoral research. These householder lamas perform both ritual services and productive labour on family farms in order to sustain themselves, as their monasteries cannot financially support them. Yet unlike the Buddhist nuns of Zanskar, the householder lamas of Sikkim marry, beget children, inherit property, engage in trade, and enjoy considerable status and power in their families and the community. Ascetic monks have higher status and spiritual authority as compared to any householder lama in Sikkim, yet gender hierarchies persist as celibate nuns in Sikkim are ranked below any ordained householder lama.

The narratives of the Buddhist nuns outline a comprehensive picture of what motivates a woman to dedicate herself to a spiritual life in the nunnery thereby rejecting her feminity and maternity in becoming a nun. With the help of several case studies, Gutschow explains the rite de passage that transforms a girl into a nun and the central role-played by these nuns in the Buddhist economy of merit (exchanges between the monastery and laity). Significantly, the narratives of these Buddhist nuns highlight their skilful subversion of the hierarchies that oppress them and document their agency.

This seminal work breaks the silence on gender in Buddhist studies and Himalayan anthropology that has yielded numerous studies of Buddhist monasteries and (male) monasticism while completely ignoring the nuns and their nunneries. I hope this book will encourage other ethnographic studies to follow a gender perspective.