Notes on the Religious Status of Women in Buddhist Thailand

『龍谷大学社会学論集』 7号 (1986)In Thailand, a Theravada Buddhist country, there is an ideology of male superiority to which even women acquiesce. Such male dominance is symbolized in the Buddhistic world. While men can enter the Sangha, living in temples as dek wat (temple boys), sama nen (novices who abide by 10 precepts) and phra (monks who abide by 227 precepts), women have no clergy to get the way to nirvana. Thai women have the cleric form of mae chi, the pseudo Buddhist nun, but they can practice only 8 precepts as lay ascetics in the periphery of the Sangha. As to the holding of practical knowledge of religious rituals or to interpret their cognitive world, Thai women have been under the direction of men having experience in the Sangha because that the Thai Sangha played an important role in the moral education of young men before the introduction of a national school system in 1922. In spite of alienation from the membership of the Sangha, in the level of popular Buddhism represented by the notion of bun (merit) and bap (demerit), Thai women have another religious orientation to be different from which men have: (1)as mother, women are concerning ordination ritual because they can share merit by having their sons become monks. (2)as the actor of daily merit making such as the offering of daily food, women are more diligent in their support of the Sangha than men. (3)regarding the observance of precepts too, women are more interested in keeping 5 or 8 precepts on holy days and at the ceremony of becoming mae chi. (4)for the 'socially matured' women, ascetic way of life is highly valued as their practice of merit making. In a sense, as 'constant' Buddhist, for the motherhood, woman is nurturer of both her own children and Buddhism, and thus the Sangha is dependent on women for its members and for its sustenance