The Ordination of Women in Buddhism, Old Facts & New Fables

MacBeth vs. MacDuff.

One of the recurrent issues in my own writing is the misconception that "crazy theories" come from the fringes: on the contrary, in Buddhism, the craziest theories can (and often do) come from the pinnacle of prestige, influence and academic authority (sometimes from the centers of religious authority, too).  I dealt with this question generally in my (still-unpublished) lecture, "The Opposite of Buddhism", and I discussed a (stunning) particular example in my earlier work on the "standard misinterpretation" of the 12 links of "dependent origination".

English speakers often work from a false assumption that what is "central" is conservative and reasonable, and what is "fringe" is radical, original, creative, and more likely to be unreasonable.  That may be true of some areas of scholarship, but I can tell you (and I must warn you) that Buddhism isn't one of them.  There is plenty of craziness at the center of the halls of power (and there isn't much power in those halls).

Often enough, however, what academic publications provide is a certain style of obfuscation for just how crazy these theories may be.  In the case of my critique of a theory proposed by Bhikkhu Pāsādika, I honestly think that the theory was refuted simply by writing it out clearly; in other words, as soon as the obfuscation was removed, any reader could see for themselves just how far-fetched it really was.

Below is an alert that I sent out to colleagues several years ago (as an e-mail), about a genuinely crazy theory propounded on the origin of the ordination of women in Buddhism.  I'm not really offering a critique of it here, but simply (1) pointing out that the theory exists, (2) warning the reader about all of the obfuscation, and then (3) restating what the theory really is without that obfuscation.  As with Bhikkhu Pāsādika's theory about a "materialist conspiracy" re-writing portions of the canon, I think that this "feminist conspiracy" theory is (likewise) so far-fetched that nobody could really take it seriously.  However, none of these theories come from the fringes: this stuff is all being published from the pinnacle of power and privilege, with the imprimaturs of wealthy institutions stamped onto the flyleaves.

-----Begin quotation (May, 2010)-----
It would be difficult to imagine how anyone would know that an exciting new article was published by Hinuber in an obscure journal called ARIRIAB in 2007.

In fact, even if you did stumble upon the ARIRIAB website, you would not be able to guess that this article is available for download as part of ARIRIAB-11.PDF, as there's no list of authors, and the files are scanned images (i.e., not searchable as text).  Resultantly, this is a nearly-hidden gem, and I will be so gauche as to send out a fan-club letter alerting my colleagues to its existence:

http://iriab.soka.ac.jp/orc/Publications/ARIRIAB/index_ARIRIAB.html

Now, even if you see the article, and even if you start reading it,
you might well miss its hypothesis:

Hinuber "dramatizes" the article, by delaying the revelation of his
own thesis until the latest stage possible.  Although this approach has
its advantages, the main defect is that you get an easily readable
opening, followed by a lengthy digression into the details of K.R.
Norman's mis-translation of a single passage from the Vinaya in the
middle portion of the essay (and, I think, there's some joy taken in
Hinuber outdoing K.R. Norman in this respect) --alas, I think many
non-specialist readers will simply give up at this point.

However, in the last act of the drama, the article returns to subjects
of mainstream interest that deserve a broader audience than they
are likely to find (hidden away in the pages of ARIRIAB).  Partly by
sheer co-incidence (e.g., an unpublished thesis that I read some years
ago) I happened to be already familiar with most of the passages that
Hinuber draws together here, but (1) many readers will not be, and (2)
some readers will only be familiar with this stuff as re-phrased (and
indirectly alluded to) in the most evasive and obsequious terms
possible.

As suddenly as MacDuff declaring that he was born of no mortal woman,
the last act takes yet another dramatic turn (terminating in a
footnote) as Hinuber decides to take the further step of concluding
that the ordination of female Buddhist monks took place AFTER the
Buddha's death (whereas, formerly in the article, he had merely
suggested that it took place very late in the Buddha's life) --a
reasonably radical change in interpretation of familiar facts (and,
frankly, I wonder if Hinuber didn't add this just to startle his
audience).

The real value of this article, for the larger number of reasons, will be that it draws together the material on the status of women during the lifetime of the Buddha without the usual evasions of what the primary source texts actually say.  In one of the very last footnotes, Hinuber draws attention to the fact that, at a minimum, the women's ordination was neither equal to the men's, nor simultaneous with it --nor was the women's ordination merely a few years after the men's.

Additionally, for those who do not already know it, the middle portion of the argument (that will be difficult for non-specialists to follow) does demonstrate (with some new examples, and some old) just how fragmentary the Vinaya now is --and how many peculiar influences (from Jainism, at least) were able to creep in (both doctrinally and
linguistically) before the canon was closed.

While I am very pleased at my own sheer luck in discovering this
article, others will not be so lucky (and it would be even more
difficult to find if English were not my first language, etc.) --and
this reminds me of my long-ago proposed project to start some sort of
annual newsletter on new publications on/in Theravada Countries (so
that all scholars in related fields at least have a list, perhaps with
a few articles and illustrations to brighten it up).
-----End of quotation (May, 2010)-----

The replies I received from this notice (at the time) were very much along the lines of, "You can't possibly be serious!" --and I then had to reiterate that this is certainly not a theory that I support myself.

From my perspective, this theory that there were zero ordained female monks during the Buddha's lifetime, and that they were instead falsely added into the canon at a later date (as part of a "feminist conspiracy", so to speak) is completely crazy.  It would require an absurd series of assumptions, and would undermine the same textual sources that the theory relies on to support itself as (presumed) historical evidence.  Such an interpretation would be entirely created and sustained by a series of "self-fulfilling-prophecies" of the most absurd kind (discarding evidence of female monks existing during the lifetime of the Buddha, and grossly reinterpreting other evidence, etc.).  Nevertheless, this completely crazy theory passes the highest levels of peer review, receives the highest levels of institutional support, and is supposed to be taken very seriously, etc., etc., just as with so many examples from the 19th and 20th centuries.

In contrasting the 21st century to the 19th: change is an objective fact, but "progress" is merely an ideology.

It is has never been the case that "the center" had a monopoly on virtue, nor that "the fringes" had a monopoly on crazy theories.  There's a great scarcity of virtue all around, and there's a great deal of corruption, nepotism, incompetence, and sheer stupidity at "the center" everywhere I've been (and I've been almost everywhere).

My Mainland Chinese Publications (Exist) On Paper

As I'm aware that these things are unseen and unheard of outside of Mainland China, I thought that I would share the paper-and-glue reality of the academic publications that resulted from my time there.  The Aṅguttara Nikāya (a big, red book) is included in the background to provide a sense of scale: for whatever reason, Chinese anthropology is issued in big, heavy, bilingual tomes.

• 《巴利文的消失:一個實用的指南》,《巴利文的消失:一个实用的指南》, published in Chinese translation in Yunnan's Journal of Ethnic Minority Studies, 民族大學雲南 (peer reviewed [同行評審] and published by the University of the same name, Min Zu Da Xue).
• 2010, "The Disappearance of the Pali Language: A Pragmatic Guide", the English version of the article above was separately published in an English-language journal of anthropology, The Ethnological Review, from Kunming University Press.

One further article was supposed to be published as a book-chapter in mainland China (it was the ill-fated "Canon and Reason…") and remains as-yet-unpublished in both Chinese and English.

Peer-Review Works (or Doesn't) Both Ways

Below is the abstract (in English and Chinese) for an article that I have previously mentioned on this blog ("Canon and Reason…").  I was reassured that it would be published several months ago --but after repeated delays, I lost faith in the journal that would have (supposedly) already published it by now.  That's right: I completed the laborious peer-review process, and then I myself ended up cancelling the article anyway.

This isn't the first time that this has happened to me.  It is the second time.  I hope it will be the last.

A handful of people might have noticed that I had an article listed as "forthcoming" for a period of about one year, because it had already been approved and accepted by the editors at the Journal of Contemporary Buddhism.

The eventual cancellation had nothing to do with the quality of the articles: in both cases the articles in question passed peer-review, and were accepted by the editors.  If you asked me when you'll be able to read either one of these articles in print, the answer is that I don't know.

Publishing specialized non-fiction of this kind isn't about money: there's no way that any of these publications could remunerate me for the number of hours of work that go into research of this kind.  Even if they could, they don't.  There's no money in the game, so what an author is hoping for is professionalism, some degree of mutual respect, and (hopefully) access to an audience of other specialists.

However, at some point (after inexplicable delays of some number of months, and some number of incoherent e-mails) the author may feel that it's better to walk away from the publication than to continue to pursue it (not knowing when the thing will appear, or if any of the promises made on the editorial side will be kept).

In the case of my article that was accepted by Contemporary Buddhism in the U.K., so much time had passed since the editors assured me that it was accepted for publication, that I started asking questions.  The answers that I received were incoherent at best (and insulting at worst).

In that case, I had received detailed comments from one of the two editors, showing that he had really read it in detail (and considered the subsequent revisions, etc.) and, for that reason, I had taken the approval of the article seriously.  It became evident (many, many months later) that the other editor had not read the article (and perhaps never did).  In the antics that ensued (in which, basically, my one question was, "All the revisions were approved, so when's the article going to press?") I eventually cancelled the article.  Again: I cancelled it myself, not the editors.

Several of the deadlines the editors had declared for themselves elapsed (with no explanation) and, as alluded to, the answers to my simple questions were raising more questions.

The process was painfully unprofessional: I would receive an isolated e-mail after they broke their own deadline saying, "we'll have another meeting in a week, and get back to you then", but then I would, in fact, hear nothing.  Months and months passed during this silent drama, and when I finally cancelled the article (to enter it into peer-review elsewhere) I never heard any reply to confirm the cancellation from the editors' side, either.

"Canon and Reason" was supposed to be published months ago, but now I have no idea when it will be published.  Likewise, "Mind and the Material Elements" should have been published in Contemporary Buddhism more than one year ago by now, and instead it has had to re-start the peer-review process (in the latter case, repeatedly).

I have worked as a professional editor, of both academic non-fiction (in book form) and of newsprint with daily deadlines (but lower standards of accuracy, etc.).  I have also been a peer-reviewer (i.e., reviewing some other author's article for some journal: you may be thinking this is impossible because I don't have a PhD, but it isn't).  I know what the editorial process is, and I know what the peer-review process is, and there is a huge difference between the two.

The ritual of peer-review is not nearly as thorough as a professional editor who is paid to conduct fact-checking.  In the humanities, peer-review isn't a mode of fact-checking at all.  It has an interesting history, originating as a uniquely British system of decentralized state censorship (read more about the history here) [alternative link added in 2024] and evolving through its interaction with the "hard sciences".  However well (or poorly) it may work for physics or chemistry, there's an entirely separate question of its effectiveness in the quagmire of cultural issues where religious, political and linguistic domains overlap.

…Mario Biagioli argues in “From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review” that a deeper excavation of the genealogy of peer review suggests that its origins may, significantly, lie in seventeenth-century academic book publishing, and that peer review of journal articles formed a much later stage in the process’s development. Biagioli ties the establishment of editorial peer review to the royal license that was required for the legal sale of printed texts; this mode of state censorship, employed to prevent sedition or heresy, was delegated to the royal academies through the imprimatur granted them at the time of their founding. The Royal Society of London, for instance, took on that imprimatur by passing a resolution in December 1663, one year after its founding, which stated that “No book be printed by order of the council, which hath not been perused and considered by two of the council, who shall report, that such book contains nothing but what is suitable to the design and work of the society” (qtd. in Biagioli 21). The purpose of such review, as Biagioli emphasizes, is more related to censorship than to quality control… [op. cit. supra]

 
Peer-review didn't originate in Asia, and it certainly didn't originate as an instrument that was useful for (e.g.) cultural anthropology, comparative philology, or the study of contemporary politics and religion.  There are many mismatched expectations applied to the process of peer-review and the results are… not what Francis Bacon would have hoped for.

From direct experience, I can report that some some reviewers (in Buddhist Studies) think that their role is to prevent anything offensive to Buddhism being published (which is a fairly fundamental conflict of interest), and some think that their role is to prevent anything being said to diminish the memory of deceased European scholars (again, a conflict of interest, and an obstruction to ever admitting or addressing the errors of past scholarship… one of the favorite subjects of Francis Bacon, it so happens).  I've now received more than one peer-review stating that I should not be allowed to point out errors in a 100 year old Pali-English dictionary; ask yourself if a scholar of Ancient Greek would receive a similar criticism, for reporting an error in a 100 year old dictionary for translating Greek to English, or if a scholar of Christianity would be discouraged from discussing a similar problem of the definition of terms in Aramaic, Hebrew and so on.  "Buddhist Studies" exists at a very problematic intersection of religious attitudes, and may be especially ill-suited to the process of peer-review.

This is part of the scientism of the social sciences: we pretend that a reviewer can verify my critique of Cambodian Anthropology in the same way that a reviewer of chemistry can check the equations in a lab report.  It is difficult to pretend that any reviewer has the time or ability to check even the most dry, factual, and philological claims in my work --because, in fact, the more dry they are, the more time-consuming they would be to verify, and the more demanding of the special expertise of the reviewer.  At some level everyone knows that peer-review isn't equally effective for all of the sciences and humanities; if it were, we'd use the same method to gamble on racehorses.

This is all very much a digression for the purposes of this short article: all that I have to say here is that (to my own surprise) I have ordered one of my own articles to be cancelled, and for the second time.