Access, Attitude And Attainment: Reviewing Gender Relations In The Jatakas

Abstract

Any attempt to reconstruct varied relations in any given society of the past or the present needs to be analysed through a range of inter-related variables like class, race, gender, caste, ethnicity etc. Often, roles and representations of gender categories have been evaluated through religious texts and prevailing practices (which in turn are reflections of sanctioned norms and religious ideas). Attempts toward evaluating the position of women in early India were made from both orientalist and nationalist perspectives but in recent times recognition of the importance of gender as an analytical category has aided and enabled refreshing and suitable understandings towards power relations between men and women. Buddhism was the first religious institution in the world that provided women an alternative, that of aspiring for soteriological goals and spiritual aspirations. Canonical literature testifies this stance but what has remained intriguing is the vicissitudes of institutional structures, spiritual practices, relations with the laity and inherent patriarchal hierarchies remained components that had to be factored in. This paper examines the path of soteriological aspirations of Buddhist Women by evaluating three aspects of this spiritual journey, i.e. initiation into the Buddhist sangha, sexual attitudes of the inmates and finally the aspect of attainment or reaching arhatship. Each of these are reflective of societal prescriptions and peculiarities but yet of possibilities. This has been envisaged through an analysis of the layered and dually timed structures of the Jatakas, a voluminous collection of Buddhist stories which are largely considered popular but are distinctly canonical.