Post #27: He and She

24 May 2023

The Dhamma is not about dividing our house even further, but about finding common ground wherever possible (see Post #15: Left and Right); I have called it my anchor in the agitated seas of life, not a propeller for whipping things up even more. That said, however, the Dhamma also requires truthfulness and sometimes a firm stand, and so I will not pretend that I am on board with all the conventional wisdoms of our day, largely because I am inclined to look also to the past, and not just to a projected and idealized future, to find my bearings in the present.

Readers may have noticed and perhaps been taken aback by my readiness to use the male pronoun where few others still do, though I have tradition on my side in insisting that doing so does not imply any exclusion of women or anyone else. Nothing could be further from my mind: I grew up on equal terms with the girls, on the alternative side of Berlin, American Sector, and it never occurred to me, then or now, to consider them anything other than sisters or competitors with whom I was, and am, on the same footing. It would look absurd to me if any aspect of the Dhamma were taken to favor one sex over the other, or if women were confined to any narrower sphere of life than men. That is yesterday’s debate, so far as I am concerned, long settled except for a few marginal areas, and my pronoun policy is irrelevant to those.

If we look back on the Buddha’s day from our vantage point after 2500 more years to distill for our lessons in life, we might be tempted to protest at how he maintained some distinctions between the sexes that we would not be very comfortable with today. But how could it be otherwise? The Buddha and his contemporaries did not have the benefit of either our historical experience or our material circumstances, and an enlightened being cannot be expected simply to leave behind, as if they were nothing, all the countless constraints and limitations that social conditions impose on him or her. (As Eckhart Tolle has quipped, if you think you are enlightened, go and spend a weekend with your mom. Jesus was even blunter: no one is a prophet in his parents’ house.) In the Buddha’s day, the question of the social and spiritual status of women, and even more so, of their inclusion in or exclusion from the Sangha, was controversial to a degree we can barely imagine and bordered on scandal by dint of being broached at all. It is no surprise that the organizer of a new spiritual community would have hesitated to expose his fledgling institutions to what he could foresee would be major strain and conflict over the issue.

The Buddha was a great innovator in his way, but he was neither by temperament nor by social position nor by considered judgment predisposed to be a revolutionary; his was the middle way, in politics as much as in anything else, and he foresaw what the inclusion of women among the monks must mean—scandalous gossip even if there was no reason for it, concerns over the women’s safety, much grumbling and even a serious backlash among the already ordained men, and massive resistance in a surrounding society for which such a move was not only extremely radical in principle, but which also depended, for its future survival, on the continued availability of mothers, whose absence cannot be compensated for as shortages of men can if need be. To put it bluntly, fathers are largely dispensable, as the Buddha himself demonstrated when he walked out on the night of his son’s birth (aptly named Rahula in the literature: “Fetters” or even “Ball-and-Chain”). Women of childbearing age, on the other hand, when they “go forth from the household life into homelessness” in a traditional society, strike at its future numbers, and thus at its very heart. So far as the Buddha’s lay students were concerned, there was never much of an issue, and he had many prominent female followers, quite a few of whom are said to have become fully liberated. He also consoled a king with whom he was friends, Pasendi, when he was upset over the birth of a daughter rather than a son, that having a daughter was in fact no cause for misgivings (Samyutta Nikaya 3:16).

A lot more could be said about this complicated issue in the Buddha’s day, and how his eventual relenting and allowing an order of nuns to be established played out later in Buddhist history, with plenty more twists and turns; but such a sweeping treatment would be out of place here. It should be enough to recall how Ananda made himself the spokesmen of the women seeking admission to monastic life after seeing Gotami—the Buddha’s own maternal aunt and foster mother after his own mother’s death in childbirth—cry bitter tears over the Awakened One’s intransigence. After being repeatedly rebuffed, Ananda was at last able to put his finger on the decisive point, the clinching argument, when it occurred to him to ask the Buddha whether it was not true that women had the same spiritual capacities, the same ability to become enlightened and liberated as the men. This the Buddha could not but admit, and thus the doors of the Sangha were opened to women, though with a catalogue of reservations that makes for uncomfortable reading today—if we forget what an unprecedented step the Buddha was taking in a society that was in many respects not ready for it. (After the Buddha’s death, Ananda was given no end of grief by the other monks over his championing of the women, see for example Cullavagga 11.1.10.)

To return to the great pronoun tug-of-war in our own day, the battle has long moved on to more open ground, far beyond the original (entirely reasonable) goal of assuring women that they count for the same as men. These days it as much as anything about professing one’s fealty to a comprehensive socio-political creed, and the elaborate protocols that go with it, so that one might continually signal a virtuous conformity with right-thinking trends. What is even more problematic, it has lately been expanded to claiming the explicit right (on the presumed power of one’s own superior insight and righteousness) to prescribe to others how they must use the language—even against all established usage and tradition—and to shame and shun them by any available means should they have the effrontery not to play by the prescribed rules.

To get concrete, although there are a few cases where “they” will pass with technically singular pronouns (“everyone” being the most obvious example), much if not most of the time these millennial days of ours, the obsessive avoidance of the male pronoun has made “they” the fallback option of choice in ways that are not only grossly ungrammatically but regularly produce veritable monsters of construction. And here, though I do not wish to exclude anyone, I must dig in my heels and insist, as a writer devoted above all to his craft, that grammar and usage and proper diction must trump other correctnesses. Around language, we have some established standards to rely on; in politics we only have a lot of competing ideologies and fads, and today’s most loudly proclaimed verities are likely to become tomorrow’s embarrassments and satires.

That anyone should have a right to demand what is in effect a millennial pluralis majestatis I find not only bewildering but disturbing and counter-productive, because it violates precisely that principle of equal standing which it purports to uphold. Let everyone count for one equally, absolutely; but how can that leave anyone entitled to a plural pronoun? Sound grammatical conventions are often flexible but never completely arbitrary: they embody meaning. And what is inescapably implied here looks neither liberating nor progressive to me whatever angle I approach it from.

One might object that the intention is not for anyone to become more than one but merely to escape from a confining duality. That maybe so, but even leaving aside all consideration of the sense and nonsense of thinking one can just opt out of a distinction so primordial, and with all due respect for intentions, the meaning of so fundamental and well-established a word cannot simply be changed at will. “They” is the very definition of plurality as against oneness, and no political winds can blow away so bedrock a fact. Even the claimants themselves, if sincere, cannot possibly be unaware of what they are clearly implying with their demand and must live with the suspicion that the majestic associations, if only as an object of attention, are by no means unwelcome to them.

Exactly what, if anything, sets the sexes apart, and whether (or to what extent) it is possible to move between them, are questions that have become so divisive, so fraught, and often so strained, that I do not wish to drag them into my own version of a safe zone. This is a tiny corner of the world that I have set up, behind a little wall as Plato says, to escape from the cultural and political storms that are buffeting us on all sides with their wild and often violent gales.

So once and for all, even if you would handle the pronoun question differently, please be reminded of my categorical insistence that the he proliferating in my pages is not a pronoun of exclusion by my books. You may insist that it is, with majority backing; but I do not recognize the voting principle in such matters, and we could only agree to disagree.

Reading:Anguttara Nikaya 8:51 (the story of how the Buddha relented, at Ananda’s repeated urging, on the question of allowing women to join the Sangha)