Gender Discrimination in Spirituality?

[Guest guest]

Harsha: You make some excellent points about gender and I will forward this

to the list that I moderate. It seems that spiritual personalities, like

everyone else, are a product of their culture and their times. What

implications does this have for understanding spiritual truths? It is my

view that great Jnanis like Ramana, while respecting the tradition and the

culture in which they were born, did not in anyway make a distinction

between gender when imparting instructions on how to Recognize or Realize

the Self.

 

<mpw01

 

hello again. i've been on the no-mail option while finding another, more

convenient e-mail address. i should thank ram chandran for encouraging me

to post again. and thanks to the list members for letting me to rejoin the

discussions after an absence of several months. unfortunately, the absence

has done nothing to alter my disqualification from any authority on these

topics.

i want to say a little on the subject of gender. first, with ramakrishna,

it seems to me that his nondiscrimination is much qualified here:

"discriminate against women studying vedanta or taking sannyas." in these

two things alone? his famous "women and gold" is a very androcentric way to

describe temptations since it assumes the male body as standard. this is a

minor point, and please, i hope i'm not coming across as bellicose.

more generally, the question of whether there are

inherent gender identities is, to me, interesting. i

think a good argument can be made that any assignment

of characteristics according to gender is a

linguistic and not a natural (or biological) one.

for example, does a y chromosome offer a material

basis for the comment that men are "more motivated"?

or, is the y chromosome called into being as a result

of prior, gender polarizing conceptions of men and

women? i more readily say "yes" to the second

question because it emphasizes the constructedness of

materiality, which i think fits nicely with advaitin.

in other words, male, female, chromosome, hormone

(or any biological or cultural word or explanation

for gender) . . . they don't exist until called into

existence by some linguistic system that is

inherently artificial. this renders gender

distinctions artificial since they're at the level of language, a level that

must be transcended.

i'm not qualified to speak specifically on scriptual issues, although i too

am vexed by the presence of gender even in the qualification of words like

"monks" or "sanyasis." how does one recognize "a soul encased in a female

personality"? or, should one say "encased in a female body"? and how is

the distinction between bodies (or personalities) made? the decision to

divide bodies dichotomously according to gender looks, to me, purely

arbitrary.

thanks for your patience and for reading my writing, and i hope this message

is not too simple-minded.

maxwell.