Gurmeet Kaur

The literary sources reveal that Buddha left his wife and child at home to find enlightenment, which implies that he saw women, and domestic life in particular, as an obstacle in the path of liberation (nirvana). This article is an attempt to question the social norms concerning women accepted by the Buddha and Buddhism through the lens of gender. In addition, it throws a critical light on the eight garudhammas (rules to be observed by fully ordained Buddhist nuns). Buddhism was introduced by the Buddha as a tradition that changed the extant Vedic way of life to his own “way of life,” known as Buddhism in the contemporary world. It cannot be said that the Buddha converted people from the Vedic religion to Buddhism. Instead, the Buddha used the debate to figure out higher truth through logic and attract people to Buddhism. Thus, the roots of Buddhism lie in denouncing the obsolete practices of the Vedic system that promoted any kind of nobleness/righteousness established by birth. In contrast, he promoted righteousness and nobleness based on action and logic. Unfortunately, an important and often overlooked aspect of Buddha and Buddhism, in general, is about women’s place.

Tara is both a Buddhist and Hindu deity. She is widely worshipped in the esoteric branch of Buddhism: Vajrayana. Even in the exile, Tibetan refugees follow the practice and rituals associated with Tara. Lamentably, she has been given an auxiliary and secondary role in comparison to male deities. Various feminist scholars have begun to look at aspects of society through the lens of gender. They have been at the forefront of studying gender roles and its psychological consequences for those who try to abide by them. In religious studies, especially in Asian context, many of these discourses are difficult to perceive because they were unconsciously appropriated as truth by the people of the society in which they circulated as an inviolable aspect of the worlds or as nature. This study is an attempt to examine the representation of Goddess in various ancient texts as essential to the study of the divine feminine. This hybrid study merges traditional Indology with feminist studies, and is intended for specialists in the field, for readers with interest in Buddhist, and for scholars of Gender studies, cultural historians, and sociologists.