New "Good Manners Curriculum" to Curb Gay and Transgender Expression in the Thai Sangha
by Danny Fisher
Via Steve Silberman at Shambhala Sun Space: BBCTurkish.com has a report about a new “good manners curriculum” in the Thai sangha designed to “discourage behaviour seen as effeminate.”
- The guidelines are aimed at curbing the flamboyant behaviour of gay and transgender monks.
The religious authorities say they’re responding to increasing irritation among more conservative Thai clerics and members of the public with behaviour perceived as effeminate.
They’re aiming to reduce or eliminate the wearing of make-up and tight robes by younger priests, and generally attitudes that suggest homosexual activity.
Of all Asian countries, Thailand is perhaps the most tolerant of homosexuality, which is often open and flamboyant. But it’s still considered largely incompatible with Buddhist priesthood, with its traditions of celibacy and self-discipline.
It is part of my understanding of Buddhist monasticism that practitioners rein in explicitly sexual expression, be it hetero- or homosexual. That said, I’m concerned about how this curriculum might be misused. (It’s the BBC’s terminology, but I wonder, for example, what would “attitudes that suggest homosexual activity” include exactly?) I guess we’ll just see what happens…
[Image via BBCTurkish.com.]
A bit more on this etiquette guide and 'reformist' project in Thailand can be read from an April BBC report here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8020311.stm
Classical Buddhism has always been concerned with regulating the behavioral presentation and comportment of Buddhist monastics. The rules of the monastic codes, the Vinaya, are famously concerned with many points of detail that liberal Westerners would perceive as irrelevant to the authentic religious life. Buddhism, however, believes that shaping and transforming bodily comportment is foundational to both individual religious progress and the social success of the Sangha.
At the same time, the Buddhist monastic order has always been concerned with excluding homosexuals and hermaphrodites from the Sangha. As the new book by John Powers, A Bull of a Man, makes clear, Indian Buddhism was very concerned to present the Buddha as a virile, masculine and heterosexual exemplar. So the problem was not simply that monastics should be asexual, and therefore any sexualized public identity was innapropriate.
Every actually existing Buddhist monastic order in the various Buddhist lands has come to its own unofficial, uneasy and ambiguous compromise with the universality of homosexuality in human society. It is not surprising and not uncommon to find homosexual relations of various sorts flourishing within Asian monastic orders, although never officially. In Thailand this issue is even more pronounced in the 20th and 21st centuries by the flourishing and increasingly public subculture of both males cross-dresses and male homosexuality. There are, as a result, regular bouts of public concern over homosexuality within the Thai Sangha. The modern Western liberal discourses endorsing human rights and non-heterosexual identity have placed 'traditional' attitudes about and accommodations to homosexuality in the Sangha under even greater critical pressure.
The scholar Peter Jackson has written the most on this topic. While his work is demanding because it pays close attention to both Pali and Thai language, idioms and cultural contexts, it is also very rewarding in understanding Homosexuality and Transgenderism in Thai Buddhism. This article is particularly good: http://www.enabling.org/ia/vipassana/Archive/J/Jackson/homoBuddhaJackson.html
Erick
Re "It is part of my understanding of Buddhist monasticism that practitioners reign in explicitly sexual expression"
An interesting parapraxis (slip of the pen): 'reign' instead of the homonym, 'rein'.
Thanks for the free grammar-check! : ) I've made the change.