Thailand: Is this really no place for female leaders?

Bangkok's worst flooding in decades seems to have floated a lot of garbage - both the physical and verbal type.

Some superstitious minds are blaming the country's first female prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, for bringing bad luck to the country, echoing last month's YouTube clip which showed a controversial monk proclaiming women unfit to lead a country.

To justify his claim, Phra Kasem, clutching the Thai translation of the Tipitaka, read a verse attributed to the Buddha from the Kandina Jataka: 

"I admonish men who, with arrow as weapon, strongly releasing it; I admonish the lands ruled by women; Indeed, beings under the sway of women are admonished by the wise."

To play on the insult, he read another short Anguttara Nikaya passage where, according to the Thai translation, the disciple Ananda questioned the Buddha "why women neither sit in the assembly, nor undertake business, nor go out of town" with the Buddha's reply that they were "angry, envious and weak in wisdom".

The video clip incensed many fair-minded Thais. Buddhist academic Surapot Taweesak pointed out that one cannot just look up a random passage in the Tipitaka as a definitive answer to any social issue.

 He recommended that Thai monks educate themselves in the political and social reality of the day before applying the teachings of the Buddha, because while some parts like the Four Noble Truths or Dependent Co-origination are meant to be universal, others are context-specific morality teachings given to a different place (India) and time (around 2,600 years ago).

This author absolutely agrees that the Tipitaka is not a crystal ball or fanciful rambling that can be conjured up to explain everything. The Buddha clearly stated that what he taught represented only a handful of leaves within the forest.

But as the Tipitaka passages cited are purported to be the Buddha's opinion of women, the author believes it's important to question the context in which the Buddha - who recognised women's equal potential for enlightenment - might have said such uncharacteristically misogynistic things - if he indeed said them. 

With a rudimentary knowledge of Pali, I would like to offer a contextual reading of the cited passages in this two-part article.

First of all, it's important to keep in mind that, from the very beginning, the Buddhist Canon resulted from a collective effort of an all-male monks' assembly, reporting from memory what they personally had heard from the Buddha. 

Predictably, what they heard would be concerned less with secular affairs than with spiritual matters. Sexual desire, as the main stumbling block for a celibate life, would often come up, and in such an all-male (supposedly heterosexual) circle, the word "woman" - their common denominator of sexual desire - could easily come to be shorthand for desire itself; something to be indignant at.

However, the Buddha must have given similar teachings to female "monks". And in that context one wouldn't be surprised if he had used the word "men" to personify the sufferings of sexual desire. 

Indeed, had the Tipitaka's line of the transmission included female reciters from the start down to the present time, we might have records of "men" representing revoltingness.

This Kandina Jataka was told by the Buddha to a monk feeling tempted to return to household life and his wife's attention and pampering. What was being admonished, therefore, is actually not women per se but lust. In such places, one must read "lust for" before "women".

 The third line of the verse, as an example, should be understood as: "beings under the sway of (lust for) women are admonished by the wise".

The first line in the Thai translation is problematic. "I admonish men who, with arrows as weapon, release them in full strength." This doesn't hang together grammatically or semantically with the rest. 

Considering that the story is about a mountain stag killed by a hunter after following a doe into a human village, a better translation for the original Pali should be, "cursed be the arrow (of desire) strongly piercing man".

Here, the Buddha was obviously comparing the metaphorical dart of desire piercing the monk's heart to the hunter's arrow that killed the stag.

The same sense also is conveyed by the second line. As both the text (verse) and context (story) are about men under the influence of lust, the word itthi (generally meaning "woman") is better translated with its second meaning of "wife". 

Thus the line should read, "cursed be the land overrun by the wife", referring to any male leader who fails to keep his wife from interfering in the affairs of the state.

Again, the regressing monk who allowed his household desires to jeopardise his spiritual advancement was compared by the Buddha to a ruler who let his personal relationships interfere with his just rule. 

If female leaders had been the norm of the day, one would easily expect the verse to be put as "cursed be the land overrun by the husband".

Now we turn to the second passage. Although Pali belongs to the Indo-European language family and its grammar bears astonishing similarities to Continental languages, it differs in one important aspect: the lack of indefinite and definite articles (a/an/the). 

As a result, it depends on the context whether the key word matugamo refers to women in general or specific individuals.

The Thai language also lacks articles. To clarify, translators normally would insert words like "a", "some", "that", "those" or "certain". Unfortunately, no such words are given here, leaving the passage as vague as in the original Pali. 

Without understanding of Pali grammar, a prejudiced mind is prone to read it as a blanket condemnation pigeonholing half of the world's 7 billion people to menial jobs.

But there's a strong hint that the sutta is not a generalisation of women. It is worth noting that the passage doesn't contain generalising words like sabbe ("all"). 

Even more importantly, it hinges on a crucial part completely oblivious to Phra Kasem. Both Ananda's question and the Buddha's answer centred around the conditionality of hetu ("reason") and paccaya ("condition"). 

Therefore, one should read the passage as concerning only some women - or men, for that matter - who are angry, jealous and weak as unfit to carry out those mentioned tasks, but by no means rules out the rest who aren't.

This, the author argues, is the way to read the sutta without turning the Buddha into a hypocrite. This will be discussed in the second part tomorrow.

Which way the tipping point?

The severe flooding of Bangkok and its suburbs has forced tens of thousands of the residents to flee over the past weeks. Many have returned to the villages of their birth, including some of my close friends.

Buddha statues are almost submerged at an amulet market near
the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok yesterday.

After years of living in the city, most have encountered some inconvenience, especially those whose villages are also flooded. They, however, seem to have taken things in stride.

Some have reported that although the flood is more severe compared to what they had experienced when they were growing up, the relatives they are staying with have encountered little interruption in their daily lives. In fact, some have found it quite amusing when they learned that their relatives would love to have the flood waters linger a while, for it has provided them with so much fun fishing!

The villagers have little problem with the flood because they live in old-style houses of the Chao Phraya floodplain _ built on stilts and readily equipped with row boats.

As destructive as the current flooding of Bangkok and the surrounding provinces is, I believe we should consider ourselves lucky, for it could have been much worse. The flood is caused mainly by the unusually large volume of water rushing down from the North. High tides may have added to the severity of the flood, but imagine what could have happened if Bangkok and these provinces were to be hit also by a strong storm that brings heavy rain as well as causing storm surges in the Gulf of Thailand?

Although the typhoon season is usually over by this time of year, a stray storm cannot be ruled out.

It should be apparent that the flood damage has been so great mainly because of the rapid expansion of roads, residential areas, industrial estates and commercial establishments over the past few decades. Many of them are built right on the existing floodways without providing adequate routes for water to conveniently flow through.

With the predicted increases in frequency and severity of storms and higher sea levels resulting from global warming, a more destructive flood will happen more sooner than later.

The central issue is: what to do between now and then, to reduce the level of destruction?

That we need to create adequate "water expressways" from, say, Pathum Thani to the sea, should not be disputed. And the urgency of the need requires that we launch brain-storming work forthwith.

Ideas have been floated about creating such expressways east and west of Bangkok, but no one seems to have suggested that a big one be built right through the heart of the city.

Impossible to engineer? I do not believe that.

Politically unwise? Maybe.

Too costly? Perhaps.

Ruling that idea out without a thorough study and full debate, however, would be more costly.

For decades, the idea of building satellite towns to take the pressure off Bangkok has been discussed and one almost came into fruition a few years ago.

The building of a satellite town in Saraburi-Nakhon Nayok area was aborted soon after inception because it was conceived for the wrong motive _ it was intended to benefit the politicians and their cronies, more than to provide true relief for Bangkok.

Despite that setback, the idea needs to be revived. Modern transportation such as bullet trains and digital communications should allow such a town, preferably towns, to be located outside the Chao Phraya floodplain.

Many have opined that this severe flood will bring a great benefit _ it provides a platform on which all sectors will come together and deal with the flooding issue once and for all.

Some, however, have expressed strong doubts and have pointed out that the ugliness of the current situation _ politicians trying to benefit, both personally and politically, from the disaster; the affected people waiting for handouts without lifting a finger to help themselves; the spread of blame on the revered institution _ all this will speed up the rush towards the opposite outcome, namely, a sharper social and political division that will end in a civil war.

Where do I stand on this issue?

Having experienced many aspects of the flood first-hand, I am not optimistic.