Buddhist Feminism in Ceylon

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 14 pages

From Lucifer of October 1889, and built around a piece of evidence Blavatsky clearly enjoyed finding. The Wesleyan Mission's own report for the Galle District had conceded that the dominant force for Buddhism on the island was woman — that the Buddhist woman is not shut in the zenana or denied free worship at the shrine, that she can climb unchecked to the peak where the footprint of Buddha is, and that in the home she keeps the altar. Blavatsky simply takes the missionaries at their word and asks what follows.

What follows is a comparison. She sets the Ceylonese woman's position beside that of Christian women in the early centuries and the Middle Ages, and calls in Principal Donaldson, who had written in the Contemporary Review that he used to believe Christianity had raised the position of women and could no longer do so: in the first three centuries, on his reading, it tended rather to lower their character and contract the range of their activity. The wider claim of the article is stated at the head of it — that Buddhism was the first system to set out deliberately to end the male gods and the idea of a sexual personal deity as the father of men.

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