Female monk Dhammananda one of the 100 most influential women

Photo: Wikipedia – Gakuro

Thai female Buddhist monk, Dhammananda Bhikkhuni, has been named by the BBC as one of the 100 most influential women this year.

There has been so much negative news coming at me in recent years that I often find it difficult to write something positive about Thailand. But luckily I read today that a Thai female monk was named one of this year's 100 most influential women when it comes to the future by the BBC.

I wrote about her earlier in the context of a general story about female monks in Thailand. (Female monks are almost equal in status to male monks. They differ greatly from the white-robed nuns, called mae chi, who act more like workers in the temples).

Here is my story: www.thailandblog.nl/BACKGROUND/vrouwen-binnen-boeddhisme/

Quoting from it about Dhamananda:

Dhammananda Bhikkhuni

At present, there are about 170 bikkhunis in Thailand, spread over 20 provinces. (And there are about 300.000 male monks spread over 38.000 temples). One of them is Bhikkhuni Dhammananda (Dhammananda means 'The Joy of the Dhamma, the 'Teaching'). Her name was Chatsumarn Kabilsingh before she was finally ordained as a monk in Sri Lanka in 2003, worked as Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Thammasat University between 1975 and 2000, was married and has three children. She is now abbess of Songdhammakalyani Temple in Nakhorn Pathom and active nationally and internationally on the role of women in Buddhism.

In the book "Thai Women in Buddhism" below, she calls the Buddha "the first feminist" and attributes most of the restrictions on women in Buddhism to later interpretations of what the Buddha taught. She also tells of the harassment that bhikkhunis have to endure, not so much from the believers but from other monks and from the authorities.

For example, a visa was refused to monks from Sri Lanka who wanted to come to Thailand to initiate more women as monks. And on December 9, 2016, a group of bhikkhunis who wanted to pay tribute to the late King Bhumibol were refused entry to the royal palace. They had to take off their robes to enter, all with an appeal to the 'law'.

Here is the story on the news website Prachatai. A wonderful summary! Tribute to all these women!: prachatai.com/english/node/8253

Quote:

The theme for 2019 is “the Female Future” and the list also includes Kuwaiti women's rights activist Alanoud Alsharekh, who works on the abolition of Kuwait's “honour-killing” law; Japanese model and author Yumi Ishikawa, founder of the #KuToo campaign against the requirement for women to wear high heels at work; sumo wrestler Hiyori Kon, who fought to change the rules which barred women from competing professionally in sumo; US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever to serve in the US congress; Filipino journalist and press freedom advocate Maria Ressa, an outspoken critic of President Rodrigo Duterte's 'war on drugs'; and Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, whose school strike protests mobilized millions of young people around the world, forming the 'Fridays for future' movement.