A Liberatory Complementarianism?: Contemporary Tibetan Nuns Theorize Motherhood and Womanhood

Complementarianism, a Christian and post-Christian understanding of gender in which men and women are understood to have intrinsically different bodies and characteristics that “complement” one another, is generally understood by western feminists as a discourse of patriarchal oppression. For instance, in American evangelical Christian contexts, complementarian discourses are often used as theological justification for confining women to the domestic sphere in their roles as mothers (Lazarsfeld-Jensen 2024). Joan Scott (2017) argues compellingly that complementarian discourses were also secularized from Christianity through European categories of natural law and then used to enforce patriarchal gender norms, especially the role of mothers in the United States. In this paper, the authors propose a salient counterexample from a group of learned nuns in contemporary Tibet, showing that the association between patriarchy and complementarianism is not universal, and should not be mapped onto non-western and non-Christian contexts. Like Mahmood’s famous treatment of agency among Muslim women involved in piety movements in Cairo (Mahmood 2012), our study reinforces feminist scholarship which argues that women’s experience must be treated as locally as possible. 

For most of Tibetan Buddhist history, women have been considered categorically inferior to men, and women were hence encouraged to gradually accumulate good karma and take rebirth as a man before undertaking the most powerful and efficacious Buddhist practices. Even nuns have historically been denied the opportunities for religious study and practice afforded monks. Although in non-Tibetan cultural contexts, vows of celibacy have sometimes led to nuns being understood as a third gender (e.g. McNamara 2002), neither fully male nor female, in Tibet monasticism, nuns remain fully gendered as women. This in turn had important social repercussions for Tibetan nunneries, as there was little reason for laypeople to donate to a nunnery when nuns were incapable of performing the rituals and making the spiritual attainments that would generate good karma for the donor. Moreover, because most forms of learning were disseminated in Tibet within Buddhist monasteries, lack of educational opportunities also denied women, lay and monastic alike, pathways to prestigious vocations such as politicians, rulers, intellectuals, and doctors. Over the past three decades, however, the position of religious women in Tibet has changed dramatically. For the first time in Tibetan history, Buddhist nuns are receiving terminal degrees of Buddhist scholarship and practice. These degrees in turn have credentialed nuns to become medical doctors, philosophers, and religious teachers, changing the perception of women in Tibet more generally. 

This paper draws on decade-long fieldwork at Larung Gar, the monastic center in Eastern Tibet that first began conferring these degrees, including extensive interviews with the scholar-nuns and other nuns there, as well as many of the institute’s abbots, teachers, monks, and lay devotees. We include the nuns as co-theorists by providing an overview of their understanding of gender, particularly the subversive manner in which they appropriate complementarian discourses. Especially relevant for the present unit, the nuns treat motherhood as the defining feature of womanhood even as they themselves have taken vows never to become mothers, appropriating the compassion ascribed intrinsically to women within Buddhist discourses for their own celibate religious attainments. 

The most common defense of gender equality offered by the Tibetan nuns is the argument that men and women are fundamentally different in kind, each with their own strengths and weaknesses in a complementarian model of gender. Women and men each have their own assigned jobs, personality traits, and bodies. One nun cited a canonical teaching saying, “women like to talk about others behind their backs, they have a narrower mindset and hold grudges. In the fight for gender equality, we have to admit these natural tendencies.” The same nun also said that women are often shy or coy whereas men are often bold and straightforward. Other nuns argued that women are intrinsically more fickle and predisposed to desire than men.

Nevertheless, the nuns are firm in their promotion of gender equality. In supporting this view, they draw on discourses of motherhood, the paradigmatic expression of compassion in a litany of Buddhist traditions. It is easy to imagine that motherhood could be weaponized against the nuns, as it often is in complementarian models of gender, wherein a mother’s supposedly intrinsic care for their children is used to justify women staying at home while men enter the public sphere. But the nuns use the Tibetan Buddhist concept of motherhood to justify gender equality. One nun said, “In worldly terms, women are the treasure of the world through their identity as mothers…In transcendental terms, the source of compassion is women and women generates the compassionate mind more easily than men. For example, during the Yushu earthquake, you heard many examples of fathers running away, abandoning their children, but you never heard such things about mothers, they always took care of the children.” Mothers are more equanimous and poised than men, both traditionally masculine attributes, because of their innate compassion. Nuns, by virtue of being women, are endowed with the same innate traits as mothers, but are able to apply their compassion on a far larger scale, to all the sentient beings of samsara. In these and many other examples that we will offer, women are reappropriating a complementarian discourse, historically used to oppress women, to liberate them in both Buddhist and political terms instead. 

Works Cited

Lazarsfeld-Jensen, Ann. “A Conservative Church Response to Feminism: Less Power, Less Privilege and No Equality.” In Gender, Feminist and Queer Studies, pp. 35-48. Routledge, 2024.

Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 2012.

McNamara, Jo Ann. “Chastity as a Third Gender in the History and Hagiography of Gregory of Tours.” In The World of Gregory of Tours, pp. 199-209. Brill, 2002.

Scott, Joan. Sex and Secularism. Princeton University Press, 2018.