408 Part V: Southeast Asia
Esterik 1996). As one monk reported, nuns cook for the monks and clean for
them as well. They may pursue spiritual development, but they are subordinate
to the male monks (Salbi 2016). A woman in white is not a monk; monks wear
the ochre robe.
One of the most compelling explanations for the low status of women in
Theravada Buddhism links it to the freedoms women have traditionally had in
other worldly domains of the culture. The very earliest Westerners to visit
Thailand commented with surprise on the public roles of women in economic
activity, from buying and selling land to running the bazaars. Men, on the
other hand, were busy with nothing but “sitting or lying, playing, smoking and
sleeping,” according to Simon La Loubere in the seventeenth century (Kirsch
1996:13). In the premodern economy, international trade was controlled by
royal monopolies, while women ran the small-scale, internal trade in the mar-
ket and the bazaar. As the Thai economy began to modernize in the nineteenth
century, the king leased or sold his monopolies to merchants, but these tended
to be neither Thai men nor women, but Chinese immigrant trading families,
while Thai women continued in their control of small-scale economic activity.
In the twentieth century, the Thai economy became more complex, but
women were still found in unexpectedly high numbers as owners or managers
of large and middle-sized firms, as market sellers, hawkers, and market garden-
ers (Kirsch 1996:27–29), while Thai men are dominant in “power occupa-
tions”: high-ranking government officials, professionals, office staff, medium-
rank government officials, and clerks. Kirsch’s contention is that Buddhism
devalues these world-attached roles, leaving them to women, while idealizing
Buddhist values of asceticism, renunciation, and worldly nonaction, reserving
these roles for men. Thailand has a highly institutionalized, state-backed all-
male Buddhist hierarchy referred to as “the sangha.” The sangha is a “power
occupation,” like government service, where men have authority. Women like
Voramai Kabilsingh and Dhammananda are very slowly making inroads into
this old pattern of domination.ENDNOTE
(^1) Pali is the vernacular version of Sanskrit used for public and religious discourse in the early Bud-
dhist centuries; this became the sacred language of the Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia.
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