Parwati Soepangat (1932-2016), fondly often known as ‘Ibu Parwati’ to the Indonesian Buddhist neighborhood, was one of many first ladies disciples of Ashin Jinarakkhita (1923-2002). Ashin Jinarakkhita was the so-called father of recent Indonesian Buddhism – and a distinguished founding member of the Indonesian Buddhayāna motion. After I arrived in Indonesia in 2015 to conduct analysis on Ashin Jinarakkhita, I discovered about Parwati’s writings and position as a Buddhist missionary on this planet’s largest Muslim nation. Certainly one of my informants, a niece of Ashin Jinarakkhita, advised me: ‘To grasp Ashin Jinarakkhita and his Buddhayāna motion, you need to speak to Ibu Parwati.’ So I met Parwati in Bandung and interviewed her a number of occasions at her house in Jakarta.
Parwati candidly shared many insights into Ashin Jinarakkhita’s Buddhayāna motion and the event of Buddhism throughout Indonesia’s New Order interval (1966-98) below the president Suharto. The authoritarian New Order regime, which primarily targeted on financial improvement and maintained a repressive method towards Left-wing views and political dissent, lasted till Suharto’s resignation in 1998. Parwati shared her views on faith and gender points too. In 1973, Parwati, with endorsement from Ashin Jinarakkhita, established and served because the founding chairwoman of the Indonesian Buddhist Ladies’s Fellowship, a ladies’s organisation inside the Buddhayāna motion, about which we’ll study extra later.
In line with the 2020 Indonesian nationwide census, Buddhists make up roughly 0.7 per cent (round 2 million) of the full inhabitants on this planet’s largest Muslim nation. At present, many Indonesian Buddhists bear in mind Parwati because the ‘Buddhist Heroine of Solo’ (Srikandi Buddhis dari Solo). Her life and profession, in some methods, replicate the story of Buddhist ladies in postcolonial Indonesia. The Theravāda Buddhist-majority mainland Southeast Asian international locations (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand), have a powerful patriarchal, monastic Buddhist custom. Nevertheless, no such patriarchal monastic authority for Buddhism exists in Islamic Indonesia. This supplied the house and alternative for Parwati to rise to prominence within the Indonesian Buddhayāna motion. Parwati was a double minority – a Buddhist and a lady – in Muslim-majority Indonesia. Nonetheless, she advocated gender equality and girls’s empowerment to unfold Buddhist teachings and develop ladies’s spiritual participation throughout Indonesia.
Parwati was born on 1 Could 1932, within the Surakarta Palace of Central Java, which was then a part of the colonial Dutch East Indies. Her Javanese mother and father named her ‘Parwati’ after the Hindu Goddess of energy and sweetness. Her father Kanjeng Raden Tumenggung Widyonagoro was a regent of the Surakarta Palace, the royal residence and the executive headquarters of the Surakarta Sunanate. Her mom Raden Ajeng Soewiyah was a instructor within the palace faculty. Parwati’s biographer, Heru Suherman Lim, writes that she adopted her mother and father’ Buddhist religion and adopted a vegetarian weight loss program in childhood.
Born and raised within the Surakarta Palace, Parwati was educated and skilled in Javanese traditions. She spoke Javanese whereas rising up, which later proved to be helpful in spreading Buddhism among the many Javanese inhabitants. As a part of her conventional aristocratic coaching, she discovered to placed on kain kebaya, a jacket-blouse and batik skirt mixture thought-about the nationwide gown for Indonesian ladies, each time she was out on palace grounds. She additionally fasted on Mondays and Thursdays, and typically ate solely white rice and fruits to restrain her want and practise self-discipline. Her biographer writes that, as soon as a month, she slept below a sapodilla tree accompanied by her nursemaid to coach herself to ‘settle for unpleasantness and to develop a bond with nature.’ Parwati discovered and loved bedhaya, a type of Javanese ritual dance. She shared how she struggled to know the which means and philosophy behind the hand and leg coordination actions of the ritual dance, and the way her data in Buddhist doctrine helped her to realize self-discipline and meditativeness.
Formal Dutch colonial rule of Indonesia resulted in 1949, and nationwide liberation quickly introduced the rise of a ladies’s motion and the emergence of girls’s organisations. The decision for schooling dominated the early part of girls’s activism. And Parwati was uniquely positioned to contribute to this motion.
The roots of Parwati’s feminism got here from her mom, Raden Ajeng Soewiyah. The latter was a palace instructor and formed her daughter’s schooling and her feminism. Raden Ajeng Soewiyah – a eager reader of the works of Raden Adjeng Kartini (1879-1904), Indonesia’s first feminist and educator – wished her daughter to review overseas to obtain the next schooling than she had. As such, Parwati obtained a superb schooling from a really younger age. After graduating from highschool, she was accepted into Gadjah Mada College, a high college in Yogyakarta, at a time when it was uncommon for ladies to attend. In 1958, she graduated with a level in academic psychology.
Javanese ladies didn’t obtain emancipation due to the view that the spouse is inferior to the husband
After Parwati accomplished her school diploma, her mom sought to ship her daughter overseas to additional her schooling. Raden Ajeng Soewiyah felt insulted by her pals who had recommended marrying Parwati to a person within the diplomatic service earlier than sending her overseas. Her mom rejected her pals’ suggestions and insisted on sending her daughter abroad as an ‘single lady’. A 12 months later, Parwati enrolled within the George Peabody School for Lecturers, which is now a part of Vanderbilt College in Nashville in america, the place she graduated with a grasp’s diploma.
Upon finishing her grasp’s in 1959, Parwati returned to Indonesia. She started her educational profession as a lecturer in psychology at Gadjah Mada College. Following her marriage to Soepangat Soemarto (1932-2017), a professor of engineering on the Bandung Institute of Know-how, she relocated to Bandung to change into a professor within the college of psychology at Padjadjaran College. Between 1969 and 1970, when Parwati accompanied her husband to the College of California, Berkeley, for his graduate research, she took programs in psychology there.
In 1986, again at Padjadjaran College in West Java, Parwati accomplished her doctoral diploma in psychology with a dissertation entitled ‘The Affect of Cultural Surroundings on Motherhood and Emancipation as a type of Feminine Self-Actualisation: Case Research of Working Moms in A number of Cities in Java: An Method by the Idea of Cultural Psychology’. Drawing on case research of working moms in a number of cities throughout Java, she argued that Javanese ladies didn’t obtain full emancipation due to the conservative view that the spouse is inferior to the husband. This notion led them to take up an unequal share of family labour. Her dissertation mixed pursuits in psychology, gender research, and her data of Javanese tradition.
Parwati then served because the chair of the tutorial psychology division and because the director of the Centre for Ladies’s Research at Padjadjaran College. She lectured at a number of establishments in Bandung, together with the college of psychology at Maranatha Christian College, the college of philosophy at Parahyangan Catholic College, and the division of nursing on the College of Well being Sciences Saint Borromeus. She additionally spoke extensively at worldwide conferences on psychology, gender, feminist theology and Buddhist research.
Parwati advised me in our interview that she knew little about Buddhist doctrines in her earlier years. Through the early years of postcolonial Indonesia, most Buddhists have been ethnic Chinese language who worshipped in Chinese language temples, often known as klenteng. These temples fused components of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. Ashin Jinarakkhita, an ethnic Chinese language Indonesian, first encountered Buddhism at Chinese language temples by chanting scriptures and practising vegetarianism. Again then, a lot of the Chinese language migrant monks in these temples have been ritual specialists who carried out funeral rites. They neither performed spiritual lessons nor lectured on the Buddhist teachings.
In contrast to Ashin Jinarakkhita, Parwati was an ethnic Javanese who might perceive neither Mandarin nor Chinese language dialect. She couldn’t additional her data of Buddhism on the Chinese language temples. As a substitute, she discovered about Buddhism on the Theosophical Society.
The Theosophical Society was established in New York in November 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Metal Olcott, William Quan Decide, and others. Within the Eighties, a German by the title of Baron von Tengnagell based a department of the Theosophical Society within the Dutch East Indies. Nevertheless, little is understood about von Tengnagell besides that he died in Bogor in 1893, and the Theosophical Society declined following his loss of life. A couple of years later, a number of Dutch and Javanese intellectuals revived the Theosophical Society and opened lodges in varied components of Java.
They wished to dissociate Buddhism from Chinese language tradition and current it as an indigenous Indonesian faith
Within the a long time following nationwide independence, the Theosophical Society promoted the teachings of main world religions, together with Buddhism, to most of the people, and garnered a large following of educated Indonesians. Parwati turned a member of the Theosophical Society when she was an undergraduate at Gadjah Mada College and started to study Buddhist teachings from Theosophical writings reminiscent of Olcott’s books The Buddhist Catechism (1881) and The Lifetime of the Buddha and Its Classes (1912). She typically attended lectures and gatherings at varied lodges in Java. At these lectures, she met Tee Boan An, who would later be ordained as Ashin Jinarakkhita, and Soepangat Soemarto, her future husband. The three quickly turned shut pals as a result of their shared pursuits in Buddhism.
The Indonesian Buddhist neighborhood noticed Ashin Jinarakkhita as a religious chief who, as Parwati advised me, managed to revive Buddhism, which had disappeared in Indonesia. Ashin Jinarakkhita and his followers drew on historic claims to justify the propagation of Buddhism within the Muslim-majority nation. They wished to dissociate Buddhism from Chinese language tradition and current it as an indigenous Indonesian faith suitable with trendy Indonesia. Ashin Jinarakkhita’s Buddhayāna motion burdened that numerous Buddhist sects and doctrines result in a ‘single path’ (ekayāna) to enlightenment. His grand imaginative and prescient for a Buddhayāna motion was to advertise an ‘Indonesian Buddhism’ for a culturally and linguistically numerous Indonesia.
In 1955, Ashin Jinarakkhita returned to Indonesia from greater ordination in Burma. He and his disciples made two ‘dharma excursions’ to city and rural components of Java, Sulawesi and Bali to unfold the Buddhist teachings. Ashin Jinarakkhita wished to transform native Indonesians to Buddhism. Due to this fact, he appointed Parwati, an ethnic Javanese, to function his Javanese-language translator for his missionary journeys. They wished to point out that Buddhism was not a faith only for the Chinese language inhabitants of Indonesia.
As the Buddhayāna motion grew, Ashin Jinarakkhita moved to determine an establishment to organise its members. In July 1955, he established Indonesia’s first lay Buddhist organisation, the Indonesian Fraternity of Lay Buddhists (Persaudaraan Upasaka Upasika Indonesia, hereafter PUUI), to consolidate his lay disciples and practice lay preachers to assist him unfold the dharma. The PUUI turned an necessary platform for Ashin Jinarakkhita to ordain his senior disciples with the very best data of the Buddha dharma as lay preachers, often known as pandita, to serve the wants of a rising congregation. Parwati was among the many first disciples to be ordained as a pandita and was authorised to steer Buddhist funeral ceremonies, bless weddings, and ship dharma lectures in varied components of Indonesia.
Within the Fifties, the poor transport techniques in Indonesia made it exhausting for Ashin Jinarakkhita to journey from one place to a different and attain his rising variety of followers. Within the absence of a patriarchal Theravāda monastic authority and given the shortage of monastic members to steer the congregation, panditas reminiscent of Parwati supported Ashin Jinarakkhita in ministering to the congregation and made it potential for the Buddhayāna motion to develop rapidly inside the span of some years.
Parwati considers the Buddha’s stepmother as the primary feminist Buddhist theologian
Ashin Jinarakkhita quickly recognised the need of creating a sangha (or monastic) organisation to symbolize the Buddhist neighborhood in Indonesia. On 23 January 1963, he based the Maha Sangha Indonesia in Bandung. Shortly after the founding of Maha Sangha Indonesia, Ashin Jinarakkhita additionally determined to ordain the primary Buddhist nun in Indonesia. Through the early Nineteen Sixties, bhikkhunī ordination (that’s, the complete ordination of a feminine monastic) within the Theravāda custom was remarkable, and it stays a degree of contention among the many Theravādin communities in modern Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, as bhikkhunī ordination is a typical follow in Mahāyāna Buddhism, Ashin Jinarakkhita didn’t hesitate to help the ordination of nuns in Indonesia.
Following this primary bhikkhunī ordination, Ashin Jinarakkhita inspired Parwati to kind a laywomen’s organisation inside the Buddhayāna motion to enhance the PUUI. On 14 July 1973, Parwati established the Indonesian Buddhist Ladies’s Fellowship (Wanita Buddhis Indonesia, hereafter WBI) and served because the founding chairwoman, with Sujata Gunadharma and Visakha Gunadharma as her deputies. The laywomen organisation had two goals. The primary was to change into the most important and most lively Buddhist ladies’s organisation in Indonesia by way of administration, territorial protection, membership, and vary of actions to help ladies activists to raise the standing of girls in Indonesia. The second was to nurture Buddhist ladies’s potential and information them in accordance with the dharma by adhering to the Buddhayāna values of inclusivism, pluralism, universalism and non-sectarianism.
In 1976, WBI expanded and relocated to Bandung, the place the Maha Sangha Indonesia was primarily based, to raised coordinate the native chapters in 18 provinces throughout Indonesia. Because the chairwoman of WBI, Parwati took a proactive position in advancing the standing of girls within the Indonesian Buddhayāna motion and the Buddhist neighborhood at massive. She considers Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī, the Buddha’s stepmother, as the primary feminist Buddhist theologian in Buddhist historical past.
Parwati argues that the bhikkhunī order was the primary ladies’s organisation on this planet and was based by none apart from the Śākyamuni Buddha himself. She writes that the institution of the bhikkhunī order supplied a chance for ladies to pursue a religious life and elevated the place of girls in a male-dominated society. Because of Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī, as she contends, ladies have been not oppressed as ‘objects of worldly fulfilment’, and had alternatives to function spiritual lecturers and obtain religious perfection.
Parwati additionally suggests that there have been already Buddhist nuns within the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Srivijaya through the eighth century. Like Ashin Jinarakkhita, Parwati drew on historic claims to justify the propagation of Buddhism and, extra importantly, to raise the standing of Buddhist ladies within the Muslim-majority nation. Extra crucially, this allowed her to legitimise her WBI missionary campaigns to transform native, particularly Javanese, ladies to Buddhism.
In her lectures and writings, Parwati emphasises the numerous position of each nuns and laywomen within the Indonesian Buddhayāna motion. She highlights the contributions of the feminine monastics within the Buddhayāna Sangha, declaring that they’ve the identical duties as monks within the working of temples, serving the religious wants of the lay congregation, and propagating the Buddha’s teachings in Indonesia. She additionally remarks that Buddhist nuns preached and initiated lay followers in varied Buddhayāna organisations, serving each the lay female and male members of the motion. Extra importantly, Parwati factors out that laywomen preachers reminiscent of herself have been granted the authority to officiate wedding ceremony ceremonies and funeral rituals identical to their male counterparts.
Over time, because the chairwoman of WBI, Parwati step by step developed her ‘Buddhist feminist theology’ (teologi feminis Buddha) to advertise gender equality and girls’s empowerment inside the Buddhist neighborhood in Indonesia. In her essay ‘Buddhist Feminist Theology in Indonesia’ (2002), she lauded the Indonesian authorities for his or her 1984 promulgation of the Conference on the Elimination of All Types of Discrimination in opposition to Ladies. Though she was glad that many new provisions had been proposed for the regulation, she believed that extra could possibly be accomplished to realize gender equality and girls’s empowerment in Indonesia.
Buddhist feminist theology turned a key instructing within the Indonesian Buddhayāna motion
Concretely, Parwati believed that Buddhist feminist theology can assist to realize equality and liberation. Drawing on historical past, she identified that ladies have been lively Buddhist leaders within the Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Srivijaya and Majapahit, and remained necessary leaders through the Dutch colonial and independence intervals. Her linear historic narrative of Buddhist feminism serves to justify that Buddhism – and the participation of Buddhist ladies – had lengthy been part of Indonesian historical past.
As well as, Parwati tapped into Buddhist doctrines to assert that the Avalokiteśvara in Chinese language Mahāyāna Buddhism and the Tara in Tibetan Tantrayāna Buddhism are a glorification of ‘female divinity’ in Buddhism. She means that the Mahāyāna idea of prajñāpāramitā, which refers back to the ‘perfection of knowledge’, is personified because the ‘mom of all Buddhas’, which provides beginning to the ‘noble teachings for humanity.’ Due to this fact, Parwati is crucial of the Theravāda custom, which opposes the ordination of girls into the Sangha.
Parwati’s Buddhist feminist theology turned a key instructing within the Indonesian Buddhayāna motion. Along with serving because the chairwoman of WBI, she was additionally appointed because the rector of the Institute of Buddhist Research in Ampel, the president of the Vimala Dharma Vihara Basis in Bandung, and the vice chairman of the Indonesia Buddhayāna Council.
The case of Parwati helps us higher perceive ladies’s company in selling Buddhism and advocating gender equality on this planet’s largest Muslim nation. Extra consideration is required to look at the much-neglected position of minority Buddhist ladies within the Muslim-majority international locations of maritime Southeast Asia. These quite a few Buddhist ladies’s tales stay to be advised.
