Religion plays a pivotal role in human society, and all the beliefs and values transferred by doctrines, scriptures, religious leaders, preachers and others tangibly or virtually dominate people’s thoughts, words and deeds, and even construct a system of ethical ideal normative guidelines. It can be seen that not only the religion is relevant to human secular lives, but religious culture has the importance of shaping and constructing the cognitive concepts of believers. The influence of religion is so great that the religious doctrines are all the fundament of thought of believers; if the universal values of gender equality are put into practice, this will be a great help for the establishment of social justice of gender equality. However, it is regrettable that we find that women, in religious field, as in other fields which take male as the center of knowledge, are so marginalized and weak for their voice. Even the conservatism and closure of religion sometimes indirectly become the tenacious bastions of the gender discrimination within the religion. As for the Buddhism, we seem to easily find the arguments from the Buddhist scriptures which demonize and hurt women. Therefore, this paper focuses on how the Buddhist scriptures translated into Chinese exactly presented the opinions on female and whether the opinions on female in these scriptures were really their true appearance. Based on literature analysis and the historical analysis, this study explored the opinions of five kinds of filths, nine kinds of evils, ten kinds of wicked, five kinds of obstacles as well as the saying that women should not become Buddha which biased women in the Buddhist scriptures translated into Chinese; the researcher also attempted to rediscover the voice of women in Buddhist, reconstruct the historical role of the nuns in the Buddhist scriptures and explore the implicated female consciousness through the analysis and discussion of the “Verses of the Elder Nuns” of the doctrines during the Theravada Buddhism period, hoping to restore the religious potential powers and wisdom of women by this way. At the end of this paper, the author reflected how “Verses of the Elder Nuns” inspired the ethics of genders today, to make people of different genders gain the spaces of respect and development in her or his cultural value system, and ultimately go forward towards the ideal of gender equality.
