Buddhist teachings expound that all sentient beings are endowed with Buddha nature, which indicates the concept of gender equality in terms of Buddhism; therefore, Buddhism seems less sexist than other world religions. But since the rise of the second feminist movement in the 1960s, Buddhist feminists have raised several women issues relevant to Buddhist institutions and history. In Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism, Gross surveys discriminative attitudes toward women in Early Buddhism, Buddhist scriptures, and monastic systems. Recently, some scholars of Buddhist studies in Taiwan have been aware of those issues as well, and tried to take the examples of Taiwanese nunneries as evidences of gender equality in Buddhism. This is especially true of Taiwanese Humanistic Buddhism, which emphasizes the role of nuns and women in Engaging Buddhist Activities of modern society. This paper is aimed to discuss the relationship between Buddhist doctrines and gender during different stages of Indian Buddhism—from Early Buddhism to Mahayana Buddhism to Tantric Buddhism—to explore that Buddhist doctrines do influence the Buddhist views of women. That is, as Mahayana Buddhism established and developed gradually in history, the status of women in Buddhism had improved significantly and then got a huge, dramatic turn in Tantric Buddhism which represented Buddhist doctrine of equanimity fully. The discussion and analysis in this paper show that Buddhism is truly concerned with equality and impartiality, which indirectly reply to feminist critics of Buddhist patriarchy. Also, it reflects the interdependent tendency of the Buddhist view of gender which is plural, flexible, and updated with time and the audience.
