Sacred Heart #25
At last free,
at last I am a woman free!
No more tied to the kitchen,
stained amid the stained pots,
no more bound to the husband
who thought me less
than the shade he wove with his hands.
No more anger, no more hunger
I sit now in the sde of my own tree.
Meditating thus, I am happy, I am serene.
Sumangalamata (6th century BC) was the wife of a hat and umbrella maker, and a member of the earliest community of women followers of the Buddha.
In this poem we have an early example of Women’s Lib! Women were usually excluded from the male monks living in forest retreats. Here a woman is celebrating her freedom from the distractions and duties of conventional life, and delighted she can now give her whole time to meditating.
For centuries, all religions debated whether women had souls, and consequently not ‘spiritual enough’ to achieve enlightenment. In spite of the fact that many of the saints throughout the ages were women, it is only in the last half century that women could become preachers in Christianity. It is still forbidden in the Roman Catholic Church. Women who deviated from tradition were frequently branded as witches – and we all know what happened to them.
