But this doesn't make him enlightened. Consider his cluelessness on gender.According to the karma-rebirth perspective we have all been male and female, many times before (Harvey, 2000, pp. 453-410). Admittedly, gender has a tendency to stay the same from one life to the next, but it may change if a person has a strong aspiration that this be so, or if the working out of karma makes this appropriate. For example, in one text (Norman, 1971, pp. 41-4), an enlightened nun recalls some of her past lives, saying that, as a result of once being a male adulterer, some of her future lives were as females in unhappy marriages. In rebirth terms, a female form is seen as slightly less fortunate than a male one, but only because it tends to involve more forms of suffering. These include menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth, and the subordinate position of women in many societies (Woodward, 1927, pp. 162-3).
“Buddhist visions of the human predicament and its resolution,” 70-71
Buddhism couldn't have anything to do with the subordinate position, could it? Or the idea that women in unhappy marriages are being punished for previous lives as male adulterers? Pu-leeeze.
