Family Life in Buddhism
The Buddha offers advice to married women in the Anguttara Nikaya (7:59; IV 91-94), from the Pali (Theravada) canon, where he tells of seven types of wives - the first three types are destined for unhappiness, while the last four, as they are imbued with long term self control, are destined to be happy. These latter wives are characterised as alternately benevolent and possibly dominant (motherly-wife), equal (friend-wife) and submissive (sister-wife and slave-wife) - the Buddha thus endorsed a variety of power dynamics within marriage.
According to Diana Paul, Buddhism inherited a view of women whereby if they are not represented as mothers then they are portrayed as either lustful temptresses or as evil incarnate.
Read more about this topic: Women In Buddhism
Famous quotes containing the words family life, family, life and/or buddhism:
“Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“It is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a forest of pines. The chopper fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws them,—to get his living. You tell me that he has a more interesting family than the mouse. That is as it happens.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)