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Interesting point, and a good reminder that everyone, even the Buddha, is a product of their society and culture. Simply taking any set of beliefs at face value is, to my mind, harmful. Think deeply, and often, and discover what seems true to you, then... keep thinking. For the rest of your life. Because something more true may come along later.

I am inclined to believe that the Buddha wasn't necessarily as anti-female as people tend to see on the surface. In fact, he was pretty pro-lady, he was just looking at all the angles and through the lenses of his time and trying to make the attitudes of the public more pliable to his own. He was tricksy like that. 3nodding

Sure, there are statements that females are considered a lower birth, but think about what this means: We can still reach enlightenment as men can, but we're just going to have a more difficult time of it. It does not mean we are inferior, just that we will have a harder time of letting go. We have many things that men are not as attached to, even on a socio-biological level. Many of us have the desire to start a household and have children, things that tend to tie us to the householder's life for some time. This alone makes finding time and effort to devote to meditation, and the inclination to walk away from it all and join a monastic community somewhat more difficult to follow. Especially when given that traditionally, family and household chored were ours and not the male's.

Men, on the other hand, were not traditionally considered tied to the children or the house in quite the same way - hence, you can have a family and just walk away from it, so long as it was provided for no one looked down on it. In fact, you could probably gain in stature from walking away and becoming a monastic. It was a high calling. In women, the monastic calling was considered weird. You could be publically ostracised and/or physically beaten for it, really. It was a man's calling, and a woman wanting to do so...just wasn't right.

Also, one could examine his fights against ordaning women - sure, the ladies were turned down until they accepted certain conditions that on surface look sexist, but there's two things to think about regarding this.

One, it is groundbreaking that he took women into a monastic community at all. No one in India, aside from possibly the Jains, were seriously looking at women for any sort of religious calling in the time period this took place. No one. As I mentioned above, it wasn't done because it was considered weird for a woman to want to shave her head and leave her household behind. It was a man's work, and women shouldn't do it. That was the convention of the time. Of course there were going to have to be some sort of public placation rules regarding the status of women within the faith, or the public may well riot against the faith as a complete shaking of all tradition they held dear, and would turn a deaf ear to the dharma - by doing things the way he did, the Buddha both allowed women into the monastic line AND kept the public interested in the way, allowing it to spread on two fronts at once.

Two, some of the extra rules for nuns were for strictly protective purposes. It may sound weird that a nun wasn't allowed to go out alone, but it's not as odd as it seems if you look at the underlying factors to it. As I said before, nuns were an oddity and looked at as complete weirdos by many members of the public. A woman who doesn't want a family? Preposterous! As such, traveling alone was a danger - they would be harassed, beaten, abused...sometimes raped and killed. So some of the odd rules (bathing in public baths, or in sets, only shaving in certain ways, traveling in packs or with a monk, not touching males, etc) were put in place not to lock them down at all, but rather, to protect them and keep them safe from dangerous elements. One nun alone runs a risk of being assaulted; a pack of nuns cuts that risk considerably.

So yes. Buddha = much more forward about women than most people think. You just need to dig further in than the surface. 3nodding

Now that you mention that, it does make a lot of sense...
thank you...

-Om Mani Padme Hum-

Remember that his teachings were written I think 500 years after he taught them. And a lot of things would be changed and such. Plus the Buddha had to change angles and such on things becuase everyone around him beleived that women were less so if he let women have equal rights no one would listen to him. And nuns have more rules for the same reason, because things were written 100's of years later and the people then were ingnorant when it came to gender.

He did what he did for political reasons.