'Thakin, many men do not care for religion at all, but when a man does do so, he takes it very seriously. He follows it out to the end. He becomes a monk, and surrenders the whole world. But with women it is different. Many women, nearly all women, will like religion, and none will take it seriously. We mix it up with our home-life, and our affections, and our worldly doings; for we like a little of everything.' So said a woman to me.
Is this always true? I do not know, but it is very true in Burma. Nearly all the women are religious, they like to go to the monastery and hear the law, they like to give presents to the monks, they like to visit the pagoda and adore Gaudama the Buddha. I am sure that if it were not for their influence the laws against taking life and against intoxicants would not be observed as stringently as they are. So far they will go. As far as they can use the precepts of religion and retain their home-life they will do so; as it was with Yathodaya so long ago, so it is now. But when religion calls them and says, 'Come away from the world, leave all that you love, all that your heart holds good, for it is naught; see the light, and prepare your soul for peace,' they hold back. This they cannot do; it is far beyond them. 'Thakin, we _cannot do so_. It would seem to us terrible,' that is what they say.
A man who renounces the world is called 'the great glory,' but not so a woman.
I have said that the Buddhist religion holds men and women as equal. If women can observe its laws as men do, it is surely their own fault if they be held the less worthy.
Women themselves admit this. They honour a man greatly who becomes a monk, not so a nun. Nuns have but little consideration. And why? Because what is good for a man is not good for a woman; and if, indeed, renunciation of the world be the only path to the Great Peace, then surely it must be true that women must be born again.
'They are to each other as a burning poison falling into a man's eye.'--_Burmese saying._
I remember a night not so long ago; it was in the hot weather, and I was out in camp with my friend the police-officer. It was past sunset, and the air beneath the trees was full of luminous gloom, though overhead a flush still lingered on the cheek of the night. We were sitting in the veranda of a Government rest-house, enjoying the first coolness of the coming night, and talking in disjointed sentences of many things; and there came up the steps of the house into the veranda a woman. She came forward slowly, and then sat down on the floor beside my friend, and began to speak. There was a lamp burning in an inner room, and a long bar of light came through the door and lit her face. I could see she was not good-looking, but that her eyes were full of tears, and her face drawn with trouble. I recognised who she was, the wife of the head-constable in charge of the guard near by, a woman I had noticed once or twice in the guard.