Fourteen Years of Letting Go:
Age and Belonging in Thailand’s Bhikkhuni Movement
Daphne Weber
Program Officer
American Council of Learned Societies
Boonsri became a samaneri, or novice female monk, in hopes of curing her critically ill grandson. In doing so, she joined Thailand’s bhikkhuni movement, a controversial effort to revive full monastic ordination for women in the Theravada tradition. Since its origins in 2001, the movement has offered women a place of community and belonging, even though the institutions that oversee Thai Buddhism do not officially recognize a modern bhikkhuni lineage. At sixty-four, however, Boonsri found that sharing the margins with other women did not guarantee her a place among them. Drawing on my long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Thai bhikkhunis, this talk examines the different ways emotion is experienced, managed, and mobilized on the path to cultivating equanimity. During monastic training, Boonsri’s aging body drew gossip, pity, and avoidance from her fellow samaneris, some of whom even treated her presence as a threat to their own practice. Ordination is meant to teach practitioners to let go, and monastics are often expected to embody the equanimity it cultivates. Yet Boonsri’s story reveals how slowly that learning can unfold: fourteen years after her ordination, the hurt she experienced as a samaneri remained with her, still unresolved. By following one monastic’s long engagement with a single, emotionally turbulent experience, this talk reconsiders equanimity not as a state quickly realized through ordination but as a slow, relational practice.