Adamantine wrote:
There have been much greater numbers of authors in general in the West (what exactly are we defining as the West here?), so proportionally this is not a fair accounting. Also, you are clearly grouping many countries and multiple land masses into your accounting of what is the "West", and opposing it to India and Tibet, two countries only. I hardly think your comparisons are useful. Also, you deflect the issue of whether women are considered to have as great or greater potential as men onto an issue of authorship, which is a bit of a red-herring. Many yogis and yoginis who reach high levels of realization don't author texts.
Can you provide a citation from a primary text which states that woman have more potential than men for awakening? I personally do not beleive that gender makes one person superior to another person in terms of capacity for awakening. I think it is a very silly thing to say.
If Tibetan tradition truly maintains that woman had a greater potential for awakening than men, it would stand to reason that it would report more instances of awakened woman than men. But in the fact there are very few reports of awakened woman as opposed to endless litneys of men who are supposed to have achieved awakening.
While it is certainly the case that we can find positive messages about woman's potential for awakening in many tantras, in general Tibetan cultural practice, woman have been very disadvantaged.
If we take just one culture, Anglo-American culture, and compare it with Indo-Tibetan culture, the incidence of female authorship is much higher in our culture than in Indo-Tibetan culture. Why? It is quite simple -- in old Tibet educating women was not the norm, it was by far and away the exception. Of course, through the influence of Western values, Tibetan culture has decided to value the education of women, and this is a good thing, a positive direction. But there is still enormous sexism in both cultures, our and their's.