Unique teachings in Buddhism

Oh come on, guys. Misogyny is hardly innovative, even for the Buddha's time!
 
Maybe read it again? Put yourself in the woman's position of being verbally reduced to a bag of excrement, in front of your father, for a moment. It's a fine meditation technique, to sort out the 32 parts of the body, but an entirely different thing to heap it on another human being. That's some dark vipassana burnout - er, personal issue with women- the Lord Buddha was showing there.

Even the venerable monk who translated that sutta was at a loss to explain the Buddha's outburst, and added a footnote, in the page you linked.
 
Cino said:
Maybe read it again? Put yourself in the woman's position of being verbally reduced to a bag of excrement, in front of your father, for a moment.
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Well, that makes more sense. I was thinking of it more in terms of a meditation technique.
 
My reaction was the same as Cino's — it's strikingly misogynistic.

All the more so when its believed that women must reincarnate as a man before they can attain Buddha-hood — that one of the marks of Buddha Nature is the male genitalia.

As for it's uniqueness, I think you'll find that story told in different ways in different traditions. I'm reminded of the brother of Thomas Aquinas who hired a hooker to dissuade him from joining a religious order.
 
Thomas said:
All the more so when its believed that women must reincarnate as a man before they can attain Buddha-hood — that one of the marks of Buddha Nature is the male genitalia.
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Ah, but the Bodisattva Tara showed the old (and young) geezers the proverbial finger(s) when she vowed to only ever incarnate as a woman, and attain final enlightenment as a woman.

That's actually a nice side of Buddhism, the way they added innovation to the religion, in the ever-ongoing "turnings of the wheel of Dharma". Not sure other traditions have it quite that explicitly.

Of course, adherents of older revolutions of the wheel tend to become uptight orthodoxies.
 
Mrs Malaprop said:
I think it's anatta (not-self) which is unique to Buddhism.
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But then the Buddhists can't seem to agree what it means. How many schisms did they have over that point?
 
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