I've been working on a
presentation I'm giving this August at a conference in California--it's on
subjectivity and women in Shin Buddhism. The research has been really
interesting, in no small part because there are parallels between the way women
have been viewed in Buddhism & the way they have been viewed in
Christianity. Need I even say the parallels are negative? Probably
not.
As you might imagine, the
disparagement of women in general, and the contempt for women’s bodies more
specifically, has a long history in Buddhism—and, of course, in Christianity,
too. In spite of counter-examples, the evidence is impossible
to ignore, particularly in sutras that advocate the well-established Indian
Buddhist soteriological path of asceticism and physical austerities. This
path was particularly popular in male monastic communities; and in texts that
were written by and for this audience, the female body often was used as the
epitome of corruption and delusion that must be transcended in order to attain
awakening.
Again, this is not surprising: in a tradition where
“desire” is the overarching human problem, women—women’s bodies & women’s
sexuality—very quickly and easily become the physical manifestation of that
problem, and are demonized for it. [Think Augustine and his preoccupation
with concupiscence.] One example of this is Aśvaghoșa’s Saundarananda, in
which he tells the life story of the Buddha’s half-brother
Nanda. Throughout, Aśvaghoșa compares women to violent and even poisonous
animals who are waiting to trap weak-natured men. In general, women are
deceptive, aggressive predators, and men are emasculated and easily
ensnared. For example, he writes, “Like creepers poisonous to
the touch, like scoured caves still harboring snakes, like unsheathed swords
held in the hand, women are ruinous in the end….Women behave ignobly,
maliciously spying out the weaknesses of others, such that kinsman is set
against kinsman and friend against friend….Women’s speech is honeyed but there
is the deadliest poison in their hearts….like hordes of crocodiles in a river,
they attack without discrimination.” I couldn't help but be reminded of
the ways in which some of the early desert monastics described women, viewing
them as dangerous tempters and the embodiment of sin.
Overall, however, it is the female body itself that comes to
stand for all that is evil and decrepit about human existence, the nadir of
humanity, in a way; and thus it is the female body, when viewed “rightly,” that
becomes the best prompt for awakening. Canto 5, “The Departure,” in Aśhvaghoşa’s Life
of the Buddha, is perhaps the paradigmatic example of the experience of
awakening generated by meditation on “disgusting” female bodies. In
this episode of the Buddha’s life, Gautama has had the experience of the “four
sights,” and returns home deeply conflicted. After speaking with his
father, he enters his palace, where, in the inner chamber, he is entertained by
“splendid girls,” playing musical instruments. Once they go to
sleep, Gautama sees them as they really are, with their limbs splayed, their
hair disheveled, snoring and drooling. Repulsed by this realization, he
leaves his chamber, “in utter contempt of those sleeping
girls," resolved to renounce his life of privilege.
This trope is related to the more general, and well-known
Buddhist monastic practice of meditation on corpses—asubhabhāvanā,
described in detail in many different sutras. One particularly
troubling version of this practice is the ritual of meditating on live female
bodies, but envisioning them “dead, oozing and maggot-ridden." One
of the most trenchant examinations of this practice is Liz Wilson’s text Charming
Cadavers: Horrific Figuration of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist
Hagiographic Literature. There are too many excellent
examples in her text to include them all here, but let me mention just
two. She describes the story of Cittahattha, who, after several
periods of coming and going from the monastery, definitively commits to
monastic life after seeing his pregnant wife looking like a “bloated
corpse.” According to Wilson, the text emphasizes that it is the
“revolting sight of her swollen, cadaverous body” that finally convinces
Cittahattha to permanently renounce his home life.
Another example is the story of Sirimā, a beautiful woman who
becomes a patron of the sangha. She falls ill and dies, and
the Buddha orders that her body be left to decompose publicly. After
four days, the Buddha gathers a crowd at her repulsive, decaying corpse, and
asks if anyone wants to purchase her, for any price. When there are
no takers, he says, “Monks, look at this available woman adored by so many
people. In this very city men used to pay a thousand kahāpaņas for
the sake of spending one night with this woman. Now there is no one
who will take her even for free. Her beauty has perished and
decayed…” In story after story, the
moral is brought home: “If one can only see through the cosmetics
and ornaments a woman wears…one will discern a walking
cadaver, a vessel of filth…”
These sutras reinforce a reality that is by no means limited to
a Buddhist context, and in fact, continues to be operative in contemporary
American society: the phenomenon in which the female body is marked
as a “site of sight.” Wilson describes it this way: “Men look at
women. Women watch themselves been looked at.” She then goes on to
observe: “Consider, for example, the ritual of congregation in
bathrooms and striking poses before the mirror that adolescent girls in
contemporary America engage in so readily. Through such openly
self-reflective activities, young women learn how to evaluate themselves from
the perspective of potential admirers, how to accentuate those features that
are most likely to turn heads. As long as women are encouraged to
capitalize on their looks, such rituals will inevitable continue, making the
process of socialization for women one of sexualization." This was
published in 1996. Would anyone try to argue that 20 years later, in
the age of the selfie & the Kardashians, that this phenomenon has gotten
anything but worse?
Too
often, still today, the reality we see in some of the Buddhist sutras from millennia
ago is still operational today: women are only the objects of the male gaze; they are
unable to “see” in their own right. “…the dead, dying, or
unconscious women…are incapable of returning the gaze of their male
observers. Since they are never given the capacity to return the
gaze that surveys them, they cannot assert their own status as conscious
subjects.” In a
context where only men have the power to “see,” only their gaze and their
perspective have value—only they can create.
By contrast, women are superfluous—invisible, even.
Decades ago, Marilyn Frye talked about this in her essay on “Oppression,”
as she tried to describe all the ways—both subtle and gross—that women are
oppressed in a patriarchal society, the way they are “caged.” This is her metaphor [I’ve described it before]: “Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in
the cage, you cannot see the other wires.
If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic
focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be
unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted
to go somewhere….It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one
by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that
you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a
moment…It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of
systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance
to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as
the solid walls of a dungeon.”
The lack of a gaze, the lack of our own subjectivity, is one
strong “wire” of that cage—one that all too often women willingly concede to
men, content to be viewed as beautiful, desirable, attractive; content to let
men define us primarily through their view of our bodies. The challenge for women is to own our own
gaze: to see, create and define
ourselves, with the categories we choose for ourselves and our own bodies. In this way, we become subjects in the world
of our own making, rather than objects in the cages of others.
