by Sonny Saul
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX:
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“Our Art has been masculine through and through, this is to say, lop-sided. It has been vitiated by the unacknowledged feminine principle. This is as true of ancient art as of modern art. Men have paid a heavy tribute for their seeming subjugation of the female… I have a strange feeling that the next great impersonation of the future will be a woman. If it is a greater reality we are veering towards then it must be a woman who points the way. The masculine hegemony is over. Men have lost touch with the earth; they are clinging to the windowpanes of their unreal superstructures like blind bats lashed by the storms of oceanic depths. Their world of abstractions spells babble.”
Henry Miller, On Art and the Future
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I’d like the reader to imagine a note for my fictional character, Desire, in Buddhism, as an equal partner with Gotama.
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Desire Considered:
Considering a role for ‘Desire’ in the origin and early history of Buddhism?
I interrupt the narrative line once again, this time for the purpose of encouraging the reader to consider why Desire has been previously ignored in the literature of Buddhism. Jane Harrison’s analysis, referred to prominently in the first pages of this present work in relation to the “choice of Paris” and the painting of Giorgione, suggested that the high regard of the male and scarcity of attention given to the female in the literature and art of classical Greece amounted to negativism and indicated the possibility that something was being overcome. We have already noted the fact that the same cultural forces were at work in fifth and fourth century BC India.
It may well be that as the religion of Buddhism developed (first by means of the oral traditions and then in the literature of the first few centuries A. D.) patriarchal orientations layered and covered over important aspects and meanings of the life story of Gotama. Memories of Desire with the appearance of the written word, were purged. Then it was made definite: women are to be kept at a distance.
Our current understanding is that the recognition of the equality of not only men, but of men and women, now appears to have been a feature of both early Buddhism and of early Christianity as well. Since in reality, today neither of these religions features such equalities, therefore it appears that those to whom the inequalities were advantageous endeavored successfully to conceal this essential feature and distorted the teaching itself.
The primary source materials of Buddhism include the information that the Buddha had associates, followers, and disciples who were female. These written texts portray the founder of Buddhism as without gender prejudice.
The early sutras mention the mother and wife of Yasa, who abandoned their roles in the conventional social order to follow Gotama, and depict them as equals to the men, sharing their lot much as some women did in the early Christian community. In particular, the treatment of Mary Magdalene in the literature and history of early Christianity may shed light on the striking neglect of Desire in the early writings of Buddhism. In the contemporary literature outside of the New Testament, the ‘alternative gospels’, a picture of her emerges as an eloquent leader of the faith and an articulate advocate for the Gospel. She is sometimes referred to as ‘the disciple Jesus loved most,’ and as his ‘companion’, ‘partner’,’ and ‘consort’. A long suppressed but rich and continuing tradition (a heresy) has kept alive the story that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus and mother of his child.
The inner group around Jesus, as described in the Greek ‘New Testament’ is, like the group that the early sutras describe which gathered around Buddha, almost exclusively male. But again, non-canonical texts tell another story. The ‘gospels’, of Mary, Thomas, and Philip, the ‘Dialogue of the Savior,’ and the ‘Pistis Sophia’ all either imply or depict Jesus’ close association with women.
Not written until the next generations after the death of Jesus, and so, roughly contemporary with Buddhism’s first documents, the accounts of the beginnings of Christianity reflect many similar societal conditions and likewise, reactions to them.
It seems more than simply possible, and I believe it has been often observed, that Jesus and Gotama shared the misfortune, after their deaths, of having their teachings co-opted, and their way of life almost altogether forgotten.
I advocate the strongest role for my fictional character, Desire, in the imagined historical past, in the present, and in the future, and likewise for her companion, Gotama. The literature and oral traditions pertaining to the Buddha and his teaching are vast. The lore of Desire has yet only a beginning.