Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature

by Liz Wilson

Overview

In this highly original study of sexuality, desire, the body, and women,
Liz Wilson investigates first-millennium Buddhist notions of
spirituality. She argues that despite the marginal role women played in
monastic life, they occupied a very conspicuous place in Buddhist
hagiographic literature. In narratives used for the edification of
Buddhist monks, women's bodies in decay (diseased, dying, and after
death) served as a central object for meditation, inspiring spiritual
growth through sexual abstention and repulsion in the immediate world.

Taking up a set of universal concerns connected with the representation
of women, Wilson displays the pervasiveness of androcentrism in Buddhist
literature and practice. She also makes persuasive use of recent
historical work on the religious lives of women in medieval
Christianity, finding common ground in the role of miraculous
afflictions.

This lively and readable study brings provocative new tools and insights
to the study of women in religious life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226900544
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/01/1996
Series:	Women in Culture and Society
Edition description:	1
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

Read an Excerpt

CHARMING CADAVERS

HORRIFIC FIGURATIONS OF THE FEMININE IN INDIAN BUDDHIST HAGIOGRAPHIC LITERATURE

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By Liz Wilson

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 1996 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-90054-4

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Chapter One

Celibacy and the Social World

What makes a man to wander, What makes a man to roam, What makes a man to wander, And turn his back on home?

Lines from a song by Max Steiner in the film The Searchers

Shock Therapy

It can be a momentous and shocking experience when one sees the world through the eyes of a renouncer for the first time. Especially when one has formally renounced the social world in joining a monastic order but has lost or not yet achieved a sense of commitment to monastic life. Indian Buddhist hagiography is full of climatic scenes of transformation in which worldly, dissatisfied renouncers—especially lovesick monks and vain nuns—become serious, committed renouncers when they suddenly perceive the truth of the Dharma or cosmic order displayed in the world. Such breakthroughs are described as searing, mind-jolting experiences. They are denoted in Pali and Sanskrit by the term samvega and other derivatives of the Sanskrit root √vij, meaning "to tremble or shudder with excitement or fear." Because they involve seeing with deep emotion, the Indian art historian Ananda Coomaraswami refers to samvega experiences as instances of "aesthetic shock." These experiences certainly are, as Coomaraswami's terminology suggests, primarily associated with seeing rather than with hearing. But the agitation of samvega occurs primarily when the Dharma one has heard becomes the Dharma one sees. Samvega thus might be rendered as "the agitation of recognition," or, in more popular parlance, an "aha experience."

Sometimes it is the sight of beautiful things, like the body of a Buddha or a place of pilgrimage, that causes the shock of recognition. But usually, the state of samvega is brought on by the sight of things that incite pity, things that convey the ideas of impermanence and suffering. Because the cremation ground is a repository of corpses and thus a mute testimony to the impermanence of all human life, it is the site of many samvega experiences described in post-Asokan hagiographies. Members of the sangha spent time in the charnel fields of cremation grounds practicing a meditation technique called the meditation (bhavana) on foulness (Sanskrit, asubha; Pali, asubha) in which the meditator contemplates corpses in various stages of decay. This form of meditation is praised by the Buddha of the Pali canon and discussed at length in doctrinal compendia such as Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga. According to Buddhaghosa—the fifth-century commentator who is often considered the premier spokesman of monastic Buddhism—the meditator should go to a cremation ground and select a corpse in one of ten stages of decay, from a corpse bloated with putrescence (uddhumata) to a skeleton (atthika). Each of the ten stages has a characteristic foulness that serves as an antidote to the one of ten types of attraction to physical form. For example, the bloated corpse suits those who are particular about the shapes of bodies; discolored corpses are recommended for those who are attentive to the complexion of the skin.

Cultivating a sense of foulness is especially recommended for those of a passionate disposition. But Buddhaghosa warns would-be meditators not to go rushing off to view just any corpse they should happen to hear about. They should first ascertain the sex of the corpse, as it could be a hindrance to their chastity to contemplate the body of someone of the opposite sex, especially one that is newly dead. Because such a body could cause untoward thoughts (literally, "writhing," vipphandana), Buddhaghosa states that monks should avoid using female bodies as objects of meditation, as nuns should avoid using male bodies.

But if the hagiographic tradition of the post-Asokan period is any indication of actual practice, it appears that many monks did not heed Buddhaghosa s warning. Stories in which prominent monks contemplate dead women with salutary results at watershed moments in their monastic careers appear quite frequently, even in commentaries that are attributed to Buddhaghosa himself. And what's more, a number of these stories show the Buddha lending his authority to this practice by commandeering dead women's bodies and orchestrating experiences of aesthetic shock around them.

Why would the redactors of these post-Asokan hagiographies give pride of place to a practice that holds such risks for the meditator? This deviation from the council of prudence calls for a reflection on the vagaries of desire and the value of temptation in overcoming desire. The structure of many of these stories suggests an analogy with aversion therapy. Just as aversion therapists initially encourage inappropriate desires only to eradicate them by introducing painful, noxious stimuli, so these monks' encounters with bodies of the opposite sex are experiences that arouse the desire of the monk only to subvert it in the end. In one, a lovesick monk goes to see the object of his affection only to find that she has been dead for three days and her body is bloated with putrescence. In another, the Buddha evokes an aha experience in a lust-ridden monk by conjuring up an apparition of a lovely young woman that stirs the monk's desire; the Buddha then uses his psychic powers to transform the spectral woman into a worm-infested corpse.

Hagiographies that climax in horrific figurations of the feminine are extremely graphic; they assault the senses like an open wound. The reader or listener cannot help but recoil from the stark images of decaying beauty these stories present. Through this visceral experience of revulsion, one can achieve an existential awareness of the first Noble Truth (Pali, ariya-sacca; Sanskrit, arya-satya) of Buddhism: the dis-ease or dissatisfaction that dogs even the most pleasurable sensations. By acting on the body as a site of knowing, these stories persuade the reader or listener that there is no gainsaying the cardinal truths of Buddhism. The effect of such stories on the sensitive reader or listener may approximate the transformative power of contemplating decaying corpses in the cremation ground. What Buddhaghosa says of the charnel ground meditator may well be said of those who listen to tales of men transformed by encounters with bodily corruption: "Because he sees so many corpses, his mind is no longer subject to the power of lust."

Horrific Figurations of the Feminine

As objects of sexual desire, women are often seen as obstacles in the celibate path of the monk, sensual stumbling blocks to be avoided at all costs. The Buddha of the Pali canon frequently advocates avoiding women altogether. For example, when the Buddha s personal attendant Ananda asked, shortly before the Master's death, about how one should behave toward women, the Buddha reportedly answered: "You should avoid their sight, Ananda." "But what if we do see them, Blessed One? What are we to do then?" The Master replied: "Do not speak to them, Ananda." "But what if we do speak to them, Blessed One?" "Then you must watch yourself, Ananda."

Although avoiding the opposite sex is recommended, the monastic community must rely on the lay community for its material support, and such dependence requires that monks and nuns live in close proximity to lay households. For monks who regularly gather alms from door to door and accept invitations to eat in lay households, avoiding women altogether is out of the question. Thus avoidance is impractical as a strategy for subduing desire. But avoiding women may also be as ineffective as it is impractical. Avoidance certainly reduces the opportunities for a monk to act on sexual urges, but it does not necessarily protect his mind from lustful thoughts. The stories of aesthetic shock analyzed here suggest that in order to vanquish sexual desire, the enemy must be encountered, engaged, and exposed as a cause of suffering. In this pursuit, encounters with beautiful women are extremely useful to the renouncer, offering him a field in which to engage and overcome his desire. Like the young women who shared Gandhi's bed during his controversial "experiments in celibacy," tempting female bodies may be drafted into the service of male celibacy.

Because all bodies harbor the signs of foulness within, anyone's body can be used as an object lesson on foulness. But one finds few post-Asokan accounts of women experiencing aesthetic shock while viewing male bodies. There is, to my knowledge, only one post-Asokan tale of a male body causing an aha experience in a woman, and it involves the disciple Ananda—a man who is depicted as closer to women than any other man in the early sangha, a man whose identification with women is so complete that he calls himself a "womanly" (matrgrama) man. The relative absence of male objects of contemplation is as conspicuous as the presence of the male gaze in this literature. From the number of narratives in which alluring female bodies serve as sources of insight for sexually frustrated monks, it is clear that these post-Asokan narratives have the suppression of male sexual desire as one of their primary goals.

It is crucial to recognize, however, that lust is not simply a carnal weakness, but a sign of spiritual impoverishment, social engagement, mental delusion, and moral turpitude. To invoke a psychoanalytic trope, sexual desire is overdetermined, caused by a variety of conditions that are not conducive to liberation. Thus before exploring literary strategies for suppressing sexual desire, it is necessary to understand why lust impedes the disciplined life of the sangha. The following sections situate the place of the Buddhist renouncer within the Indian milieu and indicate some of the distinctively Buddhist values associated with celibacy.

Celibacy in the Life of the Sangha

Celibacy (Pali, brahmacariya; Sanskrit, brahmacarya) is essential to the homeless life of poverty and freedom from social obligations praised by the Buddha and his early followers. Defined as one who goes forth from home to homelessness (agarasma anagariyan pabbajati), the early Buddhist renouncer (Pali, pabbajita: "one who has gone forth") was the antithesis of the householder tied down by family and possessions. Like the largely celibate cowboy heroes of American Westerns who delight in making their home on the range, early Buddhist renouncers are represented as free agents enjoying a blessed release from domestic entanglements. Similes that contrast the free wandering life of the holy vagabond with the householder's lack of autonomy are found repeatedly in the Sutta Nipata, a collection of verses that contains some of the earliest poetry composed by Buddhists in India. For example, the "Discourse on the Rhinoceros Horn" (Khaggavisana Sutta) in the Sutta Nipata is a poem in praise of the celibate life that warns of the filial and social obligations that entrap the householder. The state of being single that celibate renouncers enjoy is compared to the strong, durable horn of a rhinoceros and the freedom of a deer wandering in the forest:

Affection for children and wives is like an entangled, overgrown bamboo grove; being unentangled like the new bamboo tip, wander single as a rhinoceros horn. Untrapped like a deer in the forest who grazes here and there at will, the wise man is intent on autonomy [seritam, cognate with "self-will"]: wander single as a rhinoceros horn.

From the perspective of these mendicants who renounce their land, property, and familial life, the wealthy householder with many sons to carry on the family lineage is caught in a web of social obligations that permit him no freedom; he is like a deer caught in a trap. The impoverished but autonomous renouncer stands in stark contrast to those whose lives are devoted to the acquisition and maintenance of wealth, power, and heirs. With no obligations save those taken on out of compassion and no constraints on movement, the renouncer wanders through the world like a dancer moving gracefully through space (while the rest of us plod along gravity-bound and preoccupied with our obligations to others).

Monks ordained by the Buddha in the sixth century B.C.E. led a seminomadic existence in which nomadism was equated with a salutary escape from the suffocating closeness of the social world, with its endless web of family and friendship obligations. Wandering the countryside for at least eight months of the year (the monsoon season being a time of retreat in which renouncers avoided the muddy, impassable roads out of compassion for the worms and other creatures likely to be trampled underfoot), the renouncer was said to enjoy freedoms that those bound by the duties of childbearing and breadwinning can hardly imagine: the leisure to spend days in meditation and study, the ability to travel at will in search of wholesome environments and accomplished teachers, and the freedom of propertylessness, of having nothing to take care of (beyond the minimal care of the body that is necessary for the pursuit of the deathless state of nirvana such as daily begging rounds in search of food). Householders can never know such freedom.

The homeless life was quintessentially a wifeless life, for the early monks of the primitive monastic community. And so it is today, among most of the Buddhist communities of South and Southeast Asia (see fig. I). Although monasteries were eventually established and Buddhist renouncers settled into cenobitic communities, the ideal of the nonmarried renouncer remains at the core of monastic life in South Asia. Higher ordination {upasampada) in the Buddhist sangha dissolves familial and matrimonial ties. If one is married at the time of ordination, that bond is dissolved; spouses are thereafter referred to as "former" spouses. If one is not married at the time of full ordination, one renounces the possibility of marriage.

Early Records of the Celibate Life

The circumstances that led the Buddha to promulgate and modify rules concerning celibacy are given in the first portion of the Suttavibhangha section of the monastic code (Vinayapitaka). The first episode described in the Suttavibhangha, where a monk named Sudinna impregnates his former wife, shows that forsaking the bond of marriage was not always an easy task. Sudinna's family was dead set against his practice of brahmacariya and they conspired to lure him off his celibate path long enough to produce a male heir. Sudinna's story raises a number of themes that are essential for understanding the role of celibacy in Buddhist monastic life. In fidelity to the storytelling traditions that communicate the fundamental values of the Buddhist path in narrative form, I will now narrate the story of Sudinna, noting the issues it raises for the study of celibacy in Indian Buddhism.

Sudinna, the son of a wealthy merchant, hears the Buddha teaching and thinks: "So far as I understand the teaching taught by the Lord, it is no easy matter for a householder to practice brahmacariya, complete and undefiled and polished like a conch shell. I'd like to cut off my hair and beard, put on the yellow robes, and wander forth from home into homelessness [agarasma anagariyam pabbajitum]. May the Lord let me wander forth."

When Sudinna asks for ordination, the Teacher directs him to obtain the consent of his parents. They, however, are reluctant to give their consent since Sudinna and his wife have not yet produced an heir. A battle of wills then ensues, a battle that plays on the idea of renunciation as a kind of death—a death to the social world that leaves grieving relatives in its wake. Sudinna's parents tell him that they would be desolate at his death and simply cannot abide the thought of his going forth into the homeless life. "I will die here, or go forth," replies Sudinna, who lies down on the ground and begins a hunger strike. After abstaining from seven meals, Sudinna appears to be quite serious. His friends inform Sudinna's parents that they will be able to see him again if he goes forth, but if they continue to withhold their consent, he will die. Given no other option, they agree to Sudinna's going forth into the homeless life, and Sudinna goes off to the jungle after receiving ordination.

Not long afterward, there is a famine in the village on which Sudinna depends for his alms. He returns to his hometown and begins to beg alms at his parents' home, offering them the opportunity to gain merit and relieving less wealthy families of the burden of maintaining him during a food shortage. Sudinna's father seizes this golden opportunity to win his son back to the householder's life. He shows him the stacks of gold that are his inheritance and explains to him that if he returns to the life of a layman, he can enjoy pleasure and earn merit at the same time. But the monk replies that he is delighted with the celibate life and advises his father to sink all his gold in the Ganges River, where it will do the least harm.

At this juncture, Sudinna's former wife asks the monk what celestial nymphs he intends to win through his practice of celibacy. Sudinna tells her: "I do not practice brahmacariya for the sake of celestial nymphs, sister." When she hears her former husband call her "sister" (bhagini), a form of address appropriate for a person with whom one has no sexual relationship, Sudinna's former wife realizes the gravity of the situation, faints, and falls to the floor.

After the failure of his father and former wife, Sudinna's mother renews the effort at persuasion. She begs him to produce a son so that the family's property will not go to another clan for lack of an heir. Rather surprisingly, Sudinna agrees to impregnate his former wife (the commentary explains that the monk believes his family will leave him alone once he has produced an heir). She is brought to him in the forest during her fertile period, wearing the ornaments that were his favorites when they were together as man and wife. After having sex on three occasions, she conceives and gives birth to a son who is called Bijaka, or "seed" (a fitting name for a boy brought into the world to carry on the ancestral line).

Meanwhile, Sudinna becomes filled with remorse over his actions. The melancholy state of his mind proclaims itself in the jaundiced, haggard appearance of his body, which provokes comments from his fellow monks and leads to Sudinna's confessing his actions before the Buddha. The Teacher declares intercourse an offense entailing "defeat" (parajika dhamma) and rebukes Sudinna in no uncertain terms:

It would have been better, confused man, had you put your male organ inside the mouth of a terrible and poisonous snake than inside the vagina of a woman. It would have been better, confused man, had you put your male organ inside the mouth of a black snake than inside the vagina of a woman. It would have been better, confused man, had you put your male organ inside a blazing hot charcoal pit than inside the vagina of a woman.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from CHARMING CADAVERS by Liz Wilson Copyright © 1996 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword
Catharine R. Stimpson
Preface
Note on Terminology
Introduction
1: Celibacy and the Social World
2: "Like a Boil with Nine Openings": Buddhist Constructions of the Body and
Their South Asian Milieu
3: False Advertising Exposed: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Pali
Hagiography
4: Lead Us Now into Temptation: Countering Samsaric Duplicity with Dharmic
Deceptions
5: Seeing Through the Gendered "I": The Nun's Story
Conclusion
Appendix: The Post-Asokan Milieu
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Wilson's study is a thorough-going, fascinating account of Indian Buddhist literature, from the Pali canon to post-Asokan hagiographic literature. She takes us on a gendered journey through Buddhist texts, exploring the position of the female in them....With a careful eye, Wilson herself gazes upon the female figure of Buddhist texts, itself the object of centuries of Buddhist soteriological practices which, by its allure, wields power even over the 20th-century Buddhist scholar.
— Journal of Buddhist Ethics

Tessa Bartholomeusz