Love & Connection: Buddhist Teachings vs Objectifying Views on Women
Buddhist teachings on spirituality and early Buddhist literature views on women hold a contradicting dichotomy if applied through the scope of love, and more specifically, heterosexual romantic partnership, as teachings value non-judgement, non-attachment and compassion, while views on women are superficial, and represent the body and its functions through a male perspective and gaze, revolved around attachment, desire and judgment. The antagonizing of women and objectifying of the women’s body is to such extent, that following the Buddhist teachings and engaging in romantic love through this perspective are mutually exclusive. This perspective on women’s bodies cannot exist in a loving, elevated, non-attached romantic relationship, and keeping this attitude would entail either opposing the Buddhist teachings and engaging in a lustful, desire-driven relationship, or abstaining from romantic intimacy altogether by renouncing and isolating oneself from “distractions," as the Buddha did when he left Yasodhara.
Are romantic love and suffering contingent on each other? “A central tenet of Buddhism is the belief that desire is the source of all suffering. Desire, it is held, produces a deluded sense of attachment to things and people and serves as an impediment to apprehending the essentially insubstantial and transient nature of all phenomena.” If romantic love is synonymous to desire, then all romantic love is doomed. Nevertheless, one can love without attached desire, an acceptance of the transience and impermanence and full enjoyment of the present moment, including the physical enjoyment of sexual intimacy as physical manifestation of love, as developed later in tantric studies. “Tantra teaches… to enjoy consciously, to enjoy with awareness, but awareness itself simultaneously causes and is the result of a subtle movement of detachment. This is not an external distancing of oneself from life or from people, but an inner separation from the lower, limited self, with its false perceptions of the external world.”
It might seem counterintuitive that early forms of Buddhism, the Theravada tradition, advocates for any form of love whatsoever, with lines in the Dhammapada like “from love comes grief, from love comes fear; he who is free from love knows neither grief nor fear/ from pleasure comes grief, from pleasure comes fear; he who is free from pleasure knows neither grief nor fear.” Nevertheless, it also states “he in whom there is truth, virtue, love, restraint, moderation, he who is free from impurity and is wise, he is called an elder” and “pleasant in the world is caring for your mother”. How can these two line coexist? Without love how can there be care? The emphasis on freedom, “he who is free from love” can be interpreted as transcendence from the attachment that often comes with love, and instead focuses on selfless, unconditional love. The Buddhist teachings, non-attachment and being on the constant quest of self development to become a more compassionate and less judgmental and materialistic individual could potentially be applied to achieve deeper intimacy, as love relies less on external validation and as a result would suffer from less projections of insecurity. While Buddhism does advocate for love, its shallow and judgmental views on women, heavily rooted on “antagonizing women’s bodies” as simple objects of desire, physical beauty or as a distraction don’t give space for transcendence and freedom and hold intrinsic attachment.
The concept of le regard, which was first used by the art critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing (1972), a documentary analysis of the representations of women — as passive objects to be seen in advertising and as the nude subjects of art”, can be extended to how women are seen in Buddhism through texts like Obeyeseker’s “Yasodhara” and Therigata’s “The Great Chapter: Sumedha”. From feminist theory “the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer.” This concept is not only limited to how men see women, but also how women end up looking at themselves. As Timme Kragh would describe in Appropriation and Assertion of the Female Self, “the male appropriation of the female is likewise an act of taking possession of, placing the female in his own context and ascribing her new meaning. He revalues and devalues the feminine, circumscribing her in a strictly male sense of worth and utility. He sets her aside, allocating her worth, expropriating her for his own consumption.” If this is the way women are seen, lacking of personal agency, heavily objectified, and incapable of enlightened love, then romantic love and enlightenment are mutually exclusive.
In “Yasodhara”, she is described through the eyes of the Buddha with alluring imagery, her body romanticized, always being highlighted for her physical beauty rather than her intrinsic qualities with alluring imagery like “swan-breasts”, and described as “beautiful”, “lovely, moon-like, preeminent among women”, and a “pure and gold limbed queen”. She is ripped from her agency when blamed for being a distraction because of her beauty, “unwittingly being a threat to Buddhahood”. Furthermore the over-sexualized, shallow male gaze, appears again when Buddha is about to leave he questions, “how can he leave once he’s seen those golden breasts?”, and Yasodhara herself carries the weight of blaming herself for Buddha leaving, questioning “why have you left me alone now, what have I done?”.
Evidently, despite the Dhammaphada stating that “those whose mind is well grounded in the (seven) elements of knowledge, who without clinging to anything, rejoice in freedom from attachment, whose appetites have been conquered, and who are full of light, are free (even) in this world”, The Buddha’s views on Yasadhora never transcended desire, or subjugation of the body as a hyper-sexualized, lustful entity, rather, by renouncing to his life he merely repressed and physically separated himself from desire. Hypothetically, if a naked Yasodhara appeared in front of a monastic, renounced Buddha, would he feel a sense of attachment to her physical body, or would he have his “appetites” conquered, where he is in such mastery of his thoughts and impulses that he would be able to see her as a being beyond her “womanhood” and body?
If the Buddha’s teachings preach that “appetites should be conquered,” which the word “to conquer” intrinsically strays away from repression, and claim that “ignorance is the greatest taint.” and “suffering must be understood,” one might question why Buddha’s views on women in monasteries are so rigid, instead of calling for the transcendence of desire by facing men’s shadow and attached perspective on women. Buddha, although described as “Lord. Transcendent One. Vanquisher. Fully Awakened. Learned. World Wise. Unsurpassed Charioteer. Guide for Living Beings. Teacher of Gods. Teacher of Humans. Peerless King of the Shakyas. Lion of the Shakyas. Great Sage of the Shakyas” as “he set foot upon the earth, a magnificent lotus sprang up and grew,” is triggered by women’s bodies in a way that monasticism and women enlightenment are heavily informed by this.
John Welwood coined the term “spiritual bypassing” in his book Toward a Psychology of Awakening, referring to “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business,’ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.” Spiritual bypassing highlights spirituality as a way to justify repression and avoidance, which exemplifies the idea of monastics being obligated to renounce love and monasteries initially being wary about women joining as they could pose a distraction instead of facing and transcending the “distraction”. Kragh points out that “women had been allowed the status of professional religious practitioners since the early days of Buddhism, in the fourth to third centuries BCE, when nuns were permitted to join the Buddhist order. However, the nuns were strictly subordinated to the monks, and given monastic Buddhism’s emphasis on the eradication of desire, the bodies of the opposite sex—and in particular the bodies of women—had been portrayed in the all-male-authored contemplation-manuals as filthy, repulsive, decaying, or decomposing. Consequently, Buddhist monasticism not only stratified gender roles within a patriarchal hierarchy but at the same time ingrained an ascetic ideal that suggested a gender performativity other than the sexual.” These ideas of the female subordination are developed in Sumedha who aims to become a nun, yet resents her body.
Given the concept of female enlightenment in Buddhism being so heavily informed by the male gaze, Sumedha, who is heavily against getting married, develops a negative relationship with her body given that she feels her body is what doesn’t allow her to achieve enlightenment. She describes her body as “repulsive, a corpse, food for birds and worms, covered with flesh and blood, so why is it to be given in marriage?” That leads her to a skewed, objectifying and traumatic way of relating to her self, merely seeing herself as a body rather than a human. Her arranged marriage, that will consist of giving her body away to a man, is also in the way of her enlightenment; “I will go forth or I will die, but I won’t get married” which shows that there is no space in her mind for an enlightened marriage. This perspective inherently dehumanizes her and speaks to the attached ideas that permeate throughout Buddhist figures.
Both female figures exemplified are removed from their ability as women to be non-attached to their body, and men’s ability to succumb to desire. Buddhist views on women argue that only way that they can achieve enlightenment is to surpass their bodily “inconveniences,” that in other cultures are regarded as beautiful, special and holy, as they are what allows for the gift of life. The two most prominent “issues” for women, that seem to get in the way of their enlightenment, are their bodily functions (menstruation, pregnancy) and their bodily appearance in the eyes of men, who are “distracted” by them. It seems disillusioned that the women have to go through the male’s terms. The fact that the framing around female enlightenment is so centered around an exception, as the Buddha uses words like they can achieve enlightenment if they want to, (thus enlightenment in love and connection), while male enlightenment is encouraged and it is an honor to give a child to the monastery, can be compared by the repressive and men-driven rules, and the overdevelopment of masculine qualities leading to toxic masculinity that has been present in patriarchal societies and in love and connection. The antagonizing of women and objectifying of the women’s body and women as an entity contradicts Buddhist teachings, and both perspectives can’t coexist when dealing with romantic love. If these perspectives are women are kept, one must fully abandon the idea of following Buddhist teachings and reaching healthy and transcendent love, or reaching “enlightenment” by renouncing to love altogether.
(Full Version with footnotes/ in text citations available upon request)
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