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Advaita Vedānta, Amy Langenberg, Antoinette DeNapoli, conferences, gender, Mataji, Nepal, Peace Grove Institute, tantra, vinaya
I was recently invited to a recent Buddhist-ethics conference featuring a workshop discussion on gender. I decided to attend the workshop en femme – as Sandhya – because I thought it might be relevant, though I wasn’t sure how. It turned out it was.
The workshop, hosted by Amy Langenberg and Antoinette DeNapoli, showcased the pair’s work on the welcome South Asian phenomenon of female renouncers. DeNapoli studied Mataji, a guru in Uttar Pradesh who declared herself a Shankaracharya (a monastic leader in Śaṅkara’s lineage). Langenberg studied the Peace Grove Institute, a community of female Theravāda Buddhist renouncers in Nepal. Having introduced Mataji and the Peace Grove, the two asked some discussion questions relating to the two, and broke us into small groups to discuss them. I forget the exact wording of the question that proved most fruitful, but it was something along the lines of “What do these female renouncers teach us about gender ethics?” And one of my group’s participants asked a most insightful question: “What do we mean by gender ethics?”
That question led me to the thoughts that I shared with the group then and which I’ll share with you here. I said: gender ethics seems to mean the role (or lack thereof) that we think gender should play in a good life. Once I said that, I was immediately struck by the difference in gender ethics between Mataji and Peace Grove. And my previous reflections on my own gender journey helped me think that difference through.
Mataji proclaims the essential sacredness of biological femaleness, in a Śākta way that would at times suggest female superiority. In DeNapoli’s words from her article:
Mataji understands that her biological female sex “naturally” connects her to the transformative divinity of the Goddess…. She stresses that women more so than men embody the great goddess Shakti, who creates, sustains, and destroys the universe. But Shakti is more than a divine feminine life-force to Mataji. She is also a divine female who menstruates like human women. Without Shakti’s menstruation, Mataji says that the world could not exist. She emphasizes that “Blood comes out of our bodies because it came out of Mother’s body first.”
A student associated with Peace Grove, on the other hand, says something very different: “We girls just want to live our lives as freely and as happily as boys. Girls and boys are creatures of the same nature and we all have the same desires, but only boys are allowed to fulfill those desires. It is time for us to create a world where girls can enjoy their lives too.” For this Peace Grove student, boys and girls are the same in the relevant respects, even having the same desires; everyone should just be treated equally. Whereas for Mataji, female biological features like menstruation are essential to the divine functioning of the universe.
I don’t see how there could be room for transgender in Mataji’s biologically essentialist ideas. I don’t menstruate, never have, and never will; I’m not going to count as a woman by her standards. (And it’s important to remember that such essentialist ideas of gender, disagree with them as we might, are still considerably more widespread around the world than are views of gender as self-expression like mine.) For the Peace Grove student, on the other hand, people are people; biology should not be destiny, not even in a way that elevates female biology.
Mataji’s views derive deeply from her non-Buddhist Indian Śākta context, informed by Assamese tantra. By contrast, it wouldn’t be at all surprising to me if the Peace Grove student’s non-normative view of gender is tied to her Buddhism! This is where my previous thoughts on the matter came in: in Confucianism or the Abrahamic traditions, as in Mataji’s Śāktism, there’s a normativity or even sacredness attached to biological nature, including the nature of the reproductive system. In Buddhism there is no such thing! Reproduction just puts more beings on the wheel of saṃsāra; there’s nothing sacred about it. And so there is nothing sacred about biological maleness or femaleness either. (Tantric Buddhism could be an exception here, especially given its close connection to the Śākta tradition that Mataji draws from – but then it tends to be an exception in a lot of ways.)
Now premodern Buddhism was both sexist and cissexist (a term I prefer to “transphobic”) – not surprisingly given the patriarchal society it belonged to. The thing is, I don’t think that either of those flaws go deep into Buddhism’s theory. If you get rid of the suttas’ disparaging views of women and the Vinaya’s prohibitions on paṇḍakas entering the monkhood, not that much else has to change; gender doesn’t play a strong part in the path to liberation from suffering. (Since the rationale for monastic rules in the Vinaya often has to do with public perceptions of the monkhood, I think there’s a good case that the sexist and cissexist rules should be dropped today by the Vinaya’s own reasoning.)
All of that is very different from Confucianism, where husband and wife are one of the Five Relationships with their own teleology. It’s also very different from a view where the masculine and feminine principles of Śiva and Śākti are fundamental to the universe. In those systems, if you want to deemphasize biological sex, a lot more has to go out with it. With a Confucian or Śaivite cosmology, it’s a lot harder to get rid of biological essentialism in ethics, and so feminism is more likely to take an essentialist form like Mataji’s. I respect Mataji’s approach, but all the same it makes me glad I’m a Buddhist.
EDIT 24 Oct: Mataji is in Uttar Pradesh; the post originally said Madhya Pradesh. Thanks to Antoinette DeNapoli for the correction.
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Found this post helpful, for as much as I understand of it. I have written comments on these matters. I won’t elaborate here because my last such dissertation elicited more venom that might be anticipated from reasonable human beings. Faith is more than propositional in this sense. Never, ever, ever challenge the ethical base or moral foundation of something you don’t believe or understand.
The contrast between Mataji and the Peace Grove Institute reminds me of a passage that I read years ago in an article by the Croatian philosopher Rada Iveković, “Coincidences of comparison” (Hypatia, 15(4), 2000, 224–235). Iveković was talking about the Indian philosopher Bithika Mukerji, and said:
Iveković doesn’t summarize the evidence for Mukerji’s position, and I’m not enough of a scholar of Indian philosophy to know how true it is. But one can imagine that Mukerji would have the same position toward Mataji as she had toward the Vedāntic tradition in general and would see in her a lack of critical thinking.
Of course, insofar as Mataji is just dreaming up expressive poetry, anything goes. But as soon as one wants to be rigorous and determine that some ideas are false according to certain epistemological standards, one needs the “critical spirit” that Mukerji valued and found in Buddhism.
My thinking has changed since I wrote the previous comment, since I skimmed the relevant portions of Mukerji’s book Neo-Vedanta and Modernity (Ashutosh Prakashan Sansthan, 1983) that was cited by Iveković, and of Antoinette DeNapoli’s article “A Female Shankaracharya?” that was cited in the original post above.
The impression I get of Mukerji and Mataji from reading these sources is different from the impression I had via the second-hand interpretations of the sources (although DeNapoli’s article is still a second-hand interpretation of Mataji). Mukerji seems more enthusiastic about Vedāntic tradition than Iveković’s interpretation indicates. Mataji seems ignorant of the needs of transgender people, but I’m not sure that her cisgender orientation implies that one’s genitalia are destiny, as opposed to just being a strategic weapon against sexism by inverting the association of menstruation with impurity. The idea probably hasn’t occurred to Mataji that she could fight sexism and cissexism at the same time, but perhaps she could be talked into fighting on both fronts with cisgender and transgender women who don’t want their essence tied to their genitalia? Mataji is already being pretty critical of her tradition, so perhaps she would be open to going further?
I would like to take Mataji’s views seriously as an actual cosmology that she adheres to, not just a cheap and cynical political tool of convenience that she doesn’t really believe. If it’s the latter (“a strategic weapon”), then sure, she could just dump it – but that would then imply to me that she was just another political hack saying whatever is convenient for her agenda irrespective of whether it’s actually true. I would prefer to give her the respect of taking her words as she actually presents them, which implies to me that her views on female biology go deeper. While I disagree more with the content of her views on such an interpretation, I also find it more interesting and worthy of my attention.
It looks like you misinterpreted my phrase “a strategic weapon against sexism”; I wasn’t implying that what Mataji is doing is what you called “a cheap and cynical political tool of convenience that she doesn’t really believe”, and I don’t think Mataji needs to “just dump” her inversion of the association of menstruation with impurity. What she’s doing seems important for eliminating a sexist practice. My interpretation gives her the respect of taking her words as she actually presents them, which imply to me that she’s clear about her strategic purpose: “Why do you call women impure? Nothing wrong has happened to her. But women are treated like they have a disease. I want to break this tradition.”
I also don’t think that Mataji is “another political hack saying whatever is convenient for her agenda irrespective of whether it’s actually true”. I immediately appreciated, for example, how the statement “Blood comes out of our bodies because it came out of Mother’s body first” is literally true in a very concrete way: there wouldn’t be any menstruating women if they didn’t have a menstruating mother! All Mataji has to do to embrace transgender women (with regard to this quotation) is to acknowledge that not all women menstruate by saying something like: “Blood came out of Mother’s body for all women, whether we menstruate or not.” Such a rephrasing would even include cisgender women who don’t menstruate due to whatever cause! She could even go further and say: “Blood came out of Mother’s body for everybody.” This is not unimaginable.
As DeNapoli wrote of Mataji, “Her narrative performance is multivalent”, so there is room for multiple interpretations, but my interpretation is not exactly what you thought it was; I hope it is clearer now. I think theistic language has to be multivalent or else it becomes irrelevant once people learn about modern epistemology and cosmology; “liberal” theisms can continue to draw sustenance from traditional language precisely because they can take advantage of its multiple connotations. But that doesn’t mean the language will stay exactly the same as a thought-system becomes more “liberal”: Mataji would have to speak differently to go further.
You raise a good point about Mataji’s words suggesting strategic purpose: that does indicate that there is a political dimension to her work. But my question then is: does Mataji actually believe that human women’s menstruation reflects a divine menstruation without which the universe could not exist? If the answer is indeed yes, then I think it’s very difficult to reinterpret in a way inclusive of trans women, whatever politics is associated with it. If the answer is no, then I would stand by the characterization of her as a political hack: if she needs to say things that she believes to be false (or perhaps worse, doesn’t even care whether they’re true) in order to advance a political agenda, she can go ahead, but they’re not worth engaging with intellectually. So I continue to assume that the answer is yes – that she means what she says and actually believes it to be true – in the hopes of treating her with respect.
A third way to look at it is that Mataji’s personal syncretism makes sense of her life path to date, which included being a mother of two children, training to become a midwife, and wanting to fight the sexism that she saw in her social environment. In this interpretation, her beliefs and practices (whatever they are, and to whatever degree she thinks they refer to something objectively supernatural instead of something subjectively imaginative) are both meaningful to her and strategically useful to her. We don’t need to choose between credulous ideologue on the one hand and cynical actress on the other hand; her beliefs and practices could be both meaningful and strategic without conforming to either extreme. By “meaningful” I mean coherent enough in relation to her personal experience and coherent enough to those around her. But such coherence can change when presented with new information—it can become newly incoherent in a way that requires new adaptation. Since Mataji is still alive, the best way to see whether she could adapt to become inclusive of transgender women is to raise transgender issues with her and see how she responds. The result could be surprising. She is so syncretistic, which implies considerable creativity, that I don’t know what she would say; there would seem to be intellectual resources that she could draw from in the Advaita Vedānta aspects of her syncretism to accommodate transgender women.
Fair points. She could adapt her beliefs and make something new, even though it would be a big change from what she already believed – if she were to be convinced that transgender women were really women. I would guess that she wouldn’t, given both that it would pose major incoherence issues for her cosmology and that the view of trans women as women is not widely held outside the richer and/or Western countries. But that does remain a guess.
(For what it’s worth, I raised most of the points in the blog post above while DeNapoli, who knows Mataji, was in the conference able to respond, and she didn’t raise a disagreement.)
Thanks, Nathan, whether your remarks include me or not. I find my views are too much in line with Dewey and Davidson when it comes to belief(s). And that is alright with me. For my time (no money), any argument, for or against, religion/faith/belief is futile, a priori. And that is as is should be. Those who think their paths of choice are true are welcome to those views. I suppose(?), lumping philosophy and religion together, at the university level, is economically sound. Whether it is educationally wise is another matter. I do not care if believers find my critiques offensive. Others, whomever they were, or are, did not worry about that either. Here it is: theists who threw their hats into philosophy, without leaving their faith ‘ at the door’, hedged their bets…taking Pascal, seriously. Blaise Pascal was a joker, in serious clothing. Philosophers do their own brand of revisionism—hoping the spaghetti will stick. Ecclesiastics, on faith, believe their positions are immutable: change is not their friend, nor agents, thereof. Oh well.
Thanks, Paul, though I didn’t have your comment in mind when I wrote mine. Dewey’s view of faith in his 1934 book A Common Faith is very interesting and modern. Dewey had a big influence on the famous Buddhist leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, as you may know.