Sex, Marriage and Family in World Religions (64 page)

When they did address the family, it was usually regarding topics more germane 300

to maintaining a symbiotic relationship between the family and the emerging Buddhist community of ascetic renunciants, be they in the monasteries or less organized wanderers. With this situation in view, we ought to be ready to accept that there will always be much that goes unaddressed in Buddhist discussions of the family, and this is simply because the niche on the social landscape that Buddhism occupied was much smaller than that commanded by many other religions.

Second, Buddhism preserved, to some degree, its identity as a “religion of choice” that one participated in willfully and not through the givenness of birth and/or ethnicity. In particular, on the level of being professionally Buddhist— that is, as a monk or nun—one chose to leave a prior realm of family norms to participate in another zone of legality that in many ways stood against the prior religious and legal structures found in the home. Hence there are good reasons to think of Buddhism as a kind of hyper-religion—one predicated on a doubling of religious law and the establishment of a secondary form of religiosity that, though reliant on the former level, still rests at some remove from the daily life of the family. Of course, it is not unusual that religions have differing legal and/

or ethical structures for specialists and nonspecialists. It is just that in the case of Buddhism this divide is more marked and results in notably different ethical injunctions. In considering this cultivated separation, the point is not that Buddhism avoided forging deep and lasting symbiotic ties with family and government. Rather, it is that these ties were constructed across the divide created by Buddhism’s basic orientation to set itself apart in a monastic zone that prided itself on defining its own code of conduct. Making sense of this self-chosen distance helps explain why Buddhism never developed anything like canon law in medieval Europe, where all sorts of familial concerns were aggressively ad-judicated and enforced.

Third, and in concert with the two above points, Buddhism has very in-frequently enjoyed the kind of hegemony that is the norm in many other religious situations. In practice this means that Buddhism maintained a fairly flexible posture vis-à-vis competing religions and never sought to require laity to identify themselves exclusively as Buddhist or to rely singularly on the Buddhist clergy for all their spiritual needs. Given this basic flexibility and open-endedness, it is not surprising that Buddhism has, in different times and places, morphed into a variety of forms as it negotiated different arrangements for sharing religious power and privilege. Thus, in line with the first point, this simply means that there are many zones of family praxis and law that Buddhist thinkers were happy to let others legislate and oversee. Sum-ming up these points, we simply need to keep in mind the specific purview within which Buddhist thought and practice were intended and the resulting structural configurations that would inform much of what was said about Buddhism and the family.

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f a m i l i e s , m o n a s t e r i e s , a n d t h e “ p a t r o n - p r i e s t ” e x c h a n g e Keeping the above three particularities of the Buddhist tradition in view, we would do well to conceptualize Buddhism’s position vis-à-vis the family in terms of a basic system of exchange, rightfully categorized as “patron-priest” relations.

Buddhism works within this structure insofar as Buddhism was organized around the exchange of two very different types of goods, goods that were produced on either side of the line dividing monastics from laity. Some of these exchanges are fairly straightforward with the laity offering visible items, such as food and material goods, to the clergy in return for merit
(punya),
which was reckoned as a kind of cosmic power that could be put to a variety of uses including health, wealth, and good fortune along with care for the dead. In this exchange the stuff of life—food, resources, produced goods, etc.—is transacted for a higher kind of currency (merit), which is believed to be reliably powerful and productive at a more sublime level from which the stuff of life can then be recuperated and, ultimately, controlled in predictable ways. That is, Buddhist patrons were instructed that the very resources that they were donating could and would be regathered through this cycle of merit that was both the effect of their donations and then the cause of their future fecundity.

On another level of exchange, there is evidence that the wall between family and monastery often functioned as a mirror of sorts, with both sides looking across the divide to find images of their own identity. This angle of interpretation becomes particularly important when we recognize that the monastic space was regularly organized as something like a patriarchal family that employed the language of fathers and sons to structure discipline, identity, and authority in a way that rendered monastic identity not all that different from those templates constructed within the sphere of the lay family. With the importance of the religious family
inside
the monastery in view, it may even be worth hypoth-esizing that the monastic version of the patriarchal family functioned as a perfected version of the at-home patriarchal family in a way that simultaneously confirmed the monastic family as “natural” and familiar even as it proved the deepest claims of patriarchy—that life and abundance could be harnessed and managed without the direct assistance of women. Presumably, the promotion of the monastic Buddhist “family” as the final cause and source of cosmic power made similar patriarchal patterns at home appear anchored in deeper universal structures. While these are difficult perspectives to extract from scarce historical remains, at the very least we can say that though Buddhism is regularly thought of as a religion of renunciation, its institutional forms show steady and close ties with the family that range from standard patron-priest relations up to much more interesting patterns of mutual recognition and legitimization that seem to involve the exchange and verification of symbolic logic.

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d i s c o u r s e : a n o v e r v i e w

To sharpen our analysis of the interplay between family and Buddhism, we would do well to shape our discussion around four types of familial issues that appear in the Buddhist tradition. Naturally this typology will not cover all rele-vant matters, but it will organize our reflections and clarify a significant body of Buddhist concerns. First, there is a discourse on the negative aspects of family life,
the language of renunciation,
which appears throughout the Buddhist tradition and is designed to generate distrust of at-home life and to urge the listener/reader to search for truth and value in the extrafamilial space of the monastery. Second, there is a metaphoric language in which identity within the monastic setting is understood as a kind of replicate of the patriarchal family—a kind of
corporate familialism
in which the Buddha is designated as a master-father of sorts, with the clergy and the faithful understood to be his filial progeny. Third, there evolved a variety of narrower lineage claims made within the monastery that sought to establish an elite Buddhist family within the monastic family. That is, while all monks or nuns might be offered a kind of fictive kinship with the Buddha, there emerged a much more narrow kind of
elite
monastic descent group
that identified specific monks as the unique inheritors of the Buddha’s legacy. In short, as in the case of tantric Buddhism or Chan and Zen, there was a privileged family set within the Buddhist family that worked to define more tightly authority and legitimacy within the Buddhist clergy. Fourth, there are guidelines for correct conduct at home—
pastoral advice
from the Buddhist establishment that tends to focus on proscribing harmful behavior and encouraging the cultivation of a positive and generous attitude toward the Buddhist clergy.

Before exploring these four types of familial rhetoric, and then introducing primary documents that demonstrate these styles of speaking and writing, several important caveats need to be in place. First, as is probably already obvious, there is no one singular form of the Buddhist tradition or even one Buddhism.

Buddhism, even in the early period before the common era, was geographically widely dispersed and riven with doctrinal differences. As the centuries passed and Buddhism spread to more distant locales, and even to lands outside of the Indian subcontinent, it continued to adapt and develop, thereby further expanding and enlarging its range of doctrinal positions and notions of orthopraxy.

The upshot of this is simply that one should always hesitate before saying anything like “the Buddhist position on topic X is simply Y.” Against this kind of reification, it is always better to couch assessments in more defined zones of time and space. Similarly, though many early occidental Buddhist scholars saw fit to do so, it is not at all productive to go back over historical examples of Buddhism to point out what is and is not truly Buddhist about particular practices or positions. For instance, it is quite clear that though most Buddhists held
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to the ethics of nonviolence and human dignity, various forms of slavery and/

or serfdom were, on and off, practiced by a number of monastic centers in Asia.

While this might appear in the eyes of a modern thinker as an undeniable fall from Buddhist ethics, in fact, many Buddhists at the time seem to have con-doned such practices and not to have seen a contradiction. In short, let’s agree that Buddhism is as Buddhism does.

Sensitivity to this problem of pluralistic Buddhism is all the more important when we explore the development of Buddhism in East Asia. As it turns out, once Buddhism began to take root in China in the first and second century c e, it gradually shifted in noticeable ways. Largely through engaging Chinese ethics, and working at building a stable relationship with the powerful bureau-cratic Chinese government, Buddhist discourse on family and society in China took forms that often seem quite at odds with Indian precedents. Though some have been tempted to see East Asian Buddhism as a rather distant cousin of Indian Buddhism, in fact there is much continuity and many of the more notable differences are best considered in terms of emphasis. Nevertheless, there are developments in East Asian Buddhism which do not have clear precedents in India—such as a singular preoccupation with filial piety, an unusually involved relationship with the state, and a growing notion that life production is fundamentally sinful and that mothers can expect to go to hell for their involvement in the life cycle. Certainly these trends and developments warrant inclusion in the history of Buddhism’s relationship to the family, even if purists would prefer to discount them as “local” aberrations.

The question of evaluating developments in Buddhist thought and practice also requires reflecting on the nature of the evidence that will be presented here. As it turns out, textual statements are, at this point in our study of Buddhism, the most useful evidence for reconstructing the role of family in Buddhism in medieval and premodern periods. This means that our evidence will, for the most part, be drawn from works produced by Buddhist authors, and this ushers in a body of hermeneutical concerns since our statements will be drawn from those authors most deeply involved in the symbolic system. As is well known, textual statements regarding religious practices, especially statements formally made by committed participants, are not necessarily descriptive of either social praxis or belief. Instead, they are best taken as signposts for how groups went about formulating their notions of identity, proper behavior, and the general scope of good and bad ways of being in the world. As long as we approach these various types of documents within the sense that they simply represent what the Buddhists wrote and talked about when these matters came up, we won’t commit the error of thinking that texts directly reflect thinking or acting. To develop a perspective on the role of family Buddhist tradition that is sensitive to these issues, I’ll briefly explore the four types of familial discourse mentioned above and then support them with primary source-documents.

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d i s c o u r s e : a b r i e f e x p l o r a t i o n 1. As for the language of
renouncing the family,
examples of Buddhist rhetoric attacking and undermining the sanctity and finality of the family are truly legion in the surviving sources. They range from the content of the Buddha’s biographies to more tailored comments defining what humans ought to be doing with their allotted time on earth. Thus, though the flavor may vary considerably, it is regularly said throughout the Buddhist world that by continuing to reside at home one can expect to become further ensnared in the cycle of life and death
(samara)
. According to the logic of karma and rebirth, which is amply played out in the various accounts of the Buddha’s own escape from the confines of family, life at home is a site fraught with distracting desires, petty concerns, a lack of free time, and an overall tendency to forget the bigger issues of life, death, and enlightenment that Buddhist thinkers insist are the true concerns of human beings. Consequently, family life is not only judged detrimental to spiritual development, it also is condemned as a deleterious environment that can only encourage negative patterns of conduct and thinking that will bind one in the cycle of birth and death and keep one from making progress toward nirvana. More topically, among these statements about the generic risks of family life, one can also find statements about the physical dangers that women court as they follow the prescribed life cycle within the family, the risks of childbirth being paramount.

In brief, though the Buddhists will in other contexts have much to say about the correct modes of participating in family life, in the end, family life is something that needs to be overcome and left behind, since it does not have intrinsic value and, in fact, inhibits access to the goals that Buddhists posit as the real end of human being. In this sphere of discourse the Buddhists are encouraging everyone to reflect on the benefits of leaving the encumbering and dangerous domain of family life in order to pursue higher spiritual goals, even if it is well understood that only a small fraction of any population will actually do so. On another level, one could also say that, even in the earliest statements, Buddhist rhetoric has a tendency to see life as essentially negative, but not in some Manichaean sense of being evil, simply rather as something to avoid. In fact, the most well-known Buddhist myth of origins explains that the formation of human sexuality, the family, and patterns of ownership and government all result from grand cosmic errors. In sum, family as the zone of reproduction and sexuality is opposed to the final destination of human identity
(nirvana)
and, moreover, the family is held to be fundamentally flawed in a cosmic way, thereby rendering it ultimately valueless, at least within the terms of this type of Buddhist discourse.