Sex, Marriage and Family in World Religions (65 page)

2. The second form of Buddhist family rhetoric, what might be best described as a kind of
corporate familialism,
appears in the historical record when the
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Buddhists began to settle down into land-owning religious groups, approxi-mately two or three centuries before the beginning of the common era. At this point, even as the evils of family life were still espoused, monastic relations appear to have been explained with an appeal to a kind of patriarchal familialism. Though we do not know when, or why, exactly, it is clear the Buddhists began to construct an ulterior family of monastics, actually a purer form of patriarchy, that was to solidify and legitimize Buddhist identity within the pe-rimeter of the monastic walls. Thus, in formally gaining the identity of a monk or nun one joined the Buddha in a kind of fictive kinship that sealed one’s Buddhist identity with a kind of “naturalness” that was expected to facilitate harmony within the monasteries. In fact, the ritual for becoming a monk or nun seems to have been considered as a kind of rebirth back into one’s “original”

family; one was thereafter called “a son of the Buddha.” This motif of rebirth is clear, too, in the way that one’s seniority within the monastery was, and still is, determined not by real age but by the number of years that have passed since one’s ordination. In effect, with this development, the Buddhist world appears to be made up of two kinds of patriarchal families, with the lay side defined as a procreative family that fully takes up the task of making bodies and food, while the other appears dedicated to maintaining truth and higher ethics in the rarified realm of the monastery, which, though essentially nonproductive, nonetheless has some of the trappings of a reproductive patriarchal family made of fathers, sons, and lasting legacies.

Only slightly later, with the emergence of what is called Maha¯ya¯na Buddhism, this language of belonging to a patriarchal family defined by sonship to the Buddha became more pronounced and extensive in works such as the
Lotus
Sutra
and the
Tatha¯gatagarbha Sutra
. In these works a form of Buddhist sonship was conceived as an ontological reality found at the base of every individual, whether monastics or laity. At this rather crucial juncture in the evolution of Buddhist rhetoric, it seems that patriarchal family nomenclature, besides being useful for defining social life in the monasteries, expanded to define any dev-otee’s relationship to truth and truth-beings, like the Buddha. Thus, in the very act of accepting the new constellation of Maha¯ya¯na truth claims and the texts that housed them, readers and listeners were tempted with the idea to leave even prior monastic forms of Buddhist family-identity in order to step into the identity of the
bodhisattva
(buddha-to-be) and thereby reclaim one’s deepest heritage.

In this evolution in Buddhist familial language, it seems that though Buddhist authors so regularly insisted on the ineffability of truth and meditation, on the plane of seducing readers into their various literary projects the Maha¯ya¯na language of family was often relied upon to give the reader the sense of deep belonging to the Buddha’s legacy, beyond institutional arrangements, and confidence in being able to forge lasting relations with Buddhist realties of truth and purity.1

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3. As for the third category of familial rhetoric—
elite monastic descent
groups
—at different times in Buddhist history there appeared mystical geneal-ogies, even more refined than those offered in the Maha¯ya¯na texts, in which a higher Buddhist family was established within the already domesticized space of the Buddhist establishment. Thus, in tantric Buddhism in India and Tibet, as well as in Chan and Zen Buddhism in East Asia, it was claimed that certain monks were more directly related to the Buddha than other Buddhist monks or nuns. In both cases the language of fathers and sons was relied upon to explain why certain monks should be taken to be living representatives of the tradition, with truth, authority, and legitimacy flowing directly down the lineage from the Buddha to the present masters. Less noticed in modern accounts of these forms of Buddhist rhetoric are the intricate logics that emerged to explain how these elite “sons of the Buddha” were put in charge of guiding other less connected Buddhists back to their true familial relationship to the Buddha. In essence, even though these spiritual lineages seem dedicated to further priva-tizing Buddhist legitimacy, it turns out that this gesture was actually always part of a dialectic that was turned outward toward the public in the hope of eliciting more support and devotion. Consequently, these special lineages of privilege ought to be seen as refined forms of the basic patron-priest pattern, but arranged in a more exclusive and captivating manner. In sum, creating these private Buddhist lineages that supposedly descended directly from the Buddha allowed Buddhist leaders to overcome the basic tension in most forms of religious legitimacy: how to posit a perfect origin of truth and legitimacy in the distant past and yet maintain that perfection in the present. Or, more to the point, how to monopolize religious power and legitimacy while continuing to elicit support and good will from those excluded.2

4. The fourth sphere of family discourse in Buddhism,
pastoral advice,
appears in the way that Buddhists, likely from the earliest phases of the religion, prescribed proper conduct for those who remained in the family. These moral guidelines define the lifestyle to be maintained at home: one is to be obedient to seniors and considerate of others’ needs, while also adhering to the generic set of Buddhist precepts—not murdering, stealing, lying, drinking, or committing adultery. The logic at work in promoting these ethics for the family was that householders, by maintaining this baseline of moral conduct, could collect quantities of merit and avoid deeds that likely would, after death, cast them into eons of suffering in hell or in some other unsavory rebirth. Little was said about actual conduct between family members, other than mutual respect and the avoidance of aggressive or divisive behavior. Buddhist authors also seem to have had no interest in legislating particular sexual codes. When the topic was broached, the norm seems to have been to advocate mutual satisfaction without concern for particular styles of sexual activity.

Given the overall tenor of Buddhist family values, and particularly those that urge filial submission to one’s parents and seniors, one can see that Bud-Buddhism 307

dhist discourse was, and still is, intent on stabilizing and even bolstering the traditional family structures. The reasons for Buddhism’s advocacy of traditional family practice are complex, but one very important reason is that the Buddhist monasteries relied on the families to support them financially. That is, without perhaps directly realizing or admitting it, it must have been apparent on some level that the monastic form of Buddhism, as found throughout Asia, with its extensive landholding and deep involvement in economic enterprises, could only be sustained in a social setting of relative order and status quo.

Within thinking about Buddhism’s placement of itself as a quiet advocate for the traditional family, we should not overlook the many stories in which the Buddha or a leading Buddhist figure are presented as fertility figures of sorts who, when properly beseeched, can bring rain, good harvests, pregnancies, and continuity in the at-home patrilines. In short, male Buddhist figures of stature were regularly advertised as sources for exactly what the family needed to reproduce itself and its way of life. In fact, looking at the framing of these stories, there are probably good reasons for speaking of a certain erotic asceticism that runs through Buddhism, as much as it does through Brahmanical beliefs, as Wendy Doniger (O’Flaherty) has argued. Thus, somewhat ironically, it was the very success of world-renunciants that was taken as the mark of their command over the forces of fertility and well-being
in
the world.

In a less obvious way the Buddhist attempt to appear in control of fertility and well-being hinges on their effort to institute a Buddhist form of care for the dead. Throughout Asia, Buddhist care for the deceased ancestors of the laity often figures prominently in structuring and defining the role of Buddhism in society. In this configuration there is something like a triangle of exchange established between the family, the deceased ancestors, and the Buddhist monastery. Within this triangle material goods are given to the Buddhists who, upon receiving them, transfer merit to the ancestors of the donors, thereby saving the ancestors from untoward fates and fostering fertility-producing chains of exchange between the living and the dead. On this level it seems altogether fair to say that the Buddhist institution came to see itself as providing an invaluable service to lay families who otherwise wouldn’t have such direct means for suc-coring their deceased relatives and managing the ever important contacts between generations that were widely believed to define success or failure in food production and sexual reproduction.

The symbiosis between monasteries and the life cycles of the family has another angle as well. It seems that even when men and women joined the Buddhist order they often continued to pay tribute to their parents, dedicating gifts, art, and architecture specifically to win merit for the well-being of their parents, deceased or living. Thus though becoming a Buddhist cleric formally required the breaking of familial bonds, and accepting a new name and a new 308

set of authority structures, there is a wide body of evidence to show that well-trained professional Buddhists were still intent on maintaining connections, symbolic and otherwise, with their parents (as Gregory Schopen has shown).

In fact, even in their most religious and public activities, it was normal for clerics to dedicate their Buddhist deeds to the well-being of their parents. Thus, we ought to see that besides simply caring for the laity’s ancestors, Buddhism appears to have been an item of transaction
between
parents and children such that though children might exit the family to practice Buddhism, even their Buddhist pursuits might be publicly construed as gifts back to their parents. In this perspective even the family-renouncing aspects of Buddhism seem to fit closely within familial systems of emotion, indebtedness, and continuity.

In East Asian Buddhism this tendency to underwrite traditional patriarchal forms of authority and reproduction expanded, and there appeared a variety of arguments and myths designed to facilitate exchanges between the family and the monastery. In fact, in a development that further emphasized the porous wall dividing monasteries from families, Buddhist discourse in East Asia often emphasized that one is only a good, filial son at home if one patronizes the Buddhist monasteries. Playing off the construction of what was called “greater filial piety”
(daxiao),
Buddhists argued that Buddhist ethics, including support for the monasteries, were essentially both the same and better than traditional Confucian ethics, even when these Buddhist ethics in many ways undercut and subverted Confucian agendas. Certainly encouraging funds to flow from the family out into the public sphere of the Buddhist monasteries, which were generally seen by Confucians as fundamentally parasitic, ran counter to many basic Confucian suppositions regarding the scope and logic of family values, and yet this is exactly what the Buddhist re-creation of filial piety sought to encourage.

Within this context of Buddhist reconstructions of filial piety in East Asia two notable phenomena appear. First, it is said that the only way one can truly be a filial son at home is to patronize the Buddhists, since the Buddhists will, in the end, be in charge of the destinies of the ancestors. Thus, in essence, the Buddhists argued that the only way really to practice Confucianism was to practice Buddhism, since, after all, Buddhism alone could succeed in ancestor care. Second, and in a somewhat counterintuitive development, it is quite clear that the Buddhist monastic ideal of the self-effacing, submissive, and restrained monk was exported back to the family. In this unexpected turn of events, the model of the Buddhist monk became merged with the filial son at home such that good sons, though needing to reproduce to continue the family line, might otherwise be expected to conduct themselves with the calm detached chastity of a monastic, thereby avoiding indulging in destructive pursuits of pleasure and sensuality. Here, in effect, Buddhism appears co-opted by Confucian agendas insofar as the discipline and docility of Buddhist monks seems to have been “mined” from the monastic setting and reminted back in the zone of the family for purposes altogether antithetical to monastic pursuits.

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m e t a s t a t i c p a t r i a r c h y a n d t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n b u d d h i s t f a m i l i e s

In trying to make sense of these rather dense and intertwined forms of speaking familially and creating a variety of family identities and practices within Buddhism, I believe we would do well to step back from the details to recognize that patriarchal forms of family seem to be metastatic in some sense, regularly generating “higher” forms of themselves, be they in monastic or esoteric forms.

Thus, to explain the more or less mystical reason why children belong in the father’s lineage at home, and not in their mother’s, there is often recourse to a “higher,” religious patriarchal model, Buddhist or otherwise, that reproduces in a similarly immaculate manner, that is, without the direct input of women.

And, yet, this higher form of patriarchy as found in the Buddhist monastery never ends its ambivalent relationship to the primary family: On one level it buttresses the logic of the patriarchal family, and yet it is also degrades the at-home patriarchy with its own pretension to be above the travails of sexuality, pregnancy, and child-rearing. That is, in its implicit claim to do patriarchy better than at-home patriarchy, it never ceases to be an implicit criticism of its founding template. It is also worth wondering on a more sociological level if the patriarchal family structure is always delicate and forever in need of a sort of
u¨berpater
that can direct and legislate this form of human reproduction.