I’m consistently drawn to Buddhist Tantra not so much because of how “sex-friendly” it is with it’s thangkas of explicit yab-yum depictions and all, but also because of the esoteric poetry that fully acknowledges how masculine and feminine qualities complement each other. It’s very easy for the dogmatic religions to outline these same facets publicly and without shame, however they also tend to be quite rigid when deciding which gender should do what.
And that’s a recipe for disaster as we’ve seen. Hence, I think many of us are hesitant to discuss masculinity and feminity because there is apprehension that such a discussion will lead to defining gender roles. Most of us don’t like being boxed in when we don’t fit.
Recently, I’ve familiarized myself once again with a book by Mark Epstein, M.D. called “Open to Desire.” One passage has stood out to me concerning this very topic:
The copulating figures that adorn much of Tibetan art represent the interpenetration or intermingling of the male and female approaches. In this tradition the active male desire, chastened by the gap that desire creates, becomes empathy or compassion: the ability to reach into the experience of another and feel what they’re feeling. The desire to possess or control becomes the ability to relate. The beholding desire, represented by the female partner, is a metaphor for wisdom, as exemplified by the capacity to be. This formulation has always impressed me because it reverses the conditioned way of thinking. Compassion is male and wisdom is female.
What’s important to note here is that we truly HAVE been conditioned to think that men are naturally wise and women are naturally compassionate, based on our patriarchal gender role system where men have taken leadership positions in government and in religion, and women’s caretaking for children, the sick, and the elderly have been seen as the hallmarks of compassion. In Tibetan Buddhist Tantra, these strengths are quite the opposite – the skillful means and potent strength of the probing nature of masculinity make it quite suited to be the path of compassion (“I understand what you feel”); and the reality of emptiness, the physiological make up of feminity, the unlimited potential (“there is no inherent difference between you and me”)………..such qualities make feminity very suitable as the path of wisdom.
One could even say that the masculine must learn to understand others, but the feminine must learn from within.
Give it some thought.
I think you are right in saying that woman are viewed as naturally compassionate but how much of this is do you think is genetic and how much do you think is behavioural conditioning?
I also think it is quite interesting that you say men are often viewed as wise, this is never something I have came across in my own life. In fact at school and things males are often viewed as less intelligent than females. I would also quite like to know what you define as wise?
Hi Mat!
Yes, I agree that much of our gender roles are created from cultural conditioning. And I posit that men are preferred in leadership positions because of this very assumption that they are naturally wise – which we tend to define culturally as knowledge of consequences, having a moral compass, and can not only communicate a vision for a community, but can lay out a step by step plan for how to get to a vision for betterment.
So you define wise as those that are fit to lead? I think you are perhaps limiting the use of wise to those that are wise in a political sense. I think it is a different reason that men are often chosen as leaders, but I think that is another issue.
Like intelligence I don’t think I could exactly define wise.
Ah, no Mat. *I* don’t define wisdom as being fit to lead. That’s our cultural conditioning talking there.
Wisdom is the other “wing of the bird” in Tibetan Buddhism for achieving enlightenment. One wing is wisdom, the other is compassion. One without the other is clumsy and ineffective in helping others and discovering liberation from samsara.
Conventional wisdom is the understanding of how things are in our mundane world. “Ultimate” wisdom is the realization of non-duality. This is what I’m referring to, ideally.
I think since becoming celibate, I’ve become more compassionate. So this apparently silly notion that frustrated male sexuality leads to compassion actually resonates with my own experience. Very interesting.
I think it is essentially correct that we in the West have assigned wisdom to masculinity. Think of the wise old scholar in his study. Where is his wife, the wise woman? She’s not there because the wise man in Western traditions is often as not unmarried.
In Tantra, there is no essential Man or Female, rather the tantrics depict masculine ways of doing things and feminine ways of doing things. Take for eg. , there is a masculine way of walking and a feminine way of walking; masculine way of eating and feminine way of eating; similar is the case with all kinds of actions (not things or objects per se, but processes) in existence. And that is why, in indian languages, the gender is placed on the Verb (for it is an action/doing) of a a sentence and not on the pronoun (that is a person/thing, like in english). Like in english, it wud be: “she is walking” or “he is walking”, and in Hindi, it’d be: “woh jah-rahi hain” (for a woman) or woh jah-raha hain” (for the man), where “woh” is the pronoun, “hain” is “is” for hindi, and the “jah-raha” (male) and “jah-rahi”(female) is the verb for “walking” in hindi.
Now the gender is placed on the verb becoz hey theorize on the idea of the illusion of any immutable self-identity (or ego), so there can be no male or female, but masculine/feminine roles that is played for the time-being.
I guess this has been somewhat lost in the english translations of Tantra and even of Indian Philosophies.
Now as I see it, no person is fully male or female, but shades of this and that. Like I may walk in a feminine way, but talk in a masculine way, whereas debate in a feminine way, and so on and so forth. So there is no fixed ONE identity in me, but a collage of Identifications with some of it masculine and others feminine. Masculine and feminine are here used purely as Symbolic and not as Biological.
Am sure u too have observed the collage of personalities in u, with varying degrees of masculine and feminine identifications! Let me know what your observations go on this point…
Also, the question which immediately comes to my mind is that: if one takes gender as symbolic of action and not biological anymore, how do u define the symbol, like what kind of speaking wud be called feminine and what kind as masculine?
And this way of looking at gender actually gives much more room to gender types apart from the biological types of XX, XY, XXY chromosomes, and infact we can include gays, lesbians, trans and many others… infact there wud be no limit. Oh i just remembered that there r some talks by the the historical Buddha where he talks of men, women and third sex. But now we can even extend the gender-as-verb theory to include all kinds of variations. What say u?