Is the Goddess a Feminist?

Rita DasGupta Sherma’s essay, “Sa Ham—I am She,” in the anthology Is the Goddess a Feminist, is brilliant. It presents a nice antidote to the anti-body, anti-erotic, anti-life (and therefore anti-feminine) disposition of the philosophies that fixate on transcendence. “In Tantra,” she states, “purification does not consist of elaborate ablutions, pilgrimage to purifying sites, and extreme measures for cleansing the ‘impure’ body. Rather it consists of the experiential realization of the inherently pure, divine nature of the body and indeed, all things.”

She presented two terms, theology of identification and theology of reciprocity to contrast the approach to reality of Tantra and Shaktism, respectively. “In popular Shaktism, the mode of communion with the Goddess is of a dualistic nature that entails a relationship of worshiper and worshiped.” The worship of the Goddess is expected to bring about blessings, by reciprocation. “In contrast, the tantric ritual performed by the individual worshiper is designed to evoke a sense of sacred presence and heighten the awareness of the immanence of Shakti within one’s own mind-body complex.” Ultimately, the identification between self and Divine “is the only mode of relationship between the human and the divine in tantric soteriological tradition.”

The gist of Ruth Erndl’s article in the same collection is that with a “qualified ‘yes’,” she believe that shakti is empowering for women. She sees a connection between shakti and the lives of Hindu women and feminist movements in India. However, she notes, “It is not inevitable that wherever shakti or the Goddess is found there will be positive implications for women; indeed, examples of the opposite can be found.”

I found interesting the concept of the auspiciousness/inauspisciousness principle of shakti as “profoundly non-hierarchical” and presenting a different “axis of value” as contrasted with the hierarchical purity/impurity principle. In a different context, a teacher of mine once said that enlightenment is not vertical (hierarchical), but horizontal.

I agree with Erndl’s analysis that the Hindu patriarchy controlled women because women are powerful. “They recognize women’s power and propose to control it for patriarchal purposes.” The ideological task for Hindu feminists, she suggests, is to “rescue shakti from its patriarchal prison.” She further states, “Shakti is the the female creative power which cuts across identity boundaries and is thus effectively used to generate community among women.”

I think the following paragraph by Stanley Kurtz, in his essay, “In Our Image,” cornered exceptionally well the value of the Hindu Goddess in relation to feminism: “In the midst of this cultural sea change, feminism has found something of worth in the image and archetype of the Hindu Goddess. Increasingly, the image of the Hindu Goddess has suggested to feminist scholarship the outlines of a future being born in our own society. After all, in India, God can be a woman, an extraordinary transgression of our [Western] customary gender roles.  In India, moreover, this female embodiment of God can sometimes be superior to a male embodiment of God, perhaps the ultimate transgression of our customary gender roles. And, finally, in India, God can be, now a man, now a woman, now this woman, now another woman, now androgynous, and now neither man, woman, nor man-woman, but something beyond and yet encompassing all of these things. This is more than mere gender transgression. It is the overcoming of the very notion of fixed, ranked, and differeniated gender roles—perhaps the ultimate goal of many feminists. And so the archetype of the Hindu Goddess has been taken into American feminism at every level, from the most popular to the most scholarly.”

Last week, I read ahead to Miranda Shaw’s essay, “Is Vajrayogini a Feminist?” both because I admired her book “Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism,” and I feel a special affinity for Vajrayogini, the blood-red naked beauty with the flaying knife and kick-ass attitude. In case anyone couldn’t tell at first glance, this noble champion of women does not suffer fools gladly. “Apparently this goddess feels very strongly that men on the Tantric path must not disrespect women,” Shaw says. In fact, any scoundrel who transgresses against women will end up burning in a “fathomless Raudra hell,” or being slashed to pieces by Vajrayogini’s consort, Candamaharosana. You go, girl!

My favorite essay in the book was Jeffrey Kripal’s “A Garland of Talking Heads for the Goddess,” in which he wisely asserts that “one cannot easily appropriate a mystical tradition of another culture for a whole host of linguistic, political, historical and psychological reasons.” That is exactly my criticism of the wholesale importation of entire religious cultures from, say, Japan or Tibet to the United States—bringing in a ton of unsorted baubles, pebbles and rubble along with the jewels. This indiscriminate adaptation to exotic values is (to my thinking) a real problem in the dozen or so Buddhist communities I have visited in America. I am not Japanese or Tibetan; I grew up on a farm in Kentucky. My Buddhism speaks with a Southern accent. 

Within the book Is the Goddess a Femnist? I came across references to Sahajayana Buddhist Tantra, something I’ve become very interested in lately. I can’t seem to find any books on it, other than a book from an Indian publisher that costs over fifty bucks. I did come across an article online about Sahajayana.

The thing that fascinates me about Sahajayana is the cross-fertilization that occurred to produce it. It is well-known that Bodhidharma brought Dhyana Buddhism to China where it merged with Taoism to become Chan. But I never stopped to think that the cultural impact flowed in the other direction as well, from China to India. Apparently, it did: Taoism was brought to India, where it merged with Tantric Buddhism to become Sahajayana. A Chinese Taoist monk named Hiuan-tsang completed a translation of the Tao Te Ching into Sanskrit in 647, which was subsequently introduced into a circle of Buddhist mystics in India who used it to develop a new school, Sahajayana. The Vaisnavite sect of Eastern India called Sahajiya was also a later development of the Sahajayana school.

I’d like to learn more about Sahajayana. I’ve always felt a great affinity for Zen Buddhism (which might just as well be called Zen Taoism). But in recent years, I have wished that Zen could be more Tantric. I feel that “my path” looks like an amalgam of Zen and Kundalini yoga. It seems that Sahajayana (Taoism meets Buddhist Tantra) might be a school I’ll be able to relate to well.