Bodies, Pedagogies and the Buddha
Paper presented by Barbara Kameniar and the 1998 AARE Conference in Adelaide
I recently went into a local store of a franchise chain that sells cheap imported knick-knacks to inquire about the price of the statues of the Buddhas that they had displayed in the window. After a few brief moments of discussion the salesperson asked me if I knew much about Buddha statues. I replied that I knew a little. She then asked whether I could help settle a dispute about the name of 'the Buddha with the bun'. I suggested a number of names - Gautama Buddha, Sakyamuni Buddha, the Tathagartha - but indicated that regardless of the name, it was the same Buddha. The other Buddha was Maitreya Buddha - the Buddha to come.
'Yes but is it a man or a woman?' she asked. 'Why he's a man. Gautama Buddha is the historical Buddha whose teachings Buddhists follow'. She went on to tell me that a man who had come into the shop earlier in the day (who was also inquiring about the price of the statues), had, like me, insisted that the statue was a male. This had confused her because the box in which it came was labeled 'Buddha Woman'. She had not queried the label because the statue looked like a woman to her and she knew nothing about Buddhism. She merely sold the statues. She then went on to satisfy herself that the reason why the label on the box was incorrect was because the statues were produced in China 'and well, you know the Chinese, they probably got it mixed up'.
This particular encounter fascinated me in a number of ways. Like all encounters it involved the coming together of multiple absences and presences - exposing and imposing gendered, racialised and sexualised ideologies and identities. The incident suggests any number of possible trajectories, however, what I would like to attend to in the context of this paper is the western gaze upon the body of the Buddha.
In postmodern terms 'the gaze' is more than a long, fixed look of wonder and (possibly) admiration upon a body/subject. It is rather 'a fundamental structure in the ways in which the subject relates to the cultural order ... the way in which subjectivity itself is formed through [its] mechanisms ... [It is] something that impacts on, shapes, and contorts the body/subject' (Fuery & Mansfield, 1997:70).
It forms and is formed, is product and producer of the body/subject of self and other and self in relationship to other in the process of the moment. Attempting a mathematical symphony of simultaneous multiplication and division it is at the same time both unitary and multiple. Like a medical procedure it dissects and (re)constitutes the self, the other, the relationship of self to self and self to other. At all moments the gaze remains active - forming and inserting the subject in the cultural order. It might be argued that the gaze calls into question any notions of the fixity of a self. Like anatta or anatman it signals the impossibility of a static unchanging self, ego or I (thereby contributing to the postmodern angst!). However, while the gaze remains dynamic the body/subject grasps at a fixed identity for self and for other. Great comfort can be found in the construction of a seemingly fixed subjectivity, albeit an illusion!
Crucial to the 'construction of subjectivity, as well as the formation of relational contexts between that subject and his or her social world order' (Fuery & Mansfield, 1997:71) is 'the body'. For theorists such as Foucault, 'the body is central to formations of meaning' (Fuery & Mansfield, 1997:86). It also serves as a site of desire where desire itself is understood as being socially constructed (see Stoler, 1997:165-187).
The body is marked by gender, race, sexuality, class, age, life stage, educational attainment, employment status and any number of other culturally determined and determining momentarily configuring categories. As such the body is a marker of difference - not merely because of visual markers such as skin colour, eye shape, height, sex organs, body language etc. but also because the visible characteristics are charged with meanings of unseen, invisible properties. Nationalist, racist, sexist and sexual discourses draw on ideologies that see a direct relationship between 'outer form and inner essence'1.
All hinge on visual markers of distinction that profess to - but only poorly index - the internal traits, psychological dispositions, and moral essence on which these theories of difference and social membership are based. (Stoler, 1997:132-134)
For Fanon this relationship is played out in the 'fact of blackness'.
I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why it's a Negro! ... Negroes are savages, brutes, illiterates. But in my own case I knew that these statements were false'. (1993:224,225)
'Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!' Fanon reflected to himself 'Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me' (1193:221).
Sander Gilman's discussion of representations of black bodies and white bodies in eighteenth and nineteenth century art highlights the way in which 'the sexuality of the black, both male and female, becomes an icon for deviant sexuality' (1993:175).
In 'The Hottentot Venus' the physiology of Saartjie Baartman is understood as an external sign of her '"primitive" sexual appetite' (1993:178). Racialised bodies are sexualised bodies. In colonialist discourse, bodies of colour, and particularly black bodies, are lascivious and deviant.
'Men of color, and in particular African American men [are seen] as sexual aggressors or as "supersexual" beings ... white men [are] self-chosen "saviors" of white women, and ... white women in relationships with men of color [are] sexual and social transgressors (Frankenburg, 1994:77).
According to Bhabha 'race becomes the ineradicable sign of negative difference in colonial discourses ... We always already know that blacks are licentious, Asiantics duplicitous ... (1995:75)
Frankenburg notes that while there were times when Asian men were seen as 'lascivious and predatory' the bachelor communities of Asian and particularly Chinese men that developed as the result of anti-Asian immigration laws in the United States which excluded Asian women 'led to an inversion of the construction of Asian masculinity from "hypersexual" to "undersexed" or effeminate" (1994:76).
The situation was similar in nineteenth century colonial Australia where the large number of Asian, particularly Chinese people working the diggings were men. The Alpine Pioneer at Kiandra complained that the Chinese 'would never amount to anything as colonists because they brought no women and did not care to settle' (Clark, 1980:126). Their status as itinerants would only have served to further exclude them. And, like the Asian migrants of the United States, 'the Celestials' as they were known could also be framed as hypersexual. However many of the cases cited by Clark amount to accusations of deviant or 'unnatural' sex on the part of Asian men. In one particular case in 1857 at Buckland River
'a rumour spread like wildfire that a Chinaman had been seen committing an unnatural crime with one of the brute creation near the dwelling-place of a highly respectable married man. A female had witnessed this abomination. Here was the final proof that the Celestials were monsters in human shape, who practised abominations in every encampment and made lewd gestures towards women and children. Infuriated by the assault of these barbarians upon the purity of an Australian woman, a meeting was summoned at the Buckland for 4 July ... [where the men resolved to] drive the yellow bastards out of the Australian bush'. (1980:116)
The telling of this 'incident' reveals the racialised and sexualised identities of each of the players. The Asian man is constructed as sexually deviant and in close relationship with animals. Gilman discusses this linking of the racial other with animals noting that the female Hottentot was considered the 'lowest' human species and was compared to the highest ape - the orangutan (1993:179). The European/Australian man is married (his sexuality thus beyond question) and European/Australian men are "men of character" and defenders of morality, decency and 'the purity of an Australian woman'. And the Australian woman, she was the embodiment of bourgeois respectability, charged with the responsibility of upholding the highest moral standards of the empire. Indeed the morality of the empire depended on her. To offend her is to offend the empire.
Writing on male homosexual desire Tony Ayres argues that
'the same racial stereotype that makes Asian women desirable makes Asian men marginal ... there are few depictions of Asian men as masculine, powerful & desirable. Typically, East is represented as subservient, powerless & feminine, West is dominant'. (HQ Magazine, Mar/Apr 1998)
And Anthony Wong notes:
For me, it tends to operate on the level of preconceptions - "I know what Asian guys are like. They're gentle. They're soft and they're submissive." It operates on the level of, "God you speak such good English," or "Asian men all have small dicks". (HQ Magazine, Mar/Apr 1998)
Constructions of Asian masculinities and femininities, whether heterosexual or homosexual suggest submissive, servile, small and containable bodies. In the case of Asian women it may be argued that they suffer under the imaginings of excessive femininity. In the case of Asian men, it might be argued that they suffer from the same - simply, they are not man enough.
And so to return to the encounter in a shop around some statues of the Buddha. Serene, one-pointed and without breasts, Gautama Buddha sat, hand touching the earth as his witness to the overcoming of Maya and desire. Perhaps because I had known he was a man it was impossible for me to see anything other than a man, but the salesperson saw a label and theorised that the slight figure with the serene look and the 'bun' was indeed a 'Buddha Woman'. The incident may have gone untheorised but for the research I had been undertaking in Studies in Religion classrooms where the topic being studied was Buddhism.
I had not intended to undertake a reading of constructions of sexuality in the classroom. While I had considered that religious bodies would be both racialised and gendered, I had not initially considered that they might also be sexualised. What drew me to the possibility of a sexualised framing was a discussion between a group of students at the first school site - School A. The discussion centred around the television show Monkey. At issue was the sex of the monk Tripitaka. Was Tripitaka a man or a woman? They concluded that he was meant to be a man but had been played by a woman. But why would this be? The question was left unresolved. The discussion also dealt briefly with the sex of the Buddha as portrayed in Monkey. I began to ask students to tell me what images came to mind when I prompted them with the following identities: Christian; Jew; Hindu; Aboriginal person; Muslim; Buddhist. The images across the four schools were astoundingly similar. While each of the images holds their own fascination, of direct interest to us here is the composition of the imagined Buddhist body.
With the exception of two students who saw 'nothing' when prompted, all students imaged monks - bald, saffron robed and almost always seated in meditation. At face value this may not seem at all surprising - quite possibly the same image would arise for you. It did for me. What emerged as surprising was the response given to the question that followed - why do you think you see this image? All students who were asked this second question claimed that they imaged a monk because a monk was the only Buddhist they had met - in each case the class had been on an excursion to a Buddhist temple. Again this might not be surprising except for the fact that the students from School A and School C had gone to the Zhu Lin temple at Ottoway where they had not seen a monk - none was in residence at the time of either visit. The person who had spoken to students from both schools and given them a tour of the temple was a woman. School B visited the Vietnamese Buddhist temple at Pennington. They were spoken to by a monk, however, one of their class members was a Buddhist who attended the Vietnamese temple herself. Prior to the temple visit she had been identified in class as a Buddhist. Some of the students had approached her informally outside of class time to inquire about appropriate manners when attending the temple. What follows is a conversation between two class members of School B and myself. While this particular conversation was not prompted by my queries about religious imaginings, it picks up on the gendered nature of the Buddhist body.
Me - When you've talked about Buddhists as well you tend to have talked about monks. So do you perceive a Buddhist as being male? When you think of a Buddhist.
S1 - Um, yeah yeah yeah I ..
S2 - I guess so
S1 - I, I, I ....... most people seem to think of a Buddhist as the orange robed monks ... um, but I didn't have that in the back of my mind when I was talking about that yeah
S2 - I guess so because like I was saying before the exposure you have had. We haven't really talked to any Buddhist ... ah just really normal citizens. But we went to a, that Buddhist temple and then you see our attitude coming out
S1 - it's the Buddhist monk
S2 - yeah that's what we saw. That's what we learnt about
S1 - when we watched those vidoes all they interviewed really was the monks. Yeah!
S2 - yeah so there's an example of society, our little society's view because we saw the Buddhist that's what our image is now, our image remains that basically. So we have to probably to meet a normal person in society
Me - what about Xi?
(embarrassed laughter)
S2 - Yeah but she, she doesn't really like to talk about it much and if you ask she, she, you don't think to ask. We didn't know she was an actual Buddhist.
S1 - Yeah, yeah!
S2 - We don't really know her too well.
S1 - Yeah, yeah!
S2 - You don't really think to ask.
S1 - She's really quiet and she doesn't talk about it much
Me - so do you kind of assume everyone here is [the same religious denomination as the school]?
S1 -She's not (laughs)
Me - No. But do you assume that the others are?
S2 - Well you're in [this particular religion] school, that's what you come here for.
S1 - Um, Christian probably. I mean.
S2 - some of them are Greek Orthodox.
This conversation is rich in data, however, given the need to attend to the sexualising nature of the discourse, I will only highlight the students failure to see or failure to (re)member Xi as Buddhist. They also seek to attribute some degree of responsibility for their lapse in memory to Xi herself - she's really quiet, she doesn't talk much. In fact what the students have engaged in is what Frankenburg identifies as a colour evasive/power evasive repertoire for thinking through race (1994:142-157). They seek to mask difference by evading it and stressing sameness - even if that sameness is constructed only through the evasion of difference. They don't see Xi's Asian-ness or her Buddhist-ness. They see instead a quiet student in a uniform just like their own.
Let us attend further to the image of the monk. Like all other categories, that of the monk is marked by class, age, race, gender, life-stage, sexuality etc. One of the notable characteristics of the monk is his abstinence from sexual relations. In a heterosexually charged world his refusal of a woman constitutes him, in part, as a man who is not a man. In my earlier readings I had framed the monk as androgynous - bringing together within himself both male and female characteristics. I no longer believe this is the case. I now read the monk, the man who is not a man, as being largely asexual - though not entirely. Sitting passively, eyes neither open nor closed, head shaved signaling the 'destruction of personality' (Firth 1975:291), the loss of identity, the Buddhist monk has no apparent sex yet he his sexuality remains uncertain.
When the imaginings surrounding Buddhism are embedded in an uncertain asexuality, the presence of an absent potency may threaten the established order and in turn may produce anxiety. Pedagogies which seek to homogenize Buddhisms and fail to teach about Buddhists as heterogeneous risk limiting understanding of any Buddhism or Buddhist. For students, the imaginings of others and their cultural order may differ little from those with which they entered the course. I contend that we choose our imaginings of others and as such we can also refuse those that are derogatory or limiting. Our job as educators is to assist the students in this process.
REFERENCES
Bhabha, homi k. (1995) 'The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism' in the location of culture. London and New York: Routledge
Clark, C.M.H. (1980) A History of Australia. Volume IV: The Earth Abideth For Ever 1851-1888. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Fanon, Frantz (1993) 'The fact of blackness' in 'Race, Culture & Difference. London: Sage Publications.
Firth, Raymond (1975) Symbols: Public and Private. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.
Frankenburg, Ruth (1994) white women, race matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fuery, Patrick & Mansfield, Nick (1997) Cultural Studies and the New Humanities: Concepts and Controversies. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Gilman, Sander L. (1993) 'Black bodies, white bodies: toward an iconography of female sexuality in late nineteenth-century art, medicine and literature' in 'Race', Culture & Difference. London: Sage Publications.
Stoler, Ann Laura (1997) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press.