The Divine Feminine Warrior Archetype
Hello beloved reader,
I had written a whole other post, however, my beloved partner Jamie found this book he told me about, and my enthusiasm for it is BEYOND: Time to Stand Up: An Engaged Buddhist Manifesto for Our Earth -- The Buddha's Life and Message through Feminine Eyes (Sacred Activism Book 11) by Thanissara, a former Thai Forest Buddhist Nun — she was ordained in England in the same tradition as our Buddhist monk neighbors across the road here in Southern New Hampshire.
The first sentence just in the Foreword by David Loy immediately compelled me to read more:
“Traditional Buddhism, like every other major religion, is patriarchal.”
~
Thanissara is an impassioned writer who embodies the Sacred Activist/Divine Feminine Warrior archetype within her stunningly beautiful and powerful prose. I will copy and paste her entire introduction below.
I especially appreciated this synchronicity: she ends the introduction by sharing that the spiritual activist, Andrew Harvey invited her to write this book — the synchronicity is that I began this Substack two years ago with this post where I quote Andrew Harvey and the Dalai Lama:
“The world will be saved by Western women, and the men who have the courage and humility to listen to them and be guided by them.”
This kind of synchronicity feels to me like a kind of divine guidance🥰✨🌟💖🙏🕊️
Being curious about Thanissara’s background, a Google search revealed this BRILLIANT interview, A Mindful Marriage: Kittisaro And Thanissara On Celibacy, Sex, And Lasting Love, by Leslee Goodman, January 2009.
I found the entire article to be deeply enlightening as they both offer great insights for bringing Buddhist wisdom into partnerships. One section I appreciated in particular I’m excerpting below, as sexuality is so often a taboo subject in so many religions. But if you don’t read the entire article, first, here is a summary of their backgrounds:
Kittisaro (formerly Harry Randolph Weinberg) and Thanissara (formerly Linda Mary Peacock) both grew up in households that bridged religious and cultural divides.
Kittisaro, born in 1952 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to a Jewish father and Southern Baptist mother, was an accomplished wrestler who attended Princeton and later studied at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. His growing interest in Buddhism led him to become a monk at Ajahn Chah's forest monastery in Thailand.
Thanissara was born in 1957 into a working class English family, the daughter of an Irish Catholic father and a Protestant mother. She initially pursued art but shifted her focus to meditation and Eastern philosophy, and became a Buddhist nun in England, under Ajahn Chah’s guidance.
Kittisaro and Thanissara, both committed to monastic life, eventually fell in love and left to marry in 1992. Together, they founded Dharmagiri in 2000, a Buddhist hermitage in South Africa, where they teach and practice Buddhism.
Leslee Goodman, this article’s author and interviewer, asks some great questions. (Bolding by me.)
Goodman: Is there a Buddhist approach to sexuality?
Kittisaro: In the monastery we were trying to come to terms with the fact that we each have a body with urges and a mind with desires.
Our strategy with sexual energy was not to repress it, but not to follow it either.
We tried to open ourselves to it and feel it, even though it is a powerful energy that can carry one away.
With practice, little by little, that energy is transmuted into an understanding of our feverish attempts to get somewhere we’re not.
There’s a serenity that comes from recognizing energy without labeling it as “good” or “bad.”
During my time in the forest, alone in silence for months at a time, I would often feel close to the whole world, as if all beings were inside me. So, to me, intimacy doesn’t require physical contact.
One can’t assume that, because you have had sex with a person, the two of you are close, or, conversely, that if a relationship isn’t sexual, it lacks intimacy.
What makes sexual contact truly intimate is a quality of presence and mindfulness, of honesty and tenderness and love.
And what steals away the sacred and makes sex profane or exploitative is when it’s tangled up in a feverish grasping without regard for consequences.
Leaving the monastery to be with Thanissara, I felt a great sense of possibility. In a way, fifteen years of monastic training had brought me to a point where I was ready to have a healthy relationship with a woman. My training made me more patient, more honest, and more able to receive into my heart what someone else is telling me.
If one makes a commitment to be loyal and honest, then one can fully appreciate the infatuation, the electricity, the excitement, and the bliss that accompany sexuality. But one can also see how those experiences flare up like fireworks in the night sky and then dissolve back into the underlying blackness. One can appreciate those energies but also see how fragile sexual bliss is, and how fragile pleasure is — not to demonize it, but not to glorify it either.
I don’t share the view that the sexual act in itself is liberating. I think liberating insight comes through the process of being with someone over time. It’s like when Thanissara and I chant together and listen closely to each other’s breathing so that we can keep the chant flowing. I’ll breathe when she’s not breathing, and she’ll breathe when I’m not taking a breath, so that the chant can flow without interruption. That’s a good metaphor for our relationship: we’re attuned to one another, so that our voices blend and merge, and we realize that we are rising and ceasing in something that just is.
Thanissara: It’s a misunderstanding that celibate life is a nonsexual life. To be celibate is actually to turn a microscope on your sexual energy.
You’re just not acting on it with someone else; you’re looking at all the layers around sexuality, the idealizations and projections, and sometimes you’re experiencing the rawness of it without the physical expression. That’s the monastic template.
To go from that into an intimate relationship was at first incredibly beautiful. Over time the experience of our togetherness has deepened, and the focus is more on being together as allies who support each other. The romantic, sexual intimacy has changed from more of a buzz or high to something that’s nourishing and connecting.
Goodman: Do you think our culture is fixated on sexuality to the point of being stuck?
Kittisaro: Yes, the sense is that if you don’t have a sexual relationship, then somehow you’re not whole. Or, conversely, if you do have one, then you are whole. There’s this idea that, to really be alive, we have to keep being sexually active, even if it requires Viagra and other artificial inducements.
Our culture honors just one part of the cycle of relationship — the youth and beauty part. We need to honor the whole cycle of our humanity and come to terms with this body and its urges, its aging and death. Relationship can give one a deeper appreciation for both form and emptiness — how they keep arising and merging and blending in awareness.
There is much more, and I highly recommend reading the entire interview.
You can get the following Introduction by downloading a sample of the ebook edition of Time to Stand Up, but I’m copying and pasting it here for your ease of reference.
The book was published in 2015 and I’m curious about what may have changed in the past nine years. The irony is that the Buddha teaches that everything changes — the impermanence of everything. And yet, radical social change so often takes so much time!
I’ve only just begun reading this book, but I feel called to share this now.
INTRODUCTION
This is a book I would have preferred not to write. I would have liked to write something lighter, happier, and more innocent. I would have liked to walk you through a serene wooded landscape, but instead I ask you to look with me at a burnt and tortured Earth with its polluted rivers, dying oceans, razed forests, devastated wastelands, and its litany of extinct species. I particularly invite my Dharma friends to take this walk with me, especially those of us who would like our mindfulness and meditation practices to render us immune from the impact of a burning world.
However difficult the reality, at the end of the day—just as the Buddha encouraged in his teaching of the First Noble Truth of the fact that human beings suffer—it’s always better to face the truth of our precarious situation rather than avoid it. In doing so we can explore the causes of suffering and realize solutions, as in the Second and Third Truths, the simple truth that craving leads to suffering, and when we stop craving, our suffering ceases. We can also cultivate resilience while engaging an effective response, as in the Fourth Truth with its Right Action informed by wisdom, insight, mindfulness, focus, compassion, and skillfulness.
Generally speaking, unlike the historical Buddha, who brought about radical systemic change within the society in which he lived, the institution of present-day Buddhism tends to be a conservative force, which seeks a transcendent, inner path rather than one of outward engagement. Over the last several decades, Western Buddhist movements have been busy cultivating personal enlightenment journeys and building centers, monasteries, and Sanghas in which to walk our individual paths. Alongside these activities, we have been finding ways to bring the Dharma into contemporary contexts, which—besides translating texts, writing, and teaching—involve adapting the Dharma to new issues, psychologies, and cultures. While we’ve had a positive impact on our surrounding communities, we haven’t really felt the need to become activists focused on changing the system. If we moved into Engaged Buddhist practice, it was largely ministering in areas that are byproducts of systemic inequality, for example, addressing psychological pain due to the generational trauma of the wounding systems we live in. We have yet to come to terms with centuries of injustices that perpetuate systemic suffering and therefore need to be addressed systemically as well as collectively. By necessity, such a reckoning has to move Dharma practice beyond a personal introversion and quietism.
Everything is now changing very fast. Our personal journeys are intersecting with a global evolutionary arc of colossal proportions. We are awakening into the realization that our special, personal enlightenment treks, and our small, tribal Sangha endeavors, are not going to inspire the kind of “game changer” needed to ensure a sustainable planet for future generations. The reality of catastrophic climate change and its underlying causes awakens the need for a deeper understanding of what has led us to where we are. For example, we need to be open to the implications of centuries of European colonialism that decimated First Nations and used people of color as a means of profiteering and extraction of resources. We need to understand the ways in which Buddhism perpetuates misogyny and hatred of women. Patriarchal religions that denigrate women, the body, and sexuality tend not to challenge the denigration of the Earth, but instead operate within hierarchies that oppress through race, class, and gender to preference privilege—all of which leave a distorted and often abusive inheritance.
Buddhism is being challenged: what can we who call ourselves Buddhists offer from all our practice, in response to a world in crisis? And what value is all this meditation and mindfulness if we just sit by and let the world burn? The old premise “getting involved in politics is inappropriate for a follower of a contemplative tradition” isn’t going to hold ground when the ground beneath us is disappearing—washed away by floods, decimated by typhoons, and dried up by drought. If we just sit this out, our “equanimity” will become indifference, our focus on personal awakening will be revealed as self-absorption, and our seeking of peaceful, mindful moments will become willful avoidance and denial. Instead, we now have to shift our focus to look at ourselves, our intentions, what our lives have been built on—personally, nationally, and globally—and to revisit Buddhism itself; how we’ve interpreted and embodied it. Is our Dharma practice helping us to be truly and authentically responsive to the times, or are we simply traditionalists, good meditators, nice people who are not free or empowered enough to really meet a new global paradigm?
The Earth’s ecosystems are dying. This is because of increased carbon, nitrous oxide, and methane gases due to human activity, including modern-day livestock practices. Life on Earth is possible due to a viable biosphere that depends on the ability of plants and trees to photosynthesize the carbon we produce. Our biosphere is one of the single most vulnerable parts of the Earth’s system and is the most essential to sustain life. However, as we pour massive amounts of carbon into our fragile atmosphere, heating the planet, and as we clear-cut and burn gigantic tracts of rainforest, which are the “lungs” and carbon sinkholes of our planet, the delicate balance needed to sustain a livable system is in peril. The impacts of our unsustainable lifestyles are everywhere, every day, and are taking us to the point where we have to understand that human civilization itself is under threat. While solutions are abundant and clear—in essence we have to move to renewable energy and revert to sustainable local models of agriculture—the process of how to get there is less clear. Beside our own difficulty in waking up to hard truths, our societies are now shaped by a corporate coup d’état. This is fuelled by massive wealth, in the hands of an extremely tiny minority that manipulates mass media and the body politic to keep us in denial and in a trance of endless consumption.
The Buddha was clearly radical both in his social actions and in his challenge to individuals to wake up. As we “take the dust from our eyes” we realize that nothing short of a revolution will ensure a sustainable world for future generations. Violent, uncoordinated, short-lived bursts of outrage, while understandable and unavoidable, are not sustainable. They also tend to be neither optimal nor tactical, particularly in the face of increasing use of oppressive militaristic power. However, generating collective resistance alongside a creative, joyful reenvisioning of change at systemic levels offers a hopeful way forward. As humane and ethical uprisings increase, sitting on the sideline does not honor the Buddha’s example. Instead there has to be a reconfiguration of how we hold and engage Buddhist practice, part of which is the humility to understand we are in a new learning curve. For example, we need to learn from the marginalized and decimated, such as First Nation Peoples, African Americans, communities of color, feminists, and those within the LGBTQI communities who have struggled for coherency and survival.
Our awakening journey is no longer a solo, privileged occupation. Instead, we are invited to align across all previously designated boundaries held in place by historic inequality, petty prejudice, grudges and blindness, to instead forge the “beloved community” imagined by the founder of Fellowship for Reconciliation Josiah Royce and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As Buddhists, holding true to the radical edge of the Buddha’s own life, we have much offer at this time, particularly when we align with faith communities and activists who seek to inform a response that deescalates our divisive consciousness. As you read through this book, which invites us to stand up for the Earth, I hope it can offer a way into deeper inquiry, rather than being used to justify further splitting. While difficult things are important to name, I do not do so to inflame blame, which can easily abdicate us from ownership of our individual and collective shadows. Instead, my invitation is to widen the scope of our Dharma practice to include all beings who are abused and marginalized, within and around us, for the sake of our burning world. If we haven’t begun already, we can start now.
Andrew Harvey, who invited me to write this book, asks us to “follow our heartbreak. That is, scan your conscience for the issue that keeps you awake at night. Then get up in the morning with the intention of doing something to mend that one broken thing.” This is a good place to start our journey, a journey already modeled by the Buddha. To inspire us, I tell the story of the Buddha’s life as a framework, not so much as a historical record, but as an archetype that is relevant for each of us today. At the end of the day, the essence of the Buddha’s message—as was that of Ajahn Chah, the core teacher who guides my path—is, “you can do this.” Together, not alone, we can bend the course of history.
Thanissara
Thanks for sharing, Camilla. Looks like a must read! :)
Wonderful post! Many thanks, Camilla. Sounds like a must-read.