Love Dharma. Geri Larkin
a total setup?
Sirima and Uttara were both members of Buddha’s harem when he was a young prince. In fact, their lives were more like those of indentured servants. As the story goes, they both loved Buddha so much that they decided to follow him even when they thought he might be completely nuts. While their lives had been difficult in the palace, at least there they had shelter, food, and clothing. The two made a pact to give even these things up to follow Buddha on the chance that he really had something to teach. Happily, he did. Sirima and Uttara teach us the value of friendship between women and the rewards that come with putting our spiritual work at the top of our to-do list.
Again and again we are faced with the same burning question: What really matters?
Subha was a later addition to the group. Born into an eminent Brahmin family in Buddha’s hometown, Subha decided at an early age that she wanted to become a nun under Pajapati. When she is almost raped by a man in love with her “beautiful eyes,” she blinds herself so he will no longer be attracted to her. Okay, maybe that’s a little extreme, but you get her point. Subha teaches us about the distractions that come with beauty and about how we need to be clear about what is truly important in our all too short lives.
Vasuladatta and Magandiya were also consorts of King Udena. Both were actually offered to Buddha as wives when he was young. When he said no, they became wives of King Udena. Apparently they never quite got over Buddha’s rejection, at least Magandiya never did. She became so hateful, and so jealous of the king’s other wives, that she actually burned her biggest rival to death. That the young woman could commit such a heinous deed and later become a nun is a tribute to the power of salvation in a heart so sincere that it not only wants forgiveness but awakening, too. Her story is a literal reminder that jealousy can kill.
Vimala was the daughter of a prostitute and decided to follow her mother’s career path. She was also apparently quite a beauty. So overwhelmed with lust at the first sight of him, Vimala did her darnedest to seduce Moggallana, one of Buddha’s top disciples. His response was to call her some pretty horrible names. This so shocked her that she wanted to find out what had given him the ability to reject her. That curiosity led to her becoming a nun and, later, enlightened.
Her story reminds us that so much opens up to us when we let go of our need for physical beauty—ours and our partner’s.
And finally, there is Visaka. She was the loving wife of an eminent man who, after hearing the Buddha teach, decided he would never touch a woman again. Visaka decided to follow Buddha as well and gave up her social standing for a life of meditation in the country. After some time she returned home to find that her husband had decided not to renounce the world after all. Rather than respond in anger, Visaka became her husband’s teacher. Buddha was known to say that she was such a skilled educator that her words were his words. Some people believe that portions of the Dhammapada, one of the most well-known collections of Buddha’s teachings, are actually the teachings of Visaka. Her story demonstrates the truth of our potential as teachers.
For most of the women who followed Buddha, problems in their relationships caused the pain that led them to him. In most cases, relationships were ripped out from under them for one reason or another. In others, the women themselves walked away from their husband or lover—an awesome act of courage given the time and the place. In each of the 166 stories that have lasted through the centuries, miracle of miracles, enlightenment arrived through each woman’s understanding of the impermanence of all of the components of relationships— youth, beauty, well-defined roles, commitment, acceptance. Sometimes enlightenment happened quickly. Other times it took years. Out of these women’s lives emerged a deep humility and compassion and a driving need to surrender to the reality of their situations. As a result, “the great ball of doubt” or momentum toward the experience of enlightenment was allowed to grow until at last a deep, secure, and abiding happiness laid at their feet. And we rejoice. Because if they can, you and I can. In the wake of their experiences arose relationship dharma. Wisdom that we can use to figure out our own lives, to set our relationships upright, to find our own awakened hearts.
SOME OF THE WOMEN described in this book have become known to us because their lives show up in Buddha’s own teachings. Their sincere efforts, demonstrating an abiding faith in the four noble truths, were so strong that he singled out their behavior as an example to other spiritual seekers. For most of the women, however, the journey of their stories to our place in time was much different, much quieter. These women shared the stories of their enlightenment in the form of prose poems that were memorized and passed along, generation by generation, for some say 350 years. At that point they were finally written onto palm leaves during a major Buddhist council that was held in Sri Lanka somewhere around 80 b.c. Long neglected, the poems resurfaced in 1909 in a translation by a wild woman adventurer named Caroline Rhys David. After that, silence again until K. R. Norman published an academic translation of the Therigatha in 1971. It took another twenty years for Boston-based Susan Murcott to trip over Norman’s translation during a stay in Melbourne, Australia, and find the time, heart, and energy to further free the stories from the old texts.
Thank Buddha she did. You and I need the stories of these ancient women. We need them as proof that we all have sadness in our lives. We all have crises. We all have relationship issues. Not a single one of us is safe. Yet in the same breath they offer their lives as proof that we can survive the despair and the heartbreaks. Most of all, these women stand as models for how we can transform our personal tragedies into our own awakening. I cannot imagine a greater gift.
Chapter Two
RELATIONSHIPS AS PARTNERSHIPS
And why has modern love developed in such a way as to maximize submission and minimize freedom, with so little argument about it? . . . We are more than happy to police ourselves and those we love and call it living happily ever after. Perhaps a secular society needed another metaphysical entity to subjugate itself to after the death of God and love was available for the job. But isn’t it a little depressing to think we are somehow incapable of inventing forms of emotional life based on anything other than submission?
— LAURA KIPNIS, New York Times Magazine
LAURA KIPNIS IS A PROFESSOR at Northwestern University. She thinks a lot about love. She is very smart and she is very funny and she can wax poetic with the best of them about how screwed up our thinking is when we expect to find lifelong happiness in a relationship with one partner, how deluded we are to continue to believe that we can be sexually attracted to the same person for fifty years. May Buddha bless those few and far between couples capable of doing the psychic and psychological work needed to pull off such a feat. I know I couldn’t do it.
Even ten years is tough for this Dharma puppy. The rules are just too suffocating: “You can’t leave the house without saying where you’re going. You can’t not say what time you’ll return. You can’t go out when the other person feels like staying at home. You can’t be a slob. . . . You can’t gain weight . . . and so on. The specifics don’t matter. What matters is that the operative word is ‘can’t.’ Thus is love obtained.” 1
It need not be so. Real partnerships are possible—relationships where “can” and “how can I help?” are the operative phrases.
LOVING PARTNERSHIPS
Ambapali was blessed with beauty, grace, and charm. Men loved her. They fought over her, vied for her hand, until she was finally appointed the city’s chief courtesan. Only then did she find peace—mostly, anyway. Apparently, Ambapali became a courtesan in the original sense of the word, as a woman offering and accepting culture and pleasure to more than one person.
She was so popular that it is said that the city of Vesali became prosperous solely because of her work and relationships. In turn, Ambapali was generous with her charitable donations, becoming known as the uncrowned queen of the kingdom. She was known for her independence, her sureness about herself, and her view of sexual relationships as partnerships.
One of Ambapali’s most frequent patrons was King Bimbisara of Magadha, one of Buddha’s earliest followers. As the story goes, Buddha and his retinue