feminish

I’ve spent the best part of the last year in a monastery.

I had with me Irigaray’s The Way of Love and Attwood’s Oryx and Crake - and that was it. They sat and sat (stiller than I ever could) on the dusty shelf/table I’d boshed together next to my bed. Neither made it off for any more than a few page-flicks - they just seemed too full, too sticky and too stodgy…

This worried me. Irigaray was my meditation - or at least, she had been in London (when reading her To Be Two I once remember being genuinely reluctant to get off the public skip that was the Hackney Downs train). So, on a cold winter afternoon I sacrificed my one 20-minute window for a shower and scuffled around in the temple library - a funny little room, with ramshackle books 90% in Vietnamese and, I kid you not, almost entirely classified by size and colour.

By sheer fluke, I found a little book called The First Buddhist Women, and was amazed to read that there still survives (on palm-leaf manuscripts) a collection of poems composed by enlightened women ascetics in India no less than two and a half-thousand years ago.

Now un-retreated, I still haven’t read Oryx and I still haven’t finished The Way of Love, but I know a bit more about these Psalms of the Sisters. As Caroline Rhys-Davids, the British feminist who made the first translation in 1909, says, every poem captures a woman’s quest for two things:

liberty or emancipation, and the expansion of her essential nature as a human being apart from her feminine.

My immediate thought was - awesome. To me those words capture a feminist life.

Here is the nun Soma (from the modern translation in First Buddhist Women):

What harm is it
to be a woman
when the mind is concentrated
and the insight is clear?

If I asked myself:
“Am I a woman
or a man in this?”
then I would be speaking the Evil One’s language.

Everywhere the love of pleasure is destroyed,
the great dark is torn apart,
and Death,
you too
are destroyed.

…Pretty feminish if you ask me.

p.s. the CR-D quote is from her Preface to I.B. Horner’s Women Under Primitive Buddhism, Bombay 1930.