Buddhist confessional poetry: Narratives of self-conversion
 

Part 2

Last week I discussed the general importance of the Theragatha and Therigatha as examples of Buddhist confessional poetry. I pointed out some of the dominant features associated with these two sets confessional poetry. To day I wish to focus on an important aspect of these poems as seen from a modern literary-theoretical view point - the relationship between self and narrative. These poems deal with the idea of the self and many of them are narrative poems in the broader sense of the term. Even the short one verse poems possess certain narratives that inflect them; they are like dramatic monologues.

The Theragatha (264 poems) and Theriagatha (63-poems) contain many features in common. They grow out of an oral tradition which sought to place great emphasis on meter- sound texture - repetition- conventional formulae of composition etc. Some of the phraseology is shared by both sets of poems. They are also didactic in the sense they lay out a pathway towards spiritual enlightenment. In addition both the Theragatha and Therigatha share a set of common topoi - overcoming desire - ending rebirth - banishing fear - search for freedom - quest for self knowledge - shattering of shackles.

They have as their central motif the perils of self-delusion. They are self-exposures in both senses of the term. While there are clear similarities of theme and style and affinities of interest between these two sets of poems, there are also significant differences.

As works of literary art, the Therigatha, in my judgment, are superior for a number of reasons. First, the emotional reach of the Therigatha are far greater than that of the companion volume. There is a greater sense of subjectivity and occasion for empathic involvement of the reader. The nuns responsible for composing these confessional poems paid more focused attention to specificities and particularities and social densities than the monks. Second, there is a greater sense of drama in many of the verses contained in the Therigatha. The conflicts between past and present lives, the desire to seek spiritual enlightenment and the mundane obstacles that were placed before them by parents, friends and acquaintances that had to be overcome were harsher.

Third, one observes a more intense engagement with the Other in the poems of nuns. Fourth, the body as both physiological entity and symbolic construct is deployed with great poetic power in the Therigatha. Fifth, the nuns operate under the dictates and interdictions of patriarchy and these gives added poignancy to their transgressive experiences.

Hence, as poetry, the compositions collected in the Therigatha are more moving than those gathered in the Theragatha.

This is, of course, not to suggest that the verses found in the Theragatha lack their own distinctive strengths. One area in which the compositions of the monks manifested their own undeniable poetic strengths is in the depiction of nature.

There is a greater engagement with nature by the monks than by the nuns; this is indeed understandable in view of the fact that the monks lived and moved more freely in forests and open spaces than the nuns. For example in a passage like the following one observes the power of nature imagery.

Nature is not merely the background; it takes on a symbolic valence and serves to define the character of the speaking voice.

When thunder roars in the sky
Torrential rain on the path of birds
The monk in the cave meditates
There is no greater joy than this.

When resting on the river-bank strewn
With flowers, and garlands of diverse sylvan plants,
Joyous in meditation,
There is no greater joy than this.

When in the night in solitude
In a cave, wild animals roaring,
The monk in the cave meditates
There is no greater joy than this

In these verses one observes a sensuous representation of Nature both in its beautiful and fearful aspects.

As I stated earlier, some of the poems in the Therigatha are extremely moving with heightened and overflowing emotion. For example the following passage from a poem by the nun Kisagotami illustrates this well.

Returning home
To give birth to my child
I witnessed my husband die
In the forest.

I could not reach
My kinsfolk before tragedy struck..
My infants I lost and my husband too.
And on reaching home, full of sorrow
I saw on the pyre, my parents
And brother engulfed in flames.
Dramatic juxtaposition

Some of the poems in the Therigatha achieve their intended effects through dramatic juxtapositions. For example, the poem by Subha narrates a story of stark contrasts, and contrasts constitute the emotional center of the poem. Subha is travelling to the forest to meditate in solitude; a robber suddenly appears, blocks her path; he proposes that she discard the yellow robe and enjoy the pleasures of sex with him in the grove full of flowers. Subha finds this suggestion utterly repulsive, and points out to him the impermanence of the body. She deploys a striking image to make her point – the body is like a corpse decaying in the cemetery .

The robber is not persuaded, and he extols the beauties of her eyes which he fids most alluring. She tries again to point out to him the illusory nature of human beauty by likening her body to a painted puppet. The robber is still adamant and unpersuaded, and Subha decides to pull out her eye and give it to him. The lustful robber is overcome by this gesture and he begs forgiveness. It is evident that this poem gains its effects through the collocation of antithetical emotions.

In order to comprehend the power and effectiveness of the Theragatha and Therigatha as literary texts, one has to pay close attention to the concept of the self. The concept of the self, in addition to being closely related to the idea of narrative, is important on two counts. First what is the nature of the literary self, or literary subjectivity, inscribed in these poems? Two, how does the Buddhist idea of no-self (anatta) factor into this textual production of these compositions? I propose to examine these two important questions.

It is generally believed that the human self is independent, free, autonomous, self-contained and self-present. It is the locus of action and authority. However modern cultural theory has consistently demonstrated that this is indeed not the case; far from being autonomous and self-sufficient, the self is subject to severe limitations. Anthropologists would argue that the self is largely a product of culture. Psychologists such as Lacan contend that the self is created by language. Marxists and other materialists would point out the formative influence of social forces in shaping the self. The net result of modern cultural theory has been to downgrade the self as an autonomous entity. To be sure, this does not mean that the sense of agency is absent from the self. The self still possesses a sense of agency, but it operates within a decidedly circumscribed field.

Naratives

The terms self, individual, person subject and agent are, in common parlance, used interchangeably. However, it is important that we make finer discriminations among them. The self denotes the imaginary register consisting of identifications, narratives, and images that serve the notion of the individual. The individual, as the etymology suggests, refers to the undivided site of consciousness, action and meaning. It is indeed an illusory whole that gives the appearance of a free and self-determining being. The subject, on the other hand, is a disciplinary construct; it is it is constituted by language, social and cultural formations, and institutional discourses. It does not signify the sense of autonomy, sovereignty, initiating power that the term individual implies. I employ the term agent to index the locus from which an action is initiated, and I use the term person to denote one who possesses agency. It is important to bear in mind these finer shades of meaning as we apply the term self in our discussion.

One important feature of the Theragatha and the Therigatha is the way in which the self of the poet seeks to project a complex image of himself or herself. Let us consider the following confessional poem by the nun Sukka.

What has come over BR>These people of Rajagaha?

They behave as if
Intoxicated , and do not
Honor Sukka’s gloss
Of the teaching of the Buddha.

But the wise
Imbibe that teaching
Which is sweet,
Overpowering, and never excessive
Like rain to travelers.

You are Sukka
For your mind is bright

Its calm and free from craving.
This is your last incarnation,
You have vanquished
Mara and his retinue.

Admirable image

What we see here is the way the poem projects an admirable image of the poet who happens to be a nun. We witness how the idea of self works itself out through the verbal weave of the poem. Hence, the relationship between self and image acquires a great urgency. How do we conceptualize this relationship? I wish to make a few suggestions on this point. Here I would like to invoke the writings of three scholars representing the disciplines of philosophy, anthropology and psychoanalysis. They are George Herbert Mead, Irving Hallowell and Jacques Lacan. One can, to be sure, add to this list with profit. Mead’s book Mind, Self and Society exercised a profound influence on many who evinced an interest in, and recognized the value of, the concept of self. Mead in developing his theory of symbolic interaction asserted that the self is essentially social and that it arises as a consequence of the interactions with others in society. According to him, the self is what the individual is able to observe for himself or herself as an object or image. The idea of image, therefore, is central to Mead’s understanding of the self.

The anthropologist Irving Hallowell similarly, although from a different conceptual vantage point, labored to emphasize the idea of the self as an image. He stressed the importance of what he termed the ‘behavioral environment’ on the formation of the self, and this behavioral environment is clearly culturally constituted. It is Irving Hallowell’s contention that the human beings act and react in accordance with a normative image of themselves that they develop on the basis of the behavioral environment. As he remarked,’ In so far as the needs and goals of the individual are at the level of self-awareness, they are structured with reference to the kind if self-image that is consonant with other basic orientations that prepare the self for action in a culturally constituted world.’

The work of the postmodernist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, in its own distinct way, also serves to foreground the salience of the idea of the image in the constitution of the self. Lacan, while re-interpreting the body of work of Freud in the light of linguistics and cultural anthropology, called attention to the social and linguistic constructions of the self and it is evident that the idea of the image is central to his project..

Lacan argues that it is in what he terms the mirror stage that the articulation of the self in human beings begins to take place. He believes that the recognition of the self by the child as he or she sees the reflection in the mirror paves the way for this articulation. Once gain we see the important dialectic between self and image, as we saw earlier in the formulations of Mead and Hallowell, widely different though they are from Lacan’s.

Intersection

It is evident, then, that there is a very important intersection of self and image. This has great implications for understanding the textual productivity of the Theragatha and Therigatha. The moral earnestness, the self-conversions, self-surrender, the ‘visage of salvation’ (to use Goethe’s phrase) evident in the poems, unmitigated subjectivity leading to reflective subjectivity, the fundamental motif of mental self-delusion that runs through the poems, the passionate commitment to spiritually led liberation all underline the importance of the idea of image as a way of understanding the self inscribed in these Buddhist confessional writings.

Earlier on in this essay I alluded to the fact that two compellingly important questions related to the idea of the self in the Theragatha and Therigatha are, what is the nature of literary subjectivity articulated in these poems and how does the idea of non-self advocated by Buddhism play into the decoding of selfhood projected by these poems. Let us take the first question first. Here the important issue is the relationship between the psychological self and the literary subject that emerges from poetic self-representation. These Buddhist poems can be described as autobiographical poems. The eminent deconstructive literary theorist Paul de Man once said that an autobiography is any ‘text in which the author declares himself the subject of his own understanding.’ The Theragatha and Therigatha, according to this de Manian line of thinking, are clearly autobiographical in nature.

What is interesting about de Man’s (and the many who think like him), thinking is the abandonment of referentiality; he argues that in autobiography the subject has no clear reference, and that the subject is more a textual production.

He maintains that the action manifest in an autobiography is not historical but rhetorical. He posed the following question. ‘Are we so certain that autobiography depends on reference, as a photograph depends on its subject or a (realistic) picture on its model? we assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces the consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all respects, by the resources of the medium?’

It is my considered judgment that de Man is guilty of over-emphasizing the case. Surely, one cannot totally ignore the referential aspect of self-writing; after all writers of autobiographies are actual flesh and blood living beings who inhabit a specific place and time and historical conjuncture. At the same time, one has to concede that Paul de Man has an important point that we cannot afford to ignore, namely, the overpowering influence of language, rhetoric and genre requirements in the process of literary self-representation and textual production. As we probe into the problematical dynamics of the self in the poems contained in the Theragatha and Therigatha, we need to bear in mind this important desideratum.

Transformation

In the Theragatha and Therigatha what we find are attempts at self-creation and self-representation. The authors seek to make themselves the subject of their own poetry. Here we see two interconnected processes at work. The first is the transformation of a psychological subject from a situation of ignorance to enlightenment, from self-delusion to self-knowledge.

The second is to capture this newly emergent self in the net of language. When we seek to examine the issue of literary subjectivity and self-representation in these Buddhist confessional poems we need to pay close attention to both of these aspects. This is complicated by the fact that the Nietzschean understanding, which is widely endorsed by modern cultural theorists, that the psychological subject is not a given that exists prior to our projection of it. For example, modern literary critics examining Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude contend that it is less a retrospective story that is being remembered than a literary creation put into play in the very writing of the poem. Such lines of thinking have a direct bearing on our comprehension of the Buddhist confessional poems under consideration.

Let us consider a poem written by the nun Sujatha that illustrates this point.

Adorned with jewelry
And sandalwood-smeared garlands
Body full of finery
With maids in attendance
With plentiful food and drink
Leaving my house
I approached the pleasure gardens.

Having delighted in the gardens
Having played there
On my way home, I saw a temple
And I stepped into the temple
In the vicinity
Of the city of Saketa.

There I saw the light of the world,
The Buddha, I paid homage to him.
I sat down there.
With compassion, he led
Me to his teaching.

Hearing his visionary words
I discovered the truth.
In that very space I attained
The boon of non-rebirth.
Pleasure -loving woman

In this poem, we see how Sujatha is transformed from a pleasure-loving woman into a highly disciplined and religious person. The psychological transformation recounted in the poem is indeed compellingly cogent.

However, it is the language, the tropes, and the structure of the narrative that drive the self-representation. Hence we need to pay very close attention to the verbal texture of the poem. The literary subjectivity of the poem, it is evident, is very largely the result of linguistic and representational strategies. What this means is that when we explore the Theragatha and Therigatha as literary texts, and how literary subjectivity is produced in them and how literary self-representation takes place, we need to be mindful of the rhetorical architecture of the poems. We need to always keep in view the fact that poets are at the mercy of language. We cannot bring down the limiting walls of language by means of language.

Non-selfhood

The second question relates to the avowed repudiation of the concept of the self in Buddhism; it proclaims non-selfhood. If this is indeed the case, how does one square this with the self-conversions depicted it, and self-representations projected by the poems in the Theragatha and Therigatha? Here it is important to have a clear idea of the concept of non-self as articulated in Buddhism. If Buddhism repudiates the notion if self how can there be a system of ethics based ion individual responsibility? The fact is that Buddhism does advocate a concept of personhood, agency and moral responsibility.

The idea of moral retribution (kammavada) enunciated in Buddhism exemplifies this .The Buddha used the idea of non-self in a special and distinctive way; otherwise how can one explain the Buddha’s use of words such as I,(aham) mine (mama) and self (atta) in the scriptures? In order to understand the specificity of meaning giving to the tem self by the Buddha, we need to have a clear idea of the intellectual traditions of India that were dominant at the time.

Death

At that time in India there were two important schools of thought, the ‘sassatavada’,the substantialists which believed in a permanent self and ucchedavada, the annihilationists or materialists who believed in the annihilation of the self at death. Buddhism rejects both views and advocated a third middle way. The following comment made to Kacchayana by the Buddha illustrates this.

‘This world, O Kaccayana, generally proceeds on a duality, of the belief in existence and the belief in non-existence. …..All exists, Kaccayana, this is one extreme. Nothing exists. Kaccayana, that is the other extreme. Not embracing either extreme, the Tathagatha teaches you a doctrine of the middle way.’ How does the Buddhist approach to the self, this declared Middle Way, address issues of human agency and moral retribution? These are vital issues central to the understanding of the Theragatha and Therigatha as Buddhist literary texts.

The Buddha saw the human self as a form of psychophysical personhood; he used the term ‘namarupa’ two designate this. He did not separate out the two, mind (nama) and body (rupa) as is the normal practice, but steadfastly held them together as a complex unit. This concept is closely linked to the five aggregates (panchakkhandha) and consciousness (vinnana). The sense of continuity that underwrites any notion of self is sustained through this consciousness. The trope of the stream of consciousness (vinnana sota) is central to understanding the nature of human experience and moral responsibility.

Hence, in our attempts to fathom the Buddhist concept of the self and how it relates to the poems in the Theragatha and Therigatha, we need to pay attention to these formulations advanced by the Buddha. A study of the Buddhist concept of self and the issues of self-representation and textual production reflected in the Theragatha and Therigatha should enable us to work our way towards a meaningful Buddhist poetics that can engage in a fruitful dialogue with contemporary cultural theory

( To be continued )