Buddhist confessional poetry: Narratives of self-conversion

[Part 1]

I wish to devote the next few columns to an exploration into the Theragatha (Verses of Monks) and Therigatha (Verses of Nuns) in the light of modern literary theory.( I am fully cognizant of the risks that such a move would entail). These sets of verses written some thousands of years ago, it seems to me, contain a refreshingly contemporary ring and challenges to modern structures of feeling. They have the capacity to bear the weight of contemporary interpretations read into them. What I plan to do is to examine these compositions in terms of modern categories of literary analysis such as narrative discourse, tropes, strategies of textual production and self-fashioning. These poems constitute one of the earliest and most significant modes of confessional writing in world literature. In addition they jointly open a wonderful window on to the decidedly austere world of asceticism and the complexly structured aesthetics of renunciation. The interesting question here is whether the aesthetics of renunciation lead to a renunciation of aesthetics. My answer is categorically in the negative.

I have chosen to characterize these Buddhist poems by monks and nuns as confessional poetry. A clarification of this term is in order. The English word confession comes from a Latin word and is closely associated with the Roman Catholic Church. However, I am using the tem in a much wider sense. In addition, I believe a distinction needs to be made between the two words admission and confession. In ordinary parlance they are used interchangeably; on the other hand, in legal discourse they carry specific connotations. I intend to establish a distinction between the two words. Admission could be voluntary or involuntary. On the other hand the term confession, as I interpret it, suggests a voluntary action. Moreover, it is embedded in a narrative and there is an acceptance of moral guilt over a deed done .It is in this sense that I am using the term confession in this essay

The Theragatha and Theirgatha are included in the Khuddaka Nikaya, the fifth section of the second basket (pitaka) of Buddhist scriptures known as the Sutta Pitaka. Tradition has it that they were recited at the First Council that took place not long after the passing away of the Buddha. Most scholars are of the opinion that these verses were composed somewhere in the period from sixth to third century B.C. The Thergatha consists of 263 verses composed by Buddhist monks and the Therigatha consists of 73 verses composed by Buddhist nuns.

These verses have been traditionally examined in terms of the historical background of the monks and the nuns, the social basis and organisational structure of monastic life, the linguistic preferences of the texts, the religious vision expressed, the metrical features and so on as well as textuality in the older sense of the word which focuses on technical aspects – philological and editorial aspects - of production of texts. Some commentators on Indian literature such as Rhys Davids and Winternitz have pointed out their literary value. In terms of my own continuing engagement with these two collections of verses, it was indeed Martin Wickremasinghe who ignited an interest in them by pointing out their incontrovertible authenticity and humanism.. In this essay I wish to focus on these two collections of verses in terms of their literary worth and aesthetic proclivities.

The eminent literary critic Terry Eagleton once remarked that,’ criticism is not a passage from text to reader; its task is not to redouble the text’s self-understanding, to collude with its object in a conspiracy of eloquence. Its task is to show the text as it cannot know itself, to manifest those conditions of its making (inscribed in its very letters) about which it is nearly silent.’ This is a useful thought to bear in mind as we examine these writings as literary texts.

It is also important to remind ourselves of the fact that these texts should not be regarded as transparent and immaterial media through which we can comprehend a Buddhist reality. Instead we need to examine them as figurations of reality that produced it and to which it has responded. What this means is that giving up on the idea of seeing these literary texts in a purely religious or purely aesthetic perspective, it is important that we demonstrate how the linguistic, tropological, stylistic choices made by the authors represent the reality that they simultaneously wish to make manifest and conceal. The verbal texture of the poems should occupy the investigative center of our analysis.

Let us first consider some representative examples from the Theragatha and Therigatha. As I hope to demonstrate later, the Therigatha are superior to Theragatha as works of creative literature, as willed art. I shall explain this difference in the latter part of this essay.. The following verse is by monk. The translations are mine. Some years ago I transited a selection of the Therigatha and showed them to the eminent translator and scholar A.K. Ramanujan of the University of Chicago (His translations of classical Tamil poetry are exemplary). He pointed out to me the importance of capturing the inner form of these poems, and that is what I have sought to do. Let us consider a few examples. The following poem is by the monk Godhika.

Incessant rain
Like a tuneful song
My small hut is comfortable,
Well-thatched, protected
From the draught.
And so is my mind
Calm and settled.
Dear sky-god
Go on raining if you wish.

The following poem is by the an anonymous nun :

Sleep well
Little sister
Wearing the dresses
That you yourself have spun.
Your desires
Are quelled
Like wilted vegetables
In a cooking pot.

The following poem is by a monk:

My desires have been
Burned up.
Recurring life
Extinguished.
The incessant journey
From rebirth to rebirth
Is totally undone.
No more renewal of lives.

As one seeks to explore the literary significance of these Buddhist religious verses, a question that presents itself with increasing urgency is the nature of the authorship of these compositions. Were they written by the monks and nuns under whose names they appear? Or were they composed by others and attributed to the respective monks and nuns? Owing to the paucity of evidence one cannot make assertions with any degree of finality on this issue. On the basis of available research on this topic we can surmise that many of the verses were written by the monks and nuns themselves. Some of the nuns who are cited as authors of the poems were well-known historical figures. In some cases, the verses may have been made on the basis of the words of the Buddha, or may have been composed by others and attributed to the monks and nuns.

However, this is an issue that is of greater importance to the literary historian than the literary critic and literary theorist. From the point of view of the literary critic what is important is the nature of the projected literary persona of the writer and the envisaged implied reader. Hence, in this essay, I will be focusing on the literary personae that find articulation in the Theragatha and Therigatha. The bulk of the essay will be devoted to those aspects of Buddhist confessional poetry that should prove to be of interest and value to modern literary sensibility.

Economical

The Theragatha and Theirigatha are, for the most part, economical, compact, and confessional in nature. There is a certain austere compactness in many of them. This confessional impulse emerges with particular force in some of the longer poems contained in the Therigatha. These verses can be characterised as examples of self-writing, self-figuration, that celebrate the joys of renunciation. Having given up worldly and domestic life for a variety of reasons, the monks and nuns whose lives are celebrated in these poems seek the joys of spiritual liberation. The turbulence and misery of the former times are compared with the tranquility and spiritual joy that marks the present moment. Some of the subtler effects of these poems are secured through the deft juxtapositions of the past and present, memory and newness, leading to transformative epiphanies. These monks and nuns write from the cool remove of self-discovery and spiritual illumination.

Any student of literature who turns his or her critical gaze on this corpus of Buddhist self-writing is likely to be struck by a number of interesting features. First the compactness, the economy of expression, that mark many of these poems command our attention. It is indeed true that some of the longer poems, which rise to great heights of self-interrogation and self-validation, are looser in structure. However, the shorter poems, which are mainly declamatory in nature, display tightness of structure and a capacity for disciplined articulation that add to their intended effect. Let us consider one or two examples. The first is by the monk Vitasoka.

I shall shave my hair, I thought
The barber approached me
Taking a mirror
I looked at my body
My body appeared empty
The blackness of ignorance
Was dispelled, and the top-knots of
Desire discarded.
Rebirth is stilled

The Theragatha, and Therigatha are full of striking poetic imagery that gives shape and direction and incisive intensity to the inscribed experience; this is more apparent in the Therigatha. In contradistinction to the mainstream Sanskrit literature the imagery in these Buddhist confessional poems is memorable but not unjustifiably ornate or excessive. It is functionally precise. The idea of self-discipline, which is at the center of the themes of these poems, finds articulation in style, technique and representational strategies of the poems as well. Let us consider a few representative examples .The following poem is by the nun Mutta. The direct address by the poet to herself adds to the dramatic power of the poem.

Mutta, liberated from

Bonds

Like the moon freed from

The clutches of Rahu.

With a freed mind

Without debt

Partake of your food.

The following poem is by a nun named Sangha in which once again she celebrates the joys of renunciation and the bliss of calm

Letting go of my

House,

Having walked out,

Giving up son,

Cattle, and what was closest

Rooting out craving

I have achieved

Stillness.

Another area that merits close consideration is the deployment of poetic symbols as a way of intensifying the experiences recounted and their concomitant emotions. These symbols serve to preserve the economy of expression and evocative power. It is indeed interesting to note the complex ways in which the Buddhist nuns who had renounced worldly life and sought refuge in the tranquillity of both the external and internal worlds respond to nature and its beauties. The encounter with nature is more pronounced in the verses by monks. However, the verses by nuns do contain memorably vivid symbolizations of nature. It seems to me the three central symbols that vivify these poems are forests, rocks and water.( A reader with a Jungian predisposition will have much to comment on this point).

The authors of the Therigatha deploy these symbols as a way of pointing to the inward tranquility that they have achieved or are seeking to achieve. For example , let us consider the symbol of the forest; which conveys to us a sense of mystery and tranquillity, fear and attraction. The fauna and flora associated with the forest radiate a calming influence. As I stated earlier, three of the symbols that are commonly found in these verses are the forest – rock – and water.

Symbolic meaning

There are numerous poems in these two collections that carry a heavy freight of symbolic meaning. Thee poets made use of symbols as a way of imposing an order on their experiences and fashioning a formal compactness. The following poem by the nun Mutta exemplifies this admirably.

I am well released

Truly released

Three crooked things

The mortar

The pestle

And my husband.

I am released from

Birth and death.

The spinner of

Rounds and rounds of being

Has been vanquished.

Very often the authors of the Theragatha and Therigatha secure their effects through dramatic juxtapositions of outward turbulence and inward calm, body and mind, desire and renunciation, chaos and order. These dramatic conjunctions ensure the gaining of a sharper vision of spiritual reality. The following verse is by the monk Chandana.

Decked out in finery

With the entourage of maids

My wife approaches me

Carrying the baby

On her hip.

Gazing at her

Mother of my son

Decked out in finery

Adorned and well- dressed

I recognized her

As a snare

Spread out by Death.

Physiological entity

The topos of the body is central to a proper understanding of the meaning of the Theragatha as well as Therigatha and the poetics that underwrite them. In them, we see how the body is treated not only as a physical object, a physiological entity, but also as a symbolic construct and a site of epistemology that challenges knowledge and perception. It is indeed through the graphic portrayal of the inevitable decay and putrefaction of the body that the compelling need to search out spiritual values is stressed. The general attitude of Buddhism to human body is one of circumspection. In my book ‘Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice’ (State University of New York Press) this aspect is highlighted.

The following poem by nun Abhayamata encapsulates this well. Reading poems such as these, compact as they are, one feels the breath of spiritual powers that shape human destiny.

Mother, from head to foot
Consider this
Unclean
Smelly body.

I have torn out
All passions.
The burning fever has been cooled.
I have achieved stillness,

The Therigatha represents one of the earliest instances of confessional poetry by women. The confessions contained in these poems take place against a background of religion conviction and spiritual imagination. For a confession to take place efficaciously, there should be a confessant and confessor – here I am using these words in their traditional sense where confessant refers to the one who confesses and confessor being the person to whom one confesses. This relationship for example, is very close to the institutionalized confession of the Catholic Church. In the case of Therigatha, when considered as literary texts, what we observe is the way nuns, many of whom obviously suffered domestically or were guilty of various moral infractions, are confessing to a group of religious-minded but also literature-sensitive listeners or readers. Hence, there is difference in the nature and significance of the idea of confession in these Buddhist poems from, say, the confession in the Catholic Church.

A confession is more than an act of self-representation or autobiographical articulation in that it almost always presupposes a community of readers or listeners; this community of readers or listeners presumably upholds the same constellation of values as the confessant thereby making for facile and productive communication. In the case of Buddhist nuns, their confessions are addressed to others like them who have chosen the path of righteousness or realised the value of it. As we noted earlier, for a confession to take place effectively there needs to be a confessant and a group of confessors; in the case of the Buddhist nuns in the Therigatha we know who they are The eminent literary theorist Northrop Frye says that ,’Nearly always some theoretical and intellectual interest in religion, politics or art plays a leading role in the confession.’ As far as the Buddhist nuns - whose confessions are gathered in the Therigatha - are concerned, it is the religious impulse that drives them to their respective self-expositions and self-critiques. Good confessional poems are invariably relational.

Although the Therigatha were originally approached as religious texts (even today there are in many ways regarded as such), we now recognise them as literary texts of great emotional power and artistry. Therefore, in addition to the religious convictions that clearly undergird them, we need to pay attention to the aesthetics of these texts as well. What this means is that we need to recognize that the community of readers posited by these poems is united not only by a common fund of religious beliefs but also by a common reservoir of aesthetic understandings and investments.

Some three decades ago Robert Phillips, in examining the nature of modern confessional poetry came up with sixteen traits that he regarded as being constitutive of confessional poetry. The most important ten among them are the following.

It is highly subjective.
It is an expression of personality, not an escape from it
It is therapeutic and or purgative.
Its emotional content is personal rather than impersonal
It is most often narrative.
It portrays unbalanced, afflicted or alienated protagonists.
It employs irony and understatement for detachment.
It uses the self as a poetic symbol around which is woven a personal mythology.
There are no barriers of subject matter.
There are no barriers between the reader and the poet.

It needs to be said that many of the traits identified by Phillips are, mutatis mutandis, applicable to the verses contained in the Therigatha. However, there are a few that do not accord with the basic imperatives and intentions of these Buddhist confessional poems. I would like to focus on four of them. Phillips says that confessional poetry is an expression of personality and not an escape from it reminding one of some of T.S. Eliot’s formulations on poetry. The notions of selfhood and personality as they relate to Buddhist thinking are complex and intricate and I have chosen to discuss this aspect later in the essay. Similarly, the confessional poetry of Buddhist monks and nuns do not employ irony regularly and overtly as a way of achieving detachment. They use other stratagems to secure this objective.

( To be continued )