Buddhism From a Feminine Paradigm
Over the last years I have explored more deeply practicing and teaching Buddhist meditation from what could be called the feminine paradigm. What do I mean when I say this? We’re not talking about gender even though the language is gendered. We’re not talking about men and women. We’re talking about a way of orienting towards the world from the feminine archetype, a way that embraces embodiment, relationship, intuition, feeling, being, interdependence, and immanence or embeddedness.
It’s important to remember that we all have mixes of what is called masculine and feminine energy. You can also call it yin and yang energy if that’s more comfortable for you. For me it’s important to keep the word feminine in this description because sexism is closely tied to the devaluation of the feminine archetype. At the same time as we see the qualities of the feminine archetype devalued, we also see the devaluation and oppression of women and women’s ways of being.
Why is it important that we emphasize a feminine archetype? This orientation is one that has been increasingly devalued over the last two to five thousand years (depending on how you measure the rise of patriarchy.) During this time we see an increasing emphasis on what is known as a masculine paradigm or yang energy: emphasis on independence, conceptual thinking, doing, goal orientation, and transcendence. While these are useful qualities that we all need, they have become increasingly unbalanced by a lack of valuing and manifesting the feminine archetype, or yin energy. We see this everywhere in the unbalanced and destroyed world around us. This lack of balance manifests as worship of independence and individualism, being out of touch with our environment, focus on getting what we can without concern for others, unbridled predatory capitalism, the destruction of our natural world and planet, income inequality and racial oppression and people being increasingly disembodied and out of touch with intuition and feeling.
We also can see this lack of balance in the Buddhist teachings. The Buddha was born during a time when patriarchy was growing in strength. While I think that it was quite likely that the Buddha himself had very balanced feminine and masculine energies, the Buddhist teachings were primarily preserved in the Theravada lineage for over 2000 years by a male monastic tradition that generally emphasized the more masculine energies. One has to wonder how this transmission influenced what was preserved and how it was preserved. What did we lose in this transmission? What flavor of the teachings got preserved? In the sutras, we see a tendency towards asceticism, transcendence, striving for a goal, and a stronger emphasis on the mind quality of wisdom over the heart quality of compassion. We can see a stark example of this preference of the masculine over the feminine in the dying out of the female monastic lineage, likely due to lack of material support, and in the resistance from traditional quarters to reinstating full monastic recognition to women, citing sexist exclusions in the scriptures to support this resistance.
We can see the tyranny of the lack of balance within ourselves in our endless pursuit of perfectionism, our restlessness and always doing doing doing, wanting more and more, having forgotten how to be, how to relax. We may find ourselves unconsciously doing our meditation practice from internalized patriarchal conditioning, resulting in over-efforting, controlling our experience, and struggling to obtain transcendent blissful states.
Many of us are looking to reclaim the power, beauty, and gentleness of the feminine archetype within, no matter what our gender identification is.
For most of us are hearts and minds have been thoroughly colonized by patriarchy as the dominant cultural energy in this country and increasingly in the world, and we know we need balance, we need to reclaim our ability for feeling deeply, for embodied wisdom, for sensing the sacredness in this very world.
Both the Buddhist teachings and our dominant cultural paradigm need to shift towards the feminine. In fact, I think it’s the only thing that might save us as a species and save our planet from destruction. The Buddhist teachings can offer us a way to strengthen the qualities that we need and we’re going to need in this world, the qualities of feeling and embodiment and attention to our environment around us.
First we need to learn how to arrive in our bodies, in our sense experience, not so easy to do in our mind-oriented dominant culture. We need to learn how to connect to what we feel in a balanced way. We need to let wisdom emerge from a place of intuition and heart. We need to arrive here and let transcendence come from within this world of form.
Through sense embodiment and deep connection with life as it unfolds, the contractions that bind us have space to dissolve. This grants our hearts and minds the freedom to come into intimate connection with ourselves, other people, animals, plants, and all life. From this abiding presence, we respond to life’s challenges with greater understanding and compassion.
