Om Mane Padme Hum
Similar Posts
Kate Swift, Inherent Sexism in Language, and the Bhagavad Gita
When I read Kate Swift’s obituary yesterday, it lead me to think more deeply about a recent conversation I had about the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita, not surprisingly, is required reading for most yoga teachers. It is an integral part of the history and philosophy of yoga thought and practice. It is, though, about a battle in the middle of war, in a time and place where a woman’s highest and best (and arguably only role in life) is to be obedient first to parents and then to husband. Purity, obedience, and beauty (as decided by society) are the great virtues of women. As a dialogue between a male warrior (Arjuna) and a male incarnation of the deity (Krishna), all of the spiritual and social teachings are presented in terms of men and males, right down to the pronouns. The translation that was being discussed was that by Juan Mascaro. As a mid-twentieth century translation by a Spaniard at Cambridge University who has lectured on “Literary and Spiritual Values in the Authorized Version of the Bible,” the translation no doubt perpetuates (without any specific or willful intention to do so) the inherent sexism that is also found in the English language and in the Bible and its notion of God.
The question raised was how a book that perpetuates sexist stereotypes could be required reading to be a yoga teacher. (See my previous blog entry on how we, as yoga teachers, can rely on a book that is primarily about war.) How would it read, it was suggested, if all the pronouns in the Gita were changed from he to she? The person raising the question said that making this change made the spiritual guidance more accessible to her. For me, shifting the pronouns from male to female does not address the challenge because I do not believe in spirit that can be given gender. I read the Gita and other yoga texts in two ways: (1) as historical and literary/philosophical documents that are products of the author’s time and place in history; and (2) as a source of universal human truths. The Gita, as a dialogue between a warrior and a male avatar of “God,” does not have much place in the ideals I hold dear. Neither the caste system nor the roles for women espoused in the text support my own beliefs about equality, justice, fairness, or love. The extraordinary teachings of yoga, though, transcend the history out of which they arose. To do justice to the yoga texts — and not just the yoga texts, but the great teachings and texts that are an integral part of our social fabric — we must both recognize their historical context and be open to learning what has transcended history and cultural boundaries to make them living words.
In attempting to make the shift to a modern interpretation that allows for “feminism,” I know many who try to address some of the challenge for modern readers by saying that we all have characteristics of the masculine and the feminine, and so we can read the guidance in the texts as being valid for both sexes. The problem I have with that is Kate Swift’s point. If we label various personality traits and characteristics as being elementally male or female, we are still perpetuating sexism through linguistic bias. It is not enough for me to make the warrior female and allow her “male” characteristics. What I think is that all human characteristics are gender neutral. If the teachings are not to be biased when we as teachers transmit our reflections on the texts to our students (after recognizing how history has done it), then we need to say that all people can be assertive or passive, strong or sweet, rigorous or soft, etc, but not just say that some are masculine and some are feminine and that in having all of these traits to some degree, we are showing that we are both god and goddess, masculine and feminine.
Or we could just not do any labeling at all, instead concentrating on the truly universal yoga teachings of right action, selfless service, and deep abiding love–none of which have anything to do with gender.
Becky Agitated (by minor disruption)
I am having my bedroom painted over the holiday break. Yesterday, I took all of the pictures off of the walls, moved most of the other furniture into other rooms, and rolled up the rugs in the hallways. The room is in the middle of the plastering and sanding stage and is filled with the painter’s tools, and so, the door is shut.
Becky only has two places she likes to be for most of the day: on the bed in the bedroom and on the sofa in the living room. When I meditate in the morning and then write in my journal, I sit in the living room. I used to try to sit in the yoga studio, but after her sister passed away, Becky howled until I sat in the living room with her. Becky now will fetch me to the living room if I do not go to meditate right after I have fed her. This morning, she woke me up early because the bed was not in the right place, and she was not happy that the bedroom door was closed. When I went to sit after feeding her, she stomped back and forth, instead of coming to sit with me. When at first I did not pay attention to her, she got more agitated. I finally got up to check on her. She raced up the stairs to be outside the shut bedroom door. I picked her up and brought her back to the living room to sit with me. I pet her until she relaxed. Once she had been shown that her morning sitting place was still there, I was able to sit in meditation without disturbance for 25 minutes.
Our own minds are like that. If there has been a disturbance in our routine that ripples our mind waves, whether it is celebration or upset, small or large, it can feel very challenging to meditate. If our thoughts continue to be in a whirl while we are sitting, we need to just bring our thoughts back to the mind space of meditation over and over again, just as I had to remind Becky our sitting place was still undisturbed even though her daytime sleep spot was disrupted. The more we practice, the easier it becomes to shift to an inner place of peace and light. The less often we allow changes in routine to disrupt our practice, the stronger we become in the face of challenges.
My Top Yoga-Related Reads of 2010
These are not in any particular order. Nor have I attempted to make a list of round numbers, such as “top 10,” though I could have found 10 to be “top” if I had really tried. The emphasis here, with the exception of the new edition of the Yoga Sutras is my continuing contemplation and study of the intertwining of east and west and how it has created, informed, and shaped my studies and teaching over the years. There is an emerging body of scholarship on this topic, and this list has the highlights I have read. I have put one book of older fiction on the list. I have consistently made it a practice to read modern Indian literature to gain another perspective on Indian society other than the westernized yoga we practice. Here’s the list.
1. Ram Das, Be Love Now. Be Love Now is a beautiful expanding spiral of reflection from what started in Be Here Now. I got my first copy of Be Here Now when I was 13 or 14, not long after it was first published. I learned about it from friends at Quaker Youth camp, and it was a not insignificant part of my youthful spiritual thought and growth. Be Love Now is full of love and sweetness and a wonderful reflection on the relationship of a spiritual leader to his guru. For those of us for whom Be Here Now was an important book early on, I think it is a wonderful opportunity to reflect on our own spiritual path and studies. When I was reading it, I wondered whether Be Love Now, which seems to assume a certain basic level of understanding of yoga philosophy terms and readings and familiarity with a group of modern teachers and practitioners, would feel less accessible to someone who was moved by Be Here Now in their younger days, but never really followed up with the practices or studies advocated except on a most ethereal level.
2. Robert Love, The Great Oom. I found this biography of Pierre Bernard absolutely fascinating. I have long been interested in the interrelationship between colonialism and Western practice of eastern spirituality and religion. This book highlights a previously unexplored aspect of the relationship between east and west. Of note for me, was that Pierre Bernard, though clearly an important influence on the practice of hatha yoga in America, did not himself travel to India.
3. Louis Bromfeld, The Rains Came. This is the only book on my list that was not published in 2009 or 2010. It is also not a yoga book. Although dated in some respects, it is a deeply engaging exploration of how Westerners (both religiously inspired do-gooders and colonial profiteers) and Indians (Hindus, Muslims, and Christians) collectively react to, respond, and in part cause the extremes of catastrophe in the wake of monsoon flooding. All too timely in its own way as we watched what happened with the flooding in Pakistan. I think of it as yoga-related because it provides perspective on the intertwining of religion, community, and society with colonization, which I think is an essential part of our understanding of our own western practice of hatha yoga and eastern styles of meditation.
4. Mark Singleton, The Yoga Body: Origins of Modern Posture Practice. My friend Jane — fellow yogini and ever intelligent conversationalist on yoga philosophy and practice, and frequent commenter on this blog — lent me this book to read after we had been talking about our reactions to The Great Oom. It’s a bit of a tough read, as is common for dissertations turned into books, but it provides fresh perspective and interesting research and insights on our modern physical practice of yoga and, yes, still more information on the dance between east and west.
5. Edwin Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary. I haven’t read this through cover to cover, as that is not the point for books like this, but I have been dipping in and out of this translation and commentary from the moment I got it and expect to be doing so for years to come. The scholarship and perspective is an excellent supplement the many translations and interpretations of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras that I already have in my library.
6. Stephen Phillips, Yoga, Karma, and Rebirth: A Brief History and Philosophy. I bought this book several months ago after having overheard Dave Kennedy mentioning it to John Friend. I am still working my way through it. Like Singleton’s book, it is another slow read, but useful in its tying together and giving perspective on the relationship between traditional eastern thought and western practice and understanding.
It Takes a Snowflake
It is almost inconceivable to my limited mind how many snowflakes it took to whiten our world yesterday morning. This weekend, there will be far more snow (alas, it will be too cold to stick to the trees and create such a beautiful canopy; instead we will have howling winds and heavy going). I might catch the first of the snowflakes tomorrow morning on my walk to work before the storm really comes in with all its wild fury. When there are only a few, it is easy to see the individual flakes. Once there is a storm, though, we tend only to see the storm.
Just as it is hard to remember that the snow is about both each individual flake and the whole snow fall together, we forget about the simultaneous place of ourselves as individuals as part of the whole, or we get caught up witnessing ourselves as individuals and forget that we are all a part of a much vaster energy. The reality is that we are all both all of the time — we are completely individual and part of a vast, interconnected web. When we can remember and witness both aspects of ourselves, then we can most deeply witness, participate in, and appreciate the extraordinariness of being.
