Professor and scholar Vanessa R. Sasson talks with Parul Pandya about her fictionalized account of the often overlooked story of the Buddha’s wife. It is through her eyes that the reader witnesses the transformation of Siddhārtha Gautama, from pampered prince to the journey that will end in Buddhahood, all the while portraying the fabulist and magical touches that call back to the tradition of the age as well as showing the confined roles that women played “behind the scenes.” Vanessa R. Sasson is a professor of Religious Studies in the Liberal and Creative Arts and Humanities Department at Marianopolis College, Quebec. She is also a Research Fellow for the International Institute for Studies in Race, Reconciliation and Social Justice at the University of the Free State in South Africa, as well as Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Religious Studies of McGill University, Montreal. As a scholar, her focus is on Buddhist studies, with particular emphasis on hagiography, gender and childhoods. Vanessa’s published books include The Birth of Moses and the Buddha: A Paradigm for the Comparative Study of Religions, and the edited volumes Little Buddhas: Children and Childhoods in Buddhist Texts and Traditions and imagining the Fetus: The Unborn in Myth, Religion and Culture. The host of this episode is Parul Pandya. Parul has been working in non-profit in various roles through the past decade, including as a community builder, consultant, programmer and producer. She specializes in using arts for social change. After finishing managing in community granting for the largest government funder in Canada, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, she began her own consulting practice, Community Impact Non-Profit Consulting, which enables community engagement and equitable innovation. She is also a Queer South Asian freelance writer/poet, and has worked for various activist causes for over a decade. She has a deep passion for ethics and social justice, which she also teaches at Centennial College.
Books by Vanessa Sasson
Yasodhara: A Novel about the Buddha’s Wife
Other Related Materials
Stars at Dawn: Forgotten Stories of Women in the Buddha’s Life
Music is by The Worst Pop Band Ever
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations features curated discussions and interviews with some of today’s best-known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library’s 100 branches.
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Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations
Vanessa Sasson and The Buddha’s Wife
Gregory McCormick: Welcome to Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations, our regular Toronto Public Library podcast series featuring curated discussions and interviews with some of today’s best-known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library’s 100 branches.
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[applause]
Parul Pandya (PP): So before we get started today, we're actually gonna start a little bit backwards than maybe some of the events that maybe you have been to before, which is I'd like to invite Vanessa to introduce the book, tell us a little about those who perhaps have not had the opportunity to read the book yet. And then from there perhaps, inviting her to read a page or two from the novel, just to get a sense of the flow and the feel of the book. So I'll turn it over to Vanessa.
Vanessa Sasson (VS): Thank you for being here. I'm really touched and I'm very grateful that you're all here. I'm particularly touched that I have a special guest; my sister flew in from New York, which I just discovered, so I'm a little shaken by that, so...
[applause]
VS: It's a bit of a surprise. So I'll try to do a good job of this and not get all weepy. [chuckle] So I'll tell you a little bit about the book. I don't know if I can read with the microphone at the same time, we'll see how that works. But I have been studying Buddhism for 20-odd years, I don't actually know how many, and I have been specializing on the Buddha's hagiography, so his life story as it's narrated in early sources, looking at early Chinese and Sanskrit, Nepali and Tibetan texts, whatever I can find that talks about his life story. I'm fascinated by it, it doesn't end, there's so many versions of it, it changes. Wherever the story is told, it's told differently.
VS: And over the years, obviously, if you read about the Buddha's life story, you discover he has a wife, which seems to miss a lot of people's radar is that somehow he's always the figure, and we forget that there was a wife. And she was there for a very long time, so she's not like she's there for five minutes, he's like a token wedding, and then he leaves her. She's there for lifetimes. This is one of the things that I've started kinda creating an academic argument about this, that I wanna say that the Buddha and his wife is actually an eternal love story, something that we don't have in Western literature, because it's a love story that they keep coming back to each other, lifetime after lifetime. It's very beautiful and very romantic, but we don't tend to think about Buddhism as having that kind of a quality. So I wanted to bring that quality out and to kinda give her a voice, and tell her story, and recognize that there was a woman by his side.
VS: So you know that they say, "Behind every great man, there's a woman." She was not behind him, she was next to him for lifetimes, and we have missed that narrative. Not everywhere in the world; there are Buddhist countries that are very conscious of her existence and have stories and poems and songs in her voice. But the most common thing that people say to me when they encounter the book is, "I didn't know the Buddha had a wife." That's the most common thing that I get, and I'm sure a lot of you have had that same experience. It's totally fine, she's not really given much a voice. So this book is a way of giving her a voice.
VS: Her story has a lot of sadness to it because she's left behind. He goes off and he becomes the Buddha, and he's praised and celebrated and he's Mr. Buddha, and everyone remembers him, and there are statues of him all over the world 2,500 years later, and temples dedicated to him. He's got a lot of attention. But she was there and she got left behind, and this is after lifetimes of being beside him. So the loss is particularly pronounced because she was with him lifetime after lifetime and then in the last lifetime, he walks away. So there's a sense of utter betrayal of, "How could you leave me behind? Why won't you take me with you? Why can't we do this together? How come you had to do this by yourself?" And that's one of the unanswered questions of the story. I mean, there's obviously a Buddhist answer to the question, but on some level I think there isn't, 'cause why didn't he take her with him? Why did he have to just break it there?
VS: So he leaves her, he becomes the Buddha. So he was a prince in a kingdom, if you don't know the story, and has a very kind of fairy tale life, protected in his palace, never see suffering. And then one day, encounters suffering and realizes, "I have to get out of here." And he runs away. And he runs away so fast, he doesn't even say goodbye to her. He waits 'til she's fallen asleep, the day she's given birth to her son, his son, and looks at her... According to one text, "He stares at her through the room on the threshold," he won't even step into the room. He just stands on the threshold, and he looks at his sleeping wife with a newborn son and he thinks to himself, "If I pick up my son, she will wake up and then I can't leave." And to me, that is the most romantic moment of all. 'Cause it's not, "I can't wake up my son 'cause I don't wanna wake up a newborn." It's, "I don't want her to wake up 'cause then I can't go." And he doesn't explain why but to me, there's something very beautiful about that, that somehow if he wakes her up, all the courage will be gone. That's how I read it anyway. There's obviously alternative interpretations, but I like that one.
VS: So [chuckle] he can't, he can't say... He can't walk away from her, so he has to leave when she's asleep. And so he gallops off and goes to do his training in the woods, and he leaves her behind. And what's so extraordinary is that the early literature is full of stories and poems and songs of her absolute anguish when she wakes up the next day and she finds out he's gone. "How could he do this to me?" And so she's alone in the palace with her in-laws, royal in-laws, not... [chuckle] You have in-laws and then you have royal in-laws. [chuckle] And if you know anything about South Asian literature, there's a trope there. So she's got the serious in-laws, and she's alone, left behind. And in South Asian tradition, when a man becomes a renunciant, the wife is a widow. It's a social death, he's officially gone, it's finished, he can't ever come back. And so now she's a widow, and she has to give up her bangles, and she has to remove the parting in her hair, and she has to remove all of her beautiful clothes, and she has to wear white, and she's a widow. And she's left behind, but he's alive, and she's a widow with her son.
VS: And then, seven years later, once he's achieved Buddhahood, he comes back, and he's the Buddha, and it's fabulous. We have a Buddha, everyone's excited, the cosmos is excited, flowers fall from the heavens, the gods are... Everybody's excited, the whole universe is excited except for her. And he comes back to the palace, and she refuses to come see him. Everyone else in the palace comes to see him, and she stays back, and she says, "If he wants to see me, he's gonna have to come see me himself." So she's still the wife. And she said, what he did was wrong. And so she stays in her room, and she knows him because he comes [chuckle] to her room. So he knocks on her door and he shows up, and it's the only person that he will go see personally. And so he goes to see her, like a husband entering her private room, as though he's still her husband in some way. And he greets her as the husband, but as the Buddha. So there's a... The bonds between the two of them is very profound, it's very beautiful, and there's something very romantic and also quite sad, because it's all about this loss.
VS: And then, the worst thing happens is he tells her, "Well, so I'm back. I'm the Buddha, and I'm gonna take our son now." His son is seven years old, or eight years old, depending on the text you read, it doesn't matter. And he says, "It's time. My son has asked me, 'Where's my inheritance, what happens to my life? Are you the king, are you not the king? What happens now that you are back?'" And he says, "If you want your inheritance, I will shave your head, that's your inheritance. What you receive is the teachings, that's what I have left to give you." So he tells her, "I'm gonna take our son with me." And so she loses, again. Her life is like a stripping away of loss after loss after loss. And he goes and he becomes the Buddha, and she has to figure out how to live with that. So he takes the son.
VS: So the piece that I thought I would read to you is the Prologue. I open the book with her having to say goodbye to her son, which to me... And this is... Something that really struck me is so many texts will point to the fact that there is this tradition of him taking the son; it's a universal aspect of his hagiography. I have not yet seen one text that describes the moment of goodbye between her and him, where she says goodbye to her son. And to me, that's... I interpret things very romantically, but I'm convinced that what that means is that the authors of the tradition couldn't bear it. That this is really a very sad story, and the authors of the tradition know this. They're sensitive to this because they have depicted a very sad story, but there are some scenes that they actually just point to but never draw out. So this scene, I had to imagine myself because I had no text to build on. I just knew it happened but I had to write it out for myself, I couldn't copy anything.
VS: So I'll read to you just a portion of it. It's when... The book opens, and she's in her room, and she's devastated, and she's crying with her maid servant, they have a very intimate friendship, her and her maid servant. And she's angry at him and she says, "How could he keep doing this to me? He keeps taking everything away from me, what kind of a husband is this?" She's really angry. And so she's expressing her outrage, and her fear, and her emotion, and she's sad, it's all of the emotions under the sun. And then finally, her maid servant says, "But you can't fall apart because your son needs you now. So this is what's gonna happen, you have to go downstairs and say goodbye." She doesn't have any choice. So the scene I'll read to you, if I can manage this, is when she says goodbye.
VS: "I walked carefully down the rounded marble staircase that led to the great hall. My trembling had subsided, but I was still a bit uncertain. I held the golden handrail with one hand and I lifted my robes with the other so as not to slip. When I reached the bottom, I exhaled. I could see bodies milling around in the courtyard ahead, men dressed in orange rags, moving around silently, ochre-colored shadows. I adjusted my braid one more time, smoothed down my white wrap, tightened my sash, and crossed the great hall to the courtyard with one objective in mind: To find my son.
VS: He was sitting by himself, by the edge of the lotus pool. 'How are you, darling?' I asked, as I sat down beside him. He didn't look up. His fingers were trailing through the water in between the flowers. A flock of blackbirds tore through the darkening sky, chasing the Moon like lost souls. He didn't notice them either. The servants would start lighting the oil lamps and then everything will be different.
VS: 'Sweetheart?' No response. 'Rāhula,' I whispered, as I placed my hand on the softness of his neck. 'Please look at me.' He trailed his fingers a little while longer, making pathways through the water. A frog watched him from the safety of a lotus leaf. Eventually, he looked up. His beautiful eyes were filled with emotions as he cannot speak aloud. I wanted to fall into them. My mind fled into the past without permission as images of him from over the years paraded before my eyes. When had he grown so tall? I placed the lock of hair behind his ear, as I had done so many times before. But then I recoiled at the realization that soon, his hair would be shaved. He would be so different. He wouldn't really be my son anymore.
VS: 'How are you feeling, sweetheart?' I asked, as I attempted to put the thoughts aside. He shrugged, 'I'm alright.' 'Are you ready?' 'I guess so.' He turned towards the water again. 'Sweetheart, it's alright to be a little bit scared right now. You don't have to be so brave.' He looked up at me. 'You know, I'm scared, too.' At these words, all of his restraint melted, and he threw himself into my arms. 'Oh, Mother, I am scared. I don't want to go.' He sobbed against my neck. He was trembling, just as I had been. Every fibre in my being wanted to scoop him up and run away, run from the men in orange robes who were forcing us into this separation. Run from the world that dictated such realities and called them wisdom. My baby was crying, and I wanted to make his tears go away. I inhaled the sweet smell of him. I would have renounced the whole world to be able to hold on to him, but I would not renounce his future to satisfy my desires. Slowly, ever so carefully, I pulled us apart.
VS: 'My most beautiful, sweetheart', I whispered, 'I'm so sad, I cannot imagine living without you. But I won't hold you back, it's time for you to find your life.' 'But I want to be with you', he exclaimed. 'I know, I want that too, but you will be with your father, he will take good care of you.' He looked past at me to where the men were, his father sitting straight and elegant at the center. 'I don't even know him', he objected. 'You will learn to know him.' 'What if he doesn't like me?' 'Oh, that my darling, is one thing I know you don't have to worry about,' I said with a confident smile. 'You are impossible not to love, my beautiful Rāhula. And your father is a good man, you will see.' He wiped his tears, which I knew was a good sign. 'But what if I never see you again, Mother?' He asked, as he voiced an all too familiar fear. 'I believe we will see each other again, darling. But if anything happens,' I stumbled against the words, 'Well, then I will see you in the next life. We will never be lost to each other, Rāhula, don't ever forget that.' Men in orange robes approached, 'Are you ready, young master?' Asked one of them. Rāhula searched my face, looking for permission. 'He is ready,' I answered for him."
PP: Thanks, Vanessa. I think that... It's a perfect way to start our conversation today. And it just so happens that it's at the beginning of the novel as well. So for folks who haven't had a chance to read the novel yet, you get the memory of remembering Vanessa, reading that to you as you get started. So one of the thought... One of the things that fascinated me, Vanessa, is that, you weaved together your knowledge as a scholar, as well as that of fabulism, as well as the complexity of telling human stories that connect with all of us. How did you manage and what struck you perhaps, as the most important, in terms of telling the story when it came to speaking towards journey and the concept of journey, both as her journey as an individual, but as to that point, you've spoken about of how she was so pivotal in influencing what... Who eventually became the Buddha?
VS: It's a good question. [chuckle] I don't know. I was conscious of a lot of things and other things, I think I was just letting myself go, which was a really exciting thing to do 'cause you never do that as a scholar. You are always just very, very precise and kind of organized about your arguments, which is very important. But there was definitely a piece of me that was just kinda letting go and kind of having the journey with her. I knew that she had to get through it. That was clear to me. The tradition is very clear about it. So she has this story of loss. Her loss is so profound that in Sri Lanka, to give you an example, of how beautiful this emotion is, is that in Sri Lanka, in some villages, still today, her songs are sung at funerals. It's part of funeral liturgy. Because who better to know what loss is, than her? So the sense of loss was really important to engage with and to feel and to carry and to hold. But the tradition is also clear that at the end of her life, she also leaves the palace and she goes into the forest to find the Buddha and she follows the teachings and she becomes... It's like a happily ever after. After all of this loss, there's this sense of like, "Oh, but then at the end, everything's okay." And she becomes a nun and she becomes awakened and she achieves all the realizations that everyone else does.
VS: It's a little unconvincing, the way the tradition does it because they spend so much time on her loss and then this kind of... You know, it's like Job. If you know the biblical book of Job, it's just this kind of spontaneous and then everything's okay. And what the tradition doesn't do often in the literature, is carry you through from the loss to the awakening. So that was really important to me is that I needed to figure out if that's how the tradition tells the story, even if they don't do the middle part, I need to do the middle part. I needed to figure out how she gets to the point where she's ready to go find awakening because that's her story. So I had to fill in a lot of blanks.
VS: And so one of the things that I did in the book is, I wanted to be really careful, and that's the scholar in me that still came out, despite my creativity here is that, as I wrote the book... I wrote the book and then at the end, I did a whole section of notes. I can't write without putting end notes, apparently. And so there's end notes, and one of my friends, who's an author, made fun of me. He said, "Who puts end notes in a book, like, in a novel?" I did. [chuckle] So there's like 30 pages of end notes but they're there, chapter-by-chapter so that for people who really wanna understand how much did I make up and how much belongs to the tradition, I go through every chapter and I say "This scene comes from here. This scene, I made up. This scene comes from here. This doesn't exist in the tradition, but was inspired by another Indian story." So that you can see the trajectory of what I did. So you don't have to guess or kinda scratch your head or do 20 years of research, but you can just follow the end notes.
VS: And then I'm very transparent also. "This is what I created, and this is where at I was following." And so I think it gives readers a sense of the tradition. Some of it's from my imagination but a lot of it is from the literature. And it was nice to engage with the literature that way and share it to remind people, "Look at this beautiful literature. Look at this story of this woman. It's there. It's 2,500 years old and it was there and it was written by male authors, almost all of it. And these male authors were sensitive to her loss." So there's something about that that I find very beautiful also. Did I answer your question?
PP: Yeah, that's great.
VS: I mean, I just talked but I don't know if I answered your question. [chuckle]
PP: It's all good. Yeah, no, absolutely. In fact, you gave me quite a nice segue into my next question, which has a little bit to do with actually your process, your writing process. And you have given us some explanation of how you went about it and the end notes, and so on. But I wanted to know a little about how did you find balance in the sense of keeping traditional writing alive, fabulism, which for folks who are not familiar, is the form of magic realism in literature in which fantastical elements are placed into everyday settings. And then also, your own voice. Because I found, there was lots of layers to this novel in terms of those three very unique standpoints. How did you find balance in that in your writing process?
VS: Well, the fabulism is Buddhist. I didn't make that up either. There's... I think in the West, we have a lot of expectations that Buddhism is really reasonable. I've had friends tell me, "Oh, you know, other religions are like religious, people walk on water and stuff. But Buddhism, that's a logical tradition." These are Western expectations. They're things that we want to believe about the tradition, we want it to be a philosophy, not a religion. So we've edited out a lot of aspects of it. But you go to any Buddhist country and the fabulism and the... You didn't call it fabulism. I'm calling it fabulism. What did you call it?
PP: Fabulism.
VS: Fabulism. Yes, fabulism. Pardon me, yes.
PP: I'm calling it fabulism, yeah.
VS: Yes, well, it's the same. [chuckle] It's all over the tradition. Gods talk to the Buddha, and they fall from the sky and magical things happen and the Buddha gives a teaching where he creates this... It's one of my favorite scenes, it's not in the book though, where he creates this magical, jewelled walkway in the sky, he's in a competition with these heretics and these heretics are sure that they're more amazing than he is. And so he's like, "No, I'll show you." And so they make water move in a special way and make a pot fly up on a ladder and he's like, "Yeah." And he makes this ladder made out of jewels and he puts it up in the sky and it's the length of the cosmos. And he walks along this jewelled walkway that he's created in the sky and he just goes back and forth, and he teaches the tradition from up in the top of the universe and all the gods come. And then he decides, he needs a debate partner so he makes a double of himself. And so he puts one of him here, and you don't know which one is which anymore, and he's debating with himself in these jewels, up in the sky that's the length of the cosmos.
VS: I mean, the magical realism, that is Buddhism is so breathtaking and sensuous and delightful. And we've eliminated a lot of that in our quest for something philosophical and reasonable. We've missed all of the senses that Buddhism is so engaged in. So I wanted to actually put more of that in the book, but it was a struggle because she was so human to me and I didn't know how to then add... So I have a few gods that pop up every once in a while. Magical things happen. But I think I didn't do even remotely enough, if I'm going to really marry myself to the tradition in that sense. But that was an important piece, is that fabulism as a tradition.
PP: Awesome, thank you. So whether it was intentional or unintentional, for me, when I read through your novel, there was clearly a feminist angle in the way you approach writing your female... Your characters, specifically your female characters, whether it's Yesodhara or her mothers before her. While these women are subject to a woman's place within their households or in relation to society, for example, or their culture. And obviously, there's this dichotomy of the relationship with her husband who eventually becomes a Buddha. They're also portrayed as pushing boundaries. Slowly but surely, they do so. So what most impresses you about her in terms of her resilience and her adaptability?
VS: Well, the pushing boundaries, to me, seemed natural, probably 'cause that's my temperament. So I was just projecting, but not really though. I figure, this was my logic: If they're married for lifetimes, if she is the wife of the great being, lifetime after lifetime, this is how he's described in the tradition, he is the great being, he's the greatest in the whole of like 10,000 cosmos. The imagination of Buddhism is tremendous and of all the beings in the 10,000 universes, he is the greatest. That's the Buddhist narrative. Well then, she's... And she's with him all the time, and she must be his match. That's... I can't imagine anything... Otherwise, he would have chosen someone else, or he would have had 50 different wives or... She wouldn't be such a present character, but she's always there. The fact that we don't look at her is a separate issue, but the narrative is that she's there. So if he's the greatest being of all the universes and she's there with him, she must be great. And if he's going to be great by pushing the boundaries of his community, and his tradition, which is what Buddhism does in his context, well then, doesn't she do the same thing? So she has to be.
VS: So then she has to push the boundaries of what it is to be a woman and what the limitations are. And so she has discussions about perceived notions of pollution in women, with her mother, in the book. And her mother is the first to really push those boundaries with her because if she's going to be great, she has to have a great mother. So it just seemed... I'm just like, "There, off we go." So I just felt like the women characters had to be just as fantastic as the male characters, if they're equal. And I think she was his equal. That's my conclusion after all of this work, it had to be.
PP: Thanks, Vanessa. So obviously, Buddhism is one of the world's most sacred traditional religions. Was there... Did you feel any pressure around telling this story? And if so, how did that play out? And again, in your process, and how did you respect that in terms of allowing it to unfold and moving beyond that to get to this final amazing product?
VS: Yeah, there was definitely pressure. One of the reasons the book wasn't published in North America is that, I kept getting the same rejection letter over and over again. I was rejected 26 times, I think. It might have been more, but I think I stopped at 26, I'm not sure. And the rejection letters I kept getting was, "Oh, this is beautiful. I didn't know the Buddha had a wife. I don't think there's a market for this." It was just the same thing over and over again. So then somebody said to me, in the publishing industry, "Look, you are gonna have to put some sex in there." [laughter] And I said, "Oh, nope. [chuckle] I'm gonna become her but there's a limit to how much my imagination is gonna go, and there's a place I'm not going and that's it." And part of it is, personally, I didn't wanna do that, I had no desire to go there. To me, it was upsetting. I thought, "That's... Somehow it felt disrespectful for me to do that." But I also thought, "It's not respectful to the tradition. Nobody... That's not right."
VS:And so, there was definitely... I had a perpetual sense of awareness that this tradition means a lot to a lot of people, and there was no part of me that wanted to become the Salman Rushdie of Buddhism and wanted to hurt the tradition by being dramatic, so I can get a big sale and... I didn't want that. So I was very conscious, I really wanted to tell the tradition as best as I could, as close to the heart of the tradition as I understood it. That was very, very important to me. But what's interesting is that certain Buddhist countries, like everywhere else in the world, are veering towards fundamentalism. And even these most beautiful, sensuous traditions of the two of them being married and being together, this now is being rejected. And so, there's a Puritanism that is happening in certain Buddhist countries that wasn't there 50 years ago.
VS: And a very good friend of mine who is a very senior monastic in a Buddhist country, I'll leave it like that, was very upset with me and she has two PhDs and she's one of the most senior monastics in her country. Actually no, she is the senior monastic in her country. And she sat me down one day and she said, "Vanessa, if you are going to do this, she can't be sad." And I said, "What? What do you mean she can't be sad? Of course she's sad." And she said, "No, she was very happy when he left because she was supporting his renunciation and she was proud to be by his side." And I said, "But you know that's not the tradition." She goes, "It doesn't matter. That's what you must write or you are gonna get into a lot of trouble." And I thought about that for a long time, that what I think is a beautiful respect of the tradition is not what everybody is going to agree with.
VS: So I had those ideas playing in my head a lot, and I had to think about it a lot and I had to be very conscious and I had to make judgment calls, but I didn't want to censor the tradition 'cause I think it's beautiful. So I wanted to engage with it and at one point, I just let go and I did it. But the boundaries were something I was always thinking about because when you talk about religions, you have to know... You have to understand what this means, so it's not a carte blanche. There was a... At the end of the day, you still write and what happens, happens. So I didn't censor but I did think at every step of the way, that much is for certain.
PP: I can imagine. There must have been lots of thought and process given to this because the fact of the matter is, the stories that we usually consider historically passed down are usually from the narrative of men as well. So lots of things to take into consideration and lots of different angles. So...
VS: If I could just add...
PP: Yeah, please of course.
VS: A really obvious angle is I'm white. I don't know if anyone noticed.
[laughter]
VS: But that's something to think about, too is that this tradition means a lot to me, it's a tradition that I've spent most of my life engaged with, it's personal to me, and I love it, and I've given my life to it in so many ways. But I cannot imagine... I cannot write this book in a vacuum of imagining that there isn't a history of Orientalism and of abuse and of imposition from White cultures to South Asian cultures to East Asian cultures and re-appropriation. So that was also like, it was a really important part of my factoring. Like, how much... I had to think about it a lot. I had to... And it's not even as though a conclusion ever is reached, there's just... I had to know what I was doing and think about it at every step and be sensitive to what I was doing, and to what the identity politics of it could be, and all of that. So that was a question, too, that I wrestled with at all... And at the end of the day, I thought, "But I have this in me to write, so I want to write it."
VS: The other issue was my historical awareness, that Buddhism travels all over the world. And everywhere it goes, it creates a new literature. So when Buddhism traveled from India to Sri Lanka in the third century BC, it became Sri Lankan. And all of a sudden, you have this entire Sinhalese library that develops around it and Poly literature; all of this develops where Buddhism becomes Sinhalese, very profoundly, and there's this whole literature that comes out of it, and the story's told from that perspective. Then it moves to China and it becomes Chinese, and the whole tradition gets re-told again, but from a Chinese perspective; the whole new library that gets developed. It moves to Japan and Vietnam and Korea and Thailand and Laos and Cambodia. It was in Afghanistan; it was everywhere. And at each step of the way, Buddhism reinvents itself. So that historical awareness was part of what gave me the permission to say that there is an invitation in Buddhism to keep re-imagining it.
VS: So I have to be aware of what I look like and what I might represent in certain places and times, but there was also a historical understanding that this is what Buddhism does. Everywhere it moves, it re-invents itself. And so this is a new voice, a Western voice of trying to engage with a very old story, just as it was done over and over again, generation before generation. But all of these are things that I was conscious about, I was never writing it as though everything's allowed. And it was a thought process.
PP: Awesome, thank you. So we very much get to see the influence that... Who becomes the Buddha has with his wife, and then how it affects her in the sense of a lot of the suffering and strife, and some of the obstacles that she has to go through in terms of her growth as a woman and as a human being. Do you feel that she had an influence that ultimately gave him the courage and the perspective to transform into the Buddha? How do you feel that worked in the other way? We obviously get that sense of her journey, but do you think that she played a pivotal role in terms of influencing his transformation into the Buddha?
VS: I hope so.
[chuckle]
PP: How so?
VS: I don't know. [chuckle] But I imagine if she's always there, she must matter. So I have her... So one of the things that the tradition doesn't do in his life story is record that many conversations between the two of them, except... There are a few exceptions. But I inserted her into scenes that were really important in his life 'cause I imagined that they would have talked about them, that they would have engaged in them if she was always there. Now, it's possible that she was in the harem and was never really talking to him; there's a way of interpreting the tradition that way. But if she was there lifetime after lifetime, I had to imagine that at one point, he sat down and talked to her and said, "I had this thought, what do I do with it?" If he doesn't want to wake her up when he's leaving, my thought is she already knows. They've had some conversation because he's worried about waking her up. So I imagine that she was there, but I don't know if she was for all of it.
PP: It's fascinating, I think, the layers of thought that are put into it. Even just having this conversation is making me rethink a lot of the different portions of the novel as well, and that's kind of exciting. So one of the things is your story... Your attention to storytelling in an intimate and immediate way is compelling, I found it extremely compelling. The characters unravel in layers as they grow and they change, and some transform. What do you hope readers most receive through your storytelling?
VS: That was one thing I didn't think about, [chuckle] honestly. I was very conscious of so many things but I didn't think about what do I want readers to get... I couldn't think about that. I knew I had a story I had to tell so it would have been almost like an artificial thing for me to say... But people keep asking me that question now, so it's a very... It's obviously an important question, but I didn't think of it at the time. What I would want is that she's known, what I would want is that the beauty of the tradition, the sensuousness of it, the humanity of the tradition and it's cosmic majesty is engaged with a bit more. There's a very simplistic engagement with Buddhism in popular culture, generally speaking. Obviously, individually we're all different and people have different levels of engagement with the tradition. But my experience in my classroom and with my students wherever I go is that there tends to be this idealized experience of Buddhism where it's just, the Buddha was this philosopher who understood something and it was only human, and it's all perfect, and it's very mental. And my experience with the tradition, both traveling through Buddhist countries and reading these beautiful texts, is it's such a sensual tradition, that every sense is engaged all the time, that there are sounds and smells and scintillating jewels everywhere.
VS: I was just reading this morning another text and it suddenly dawned on me that when the Buddha is covered with jewels in a particular text, it's not just a visual of, he's got all of these beautiful jewels on him, they sway when he walks. I'd never thought of that before. I was like, "Oh, you have to think in three dimensions." And so suddenly, I have to picture him standing in front of me and seeing the scene, like him walking on the jeweled walkway. If he's wearing jewels, they must have been moving, and they must have made noise and jingled as he walked. There's something so whole about this picture in my mind now that I don't think I appreciated when I was just looking at the text from the outside. But having imagined him, he's become three-dimensional, the stories. And I'm realizing this is such a fully human tradition in that sense, that every human sense is engaged, and we limit it when we make it just about a mental understanding. That it's so much more profound, it's about feeling things and being in the world in a particular way, it's about a love story, it's about drama, it's about the whole of the human experience.
VS: And how could it be different? How have we managed to imagine that a civilization that spans 2,500 years, that has spanned the entire globe, is only mental? How could that possibly be? If human beings have been engaged with this tradition for 2,500 years in every country in the world, it has to be whole. Human beings can't just stay on this plane. Plato did, but that's it. [chuckle] And I don't think he did either, I think probably he's more complicated. [chuckle] Yeah, it's that sensuousness that I hope begins to be engaged with, the humanity of the tradition, I think it's so much more beautiful than we realize. It's not meditating and sitting in your head all day, I don't think that's it. It's a piece.
PP: And I think we could all use peace in times like these and throughout civilization, I think we're all...
VS: Oh, I didn't mean peace that way. But yeah, that too. [laughter]
PP: Yeah, that peace. [laughter]
VS: I was like, "It's a piece of the story."
PP: Yeah, a piece of the story, got it. How ironic.
VS: But I think the story's so much more beautiful.
PP: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what comes through is the human aspect of it. I think there's a beauty in her vulnerability, but there's also this... And as we spoke a little earlier, I told you one of the things that stood out to me is her resilience. And the fact that a lot of time, these narratives that we hear around folks is that... Or around the relations of these sorts of relationships is that a woman is subservient to a man and in this case, it very much did not feel like that at all. If anything, I think that she, as you have said it's... She was very much his equal in the sense of being able to embody a lot of the things that she was throughout the course of their relationships of lifetime through lifetime.
VS: Well, some people have even said to me, "But it's too feminist that she's his equal." That, "She wouldn't fight with him or she wouldn't argue with him because a woman from that time and place would not have." But I really wonder sometimes... This is a question I've been... I haven't... It's a question to think about for me anyway, is how much of our expectations are almost Victorian about everything that is in the past? I sometimes feel like all of human history has been reduced to Victorian ethics and morals and we cannot imagine anything else, that everything in the past was stilted and confined and very controlled. But when I read the poetry and the plays of... Indian plays from 2,000 years ago, the women talk, they argue, they tantalize, they charm, they're present. So why are we always expecting that everybody was stilted in the past and that a woman would have no... Would never have the audacity to answer back at her husband? It's such a strange thing.
VS: And one of the things that I actually often thought about is... So my family background... Half of my family's here, [chuckle] is from... Is Middle Eastern, and I often thought... This was one of the things that I used to think about was my grandmother, who's late, mid-90s now, and still alive, and very Middle Eastern, very Arabic. She yells really well, [chuckle] and you have got the traditional Lebanese, Egyptian style of being in the world, and certain social expectations about a husband and a wife, but she always had her say. She still has her... There is... You cannot not let her have her say. And I thought about that a lot and I thought, "Why do I think that every one of a previous generation, women wouldn't speak? My grandmother speaks. [chuckle] Women speak. It can't possibly be that for 2,500 years, women didn't speak." So I understand that there's social containment and that there are times and places and relationships where this wasn't possible, but maybe it was more possible than we realize. This is what I've been playing with in my imagination is that the stories we tell and what was may not always be well-matched.
VS: And then we do ourselves a tremendous disservice, to women and to men, that maybe the relationships were more present in some context. I don't know, I feel like we need to open our imaginations about this, maybe be a little bit more open to the possibility that people were people in the past. [chuckle] I know, sounds kind of crazy, but that's the thought that I've been having, the humanity of the past, not just of our moment.
PP: Yes, thank you. [laughter] I'm feeling this, I wanna give it one of these. Very much so. And that's the truth. Patriarchy folks, ring a bell? The fact of the matter is that people are complex and dynamic and that we do live in a way where we either enhance or disable each other. And I think that it's far too ignorant to think that women have not been an influential or influential since the beginning of time. And in fact, we do see that in many traditions, the acknowledgment of this as well. So I think it's critical that we do have these sorts of voices and these sorts of dialogues in our... Not only with ourselves, but in our communities and with one another, and we start rightfully taking the place that is ours to own. And so maybe that segues into the last question quite neatly, which is, what's next for you, Vanessa? Is there another novel in your future? And where can people connect with you if they're interested in figuring out what's going on with you? Any way of folks being able to connect with you, and what does the future hold for you?
VS: I have no idea. [laughter] I don't know. I really don't know. You can find me easily online. I don't know if I'm gonna write another novel. This was a great... This was a very emotional book for me to write. This was my great love, it was years of thinking and of... I truly... I was in love the entire time I wrote the book. I was in love with every character, I was in love with the process. I would wake up and be like, "Oh, I'm gonna go write." [chuckle] It was just... I couldn't not write. It was the most amazing experience I think I've ever had, and I don't know if it's gonna happen again. I really don't. I just know I had to write this one, and we'll see what happens later.
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