Sarah Jacoby's Articles on Lions Roar

Sarah Jacoby examines how even though mothering has been held up in Buddhist teachings as a model of compassion, actual mothering has never gotten much respect. One summer a few years ago, a renowned Tibetan Buddhist master came through my city on a teaching tour. Several months before this Rinpoche arrived, I saw the announcement and began making plans to attend. I started early because the teaching lasted an entire weekend, and I didn’t have anyone to help me with childcare. I was parenting alone that year—my husband and I were teaching at two different universities very far away from each other—and paying for weekend childcare to attend a (rather expensive) dharma teaching was not an option, since at that time I was spending nearly half of my income on weekday childcare just to be able to work business hours. Well ahead, I contacted the Buddhist center, asking, “Perhaps there are other parents also trying to attend the teaching? Perhaps we could band together and take turns watching our children, each parent getting a chance to attend a portion of the teaching?” Motherhood can be the ideal practicing ground for working with anger, nurturing compassion, and coming to terms with impermanence, pain, and grief. Much to my surprise, the local director of the dharma center forwarded my question directly to the visiting Rinpoche, and this was the response: “Rinpoche would like people to bring children to the program. It is important for children to be present in the shrine room to hear the dharma, no matter what age they are, and for all of us to not worry if there is noise. This is the atmosphere Rinpoche wishes to have during the teachings, and nuns will be available to help if the kids get restless during the program.” This reply sent me into a quandary, full of contradictory thoughts: “Do they know one of my children is a toddler, and the other a six-year-old? Do they know what toddlers sound like when they are bored for a few minutes, let alone sitting in an all-day religious teaching? That can’t possibly work! And yet…” Despite a feeling in my bones that it was a terrible idea, I showed up that Saturday morning, wheeling in my stroller, packed with snacks and toys, to the very back of the shrine room, and seated my six-year-old next to me. Rinpoche arrived. Everyone stood up and prostrated; the air of the crowded room was razor-charged with excitement, pin-drop silent, as we waited for the teachings to begin. Except for my toddler. He was whining, not even very loud; for him, it was low-level frustration. The shift from everyone standing up to sitting in silence had startled him, and he was enjoying filling the quietness with the sound of his own voice. A few silver-haired attendees turned around and peered at us, draped in expensive-looking shawls. Rinpoche began speaking. More heads turned backward toward us. Smiles faded into stern looks. These people had traveled, in some cases, from out of state to be present for this important teaching, and had paid hundreds of dollars for the opportunity. Perhaps some of them had also spent decades child-rearing and now could finally enjoy newfound opportunities to hear the dharma. Rinpoche kept speaking, and my toddler kept softly whining. The nuns I had been told would be happy to help remained firmly planted on floor cushions flanking Rinpoche’s throne. Rinpoche calmly continued. More gray-haired heads whipped around, glaring at me, now angry. Not five minutes into the teaching, I left, children in tow. What had gone wrong? The Rinpoche who had invited us into that situation had meant well, and later that weekend even made a point of calling my children back in and warmly offered them a special blessing. But my hopes of banding together with other parents and finding a way to balance attending the dharma teaching with looking after each other’s children fell apart completely; there were very few parents of young children there, and no other children. This despite the fact that the surrounding city is filled with young families. Why was this sangha so much older and more childless than its neighborhood? Why didn’t they try to include families in their sangha, as a way to give new generations access to the dharma they valued so highly? Motherhood as Metaphor. My story can be understood as a modern version of a very old tension within Buddhism: on one hand, the theory of motherhood as an exalted expression of compassionate love, and on the other, the practice of motherhood as an obstacle to pursuing the Buddhist path. Euro-American Buddhist devotees have absorbed this tension and amplified elements that idealize the theory of mothering over its practice, but it is important to remember that this is not the only message available within the Buddhist tradition. Historical and contemporary women practicing within Buddhist traditions present us with richly inclusive, varied, and transcendent visions of motherhood. The more we consider how to follow in their footsteps, the sooner we will realize that childcare and family-oriented Buddhist instruction are not special interest add-ons, but fundamental aspects of the transmission of Buddhism to future generations. Motherhood provides the Buddhist tradition with its paramount metaphor for how we should treat one another: we should love all beings as if they were our mothers, and we should mother each being as if she were our only child. Of course, from a Buddhist perspective, this is more than a metaphor, since all sentient beings are said to have been reborn as our mother at one point in beginningless time. Variations on this theme pervade millennia of Buddhist texts, going back to the discourses of the Buddha in the Pali canon. An often-cited scriptural passage comes from the Karaniyametta Sutta (“Discourse on Loving-Kindness”): Even as a mother protects with her life Her child, her only child, So with a boundless heart Should one cherish all living beings. In Mahayana and Vajrayana texts as well, the mother metaphor endures in its poignancy to express the intensity of loving compassion we should feel for one another, even as it takes on new forms such as Prajnaparamita, who is described as “the mother of the buddhas.” Known in Tibetan as the Great Mother, this enlightened female embodiment of the perfection of wisdom has served as a lodestar for millennia of dharma practitioners, many among them female. For instance, when the early twentieth-century Tibetan visionary Sera Khandro Dewe Dorje encountered obstacles on her spiritual path, her teacher Gara Terchen reassured her, “This body you have is that of a great female bodhisattva, a mother who gives birth to all the buddhas.” When expressed in this Prajnaparamita-infused language, the liberating potential of the female form becomes indisputable. As Buddhism continues its age-old process of adaptation, now into European and American spaces, new forms of the Buddhist mother metaphor are emerging. In the last twenty years, popular anglophone Buddhist-inspired writings have extended the mother metaphor into an experiential model, presenting motherhood itself as a form of spiritual cultivation. This ever-increasing collection of books explores the rich ways in which experiences of motherhood and the relationship between mother and child can be the ideal practicing ground for cultivating selflessness, working with anger, nurturing compassion, and coming to terms with impermanence, pain, and grief. Many readers of this modern library on Buddhist mothering may be surprised to learn that despite the ubiquity of mother metaphors, no comparable conception of motherhood as a modality of Buddhist practice can be found in canonical Buddhist scriptures or in noncanonical Buddhist narratives prior to the latter half of the twentieth century. In earlier Asian Buddhist contexts, there remains a deep chasm between the universalized Buddhist call to love all beings as if they were our mothers, and the intensely particular experience of actual mothering. Whereas universalized mother love is valorized pervasively in Buddhist texts, actual embodied motherhood is more often presented as an obstacle filled with suffering than a path to spiritual liberation. This chasm is deeply gendered, for the majority of those who are recognized for cultivating universal love for all sentient beings are male religious specialists, and the majority of those who have mothered flesh-and-blood children are female householders. In her thought-provoking book on mother symbolism in early Indian Buddhism, Ties That Bind, Reiko Ohnuma concludes that “It seems fairly obvious that the failure to envision the practice of mothering as a form of spiritual cultivation stems from the simple fact that mothering is performed by women, and women, on the whole, have lacked a significant voice in traditional Buddhism.” Though women’s voices are hard to find in Buddhist canonical sources, in Tibet there are many oral and written stories about women who both mothered children and became advanced Buddhist practitioners. Perhaps the most renowned of them all is the eleventh-century yogini Machik Lapdrön, who became a mother of children as well as her own Buddhist lineage of severance (chöd). But the Tibetan Buddhist mother who wrote far and away the most about the story of her spiritual liberation is Sera Khandro (who, not incidentally, is sometimes referred to in Tibet as “the second Machik”). In her writings, Sera Khandro described life as an upper-class girl in turn-of-the-century Lhasa, as well as what happened after she decided to renounce it all in pursuit of her aspiration to practice Dzogchen teachings. With that in mind, she joined a group of pilgrims headed by Drime Özer, son of Dudjom Lingpa, who were touring central Tibet and then heading back to their homeland in the alpine pasturelands of Dartsang, Golok. Sera Khandro spent the rest of her life in Golok, eventually becoming a renowned treasure revealer (tertön)...

Motherhood Is More Than a Metaphor

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