A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer
Page 13
Hail to the Vagina
Robert Thurman
The famous Indian Buddhist Esoteric Scripture, The Glorious Esoteric Community Royal Tantra (Shri Guhyasamaja Tantraraja), is presented as a revelation granted by the Primordial Buddha Vajradhara, who gives the teaching while said to be residing in “the Vaginas of the Diamond (Vajra) Female Buddhas” (vajra-yoshid-bhageshu vijahara).”
This extraordinary setting essentially reveals the most profound nature of the infinity of reality, as perceived by enlightened beings, as the most sensitive, delicate, adamantine matrix of life and bliss. This most advanced esoteric text of the Buddhist inner science, then, describes the deepest absolute reality discovered by all fully enlightened beings, not as atoms or subatomic particles whirling dizzily about, not as a dark space of nothingness, not as inconceivable strings vibrating away in the eleventh dimension, but as “voidness the womb of compassion” (shunyata-karuna-garbham), “bliss-void-indivisible” (sukha-shunya-advaya), i.e., as a delicate but ecstatically invincible envelope perfectly capable of holding all life in freedom from suffering, while nurturing it for blissful evolutionary fulfillment. It is utterly beyond all violence. A root Tantric vow is to never perceive any woman as unenlightened.
In Buddhist Tantric symbolism, the Victorious Vagina is represented as a (usually) red equilateral triangle with apex downward. It is called the Dharmodaya—Source of Truth, or Reality-Source. In Buddhist insight, there are two kinds of truth, absolute, ultimate, or actual truth or reality, and relative, conventional, or illusory truths or realities.
As the source of relative realities, the Dharmodaya Vagina gives birth to the world and all its beings and things, since things’ freedom from fixated essence allows them to be created, develop, and flourish. This inexhaustible fount of creativity, when misunderstood, can be feared and hated as the source of suffering, since an alienated consciousness trapped in a fixated separated identity perceives the vast diversity of things as an overwhelming, uncontrollable opponent that cannot be either consumed or destroyed. But the real source of suffering is the misunderstanding, the ignorance, the misknowledge, not the Dharmodaya Vagina. When you have achieved transcendent wisdom, you emerge from the Vagina triangle, coming forward into the world and enjoying the magnificent diversity as the endless play of blissful energy. Only then do you truly vive la différence!
As the source of truth on the absolute level, we enter into the Dharmodaya Vagina triangle, go through it into the most profound transcendent reality of bliss-freedom indivisible. In this context, the triangle’s corners represent the “three doors of liberation,” three ways to approach the absolute freedom that is the ultimate reality of all things. These three are voidness, sign-lessness, and wishlessness, the visceral understanding of which leads to the enlightened realizations of freedom, peacefulness, and blissful satisfaction, respectively.
When you realize you are devoid of absolute, fixated, alienated essence, you discover the blissful freedom of infinite interconnection with all beings and things, a freedom that allows you to play harmoniously with all other relational things.
When you realize that each thing, just as it inconceivably is, is whole within itself as flowing nexus of interconnection with everything else, you are released from the compulsive drive to push it into processes of signification and causation, and you discover the unexcelled peacefulness of the reconciliation of all dichotomies and the adamantine tolerance of all cognitive dissonances that is enlightenment.
And when you realize that all beings and things are ultimately and primordially essentially fulfilled in their freedom and peacefulness, you discover the superbliss energy that is the actual reality of all things, and you effortlessly enjoy the wisdom of innermost, supreme, realistic satisfaction that transcends all suffering of both yourself and all others.
Within the sphere of the Victorious Dharmodaya Vagina, you live and die and live again endlessly without deviation from the Parinirvana play. As the great Kanhapa said, “I wander through the town adorned with my necklace of Parinirvana pearls!” This is utterly nondual and expresses the adept’s experience that all of reality is a reliable matrix for the blissful communion of orgasmic bliss and peaceful freedom.
The two levels of truth or reality are only “levels,” that is, different, on the relative, illusory level of conventional expressions. Ultimately, in their inexpressible actuality, they are indivisible, nondual. Thus relative superbliss and ultimate void freedom are indivisible in fact. The passionate red triangle represents this nonduality in that it can be entered into and emerged from simultaneously. This can also be symbolized by adding a second triangle, sometimes white, sometimes red, with apex upward. The nonduality then is represented as two intersecting triangles, which is familiar in India as Shiva and Shakti (God and Goddess, Peace and Power) in union, or as the domain of Chakrasamvara and Vajrayogini (Superbliss Machine and Diamond Unifier) in union, and in the West as the Seal of Solomon, or the Star of David.
However exactly we interpret the symbolism, however we rhapsodize about the Victorious Vagina, we cannot only adore its earthiness, we must celebrate its holiness, redolent with awesomeness and sacredness. Nothing profane or prosaic about it. Source of all happiness, violence can never reach it.
The Buddhist tradition is not mainly religion, however, does not mainly require belief, especially not belief in some fantasy world to be fabricated by suspending reason and straining the imagination. It is more science, encouraging reason, knowledge, and wisdom, considering that the more realistic you can be, the more genuinely happy and the more effectively benevolent you can be. So to truly enjoy the Victorious Dharmodaya Vagina, you need to know it deeply, to appreciate its magnificence and its profundity.
Hail to the Dharmodaya, Source of Truth and Mother of Bliss!
Rescue
Mark Matousek
I grew up in estrogen overload, in a house filled with difficult women, the only son of a harridan who’d sent her husband—my father—packing for love of another married man.
We were poor—not ghetto poor, but borderline white-trash Jewish poor: my mom, my three troubled sisters, and me, in our three small underfurnished rooms. For a long time—truthfully, my whole life—I’d convinced myself that this single fact of my boyhood, this isolation with too many women (picture a lost sperm circling an ovum), was the most formative piece of my story—hands down—the twist that made me me and formed my sperm-headed view of the world.
Then one day I realized that this was a lie—or should I say an incomplete truth.
I was in my shrink’s earth-toned womb of an office. Martha was asking about my mother, who looms like Medusa over my insides, turning traitorous thoughts to stone. She knew about Ida already, of course, but not till that day had the question of rape been on the table. Ida was raped many times in her life—as a big-breasted girl running fast with Italians, as a teenage bride bartered to a sadist (to save what was left of her reputation), as a woman whose integrity, such as it was, pivoted in her own mind around being first and foremost an excellent fuck. These were the painful details I was sharing with Martha when she scrunched up her face all of a sudden and stopped me.
“You mother was raped?” she asked.
“All of the women in my family were raped,” I told her.
Martha seemed shocked. I was shocked myself, not because the information was new but because I’d never said it out loud, which meant it had only half existed.
Now that it did—now that I’d said it—a truth (so obvious that I’d missed it) blasted a hole through my story line, the version of things I’d believed to be true. It wasn’t being trapped in a house filled with women that had made me the very strange person I was, but growing up in a houseful of raped women.
The nightmarish reel of flashbacks began, looking into Martha’s eyes, pictures of naked female flesh, the pornographized landscape of childhood. But these pictures revealed themselves differently now, not as women whorishly wasting themselves (as
others described it to me when I was a boy), not spreading themselves uncontrollably, prompting despair and abandonment; but as their bodies probably were, accosted, betrayed, and chewed up—discarded—largely against their will.
The images came back to me in a rush: my mother locked in the bathroom, weeping, hitting her head against the tub, whispering “I want to die” as I beat on the door and screamed till it opened—then her staring at me with dead eyes, a trickle of blood sliding down her neck from hitting her head against the enamel;
My beloved eldest sister, Marcia, escaping the husband who beat and degraded her, bound and gagged her, then dumped her for another woman and prompted her suicide at twenty-nine;
My other older sister, Joyce, being chased outside my bedroom door in the middle of the night, a strange man’s voice coaxing, “I’m not gonna rape you,” then disappearing at fifteen to a home for unwed mothers;
My baby sister, Belle, in hysterics at ten, crying to me that the neighbor whose child she babysat had been touching her in the bad place, wrong, and me confronting him (age thirteen) with a barbecue skewer on his patio.
These memories were just the beginning. There were more, there were echoes, the rapes continued—by men and soon enough by themselves, as my mother and sisters sold themselves short, raped their own choices, potential, respect; forced themselves into too-small, tawdry lives with men who used them as pleasure mules. The pictures came back, and as I described them—revealing so much more of the truth—a disturbingly different, more accurate picture began to emerge in myself of myself.
It wasn’t estrogen overload that had turned me into a rescue artist; it was rape overload, abuse overload, an excess of feminine self-mutilation—an absence of innocent love toward a woman. Nowhere in retrospect was there a memory of woman adored, exalted, or blessed; nowhere an image of feminine eros protected, beloved, refined, rendered precious; and nowhere an entry for me to love in the way a boy (or man) needed to love in order to free himself of guilt: the guilt of not saving what he cannot save. The shame of needing to run away because he can’t face the un-savable women. The disgrace of being forced to choose between himself, his life, and the women whose sacrifice freezes his heart, the heart he needs to survive—with despair.
Because these women were all I had. I loved them (in spite of everything) beyond words. For a long time this love was too much to face in light of the safety I could not give them. This was the actual bone-true story, I realized after that day in Martha’s office, the kernel of mourning I’d buried in rage. I hadn’t run away out of hatred. I’d run away from an excess of love.
This was shocking to me—this unmasking of grief. My armorial manhood began to unclench—forced me to share in their violation, to feel the assault on these women I cherished. Far easier to blame the victims than share their helplessness, I realized. But, telling this secret, I had no choice. There was nothing to hate now but violence itself, nothing to despise but men out of control, which plunged me into the heart of the matter. If men were rapists, then so was I (my childish black-and-white logic had told me long before I even had words for these things). As a fatherless kid starved for any male virtue to believe in—for faith in this sex I was born with, this stranger—I’d blocked the truth to save the faith that men could also be good and trusted, that I would never inflict such pain.
We do this, we men, very often, I think, mostly without knowing it. Every day in every country for every reason the mind can invent for why the violence is deserved. If Eve isn’t guilty somehow, we wager—bringing the blood upon herself—Adam cannot rule the world. And so the blame-shifting lie continues till one day—if we’re lucky and ready—we men drop the story, we start to grieve, and the cycle, the ignorance, comes undone.
I’d tell my story differently now if anybody wanted to hear it. I come from a family of raped women, but that no longer makes me a rapist. It makes me a man with a broken heart. I come from a family where cocks were weapons, but that does not make me a war machine. It makes me a man with a dangerous power (women have their own dark ways), equally fierce and beautiful. Now that I’ve grown into a man—now that I know I’m able to love—I can say what men do without hating myself or mistaking my power for violence. The tenderness of wolves, they call it—the exquisite absence of blood among killers. This is the tenderness men can give women. This is the story when shame finally ends.
To Stop the Violence Against Woman
Alice Walker
WOMAN
TO STOP THE VIOLENCE
AGAINST
WOMAN,
WOMAN
MUST STOP THE VIOLENCE
AGAINST
HERSELF.
WE CAN BEGIN TO DO THIS
NOW, NOW THAT WE SEE
A SKY
AND NOT A ROCK
A STICK
OR A FIST
ABOVE ALL
OUR HEADS.
WOMAN
TO STOP THE VIOLENCE
AGAINST WOMAN,
STOP THE VIOLENCE
THAT YOU
PERPETUATE
AGAINST
YOUR OWN
SISTER
WHO IS
A WOMAN, YOUR OWN
DAUGHTER
WHO IS
A WOMAN,
YOUR OWN
DAUGHTER-IN-LAW
WHO IS
A WOMAN.
YOUR OWN
MOTHER
WHO IS
A WOMAN.
WOMAN
TO STOP THE VIOLENCE
AGAINST WOMAN,
STOP THE VIOLENCE
THAT LIVES
IN OPPOSITION
TO YOUR LIFE,
DEEP IN YOUR
OWN TERRORIZED AND
UNCHERISHED
HEART.
WOMAN
REMEMBER WHO WE ARE:
NOT “GUYS”
BUT
THE MOTHER
OF ALL
LIVING.
WE CREATE OUT OF OUR OWN BLOOD
AND MILK
THE CREATURES
WHO OPPRESS
US;
WHETHER THEY ARE MEN
OR
OURSELVES.
WOMAN
AWAKE!
ARISE!
STAND UP!
WOMAN
TO STOP THE VIOLENCE
AGAINST
WOMAN,
GET UP
ON YOUR PERFECTLY
UNBOUND
FEET!
WE HAVE LOST THE EARTH
LIVING ON OUR KNEES.
Fur Is Back
Eve Ensler
I wanted to be funny. I wanted to be a funny, laughing, invited-to-the-party person. I wanted to be a little flirty, maybe, a little naughty, a little fab, mysterious, chic. I wanted to be fun—telling wild, crazy stories, jumping in the pool naked at midnight, wearing that sexy push-up bra. Driving the convertible fast down the highway in a rainstorm. I wanted to be delicious and adorable and not too available, not too talkative. I would have settled for a little dry, even, or sarcastic. Dry people get invited to the party. Dry nihilists, who are permanently unhappy, permanently in despair, bleak. They are there in their very expensive torn, shredded black clothing, surrounded by groups of beautiful people with fabulous torn, shredded haircuts that look like they just survived something awful—you know, that private jet ride where they ran out of merlot. But I am not dry. I am not adorable. I am not funny. I am angry. Fucking angry. I am raging.
I do not get invited to parties. Well, not anymore. I did at the beginning. I had a certain charm, a certain flair. People mistook it for funny until they discovered that I was the person who ruins the party. Interrupts the pleasure, brings in the rest of the world like a brutal Chicago winter wind. I am the person who, for some reason, has to see it, say it, and make everyone aware. I am the one who responds to the casual “what’s up” with “Well, I just got back from Afghanistan, downtown Qandahār, where the Taliban is
back. Where the Taliban actually never went away, but they are now blatantly back because the U.S. supported the wicked jihadis and put them in office. The jihadis who raped and pillaged and murdered and, instead of being brought to justice, were brought to power by the U.S., and now there is so much corruption and so much violence that the Taliban looks good.
I am that person who doesn’t stop there, who has to go on because being at the party makes me even angrier. I somehow forgot until that moment that the rest of the world went on, went to the party, they were laughing, drinking, flirting, enjoying. They weren’t undone or depressed by the whacked things going on. No the person asking me what’s up didn’t really expect an answer, didn’t even particularly want an answer. Was just asking the question, a stupid party question ’cause that’s what people do at parties. They don’t listen, they don’t give a shit, no, that’s why they are at the party. That’s why their whole life is a fucking party. Their whole life is directed toward getting invited to the party. Dressing for the party. Getting drunk or laid or into the party mood, and there I am ruining everything. What’s up? What’s fucking up? Don’t you read the news? The Amish girls shot down in the school ’cause they were there, ’cause they were girls. Or the girls in the refugee camps in Darfur going to get grass for their donkeys or wood for the fire who get grabbed, who get raped and raped and can’t find their way back. But let’s protect the rapists, okay, let’s defend them like the cleric in Australia said. They are being given too hard a time, a terrible sentence, when it’s really the woman’s fault, she brought it on herself, they brought it on themselves by not wearing a head scarf. They were open meat. If she had just stayed in her home, in her hijab, there wouldn’t have been a problem. The cleric saying this—in 2006. If they had just stayed at home.