The Buddha in the Tarot

by Paul Greer

  Word was sent to the nearby town of Kusinara that the Buddha was about to die, and so many came to witness this event, and listen to his final words. The Buddha asked his followers if there was anything in the teaching that they had not understood, and then, in his last words, reminded them once more about the fundamental nature of life: “‘Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!’”14 The Buddha, it is said, then entered the jhanic states of consciousness, and moving into the fourth state of mental absorption, he died. At this moment, the God of Creation, Brahma, uttered these words:

  “They all, all beings that have life, shall lay

  Aside their complex form - that aggregation

  Of mental and material qualities,

  That gives them, or in heaven or on earth,

  Their fleeting individuality!

  E'en as the teacher - being such a one,

  Unequalled among all the men that are,

  Successor of the prophets of old time,

  Mighty by wisdom, and in insight clear –

  Hath died!”15

  And so, our Play in Full, our play of The Fool, comes to a close. Except, as the Buddha himself said: “One who sees the Dharma, sees me.”

  A Buddhist Reflection: Buddhism, Gender, and the Environment

  Susan Murcott describes the Buddha’s establishment of the female Sangha as a “radical experiment for its time.”16 This may be so, yet if we take the Pali texts at face value, then it appears that its institution was perhaps more complex and problematic than we might at first be led to suppose. According to the Cullavagga, the Buddha was initially very reluctant to allow women into the Sangha and it was only after number of promptings from his attendant and close friend, Ananda, that he eventually relented, adding that he saw in this move the eventual demise of the Sangha. In addition he required that all Bhikkhunis submit to the “eight heavy rules” (garudhammas) which meant that they were forced to show deference to the Bhikkhus at all times.

  The modern feminist response to this narrative has been quite predictable in a sense, taking the view that the eight rules especially are textual interpolations, created by later monks determined to assert their “legitimate” authority over the nuns.17 Such modern critiques do of course prompt a very obvious question – are they motivated by a desire to reveal what the Buddha actually said, or to confirm a deeply-held opinion about what an “enlightened being” simply could not or ought not have said? The Sangha aside, the Pali Canon contains a number of other “troublesome” passages and views for those with emotional investments in an idealized vision of the Buddha’s attitude to women. For example, although the Buddha states in the Cullavagga that women are just as able as men to attain enlightenment, in the Bahudhatuka Sutta he mentions limitations on many other forms of spiritual attainment. Women it seems cannot become Mara, Brahma, or more importantly, a Buddha. In the Anguttara Nikaya he differentiates between seven types of wives – only those who act as “mothers,” “sisters,” and “handmaids” to their husbands will “go to heaven.” The rest will go to hell.18 Or what are we to make of the Buddha’s view that if a woman happens to be “ugly, of a bad figure, and horrible to look at, and indignant, poor, needy, and low in the social scale,” then it is due to a “spiteful, angry, enraged, and sulky” disposition from a previous life?19 Today, it is hoped that we would search for more reasonable and “enlightened” explanations; in issues relating to genetics, diet, economic disadvantage and patriarchal aesthetics perhaps. On the issue of “ugly women,” the Dalai Lama in an interview with Michaela Doepke recounted the story of a previous interview with a French journalist, in which he was asked if there could ever be a female Dalai Lama. He replied in the affirmative, but added “half-jokingly” that she would have to be beautiful, given that an “ugly woman” would not be particularly “effective.”20 Très drôle.

  Putting the Dalai Lama’s faux pas aside, the answer to such textual problems is not simply to brush them under the carpet, nor to erase them in the name of an idealized vision of what an enlightened being ought to have said, but to focus instead on what Buddhism is and what it is not. It is not a “religion” defined by or confined to the indisputable authority of ancient texts. It is though an insightful diagnosis of the human condition, in which all texts and practices serve as a provisional and pragmatic raft towards healing and wholeness. This raft is best maintained through what we might call The Rule of Kalama – If it accords with reason, and is conducive to the good, for the one and the many, adopt it and practice it. This rule would advocate a skillful approach to the original teachings, selecting those which are concordant with reasoned and reasonable Twenty-First Century insights and understanding, and discarding the rest as unworkable chaff. I’m sure the Buddha would agree. As such, a “reasonable” response to the issue of women’s partial and subservient role within the Sangha – as is still the case in Thailand and other places – would demand that we do not approach it in relation to notions of traditional values or scriptural authority, but as Karma Tsomo argues, to questions concerning basic human rights.21

  Returning to scripture, there are a number of insights from the Pali texts which can be skillfully employed in the service of gender parity, of which I wish to highlight anatta – the view that there is no real self behind the constantly changing and impermanent khandhas. One of the most discerning lines of enquiry in the Pali suttas is that although belief in such a self signifies attachment to the five khandhas, this attachment extends further to the issue of gender differentiation. Our attachment to form is at the same time an attachment to gender-form. In the Soma Sutta, the Bhikkhuni Soma recognizes this deep-seated attachment when she is assailed by Mara, who taunts her with the words:

  “That vantage-ground the [male] sages may attain is hard to reach. With her two-finger consciousness

  that is no woman competent to gain!”

  In response Soma states that gender makes no difference to those whose “‘hearts are firmly set, who ever move with growing knowledge onward in the Path.’” She continues however with these profound words: “‘To one for whom the question doth arise: Am I a woman in these matters, or am I a man, or what not am I, then? To such a one is Mara fit to talk!’” Mara leaves, dejected, realizing that “‘Bhikkhuni Soma knows me.’”22 This inquiry into ignorance as attachment to gender-identity is pursued more rigorously by the Buddha himself in the aptly named Bondage (Sannoga) Sutta. A “woman” he says is one who “”attends inwardly” to feminine faculties, gestures, poise, and desires, and outwardly to the respective masculine qualities in others (heterosexually speaking of course). He repeats this same analysis in reference to a “man.” By attending to these internal and external qualities, humans grasp at and become bound to a particular perception of their own masculinity or femininity, and to the external show of certain gender qualities in others. It is only in refusing to attend to such inner and outer qualities that both women and men “transcend” their femininity and masculinity and escape “bondage.”23 “Self-grasping,” as Rita Gross has argued, is not just grasping at ego, but an ego that has been acutely hardened by its occupancy within a male or female body. In our quest for freedom and enlightenment, attachment to gender qualities may well be the hardest and last element within our conditioned ego “to lose its grip on us.”24

  The World card reveals to us a need to cultivate a meaningful practice of “letting go,” which must extend itself to the masculine-feminine polarity. It suggests a movement beyond our psychological obsessions with and attachments to binary gender differentiation, where we may attain, at least in some measure, that fluidity to which the World Dancer points.

  The World card is not only concerned with a new consciousness regarding the gender polarity, but with the self’s relations with the world as a whole. In his still much–debated essay from 1967, Lynn White Jr. set out to describe what he regarded as “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” He argued that our environmental
problems derive from the Judaeo-Christian narrative concerning human nature. The Bible, he said, has taught us that humans are a special creation apart from the world and its creatures, and that we have been granted “dominion” over our God-given estate. White then argued that despite the claim that we live in a post-religious or post-Christian era, this religious narrative continues to condition our beliefs and attitudes about ourselves and the rest of the world, which retains only instrumental value insofar as it serves our purposes. White concluded that since the problem was essentially religious in nature, it necessitated a religious solution; a new narrative about human nature and its relations with the world. He went on to name Buddhism as a possible candidate in this respect, being “very nearly the mirror image of the Christian view.”25

  However, as with the issue of gender, the Buddhist “story” is not as clear-cut as White thought. As discussed in relation to The Empress, the early Buddhist attitude to nature appears very ambivalent at times, focusing as Schmithausen says on it more destructive side, and its symbolic relationship with sensual attachment and the endless cycle of Samsara. It is also notable, as Stephen Kellert has pointed out, that Buddhist-inspired countries such as Japan and China are well-known for their extremely poor conservation record.26 Yet as with gender, it is possible to adopt a skillful attitude to Buddhist teachings; to uncover aspects that accord with reason, and are conducive to the universal good. Buddhism espouses a number of ethical qualities that may contribute towards a strong environmental ethic, including contentment (santutthi), non-violence (ahimsa) and compassion (karuna). However, I wish to focus our discussion here to the underlying metaphysical framework within which such virtues might be encouraged to develop and flourish. This framework would embrace the concepts of rebirth (punabbhava), emptiness (sunyata) and no-self (anatta).

  The principle of rebirth conceives our current lives to be a very small episode from a potentially unending continuum of phenomena in flux. With this continuum, we have taken on the form and consciousness of myriad life-forms – from bacteria to plants to chimpanzees. (Indeed, the Kusanjali Jataka recounts the Future Buddha’s life as a clump of grass.) If we take this picture of our “life” to heart, then it may allow us to develop a sense of kinship with and compassion for the countless life-forms to which we are connected. This sense of kinship is explored by the Buddha in the Mata (Mother) Sutta, where he states that from “‘a beginning [that] cannot be pointed out’” beings have been “‘enveloped in ignorance and bound by craving, running from one existence to another.’” In terms of our links with others within this process, “‘you could not find a being who was not your mother [father, sister, brother] in the past, in this long train of existences.’”27 A deeper awareness of such universal “kinship in suffering” – whether it be reflected upon in meditation or simply discussed in a Biology class – may provide the foundations for a greater degree of empathy and restraint in our dealings with the other living organisms of this planet.

  As previously discussed in relation to The Fool and The High Priestess, the principle of emptiness within Buddhism does not mean that things do not exist, but that ultimately, all things lack “own-being” and are intrinsically related to and dependant upon all other things. When integrated with the principle of anatta, this understanding may provide the basis for expanding our usually limited notions of self into wider fields of identification; to take on, as Shantideva says, “all beings as my self.” This is something pursued by Buddhist activist Joanna Macy, who believes that such principles may provide a model for the development of an “ecological self.” For Macy, along with other Ecofeminists and Deep Ecologists, the environmental problems which threaten our planet originate within a “pathological notion of the self.” She names Buddhism as one of a number of non-dualistic spiritualities which may contribute towards the “dismantling of the ego-self” and the creation and establishment of an “eco-self.” She notes the important role that Buddhist wisdom, meditation and morality may play in the development of a deeper sense of interconnection with the environment, and the establishing of a more perceptive understanding of “social engagement.”28 We are now summoned, as Macy says, to shake off an issue of “mistaken identity” - the erroneous belief that we are little more than separate beings in competition with one another. It is now time to realize our true nature; as beings “co-extensive with all life on this planet.”29

  The metaphysics of no-self, emptiness and interconnection, along with the ethics of contentment, harmlessness and compassion, may combine to form a new vision of the Sangha, the “Community of the Moon.” While traditional models of the Sangha have sometimes been criticized for providing an individualistic and quietist approach to enlightenment, we must not forget that this was not the Buddha’s original intention, which was concerned primarily with centering the Sangha’s activities within the wider community. The ethics and metaphysics of interdependence would suggest that we now envisage “community” in much wider terms of identification and engagement, fulfilling in a very real sense the Buddha’s vision of the Sangha as the “whole of the spiritual life.” Such as expanded view of the Sangha was first voiced by Bill Devall in 1990, when he proposed the development of bio-regionally based “eco-sanghas,” where practitioners would ground their spiritual development and sense of communality in a commitment to conserving and protecting local natural habitats.30 The concept of the Eco-Sangha has now gained widespread and international appeal, with many – like the one in Forres, Scotland - pledged to finding ways to make the metaphysics of interconnection and the ethics of compassion a “foundation for our practice.” The aim of such communities is to “respond to the ecological challenges …with wisdom, ethics and mindfulness.”31 With the emergence of this new understanding of Buddhist community, the West has not only completely side-stepped the issue of women’s ordination – a still-divisive issue within traditional Buddhism - but has, as Jim Deitrick suggests, raised the game entirely, by moving the notion of Sangha membership beyond further distinctions between lay and monastic, and even human and non-human. This, he concludes, promises to have repercussions far beyond issues connected to the relative position and standing of men and women within Buddhism.32

  Conclusion

  In this book I have endeavored to highlight some remarkable connections between Tarot and the Buddha’s journey towards enlightenment and his return to the world. While some might regard a few of the links I have made as being tenuous at best, and my interpretations of certain cards a little unorthodox, I still believethat overall, there is a remarkable degree of congruity between the Buddha’s journey and the narrative sequence of the Major Arcana. However, in no way am I attempting to provide here yet another de Gébelin-inspired Manifesto describing “What the Tarot is Really About.” These are my personal views, which hopefully, may challenge the reader to consider some fresh perspectives on the cards. The cards are after all “doctrinally foundationless,” their interpretation as Bill Butler says “largely a matter of individual choice.”33 Indeed I agree with Bradford Hatcher that the history of Tarot interpretation is largely one of“men and women making stuff up, and then trying to find acceptance for the stuff they made up.” There never was a “Golden Age” of Tarot in the past says Hatcher, nor an original key to its “real” interpretation. Tarot is an on-going “open source project”; an evolving process in which we are constantly stoking “an artificial entity that is seemingly intelligent and moves through time gaining wisdom as it goes.”34 In this respect, it is hoped that the ideas discussed here will contribute at least something to the evolving venture that is Tarot.

  Notes

  General Introduction

  E. J. Thomas, trans., Buddhist Scriptures (London: John Murray, 1913), accessed October 21 2016, http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/busc/busc09.htm#page_43.

  From the Visuddhi Magga in Henry Clarke Warren, trans., Buddhism in Translations (New York: Atheneum, 1987/1896), p. 248.

  See for example Stephen Batchelo
r, Buddhism Without Beliefs (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998/1997).

  Bradford Hatcher, Tarot as a Counseling Language: Core Meanings of the Cards, Correspondences Section (n. p.), accessed October 18 2016, http://www.hermetica.info/Tarot.htm.

  Sangharakshita’s views are discussed in Vishvapani, Introducing the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (Birmingham: Windhorse Publications, 2001), p. 43.

  Bradford Hatcher, op. cit, Introduction Section (n. p.), accessed October 18 2016, http://www.hermetica.info/Tarot.htm.

  Robert M. Place, The Buddha Tarot Companion: A Mandala of Cards (Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 2004), p. 3.

  ibid.

  Cynthia Giles for example differentiates between four possible interpretations of Tarot divination – the rational, the psychological, the psychical and the metaphysical. A rational interpretation would consider Tarot divination as a brand of charlatanry, whereby “predictions” are based on the reader’s perceptive observations of client details, statistical probabilities and stereotypes. This is “divination” á la Sherlock Holmes. A psychological interpretation may focus on the therapeutic setting of Tarot reading itself, the mild trance-like states this may provoke, and the subsequent psychological effects – such as heightened awareness, increased connectivity with unconscious material, sharpened intuition, and a growing correspondence between reader and client perspectives. A psychical interpretation may consider divination in relation to supposed latent abilities of the mind, such as telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition. A metaphysical interpretation may introduce more speculative models of “acausal” insight; for example, Jung’s theory of Synchronicity, or Bohm’s theory of Implicate Enfoldment. See Cynthia Giles, The Tarot: History, Mystery and Lore (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994/1992), Chapter Seven: Tarot as a Way of Knowing, pp. 126-42.