Love as Enlightenment and Enlightenment as Love: Reading Feminist Hermeneutic of Reconstruction in Vanessa R Sasson’s Yasodhara and the Buddha

Introduction

Religion and spirituality pose some very difficult questions for feminism when it comes to understanding and articulating women’s experiences. These questions get further amplified in Asian contexts because of their emphasis on distinct gender roles and access to freedom of spiritual pursuit. Just as it has been pointed out that religion and gender continuing to remain ‘bifurcated conversations’ (Avishai and Irby, 2017: 647) thanks to the sacred/secular divide (Magee, 1995), the limited nature of conversations among religion, gender and literature, unless addressed, would continue to widen the gap between feminist cause and mainstream understanding of religion. This article seeks to alert us towards ‘a future of disconnection’ (Llewellyn and Trzebiatowska, 2013: 244) between religious and secular feminisms by using a feminist retelling of the story of Buddha’s wife. It is hoped that this exercise will be found meaningful in understanding women’s experiences of and attitudes towards religion, Buddhism in this case.

The rise of feminist re-visioning (Rich, 1972: 18) of the Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, in the space of mytho-fiction (such as Divakaruni, 2008, 2019, among several others) has prompted feminist critics to engage with the retellings as literary texts and as feminist critiques of Hinduism (Chanda-Vaz, 2017; Erney, 2019; Hess, 1999; Jain, 2011; Lodhia, 2015, 2020; Luthra, 2014; Moodley, 2020; Spivak, 2006). This article intends to examine a recent work in the space of Buddhist fiction to locate it at the intersection of religion and gender and examine the hermeneutic of reconstruction at work in the novel.

The novel in question is Buddhist Studies scholar Vanessa R Sasson’s debut work of fiction, Yasodhara and the Buddha (Sasson, 2021). The novel is extremely difficult to gauge by conventional, as opposed to Felskian, tenets of feminist literary criticism in that these tenets tend to focus on women’s writing from a standpoint of exclusivity in terms of style and representation of women’s experiences (Felski, 1989). The novel is a rare moment in the experience of feminist aesthetics, its trajectory of self-discovery, a trope associated with feminist writing, is unique, and it starts with questioning the patriarchal mores of the society that the protagonist lives in but ends in an epiphany about self and selflessness. In the novel, Yasodhara starts with anger, resistance and questioning but the novel has her thinking about a different side of resistance – not in the sense generally associated with feminism in the sense of resisting patriarchy but in the sense of seeing resistance as being egoistic and unproductive (Chanda-Vaz, 2017; Erney, 2019; Hess, 1999; Jain, 2011; Lodhia, 2015, 2020; Luthra, 2014; Moodley, 2020; Spivak, 2006). The novel thus poses some baffling questions about feminism and its possible engagement with Buddhist thought. Questions such as: what does Yasodhara’s perspective on resistance in the spiritual sense make her? Does it take away anything from her as a feminist?

To explore these questions, this article first turns to the presence of Yasodhara in Buddhist hagiographical texts. It then turns to unpack various strands within feminist thought on Buddhist theology. Sasson’s novel is then discussed for the contribution it makes to reconstruct or reimagine Yasodhara in the novel in the way it integrates Buddhist philosophy of love and attachment with the feminist approach to resistance. The argument is that in this integration, the novel expands the sacred-secular intersection as seen in Buddhist fiction with the incorporation of a feminist project through the retelling of Yasodhara’s story, especially with all its ‘theological imaginizing’ as noted by (Ursic, 2017: 323) in the context of Christian theology.

Yasodhara in the Buddhist Hagiographical Texts: Diversity in Representation

Several tellings of Buddha’s life story agree on a few basics. It was predicted that Siddhattha Gotama, born to king Sudhodana, King of Kapilavattu, would become a great sage, the name ‘Siddhattha’ means ‘the one who has attained it all’. The King, however, wanted to and did raise him in ways that exposed him to happiness and prosperity – shielding him from the ugly aspects that might provoke suffering and the need to seek any spiritual solutions for the causes of this suffering. Siddhattha grows up to become a kind, compassionate man interested in helping humanity. It is this tender man that Yasodhara falls in love with – a minor detail in the scriptures indicates that the two were cousins and were indeed born on the same day. Siddhattha fights a contest to win her hand in marriage and the two live a happily married life until Siddhattha cannot take it anymore and realises that he must renounce everything to go in search of truths, for the life lived in the palace seems a lie to him. He leaves and years later becomes famous as the Buddha, the Enlightened One, who preaches the message of love, kindness, non-violence and the right way to live life to overcome desire.

The Buddha’s wife is an unconventional heroine to find in a twenty-first century novel written by a Canadian academician – her strangeness is less caused by the identity of the author than by her emergence at this point in time. What is she? Was she an historical woman who was pushed into obscurity? Or was she a symptom attached to the causes of suffering as Siddhattha saw it, suffering that he wanted to find a solution to? Is she a victim of the countless erasures brought into effect by the misogyny of Buddhism? Was she a symptom of the misogyny of Buddhism? A look at the sacred and secular literature presents an intriguing picture.

Scholars working in the domain of Buddhist Studies have looked at the brief appearances Yasodhara makes in the hagiographical texts – once as sleeping when Siddhattha comes to see her and their son for the last time before leaving the palace, and once more when she is known to have become an arahat, or a female Buddha, having followed the Buddha’s path. Scriptural texts such as the Vinaya Pitaka (between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE) and Ashvaghosa’s epic poem Buddhacarita (early second century CE) make references to her plight when dealing with their main subject – the life and teachings of Buddha. Sarah Shaw (2018) points out that she is also a significant presence in the Jatakas (known to have been composed between third century BCE and fourth century CE), the tales about the Bodhisattvas or the past lives of the Buddha. Similarly, Bhadrakalpavadana (Extraordinary History of Our Auspicious Era), a sixteenth century Nepalese text, includes the trials Yasodhara faces in Siddhattha’s absence – including questions raised about her chastity and her son’s paternity (Tatelman, 1998). John S Strong (1997) argues that a careful reading of the Buddhist scriptures written in the Sanskrit text Mulasarvastivada Vinaya shows that the lives of Yasodhara and Buddha are intertwined – as can be understood from the way Buddha’s biography is intertwined with those of Yasodhara and their son Rahula. The three are in a quest together for the Vinaya text says that Yasodhara had an extended pregnancy and Rahula was born only after Siddhattha attained Enlightenment and became the Buddha.

In addition to the above-mentioned mainstream texts, there are quite a few folk/secular texts that focus on Yasodhara. Two examples include folk Sinhala texts Yasodharavata (eighteenth–nineteenth centuries CE) and Yasodharapadanaya (twelfth–thirteenth centuries CE). The former registers Yasodhara’s lament at being ‘renounced’ by Siddhattha as if she were a thing and not a life partner, while the latter is about Buddha reminiscing with her about their past lives together. Both have been translated by Ranjini Obeyesekere (2009). Sir Edwin Arnold’s, 1879 poem The Light of Asia (Arnold, 1879), on the basis of the Sanskrit sources he was exposed to as an academician in India does not portray any bitterness between the couple.

As examples from both sacred and secular texts show, Yasodhara has been a significant presence ever since Buddha’s life and teachings have come to be revisited in forms of folk/secular poetry or scripture. Moreover, there is diversity in the way she has been represented: in some texts, she has been sympathised with; in others, she emerges as Buddha’s equal; in yet others, she is seen as speaking for herself. The varied discourses around her pose an interesting challenge for feminist re-visioning in contemporary times. What can a hermeneutic of reconstruction, informed by modern feminist consciousness, do to enhance the tradition that she has been located in? While such attempts have been made in Christian theology in the form of commentary and critique (Gonzalez, 2007; Trible, 1984), Buddhist Studies scholars such as Tatelman, Shaw and Strong mentioned above have done something similar in their commentaries on Yasodhara’s presence. This article seeks to show that the space of fiction has been creatively occupied by Sasson’s novel by using ‘theological imagining’ as a method to further the project of feminist theology in all its ‘potential to enliven all theology by articulating the role of imagination in theological development’ (Ursic, 2017: 325). The novel is an exercise in attempting ‘hagiographical fiction’, a term suggested by the novelist herself to describe her experiment that is not quite historical fiction given its focus on a figure present in Buddhist hagiographical texts and written with a deep sense of adulation for its subject, Yasodhara, with the story set in ancient India and based on Buddha’s life. It brings the idea of Yasodhara alive, by reimagining the times and place in which she lived. It becomes an empowering lesson in ‘intellectual innovation rooted in modern historical struggles for liberation’ (Schneider and Trentaz, 2008: 793), making feminist theology fluid not just in the sense Schneider and Trentaz point out among the waves of feminist theology as a field of inquiry, but also in the sense of transcending discourses by flowing freely between theorisation and imaginising through fiction.

Let us turn to the novel at this point to explore Sasson’s reconstruction of Yasodhara.

Yasodhara’s Story Reconstructed: From Inspiration from the Contemporary Myths to the Buddhist Ethos of Love and Enlightenment

In her novel, Sasson builds a coherent narrative around the scanty, scattered biographical details found in sacred texts. She keeps Yasodhara at the centre of events and has her narrate them. Yasodhara is born on the same day as Siddhattha and is his cousin too. As she grows up, she becomes observant about her surroundings. At a performance, she looks at Surpanakha, a character in the Ramayana whose nose is mutilated by Lakshmana for making advances to Rama, his brother:

Surpanakha took center stage and began to sing. Night after night, I watched enraptured as Surpanakha lived out her story. I had always hated her as a character. She was responsible for a war of epic proportions, the sister of the evil demon Ravana who abducted Sita and set the whole world on fire. But this troupe gave us a different version. Through their magic, she was becoming a tragic character instead. The Surpanakha I watched on stage was lonely and wanted to be loved. She tried to win Rama and Lakshmana, but they laughed at her, teased her, and even humiliated her. They toyed with her as they threw her back and forth between each other. I was horrified by their behavior and could feel others in the audience recoil with a similar aversion. Rama was supposed to be a great hero, a king who ruled with justice and truth. How could he have acted that way? (Sasson, 2021: 74)

This is feminist re-visioning at its classic. There are more scenes such as this one. For instance, in one tender moment, when Yasodhara is humiliated for a bad performance at using a bow and arrow, she learns a great lesson in feminine power from her mother:

It is time for you to realize that women can fight. That women do. Just because we aren’t taught to use weapons does not mean that we have no power (. . . .) Our power is not always obvious, but it is there, inside of us. We have a great blaze of fire in our wombs that is the source of all of our strength. (Sasson, 2021: 49, emphasis original).

Yasodhara also learns about Durga, the goddess who killed the demon Mahisasura:

Mahisa shrank progressively until Durga managed to jump onto his back in her dainty sandals. She grabbed him with her steel fingers, raised one of the many arms at her disposal and sliced off his head as easily as if she had been slicing a cucumber. Not one hair of hers had fallen out of place. Durga is never disheveled. (Sasson, 2021: 52)

The references to Surpanakha and Durga are exercises to recognise women’s perspectives and power. These are instances that any reader, feminist or not, would acknowledge as drawing attention to women’s experiences – which is the very project of feminist re-visioning. These references also remind one of Rachel Muers’ observations about ways in which feminist theology can survive by establishing connections between past, present and future:

We arise not from one tradition but from the crossing-over, the conflicts, and the unexpected interchanges of many traditions; the theological statements we inherit themselves bear the traces of their multiple origins and cannot be resolved back into singular pure foundations. (Muers, 2007: 126)

Returning to the novel: as time passes, Siddhattha yearns to renounce his life as a prince and look for answers as a wandering ascetic. One day, he leaves while Yasodhara is sleeping with her newborn son. When she wakes up and realises that her husband has left her, she gets angry at being renounced, as if she were a thing. Over a period of time, she comes to terms with the reality of her abandonment and comes to consider her husband’s death – death in the sense of social death. She begins to take charge of the household. She survives an attempt of rape from her cousin, Devadatta. Such episodes in her life resonate with modern readers as timeless struggles faced by women. Towards the end of the novel, after a lapse of 7 years, Siddhattha Gotama who has become renowned as the Buddha comes to visit his family. Yasodhara urges her son Rahula to go to his father and ask him about his inheritance – would he be the king since Siddhattha clearly does not want to be the king? The question has deeper repercussions. Yasodhara seems to have hoped that the question from the son to the father would change the latter’s mind and bring him back to the life of a householder. But as it turns out, Buddha asks that his son come with him for an education in the pursuit of knowledge, which is Rahula’s true inheritance. Thus, he leaves Yasodhara alone – and for the second time. In her words:

Every fiber 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. (Sasson, 2021: 8)

The readers empathise with Yasodhara’s plight and the injustice of it.

However, the re-visioning and the reconstruction take a strange turn at the end. Despite all the pain and bitterness, Yasodhara, at the end of the novel, chooses to see her situation, her abandonment, from a different point of view. Instead of continuing to see herself as a victim and resisting the events happening around her, she begins to see it in Buddha’s way when she thinks to herself that ‘[a]ttachment can destroy us’ (Sasson, 2021: 252). Yasodhara’s anger is replaced by a sort of enlightenment of her own. Sasson shows this transformation in terms of spirituality, terms that we can easily recognise to be a part of popular spirituality in the twenty-first century. Yasodhara wants ‘to let go’ (Sasson, 2021: 252). She now looks at her life lived in resistance differently:

I fought change whenever it approached me. And I fought the future, hoping that if I tried hard enough, it would not become what it was destined to be. I had always thought that the king was mad for fighting the stars throughout Siddhattha’s childhood, but how different was I from him? How many of us are capable of letting anything go? (Sasson, 2021: 252)

From someone who turns to Durga for inspiration, who empathises with Surpanakha and learns lessons in female power, turning to the idea of ‘letting go’ might come across as an anti-climax. The intent behind writing this article is to explore this transformation in a feminist retelling with all its perplexities. In the last three pages of the novel, Yasodhara becomes an enigma. What causes an easily recognised feminist rhetoric to turn into an easily recognised spiritual discourse? What makes resistance directed at externalities such as other people look like a sign of a weaker, even rigid, self? And do feminist theology, aesthetics and literary criticism have the space and vocabulary to engage with this transformation? Yasodhara does not see herself as oppressed, abandoned or victimised. In her article written after the novel, Sasson (2020) argues that Yasodhara refuses to be defined by her abandonment.

Combined with Sasson’s portrayal of Yasodhara as a woman who lets go, this idea of refusing to be defined by abandonment merits deeper exploration of the larger context of Buddhist thought. Although in the setting of the novel, Sasson has not spoken of Buddha’s way as a codified Buddhist thought the way we know it today, a discussion of genderlessness in Buddhist spirituality is in order so that we can shift the focus of conversation from the novel towards non-literary, theological discourses into discussion. This is especially important because, as mentioned above, religion and gender have unfortunately been noted to be ‘bifurcated conversations’ (Avishai and Irby, 2017). Similarly, conversations around literary representations do not have to take place outside the space of discourses like religion and spirituality – more so when aesthetics and religion converge on the idea that gender is not an essence. As scholars such as Elizabeth Castelli (2001) have shown, religion is not just a tool of patriarchy. In Asian/Indian/non-Western contexts, religious and spiritual contexts make a lot of difference in the way women’s stories and even retellings are read. Feminist scholars observing arguments around the Indian epics – such as Sharada Sugirtharajah (2002) – make a similar argument for rethinking of feminist strategies as rooted in Western women’s movement. Sasson’s reimagination of Yasodhara as looking at her relationship with her husband in terms of the larger understanding of attachment and detachment needs to be located in this context.

Yasodhara as a Unique Feminist Theological Engagement with Buddhist Thought

One way to do that is to understand women characters from religious or spiritual contexts and the decisions they make in works of fiction is to treat them as potential sources of insight (Anderson et al., 2019). A reader could do this by moving away from the approach that uses a character in a pre-determined frame of what she is supposed to do to further feminist ideals or express herself in terms of pre-existing notions of feminist style. Character, as an element of literature, is beyond theme and form – rich with insights into living, thinking and loving. Yasodhara, as imagined by Sasson, deserves exploration as a way of talking about aesthetics instead of using aesthetics to talk about character (and literature in general), along with the use of feminist theological standpoints of seeing women as, largely speaking, adversely affected by discrimination and oppression. She does not fall into the script that requires her to exercise her agency in the sense of fighting back, especially fighting external factors. She does not direct change outward in ways conventional feminist aesthetics identifies (such as using resistance to assert oneself).

Yasodhara straddles several worlds of history, myth, legend, literature and hagiography. A discussion about her cannot be dissociated from these contexts. Thus, even though Yasodhara is not a Buddhist in that the novel does not refer to the codification of Buddhist tenets, her transformation at the end of the novel, from being an angry, resentful wife to seeing her own resistance towards everything around her as meaningless, requires some discussion of feminist theological scholarship working on Buddhism.

Approached by Buddhist feminist theologians and/or Buddhist feminists, femaleness has been explored for perspectives to engage with its difference that continues to keep it excluded from the patriarchal mainstream. They have looked at representations of women in the scriptures, studied the way women have practised Buddhism in the monasteries, along with the struggles they encounter, the way they expose these encounters and engage with them, and the ingenious coalition building they work towards overcoming these struggles. Those who have studied these practices in detail have brought to light unique ways of thinking about gender inequality, especially in its origins in religion and culture.

An overview of theological feminist methods would reveal that the work of feminists working on Buddhist theology falls into four broad categories. One category of work finds Buddhism to be misogynistic. Work falling into this category might be exemplified by Jean Byrne’s (2012) essay ‘Why I am not a Buddhist Feminist’. The second category of work views Buddhism to hold an egalitarian worldview that does not distinguish between men and women and finds both to be capable of attaining enlightenment. This kind of work focuses on the strategies women use to practise the religion with dignity while also challenging the injustice of the monastic orders around them. Rita Gross’s work (1986) belongs to this category. Other examples include Hamilton (1996). The third category does not assert such a correlation between Buddhism as a religion and its treatment of and perspectives on women. It focuses on taking a macro view of its institutions and presenting a far more complex picture (Blackburn, 2012; Langenberg, 2018). Alan Sponberg’s (1992) ‘Attitudes towards Women and the Feminine in Early Buddhism’ is representative of such an argument. A fourth point of view is that of genderlessness – the idea that there is a self, not male self or female self. Nuns and scholars studying the practices of the nuns point out that there is only ego (which does not have a gender). For instance, Chand R Sirimanne (2016) argues that the Dhamma is genderless. Salgado (2013: 6-7) points out in her book what nuns would point out to her that they are not women, they are renunciants. To see beyond Western ideals of feminism, literary as well as theological, one must listen to Ursula King’s (1993) argument: ‘the spiritual is the personal and the political’ (p. 198). Along with the idea of ‘beyond feminist aesthetics’ that seeks to get rid of looking at literary practice via the lens of exclusive femininity, it is this notion of the genderless self that creates a unique space to understand Yasodhara, a very unconventional model for a retelling or re-visioning of a story, history or myth.

Scholarship emerging from Buddhist feminism largely keeps Yasodhara as a character out in its discussions of treatment of women in Buddhism. However, in the work of Walters (1994) and Tatelman (1998), she is seen as a hagiographical character. It is in the act of literary imagination (in Sasson’s novel) that one gets to her as holding agency. She emerges as a character with the capacity to love and as a possibility in unbecoming a woman (a response to Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that women become women) in the sense that resistance is the only aesthetic available to women in the conventional understanding of feminist aesthetics. In Yasodhara, we have a non-identitarian, non-binary, even a genderless look at womanhood, an idea that makes most sense given the context of Buddhist spirituality.

Yasodhara’s transformation in the novel is brought about by her encounter with Kisa Gotami. The story of Kisa Gotami is well known. Kisa takes her dead child to the Buddha and begs him to bring the child back to life. Buddha agrees to do so if Kisa can manage to bring a mustard seed from a household that has not witnessed any death. Kisa is unable to find such a household and understands the Buddha’s point about the inevitability of death. Sasson does not deal with Kisa’s encounter with the Buddha in the novel. However, she presents an encounter between Kisa and Yasodhara to another end. Yasodhara is horrified to see Kisa carry the corpse of her child in her arms.

This scene is a moment of transformation for this is where she ‘gets’ what Siddhattha had been saying to her about attachment. She emerges not as a pathetic figure to be pitied, she is a person who finds enlightenment in love without the rhetoric of a doctrine. It is a crucial moment in which the Buddhist ideal of love and goal of enlightenment meet. It puts forth an aesthetic of love: love as enlightenment and enlightenment as love. There is no rancour, no hysteria, no self-pity or any of the manifestations of ‘writing from the body’ that feminist literary criticism tends to identify in the texts.

It is unusual for the central character of a feminist, re-visionist novel to look at her life, her husband, her rage in terms of attachment and detachment. That is the reason why, conventional feminist aesthetics and feminist literary criticism would prove to be inadequate when unpacking Yasodhara’s moment of reflection on her situation. The frame of reference shifts from female/feminine/feminist angst to a spiritual realisation. And that is why a feminist theological viewpoint with all its energy of ‘theological imagining’, ‘intellectual innovation’ and hermeneutic of reconstruction comes into play. The question is: does that shift make it less feminist? Or does that shift make it something else? How does that shift sit with gender/spirituality connection? And most importantly, are there more works of art that tend to look at women’s decisions, choices and realisations in terms of that shift? These questions are striking given the fact that these do not generally find space in feminist re-visionings of the Western canon.

One response to these questions lies in the way feminist aesthetics comes to look at an insight from Buddhism. This kind of consciousness emerges out of mindful self-engagement. As Anne Klein puts it so evocatively:

Mindfulness departs from the urge to master, override, rein in, or otherwise manipulate the self. It avoids treating the self as a territory to be conquered, governed, or colonized by ideals. Insofar as the relationship to oneself sets the tone for one’s relationship to others, it is crucial to have models of self-engagement that do not denigrate or otherwise oppress. A mindful person is attentive, interactive, and nonoppositional. She is also autonomous in that she need not depend on some external goal to galvanize her mindful collateral energies. (Anne C Klein, quoted in Maitra, 2013: 372)

Klein’s discussion of mindfulness merges the Buddhist focus on mindfulness to Mary Wollstonecraft’s idea that women should seek to have power over themselves, not over men. However, it is not an idea that is explored deeply in questions of conventional feminist aesthetics. We suggest that Yasodhara is a unique feminist heroine because she puts self-engagement at work while conventional feminist aesthetics frames outward engagement as examples of feminist engagement.

In other words, being a feminist should not exclude the possibility of being a spiritualist, of forgiving, of loving or of being an enlightened one. The two positions can coexist as a couple of theological feminist positions discussed above indicate and as the example of Yasodhara indicates. When Amy Paris Langenberg points out that female monastics she has worked with exhibit ‘a distinct feminist consciousness’ (Langenberg, 2018: 2) and ‘contribute a new motif or fiber to the feminist weave’ (1) while resisting the label feminist, it is the same idea and same mode of existence at work. We discover that both the manifestations of personhood (explicit spiritual as well as implicit feminist) meet in a specific kind of consciousness.

It is this availability that empowers women renunciants refuse to call themselves women. Thus, just as dhamma is genderless, the form of fiction or creative writing in general too knows no gender. This intersection between genderless writing and genderless Buddhist being in the character of Yasodhara in Sasson’s novel suggests that experience of enlightenment or fiction and faith are not tied to a gendered subjectivity or a defined form. Yasodhara and the Buddha is a novel of self-discovery as defined by Felski in which a character goes ‘backward and inward’ (Felski, 1989: 128); it is a journey not envisioned in journeys such as Draupadi’s in which she ‘returns with a vengeance’ (Erney, 2019:). Sasson’s Yasodhara makes a case for other, metaphysical journeys: ‘other spaces we inhabit and other identities who inhabit us’ (Minrose Gwin quoted in Felski, 2003: 23) to broaden the idea of experience as engaged with by both feminism and Buddhism.

As Felski (1989) puts it, ‘feminism makes a general claim for the recognition of the specificity of female interests’ (p. 70). Therefore, reading mythological heroines as representing only the polemical stance of feminism as examples of challenge to patriarchy or as examples of subversion of patriarchy alone is counter-productive to feminist agenda – in theology as well as literary critique. It is also the reason why this agenda is not well understood by women (readers and believers). For example, in 2018, the Supreme Court of India ruled that women can be allowed to enter the Ayyappa temple at Sabarimala. The judgement overthrew a long-standing practice that forbids women of menstruating age (10–50) from entering the temple premises because the male god is celibate and needs to be protected from the ‘distracting’ presence of women. Women came out in large numbers to challenge the judgement and to stop women devotees who were determined to enter the temple. The only woman judge on the ruling bench had expressed dissent on the judgement saying that the sphere of religion is not the same as the sphere of rationality and, therefore, courts should refrain from passing judgements on such sensitive issues (see Supreme Court Observer, 2018). So, what explains the anti-feminist viewpoint of the female judge and the female devotees? This is not to defend the women protesting the judgement but to foreground that feminist scholarship in theology and literature is not in touch with the vocabulary and perspectives non-scholars use. The instance is an echo of Castelli’s remark that liberal feminism has considered religion in negative terms – which means it hasn’t got rid of its own Enlightenment Era roots (Castelli, 2001).

In other words, as Yasodhara in Sasson’s novel shows us, one can be feminist, political, personal and spiritual (to echo King). One does not have to be a feminist or a spiritualist for one can be both. It is an idea that establishes and reinforces the connections between secular and religious feminisms by bringing a character from the scriptures alive into the modern, secular form.

Conclusion

Feminist re-visioning, resistance narratives and the hermeneutic of reconstruction, dealing with representation of women in literary texts in general and in women’s writing in particular, look at the notion of female agency as dismantling patriarchy. Women characters are seen as subverting oppressive patriarchal norms. The inquiry presented in this article is located in thinking about the tenets of feminist theology through a work of ‘hagiographical fiction’. It seeks to explore what models of criticism are there in place for female agency in Buddhist hagiographical tradition and if such an engagement can be turned to for answers to the larger, perhaps global, questions that feminism deals with. Felski (1989) provides one such model from the perspective of literary critique while Gross (2008), Magee (1995), Muers (2007), Llewellyn and Trzebiatowska (2013), Schneider and Trentaz (2008) and Ursic (2017) help approach the relevance of the spiritual/sacred concerns for with a view to establish connections with the secular. Women’s spirituality does not emerge as antithetical to feminist interests. On the contrary, it emerges as a liberation from thinking of love as attachment. The transformation brought about by this liberation needs more attention.

Feminist praxis – creative as well as critical – need not entail practices of ‘reading against the grain’ or reading with resistance as a motif. As Sasson’s enigmatic heroine Yasodhara symbolises, models of self-engagement, looking at relationships from the point of view of attachment and detachment, and thinking in terms of genderlessness are some of the possibilities that emerge from reading available for readers who find spirituality appealing for various reasons. The way Buddhist philosophy meets with feminist philosophy in Sasson’s imagination of Yasodhara indicates that women can turn to themselves too without having to turn to the larger institutions such as society or family or patriarchy to explore their relationships and experiences. Yasodhara is just beginning to emerge as a character for deeper, re-visionist exploration. Given the state of her very limited visibility in the contemporary feminist praxis, one finds her to be a complex character relative to Draupadi and Sita. Re-imagining her and reading about her in different ways is very likely to prove refreshing and challenging to dominant theological contexts outside the West.