關於愛，我是個小學生。

2014/12/15

crystallization of pp.3-35, ties that bind

introduction

1. mother's love:

pervasive, persistent feature of south asian religious culture (p3) 

2. confronting positions toward mother's love:

a. originated from hindu tradition: manusmrti (印度法典)

b. buddhist tradition: hinder from attaining nirvana, an integral part of the familial life one had to reject (p3) 

3. a double-edged sword:

"sometimes extolled as the most appropriate symbol for buddhahood... sometimes denigrated as the most paradigmatic manifestation possible of the attachment to the world that keeps all benighted beings trapped within the realm of rebirth." (p4) 

4. the author wants to know:

a. how mother's love is dipicted in south asian buddhist literature

b. trope, used as a figure of speech

c. differences of tropes of motherhood, sonhood, and fatherhood

d. attachment to buddha's own mothers, maya and mahaprajapti

e. why buddhist images to mother's love are so ambivalent and contradictory to nature

f. how such motherhood may reflect the emotions of the renunciant monks that composed and passed down the traditions (p5)

g. how such buddhist authors felt about their won mothers within a patriarchal, patrilineal, and family structure (p9) 

5. the structure of the book:

a. chapter 1: generals, standard maternal tropes

b. chapter 2: mother in grief as an iconic figure of attachment and suffering

c. chapters 3, 4, 5: traditions around buddha's own two mothers, maya and mahamaya, and her sister mahaprajapati gautami

d. chapters 6, 7: biological processes of motherhood, pregnancy, gestation for attaining buddahood, breastfeeding for compassionate deeds

e. chapter 8: relationship btwn motherhood and indian buddhism to buddhist ethnography and to recent feminist view on motherhood (p10)

chapter one

a mother's heart is tender --- buddhist depictions of mother-love

1. definition:

love a mother has for her child, which, in pali canon, is praised along with father as a high position, worthy of praise, equivalent to brahma and gurus. 

2. parent-love is why children owe debt to parents and honor and esteem their parents (p11) and patricide or matricide "sins of immediate retribution" (p12) 

3. mother-love subtly more highlighted and valued: (p12)

a. anguttara nikaya (大藏增支部): carrying parents on both shoulders, yet mother on the auspicious right side

b. mahabharata (摩訶婆羅多史詩): mother is more venerable for having endured suffering in gestation

c. sonananda jataka (本生經sonananda 篇): on virtues of looking after the parents, mother esp.

d. dhammapada commentary (法句經經文評論): a heart of a mother is tender

e. uraga jataka no. 354 (本生經 uraga 第354篇): father cry unfazed by deity sakka, yet comforted his mother 

4. sharp edges of maternal love as a religious metaphor:

a. edge a

- buddhas and buddhisattvas' love for sentient beings

- cultivation of loving kindness, imitate the love of a mother for her only son

- rtupana's story in hindu ritual text baudhayana srauta sutra (吠陀經？)(p17)

- immeasurable, compassion, loving kindness as in buddhaghosa's (覺音和尚) metaphor in visuddhimaga (清淨道論) (p19)

b. edge b

- particularity and exclusivity against buddha's, universal and extensive

- bound within the realm of samsara

- bound within the realm of birth and death (p16)

- sorreya's story in dhammapada commentary, woman for negative karmic consequences and shameful (p17)

- incompatible with attaining nirvana

- bondage as in buddhaghosa's (覺音) metaphor in visuddhimaga (p18) 

good and bad mothers

1. antitheses to mother-love: cruel, horrific (p22), vindictive, mercurial, vicious (p23)

2. interchangeable between "barren and fertile", "good and bad", "first would-be and later frustrated" of two mothers so that the sons rejected their mothers in favor of their fathers in dhammapada commentary, ayogana jataka no. 510 (本生經 ayogana 第510篇), jayyadisa jataka no. 513 (本生經 jayyadisa 第513篇) (pp24,25):

- concluded ass cited from liz wilson, 'samsara is a man-trap, in which women are the agents of incarceration'. (p26)

- mapped onto buddhist soteriology, dealing with salvation, the move form samsara to nirvana as a rejection of mother and an identification with the fathers

- mother-love = excessive from of attachment and suffocating, just as a bad mother, both must be rejected in order to attain nirvana (p27) 

mother-love vs. son-love

1. as mother-love, son-love is as particular, exclusive, and intense to

a. honor his mother

b. be grateful for her services on his behalf

c. take care of her in her old age

d. repay the enormous debt for bringing him to this world (p28) 

2. as visuddhimaga mentioned: enlightenment against family, against attachment, against mother-love, against what a good son has to do for his mother (p29) 

3. "evenminded" reduced from culladhammapala jataka no. 358 (本生經 culladhammapala第358篇) (p30) 

4. evenmindedness = equanimity + many mothers (sexual attraction minimization) (p32) 

5. mahayana and tibetan meditation or cultivation from mother-and-son's love (p33) 

some personal thoughts about the paper:

1. love is ubiquitous and equivalent only that the aspect or the facet that matters:

differentiation and amalgamation for buddhist's love and mother's love lie in the panorama of love needed by the former while the intensity of love offered and generated by the latter.

2. since nirvana is the highest and holiest level of enlightenment, why is it 'enormous debt' for a son that should repay his mother, the very culprit that brought him to this world full of attachments and sufferings, opposed to ways to arhat?