Vanessa R Sasson - Each time we learn, our world becomes bigger
The professor of religious studies at Marianopolis College in Quebec, who was in India earlier this year for the Jaipur Literature Festival, talks about her novels Yasodhara and The Gathering that she places in the tradition of Buddhist hagiographic fiction
Wendy Doniger has called your novel Yasodhara “a kind of Buddhist Arabian Nights that swirls around the story of the Buddha from the illuminating point of view of his wife.” What do you think of this description? Is this the sort of book you had set out to write?
The Arabian Nights is a collection of wild narratives that delight the imagination, while at the same time challenge the attentive reader. I certainly did not have those stories in mind while I wrote, but I was honoured by her description.
Having engaged with Buddhism primarily as a scholar, how did it feel to approach some of the same material as a novelist? Could you talk about the specific ways in which it was liberating, and also how your scholarly training might have got in the way?
At the beginning, this kind of writing was quite a leap for me. I had never done any creative writing before but I was convinced it was something I should try. I have been writing in an academic voice for well over 20 years. Academic writing is an important skill that I am grateful to have developed, but after so many years of writing in the same voice, I was ready to try something new. I wanted to use my skills differently and look at my research with fresh eyes.
Creative writing, however, proved to be much harder than I anticipated and many of my academic habits did in fact get in the way. As a scholar, we are trained to take a step back and describe our research with attempted objectivity. But as a storyteller, we have to step in. We have to participate in the story, become part of it. We have to create scenes and dialogue – not something I had ever done before. We have to stop describing and start embodying the narrative with our voice. It took time to figure out how to move into the narrative, and how to let go of wanting to stand so far away.
You say that this novel “does not belong to the category of historical fiction” and is better off being labelled “hagiographical fiction”. Could you help us understand the difference, as you see it? Also, some examples of historical fiction drawing on the story of the Buddha?
I wrestled for a long time with a name for the kind of writing I was doing. The academic in me needed a category. I knew I could never call my writing historical fiction because most of the history surrounding the Buddha’s life is not known to us. If we agree that the Buddha lived about 2500 years ago, I would have to try to create India from that time period. But all the stories we have in the tradition are from a later period. The elaborate abundance of the early hagiographies - the jewels and palaces and temples that the hagiographies paint for us – these were probably not quite developed yet. The world was probably much more rugged, but I did not want to write about a more rugged world. I love the dripping jewels of the hagiographies; I love the drama and fabulism and beauty. I therefore decided to stay with the hagiographical imagination and that is how I came to “hagiographical fiction” as my category.
There are many wonderful narratives that tell the Buddha’s story. Thich Nhat Hanh’s Old Path, White Clouds is a contemporary classic, as is Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. Osamu Tezuka’s multi-volume graphic novel Buddha is another wonderful contribution. We have many biographies of the Buddha’s life out there, but very few that focus on Yasodhara.
Did your research on Yasodhara engage with Pali, Chinese, Tibetan, Sinhalese and Sanskrit source materials? Or did you choose to zero in on a few? How did you make these decisions?
I used all the research materials at my disposal in every language I could read or that was available in translation. Buddhist writing is extraordinarily prolific, and I enjoyed as much as I could find. But the Buddhacarita, an early Sanskrit hagiography, may have had the most impact on my imagination. I returned to that text more often than almost any other.
What was it like to work with the story of Kisa Gotami, the woman who was utterly heartbroken by the death of her son and approached the Buddha to bring him back to life?
It was very painful to be in her skin for a while. She is a character that has long haunted me. Indeed, I think it is probably fair to say that any mother who hears her story becomes affected by it. Her suffering pierces our heart. It is impossible to look at her for too long, and yet it is also impossible to look away. I picked up her story again in my next book, The Gathering. Kisa Gotami is there too. I guess I can’t let her go.
The story of Kisa Gotami’s meeting with the Buddha, which highlights the universality of bereavement and grief, seems to have found wider resonance during the COVID-19 pandemic. If you could go back in time and meet her, what would you ask?
What a profound, beautiful question! I don’t know if I would actually ask her anything. I think that I would just want to sit next to her for a while. She experienced such profound grief when she lost her only child. But according to the tradition, she eventually set herself free. I think I would want to sit quietly with someone like that. I would want to feel her quiet and feel her freedom. I don’t know if I would want to bother her by asking her for words.
Your novel The Gathering, a sequel to Yasodhara, draws on poems in the Therigatha, a compilation of poems by the earliest Buddhist nuns. How was your first encounter with those poems? What have they offered you with subsequent readings?
I first encountered those poems a very long time ago. I don’t remember what I felt – I was a graduate student, moving quickly from one worry to the next. I don’t think I appreciated how special those poems were at the time.
But I returned to them a few years ago and felt a kind of awe about them that has not left me since. The Therigatha is a collection of poems that may be about 2000 years old. The poems are ascribed to women, and we have no reason to believe that they were not, in fact, authored by women. These are ancient women’s voices. It is a privilege to sit with such poetry all these years later, to hear these ancient women’s voices and hear of their accomplishments. It is for me some of the most beautiful poetry in the world.
Both these novels have been published at a time when there is a heightened interest in female role models that can serve contemporary Buddhist practitioners. How have these novels been received by fellow academics (feminist and otherwise), and women who are practitioners?
I have been quite surprised by the reception of these books. I was worried at first that the academic community might shun me for writing this way. Or at the very least ignore the fact that I had done so. Scholars don’t traditionally write novels.
But to my great amazement, the academic community has been very encouraging. I think the academic world may be opening up. The field of Buddhist Studies, in particular, can be quite conservative, but I have discovered that scholars are often looking for new ways to negotiate their research. Far from shunning my creativity (as I feared), many of my colleagues in the field seem to be intrigued by the possibility it represents.
Among Buddhist practitioners, a similar interest has developed. People want to hear women’s stories and they want to be inspired. I receive messages from readers from all over the world about these books – which is not something that ever happened with my more traditional academic writing. This is all quite new for me.
Rita M Gross, the scholar-practitioner who wrote Buddhism After Patriarchy, reminds us that the historical record includes “non-misogynist resources” but we need to ferret them out. Do you see your own work as contributing to a search for feminist foremothers? Which other female Buddhist historical figures would you like to work on?
These are wonderful questions. I certainly hope my work contributes to a conversation about women in early Buddhism, but that is not for me to say. I will leave that to others to discuss. As for other women I would like to imagine… there are so many! Every woman I meet in the literature tends to fascinate me. But I find myself especially drawn to some of the nameless women lately. “The wife of so-and-so” for example, or “the nun who did x or y…” I keep bumping into these nameless women and I find myself wondering about them. Who were they? What were their names? If they could tell their story, what would they say?
What was it like to write the transgender character, Surasa, in The Gathering? To what extent did contemporary debates about transgender representation influence your writing?
Contemporary discussions had a very important influence on me with regards to Surasa. I don’t think I would have imagined her as a character a few years ago. But the contemporary context (along with my wonderful, expressive students) helped me develop an awareness of the transgender experience that I was not raised with in my youth. Each time we learn, our world becomes bigger.
Transgender people have been invisible for much of human history (including my own). I wanted at least one transgender character to be visible in the book. And I made this decision not just because of the current context; I made this decision because the story itself demanded it. In a gathering of diverse women, how could there not have been transgender women among them? If all kinds of women joined the gathering, then transgender women must have been there too.
Having a transgender woman in The Gathering makes sense on another account: early Buddhist literature negotiates all kinds of sexual realities. It is not nearly as heteronormative as some might expect. Buddhist literature includes elaborate legal discussions and complicated narratives that transcend binary simplicities, including with regards to sexuality. Surasa therefore fits right in.
Chintan Girish Modi is a writer, journalist and educator based in Mumbai. He is @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.