Another example of Buddhism repressing female desire appears in the well-known Chinese tale The White Snake. Also made into many Thai films and television dramas, it appeared recently as the stage play Nangphaya Ngu Khao (The White Snake Queen, 1998).7 In its traditional version, the white and green snake sisters transform themselves into humans, and the white snake falls in love with an ordinary mortal. A monk informs the husband that he is not married to a woman but a snake. The couple already has a child and the man does not believe the monk until he gives his wife a special draught that reveals her snake form. With the husband's help, the monk is again able to imprison the snake and free the man from her clutches.
Daraka Wongsiri, one of the few professional playwrights in Thailand, revised the tale to reflect the snake's point of view. Wongsiri has had her play produced both at the professional Bangkok Playhouse, which she cofounded in 1993, and as an experimental dance-drama at the Chulalongkorn University Drama Department, directed by Ritirong Jiwakanon. In Wongsiri's text, freely adapted from Benjamin Chia's novel Madame White Snake, White Snake is a benign creature, and the relationship between the two snake sisters is as important as the one between White Snake and her human husband, the pharmacist Xixian. He courts her and she shows no undue sexual aggression. After she marries him, she uses her knowledge of herbs to cure the villagers. This power casts her in the traditional mold of a witch, but she never uses it against anyone. Unlike Mae Naak, White Snake harms no one and, thus, the monk Fahai's antagonism stems solely from his determination to sever unholy relations between human and nonhuman. When her unmarried sister, Green Snake, pines for their mountain homeland, White Snake promises to return. She intuits that her happy family life is doomed, saying, "We will not be able to spend our lives with them [humans] because we are not accepted for what we are. . . . And I am afraid of them. I am afraid of the hatred they show us. Even a man that we love most, also leaves us with hostility. Have you ever thought what would happen to us if everybody knew the truth?" (Wongsiri 1998: 39).
Fahai's vindictive righteousness in saving the human male from the female snake is far from the compassion of the Buddha. Wongsiri makes him the most unsympathetic character in the play. He instructs Xixian to deceive his wife by telling her that he has been imprisoned in the temple. Green Snake immediately knows it is a trap, but the loving wife takes her baby and goes to see her husband. Thus she is not guilty of any marital misconduct. Quite the contrary, she has in all ways fulfilled the wifely ideal. Her nature, not her behavior, condemns her.
Caught by Fahai's ruse, the snake goddess does not go on the rampage attacking villagers as Mae Naak did, but invokes natural forces, her old powers of rain and thunder, to battle the monk. Fahai subdues her by trapping her in the Golden Pagoda, where she is deprived of her husband, child, and sister. Only after Fahai dies does White Snake break through her prison and return to her sister in the mountains, with the final vision being of the two snakes dancing through the sky. The monk constrained them, but he was not able to destroy them. In Wongsiri's script, "The white snake is more sincere than the humans and ironically, the victorious monk Fahai looks like a villain" (Danutra 1999).
Taking a critical look at Buddhism's patriarchal values, Wongsiri reveals the misogyny behind the monk's destruction of a woman's love for her husband and child when he calls her a "devil." The original tale, by positing the two sisters as snakes, suggests the evil animal nature lurking behind all women's power, while in the new version they show a true affection for one another as well as a transcendent love compared to the self-righteous morality of the monk. When confronted by Buddhist rejection, they return to their pure natural element—thunder and rain. When the script was first performed as an experimental dance-drama in the small theatre at Chulalongkorn, abstract movement was used to create a more suggestive ambience of a mystical world in which humans and snakes could interact. At the end, two enormous snakes that were manipulated like a Chinese lion dance, symbolizing the snakes' return to their natural state, filled the stage.
When The White Snake Queen was restaged as a musical for the Chinese New Year at the Bangkok Playhouse, it was a spectacular production with well-known singers, lavish sets, newly written songs, and a realistic Chinese mise en scène. Despite its six-month run, Wongsiri said in a February 6, 2000 interview that the modern theatre-going public is not all that enamored of romantic tragedies and prefers comedies.
In the stories of both Mae Naak and the White Snake, institutional Buddhism curtails their aspirations and power. The early antagonism between the female animist deities and Buddhism still plays a role in popular mythology. The sangha, the Buddhist clergy, is a rigid hierarchy and has consistently forbidden women an equitable role both in its organization and philosophy: "Under both state and ecclesiastical law, women are prohibited from being ordained as female Theravada monks or bhikkhunies. While they can become nuns (mae chii) such status, in religious terms is clearly in inferior and subordinate to that of monks and does not provide them with either state benefits or social prestige" (Klausner 1997: 68).
One of the first conflicts between the incoming Buddhist religion and the indigenous rice goddess, Mae Khao, reveals a gender struggle for respect as well as the compromise between foreign and native ideologies. Siraporn Nathalang compares several versions of the encounter, but in all of them the goddess presents herself as more powerful than the Buddha, who must finally humble himself to exact grudging acceptance from her:
The rice goddess and the Buddha are put in a confrontational situation. . . . moreover these two characters symbolically represent two systems of beliefs. One is the belief in the rice goddess, which I would say, represents all the indigenous beliefs, and the other is the belief in the Buddha, which represents Buddhism adopted later. What the story recorded is that when the two systems of religious beliefs met, there was conflict. This is symbolically shown by the competition who is greater by demanding the other party to wai, to bow with hands pressed together, or pay respect. Since Buddhism did not recognize the importance of the indigenous beliefs, Buddha did not wai to Mae Khao who indignantly left with the result being drought and starvation. In order to gain back the balance of nature, the Buddha had to beg the rice goddess to come back. Thus the conflict is eventually resolved by Buddhism acknowledging the contribution of the indigenous beliefs.
(Nathalang 2000: 106)
This confrontation underwrites the antagonism of Buddhism toward the older female deities and the assimilation process by which Buddhism either incorporated their powers or forced them underground. These legendary conflicts also reveal institutional Buddhism's distrust of women as if believing that even a good woman cannot keep her demon nature in check. Female animist cults and male-dominated Buddhism coexist today. Their relationship can be seen in the uneasy though accommodating proximity of the golden elaborate Wat Mahabute and the ramshackle but well-attended shrine to Mae Naak behind it. Theatrically both Mae Naak stories and White Snake plays continue to explore this vexed relationship while gradually giving more credence to the female perspective.
Catherine Diamond
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/asian_theatre_journal/v023/23.1diamond.html#plate08
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