Men, Women and Interbeing

While men and women are potential mates to each other, it often seems like they are natural enemies in the war of the sexes. This is particularly true when we look at the sayings of the “second wave” militant feminists. Feminist Catharine MacKinnon, for example, said that “Male sexuality is apparently activated by violence against women and expresses itself in violence against women to a significant extent. Similarly, another radical feminist, Marilyn French, famously said that “All men are rapists and that’s all they are.” The demonization of masculinity and male sexuality is nothing new. In this age of Me Too, there is much talk about toxic masculinity. Most of us are familiar with misogyny, but few of us understand the extent of misandry. The danger of such inflammatory language is that masculinity will be understood as nothing but toxic and violent. In this highly charged political environment, can Buddha’s teachings help to ameliorate the hostility?

One of the greatest teachings of Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, is the notion of Interbeing. Interbeing is another way to express Buddha’s central teaching of Dependent Origination (Pratītyasamutpāda in Sanskrit), which is the Buddhist model of causation. In a sense, the Christian’s model of causation is very simple. It is a single-factor model — God creates everything; everything comes from God. The Buddhist causation model of Dependent Origination, is, however, much more complex. It is multiple-factored. To put it in layman’s language, the existence of anything is dependent on the existence of everything else…