Is an alternative narrative simply a non-canonical work to enrich our imagination, to make us look at something familiar from a different angle? Or does an alternative narrative (the formal word being hagiography) have the potential to be a “statement of possibility”—something that causes us to glimpse something new in a text that we did not see before?

Many of us who are religious might feel uncomfortable with the second scenario, and instinctively prefer contemporary literature to be comfortably boxed in the first category. No one would consider the 2014 film Noah with Russell Crowe to indicate anything scripturally insightful, despite some critics acknowledging the film as having some refreshing ideas about human compassion and vice (for example, the film contains a made-up incident during which Noah dwells on whether he should kill his family to stop God from flooding the Earth again).

Yet, in some way, those who favor seeing alternative stories the first way must, by extension, accept that from a historical-critical perspective, the canonical text is one articulation of a cosmic truth out of many theoretical alternatives—it is the one that won out and was canonized over centuries. For those who deeply believe in the timelessness of Buddhist scriptures and that the stories of their protagonists are forever relevant to us (I count myself among these people), we cannot help but universalize them in space and time. Universalization inevitably means opening the texts up to diverse cultures, languages, and even other world views for encounter and dialogue, and allowing both text and reader to mutually influence one another and engage with contemporary authors and creators.

Of course, an alternative story would have to be very good and also quite sensitive, which is extremely hard no matter how mindful one is. After all, we are implying that this story can fulfill an almost quasi-theological function by acting like a guide to help us identify new meaning in a body of textual material that is relevant for our context and needs, but for all intents and purposes has lain latent and undiscerned for a long time. This is the question I apply to all texts concerning Buddhist women, but particularly of those that tell the story of Yasodhara, Siddhartha Gautama’s wife. Here, I’m writing not so much a review of Buddhistdoor Global columnist Vanessa Sasson’s novel, Yasodhara, as asking a question about what she does with the material provided in the Theravada canon. Is Yasodhara simply a story in a Buddhist alternate universe or is it a “statement of possibility?”

At an early juncture in the novel, Yasodhara describes not just her gratitude to her husband Siddhartha, but also her insecurity at being apparently barren:

I looked away with shame. He loved me with such tenderness. He should have been arranging for a second wife as everyone insisted, but he refused. He would not even visit the courtesans in the Women’s Quarters. Hundreds of lavishly adorned women, each one trained in the sixty-four arts of love, lazed about idly in a discreet section of the palace compound, but he never paid them any attention. I could only imagine how bored they had all become.

When a fourth year passed, I became desperate. I sought out other midwives and healers, plant peddlers and priests. I tried anything I could get my hands on in the hopes that something might eventually work. Some of the potions made me sick. I turned my bed to face the sunrise, I hung blessings in my window, and I even had scrapings from Lumbinidevi’s tree delivered and placed in auspicious positions around my room. I tried it all, but when my fifth year remained as barren as all the years before, I lost hope. Although everything else was seemingly flawless, the heart of my life was a desert landscape.