The Buddha’s Radical Reimagining of Marriage: Friendship Over Power
- Mrunal Madhuri Milind Dupte
- Oct 24
- 5 min read
Marriage is one of humanity’s oldest experiments, a social invention older than nations, older even than written law. Across time, we’ve wrapped it in ritual and myth, calling it sacred, divine, eternal. Every culture has tried to define what it means to bind two lives together, and in doing so, we’ve often revealed more about our fears and values than about love itself.
Sacred Unions and the Weight of Heaven
For centuries, religion gave marriage its sacred glow. In Christian thought, Saint Augustine imagined marriage as the mirror of Christ’s union with the Church, holy, indissoluble, and moral by design. Thomas Aquinas later affirmed this divine purpose, and the Gospel warned, “What God has joined together, let no one separate.”
In Hinduism, marriage is one of the sixteen saṃskāras, rites of passage, sealed before the gods, witnessed by the fire deity Agni.
To marry was to obey heaven; to divorce was to defy it.
Even today, traces of this belief linger, where ending a marriage is still seen as a personal failure or a cosmic offence.
And yet, 2,500 years ago, a quiet voice from ancient India challenged this sanctified view.
The Buddha’s Earthly Vision
Union without love is painful. – Jātaka II.205
The Buddha stripped marriage of its divine wrapping and returned it to the realm of human experience. He saw it not as a decree from heaven, but as a moral partnership, a social and emotional contract between equals.
Marriage, he said, is not sacred because gods bless it, but because two people choose to build kindness, patience, and mutual respect within it.
In the Jātaka Tales, the Bodhisattva advises a queen to leave her husband, a selfish king, declaring, “Union without love is painful.” It’s a simple line, but it dismantles centuries of dogma. The Buddha placed emotional well-being above ritual, ethics above obedience. A marriage that fails to nurture compassion, he implied, isn’t noble, it’s merely enduring suffering out of fear.
Unlike priests or monks in other faiths, Buddhist monks did not officiate weddings. Their role was only to bless the couple, not bind them. The symbolism is powerful: Buddhism refused to make marriage a religious act. It was a human act and therefore, subject to choice, impermanence, and change.
Modern Zen teachers echo this realism. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Narayan Helen Liebenson, and Sallie Tisdale remind us that every marriage ends through breakup or death and that this awareness should make us kinder, not careless. The fragility of love, they suggest, is what makes it sacred.
Morality, Freedom, and the Purpose of Marriage
In Buddhism, marriage is grounded not in divine command but in morality and Buddhist morality itself is founded on freedom.
As the eminent German Buddhist scholar Anagarika Govinda observed, freedom in Buddhism is rooted in individual development. It is not absolute but relative, relative to one’s capacity for mindfulness, wisdom, and ethical awareness. Genuine morality cannot exist under compulsion, he argued, because “there can be no ethical principle if there is determination from an agent outside oneself.”
This view transforms the very purpose of marriage. A Buddhist marriage should enable both individuals to grow in freedom to become more self-aware, compassionate, and independent in spirit. It is not meant to imprison two people in ritual, but to liberate them through shared understanding and ethical living.
Marriage, then, is not an escape from the self but a mirror for self-development.
If a union does not serve the growth of Dhamma if it does not lead to greater clarity, peace, or virtue it loses its meaning. A relationship that hinders freedom contradicts the moral foundation upon which Buddhist ethics stand.
True love, from a Buddhist lens, must help both partners become freer, wiser, and more attuned to the path
Women and the Marriage Contract
Across the world’s traditions, the idea of marriage has rarely been neutral toward women. It has been used to sanctify control shaping who women could love, what they could inherit, and how they should live.
In Christianity, virtue meant obedience; in Hinduism, a woman’s salvation was tied to her husband’s service; in Islam, marriage began as a contract of mutual care but later tilted toward male authority. In each tradition, holiness often came at the cost of freedom.
Since childhood women are educated to be good wives, daughter-in-laws.
Philosophers have long rebelled against this sacred inequality. Mary Wollstonecraft saw marriage as “legal slavery.” Harriet Taylor Mill called it “the only form of slavery recognized by law.” Simone de Beauvoir revealed how it turned women into “the Other,” and Betty Friedan exposed the quiet despair behind the smile of the “happy housewife.” These women weren’t just angry; they were anatomizing how love, when shaped by patriarchy, can become a beautiful cage.
Yet centuries before these feminist awakenings, the Buddha had already offered a blueprint for equality not through rebellion, but through empathy.
He described a wife as a man’s parama sakha “best friend.” In that simple phrase lies a revolution: marriage, to the Buddha, was a friendship between equals, not a hierarchy of power.
In early Buddhist society, women’s consent in marriage was recognised; love marriages were not rare. Unlike later Brahminical codes that tightened male dominance, Buddhist ethics gave women space to choose, to leave, to live.
A married woman did not change her name or wear symbols of ownership. Her identity was her own and her worth, intrinsic.
the Aṅguttara Nikāya, the Buddha warned men against pride, urging them to honour their wives with “authority in household affairs and the management of property.” This wasn’t an endorsement of domestic confinement; it was radical for its time a recognition of a woman’s economic and moral agency within the household.
It’s easy to miss how subversive this was. The Buddha was not preaching feminism in a modern sense he was dismantling ego and hierarchy wherever they appeared, including within marriage.
His teaching was psychological as much as moral: love cannot coexist with dominance. Friendship, not fear, is what sustains intimacy
The Modern Mirror
In our time, when marriage is often caught between romantic fantasy and social contract, the Buddha’s wisdom feels startlingly contemporary. He refused to idealise love or sanctify suffering. He understood that all relationships are impermanent, but that impermanence makes compassion more urgent, not less.
The modern world could use this realism. Instead of treating marriage as either divine duty or disposable arrangement, we could see it as a daily practice of mindfulness a shared effort to reduce harm and cultivate joy.
A marriage rooted in awareness is not about possession or performance; it’s about seeing each other clearly, again and again, even as change unfolds.
The Buddha didn’t ask couples to worship marriage. He asked them to understand it as a mirror of the self, a site for ethical growth, and ultimately, a reminder that love is not about holding on but learning how to let go with grace.
“All relationships are impermanent,” wrote Zen teacher Sallie Tisdale. “That is what makes them precious.”
Closing Reflection
When the Buddha called a wife her husband’s “best friend,” he wasn’t offering poetry he was offering liberation. He was freeing both men and women from the burden of roles scripted by gods and traditions.
In that friendship, there is equality.
In equality, there is respect.
And in respect, perhaps, lies the only kind of marriage that truly endures not one joined by heaven, but one sustained by freedom, morality, and kindness on earth.
