A long time ago, when Zen Master Baizhang was giving some lectures, an old man would show up to listen and then leave right after the talk. One day, he stayed behind and Baizhang asked him who he was. The old man told him that he used to be a Zen teacher, in the time of a previous Buddha, and that one day a student had asked him, “is a person who practices with great devotion subject to cause and effect?” The old man had said “no,” and because of that he was turned into a fox for five hundred lifetimes and was still, apparently, a fox. He asked Baizhang to say a Zen word and release him from his fox body, and put the question to him, “is a person who practices with great devotion subject to cause and effect?” Baizhang said, “don’t ignore cause and effect.” Hearing this, the old man was enlightened and bowed, saying “I am now liberated from the body of a wild fox. I will leave my body in the mountain behind the monastery. Master, please perform the funeral services of a monk for me.”

– Pai-chang’s wild fox kōan

I can remember the first time I started to feel discomfort in my body. I was 12 years old, and I had started to go through the changes that come with puberty. As I grew older, that feeling of unease became familiar, and I simply assumed that everyone around me also felt a sense of pain and dysphoria because of their bodies. Although my body was becoming more masculine, my way of being in the world—moving and speaking in more androgynous ways—remained the same. This attracted negative attention. People made fun of my voice and the way I skipped when I walked. Eventually, one of my bullies physically assaulted me. 

I was told by the school that there was not much that could be done—that the boy who attacked me had a difficult family life and that his parents wouldn’t really care if he was suspended or expelled. I think a lot about that boy’s suffering, which caused him to lash out at me from his own pain and hurt. 

I had to change schools. My parents also sent me to a therapist in an effort to help me get along with other children. Even though my parents were trying to protect me, the message was clear: my difference was the problem, I was the one at fault, not the people who called me names or hurt me. The therapist explained that if I wanted to fit in and be safe, I would have to talk more like a boy and move more like a boy. We did exercises where he watched me walk and told me to catch myself if I stepped too lightly through his stuffy office. I practiced lowering my voice and deadening its tone. 

I wonder what would have happened had I been born ten or twenty years later—would a therapist have offered me the possibility of gender-affirming care to help me make peace with my body and express my authentic self more courageously? I feel very protective of young trans and queer children today because of this. I also think this experience allowed me to see with some clarity the kind of emotional lobotomy we subject young boys and men to in our society. I wonder how many men wander our world starved for love, hungry ghosts so malnourished that they do not even realize they have never been properly fed? What kind of world would it be if boys and men were permitted intimacy—if their feelings were celebrated rather than suppressed and cauterized?

I still feel and notice those experiences as a kind of stiff scar tissue, and it is very hard—but not impossible—for me to be my genuine self with others. My relationships with people tend to be marked by a kind of fear, and my expectation is that I will not be accepted or loved; rather, that I will be rejected and hurt.

Like many queer kids, that feeling of unworthiness made me a target for predatory people. I am a survivor of sexual assault, which occurred when I was a young teenager. This is something I seldom talk about or share—partly from feelings of shame and partly because of how sexual trauma can be so easily weaponized against queer and trans communities.

Without the language or support to confront my feelings of discomfort with how my body was gendered, judged, and sexualized, I have often coped by dissociating from it, diving into work or creative escapism—anything to be outside my body. I had trouble seeing my face in the mirror. 

Last year, I finally worked up the courage to begin medically transitioning. I am now, for the first time in my life, looking at my face and feeling the natural joy that comes with the privilege of having a human face and accepting that it is mine. It is an astonishing feeling to inhabit a body to which I am now intimately connected. Now, when I reach out to friends and lovers, my truest self extends to the very edges of my fingertips.

I did not come to Buddhism and meditation practice because of these experiences—or at least not specifically because of them—but these experiences have shaped the color and flavor of the questions I have asked of the practice.

An early question I brought to the cushion was whether I could, if I practiced with “great devotion,” as the old man asks, squirm free once and for all from my body and its trauma. Could I skip over the messy, shameful experience of gender and sexuality and pass straight through to being a shining bodhisattva? 

In the mythical narratives of the koan stories, I could easily see myself as the unfortunate student asking Baizhang, “if I practice devotedly, will I transcend this body and these painful experiences?” Based on some of the common ideas about practice and enlightenment that circulate in Western Buddhism, there are probably a lot of wild foxes wandering around.

This is something Larry Yang, one of the core teachers at East Bay Meditation Center, talks about in his book, Awakening Together. He writes that, “we are sometimes predisposed to idealize aspirations of spiritual practice and to assume that the highest aim is to transcend the vicissitudes of this life, to somehow obviate the sorrows of this lifetime so that we only experience the pleasant, peaceful, or sublime.” Yang references well-meaning dharma teachers who avoid talking about diversity, believing that the focus of practice should instead be on our similarities rather than our differences. 

But as Yang understands deeply from his experiences as a gay Chinese American in predominantly white and heterosexual meditation communities, life is not just about similarities. He writes:

“Like any manifestation of nature—like any snowflake, leaf on a tree, or shape of a cloud—we all have attributes that are unique and characteristics that are common, it is through seeing the deep nature of our differences and how they are a part of our lives that we can also see the deep similarities of our human experience. We all feel different at some point in our lives; in that experience of difference is a similarity common to us all. Just as we cannot have a life without both joys and sorrows, we cannot have a life without both differences and similarities.”

Yang also cites the meditation teacher and psychologist John Welwood, who coined the term “spiritual bypassing” to describe the widespread tendency to employ spiritual ideas and practices as a tool to avoid facing unresolved wounds and unfinished work. For Welwood, there’s a danger of what he calls “premature transcendence,” or trying to rise above the raw and unpleasant parts of our life in the here and now before we’ve made peace with them. When we prematurely transcend, we end up dismissing real human needs and feelings—our own as well as those of others—the very stuff Buddhism is supposed to help us address. 

Did Baizhang understand the dangers of spiritual bypassing and premature transcendence when the old man student asked to be released from his wild fox body? The passage seems to indicate that no, we cannot ignore cause and effect, but once we’ve faced it squarely, the dharma invites us to use it as the grounds for our awakening to this present life.

Not ignoring cause and effect is, for me, to find in practice the freedom to live whatever is happening or has happened as the path. Not to move beyond it but to conceptualize it and make it real as a grounding for awakening. The dharma I express is a queer dharma—my own dharma, and as such, it cannot be anything else. My hope then is that when I express it honestly and authentically, that others can receive it as their dharma. And maybe, when I am brave enough to accept that it is received—and that I am not rejected but am loved by this life—I can receive my dharma back from others and see how my life—with its specific differences—is actually a shared experience.

Five hundred lifetimes as a fox is my own life right now. But is it really even a punishment to be a wild fox? Even though I came to my practice as a means of escaping my body, that same practice ultimately requires a return and reconciliation with the body. And in returning to this foxy body, I have slowly come to have experiences of true joy within and through it. I am very confident that this will continue, and even though it is hard work, in practice I also have the opportunity to rest in the powerful silence of the mysterious not-two, a place of ease from which to work in the turbulent world of the relative and the ultimate, in neither and in both.

To awaken in this body and as this body is also the basis for recognizing the self not as something to cast aside or move beyond, but as an aspect of our dynamic, flowing, and relational life. Transgender students of the dharma have a wonderful opportunity to experience and enact this universal truth. Dr. Florence Ashley, a bioethicist and scholar, has repeatedly affirmed in their scholarship that gender and transition are not acts of unearthing a preconstituted image of the self, but instead a project of “actively creating ourselves” in a process Ashley calls “creative transfiguration,” which must occur in relationship with others. 

When I read this, I felt strongly that it harmonized beautifully with descriptions of the bodhisattva way as inherently creative, playful, and imaginative. The fabulous images of the Mahayana sutras—with naga princesses turning into men or the Buddha’s male disciple, Shariputra, finding himself in the body of a goddess much to his awe and dismay—are an invitation to transform the wonderful powers of human imagination into tools of awakening. Imagination is not separate from reality but rather cognizes reality. We conceptualize the world through the lens of our imagination, and through imagination, we can reach out and create a pure land here and now, in this body, in this life, and in this world. This is the miraculous power of the Buddha and our birthright as humans. 

We cannot ignore cause and effect. We cannot ignore this life, especially the painful, embarrassing, and frustrating parts of it. But through practice, we can transform these experiences into fuel for awakening—and not an awakening somewhere else beyond the rough edges of modern human life—but right here in the middle of it. That’s where you’ll find me—sometimes a queer student of the dharma, sometimes a mischievous fox, but always flowing on and moving forward, toward a deeper love for this messy world.

The post My Foxy Body appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In August 2022, the Institute of Buddhist Studies announced that Dr. Paula Arai will join the IBS faculty as the first Eshinni and Kakushinni Professor of Women and Buddhist Studies. The position was established in November 2020 by the IBS Board of Trustees to support a professor specializing in the academic study of women in Buddhism.

Lady Eshinni (1182–1268) was the wife of Shinran Shonin, founder of the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist tradition. Kakushinni (1224–1283) was Eshinni and Shinran’s youngest daughter. Both women played crucial roles in supporting the development of the Jodo Shinshu tradition, both during Shinran’s lifetime and after his death. The IBS board created the position to honor Eshinni and Kakushinni’s contributions to Shin Buddhism and to support contemporary scholars researching women in Buddhism today.

Dr. Arai will assume the position in January 2023. She currently serves as the Urmila Gopal Singhal Professor of Religions of India at Louisiana State University, and her research focuses on the ritual practices of contemporary Japanese Buddhist nuns.

Tricycle spoke with Arai to learn more about her research on the ingenuity of Japanese Buddhist women, why this position is so important right now, and how the field of Buddhist studies can heal from its own constrictions.

Why do you think that this position is so crucial right now? The basic Buddhist project is to stop suffering, and the way to stop suffering is to practice nondual wisdom and cut through ignorance. The history of women in the Buddhist tradition is fraught with a lot of ignorance, particularly about women and women’s bodies. Within the academy, many of the dominant methods, concepts, and categories have arisen out of a limited view of what is worthy of scholarship. It hasn’t been that long that gender has been recognized as an important topic of scholarly inquiry. Right now, I think it’s important that questions of gender are more publicly discussed, particularly in the context of recent legislation regulating women’s bodies and constricting who has the right to be a woman. 

The development of this position is one way of centering this topic. When I was researching Buddhist women thirty years ago, it was as if I were talking in a vacuum and no one could hear. Now, it finally feels like the speakers are turned on. Studying women in the Buddhist tradition is now a valid scholarly topic. I think this is a great development for the field of Buddhist studies since there are so many assumptions that women have not played an active part of the tradition.

How did you first become interested in researching Buddhist women? Back in the 1980s, when I was working on my graduate degree in Buddhist studies, I was looking for a dissertation topic. Although I was studying Japanese Buddhism, I had an opportunity to go to Bodhgaya, India. There, I met a Japanese Buddhist nun. I was very confused: Here I was, about to write a dissertation on Japanese Buddhism, and I had no idea that there were living Japanese Buddhist nuns. I developed a relationship with the nun, and I went to live and study at a Soto Zen nunnery in Nagoya, Japan, where she was a teacher and Shundo Aoyama Roshi was the abbess.

When I was researching Buddhist women thirty years ago, it was as if I were talking in a vacuum and no one could hear. Now, it finally feels like the speakers are turned on.

At the time, there weren’t a lot of contemporary documents about Japanese Buddhist nuns. To get information about them, you had to talk with them, live with them, and learn how they saw the world. So I did just that. At that time, the highest-ranking nun was considered to be lower than the lowest monk. But these women fought for their own inclusion. They established forms of education and training in Buddhist texts and practices. Because they didn’t have institutional support, they had to work hard. When you have to work so hard with minimal resources, it clarifies your determination: What is worth working so hard for?

These women didn’t carry around a sense of being treated in an inferior manner, even though that was structurally what was happening. That thought didn’t help them get through the day. Their goal was to stop suffering. And so if they kept turning to the men for their cues about what they could or could not do, that wasn’t going to help them. Instead, they just studied the Buddhist teachings and found them liberating.

What were some of the challenges that you faced when you first started presenting your research, and what do you see as the major challenges scholars are facing today? When I first started presenting my research in the early 1990s, I was challenged that I only had anecdotes—I didn’t have texts. At that point, textual sources were seen as the mark of rigorous scholarship. Living and talking with people, especially women, was not respected as a serious method of study.

Although the field has opened up in looking at the embodied lived tradition, textual analysis is still the mainstay. We can still learn more from the text-historical material. But in order to grow the field, more voices should be heard and taken seriously. The challenge is for more scholars to be courageous and to question the assumptions about what it means for scholarship to be rigorous.

What types of questions are you paying attention to right now? Recently, there has been more scholarship about misogyny and male chauvinism in the Buddhist tradition. This is a worthy subject to explore. But that’s only part of the story. The question that I want to pay attention to is: How did women respond to this treatment?

The underdog has to know who’s keeping them down in order to survive. The creativity, ingenuity, commitment, and insight of the people who are held down—that’s what I want to look at. There is a powerful, creative force in the Buddhist tradition that can be traced to women’s responses to limiting ideas that are rooted in ignorance. And so I want to keep asking questions using Buddhist tools of analysis: Where’s the ignorance? Where’s the reification?

We can still learn more from the text-historical material. But in order to grow the field, more voices should be heard and taken seriously.

One of the main tenets of Mahayana Buddhism is “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” The particular forms of a body do matter. You can’t just live in the world of emptiness. We live in an embodied way. We see that so starkly in the case of regulations and restrictions imposed on the bodies of women and nonbinary people. So we have to face the particular. We have to examine the particular in the form body and see it through the lens of emptiness so we don’t get stuck in categories.

What excites you about what other scholars are doing to shape the trajectory of Buddhist studies? I’m excited about bringing as many lenses to bear as possible. The textual-historical lens has a lot of power and yields a lot of fabulous information. But looking at what Buddhists are actually doing, whether historically or in the contemporary context, can show us more sides of the tradition. Everything is so context-specific, and it’s hard to make definitive statements. I want to look at the mess. I think more people are doing that.

With human religiosity, there’s always a gap between ideals and reality. In the Buddhist context, there are the ideals of enlightenment and compassion, and then there are the heinous things that have actually happened. It’s important to never lose sight of both of these poles. I think it’s also important for people to feel empowered to use Buddhist teachings to critique parts of the tradition that are limiting or that cause suffering. If a doctrine is reifying a particular category, that will cause suffering. I’m excited that more people seem to be asking, “Is this a reified category? And if so, how do we unpack it and see if there’s another way to respond?”

What are your hopes for this position and for the future of Buddhist studies? I would love to see more people studying and working with the living traditions of Buddhist practice. Although the field has grown in the last thirty years, there are so many more treasures and insights to find. I hope scholars will be able to flourish in their careers and their lives by examining how Buddhists have responded with creativity to forces of oppression and domination.

Healing has been a major focus of my research. For the women I work with in Japan, healing is the aim of Buddhist practice. Enlightenment is very highfalutin, but healing is seen as more accessible and concrete. Healing focuses on practical actions that help remove obstacles that interfere with a fuller perspective of a situation, opening up creative space to breathe and expand possibilities. In a similar way, the field of Buddhist Studies can expand its purview by removing any lingering obstacles to researching and understanding the contributions of women, both in the tradition and in the academy. I hope to use my platform in a chair named after pioneering nuns to support and empower people to grow the field.

The post Dr. Paula Arai, the First Eshinni and Kakushinni Professor of Women and Buddhist Studies, Wants to Help the Field of Buddhist Studies Heal appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When I finally swallowed a small blue pill that smelled like an odd mint for the first time last year, I cried. Taking Estradiol and Spironolactone for hormone replacement therapy (HRT) helped me feel a sense of worthiness I had never been offered before, either by society or by myself. But it hasn’t been easy.

I recently celebrated my one year anniversary of starting the medical and social transition as a transgender woman. Though medical transition through HRT, which is also called Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy, does not make my transgender identity more legit, I have never given myself something so important. And it is through practicing the Buddhist principles of dana (generosity), sila (commitment to nonharming), and bhavana (cultivation of a wholesome mind) that I have started to trust that I might, in fact, be worthy of such a gift.  

This last year has been a mixture of doubt, joy, depression, acceptance, desire, grieving, confusion, disillusionment… Intense would be one word to describe it all. Though I’m a trans woman, I do not present hyperfeminine, nor do I subscribe to the typical aesthetics of “man” or “woman.” But because I make my livelihood as a meditation teacher and Broadway performer, my appearance is public, and I have felt constant internal and external pressure to “look like a woman” by wearing certain clothes, hairstyles, and makeup. It’s not so simple. When Broadway opened up after an almost-two-year COVID-19 shutdown, going back to rehearsals was a big moment for me. I was able to have conversations with the producers and creative team about what changes I might need to feel aligned with my newly reclaimed identity. Outside of the show, I slowly started to audition for female, transgender, or gender nonconforming roles. Though that came with infinite doubts, my artistry expanded further as I played roles that felt more like me.

I didn’t realize how exhausted I was from all of this until I sat at an online weekend retreat. Or rather, I lay down and slept during it. The pressure of my life had been cooking, and I finally found a pause to let off some of the steam. I fell asleep during almost all of the sitting sessions and took naps on breaks, then slept through the night for the first day. I felt the heaviness and delirious sensation of sloth and torpor, one of the five hindrances of meditation practice, where there was enough mindfulness present. My intention to do the retreat this time was to rest, not to deepen my practice, though these things go hand-in-hand—in order to go deeper, one might need to rest deeply. I appreciated that my system knew what to do and shut down, and I accepted it as a gift.

This retreat helped me recognize the severe intensity of my internal and external conditions while medically and socially transitioning. It allowed me to put down the intensity just for a while to remember the aspiration for starting HRT: as a practice of generosity toward myself.

Dana in the Buddhist context is the cultivation of generosity. It means giving without expectation, or unconditionally. Traditionally, it’s practiced through giving food and medicine to renunciates, or contributing to nunneries or monasteries. Dharma teachers are often supported by people’s donations. My understanding is that it’s possible to contextualize dana for modern life, although there is beauty in the simplicity of the traditional sense of the word, which is unconditional offering. I practice dana by sharing my artistry and knowledge as accessibly as possible. Organizations might pay me to teach meditation, but they offer the program free of charge to participants, and I have also organized free dance and meditation classes. Broadway shows pay me the most and cost the most for people to attend. Regardless of my performance and teaching salary for both dance and mindfulness, I do not alter what I offer—one million dollars an hour would not be enough for me and free of charge would be more than enough. This is my practice of generosity as a working artist in New York City.  

I also practice sila, the cultivation of ethical conduct and commitment to nonharming. This notion of ethical conduct is part of the eightfold path, and includes the five precepts that lay Buddhists might adhere to: refraining from taking life, from taking what is not freely given, from harming with sexual activity, from wrong speech, and from taking intoxicants that could lead to carelesness. With sila, too, there is a benefit in the traditional sense of pure renunciation, especially during retreat, and modern life may not make it easy for everyone to be disciplined. Recognizing the perfectionist in myself, I take the precepts not as absolute rules but as one of many frameworks for navigating daily life that is less harmful and for building wholesome relationships; these guidelines provide a sense of comfort and trust, not rigidity and blame.

My personal practice of sila varies and has shifted many times, both on retreats and in daily life. I try to release mosquitos after they’ve been caught. I have stopped eating animal products. I do this with the knowledge that I will harm many beings knowingly or unknowingly. Trying not to steal anyone’s time and efforts, I make sure I am respecting and listening to others with a lovingkindness attitude as much as possible. I continue to learn about the many forms of oppression that could steal the essence of someone’s humanity. My husband and I practice ethical nonmonogamous (ENM) queer marriage through communicating our sexuality and desires, exploring nonhierarchical polyamory. I check in with how heedless the mind becomes with a glass of wine and edibles. I often fail to be generous and nonharming, but continuously exploring dana and sila makes me humble. 

Traditionally, dana and sila are the foundation for bhavana: the cultivation of a wholesome mind through meditation practice. Besides my regular practice of Vipassana and the brahma-viharas, I often come back to the Four Guardian Meditations. Michele McDonald, one of my teachers, sometimes tells stories of the influential late Burmese monk Mya Taung Sayadaw (1916-2015), who had a deep connection with these four practices that specifically develop bhavana. They are:  

1. Recalling the virtues of the Buddha

2. Contemplating 32 parts of the body

3. Lovingkindness 

4. Reflection on death

Though the Four Guardian Meditations are not widely taught in the United States—perhaps, Michele imagines, because they might sound elementary to some—I have found the practices very nurturing and as protective as the “guardian” name implies. They have the balancing factors between wisdom and love. There is an inevitable vulnerability in human life with the dying body and wild mind, yet there is also the possibility to care for the fragile body and understand the mind. Anyone has the capacity for awakening, everyone is worthy. That’s what these practices show me. Michele says she tries to see worthiness in herself and others even when waiting for the cashier at the grocery store, and I have tried this myself on the subway in New York. But I really needed to practice “worthiness” intentionally and patiently toward myself because I had never felt worthy of my existence as a woman, which comes up often as insecure attachment in my adult life. Through these practices I have learned to reparent myself on a nonconceptual level. 

All the practices described above helped me realize that I wanted to begin HRT, although I knew the pills—which nontrans people might take for things like severe acne, hair loss, and menopause—would bring much uncertainty to my life. My doctor told me the possible side effects but made sure to inform me that they all vary from person to person. Remembering that the practice of dana is to give without expectation, but not recklessly, and feeling informed by my therapist and doctor, I knew I would always be protected. I could always come back to the tenderness and equanimity of dana. 

The side effects were prominent for me. During the first week, I was exhausted and stayed in bed longer because my hormone levels were readjusting. A year later, my stamina and endurance are still significantly lower than they were before; my testosterone level is a tenth of its previous level. I kept noting the unpleasantness of tension and pain in the body as well as doubts and disappointment in the mind. What if I can’t dance anymore? Depression and despair often crept in. As I talked about my experience with friends who menstruate, we realized that transitioning is like having PMS every day by choice. With the Broadway reopening rehearsals, the changes became much more obvious, since I had done the same show for a few years prior. I could not get up from the floor for 20 minutes after the first run-through. 

I think of the increased media attention on transgender women and gender nonconforming athletes and kids who are also going through HRT. Who in their right mind would go through physical, mental, and social struggles for temporary fame and success, not to mention having to go through the gatekeeping of gender-affirming healthcare? I wonder if those who write legislation and rules around transgender and gender-nonconforming athletes have ever had firsthand experience as a professional athlete on HRT. Limiting rights for transgender and gender-nonconforming athletes and young people is violent and harmful, and taking away the rights of gender identity and expression could end up killing them. I wonder if this applies to the five precepts. 

Though the intensity of internal and external conditions kept rising over the year, I know HRT saved my life. 

These days, two paradoxical experiences exist in my mind. One is tremendous gratitude that I can get gender-affirming medical care, and the other is fear of my humanity being violated, as my gender identity is questioned daily on the street, on social media, and in my internal voice. I know, however, that I can feel joy that I have never experienced before, and that I didn’t even know how cruel I had been to myself. I did not even realize the oppression that became second nature and painted my life a few shades darker. HRT was not a cure for everything, but it affirmed how I had felt about myself since I was 3 years old. This feeling of fundamental worthiness that should not be questioned for any human being had not been there for me. It was denied to me long ago when I was naively assigned male at birth by a doctor (though this is not to blame). Now I take pills twice a day, every day, giving kindness toward myself unconditionally. It is the greatest love letter to myself. It just doesn’t have words. I feel it. I will continue the practice of dana, sila, and bhavana through transition. These practices are never solid rules and goals. I understand them as an experience of rest and exploration. 

The post Practicing Dana, Sila, and Bhavana as I Transition appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It’s been more than three decades since I imagined having long, luxurious hair like the ladies in shampoo commercials. Growing up, I was not allowed to have long hair because that’s “not what boys do.”

So it felt like a dream come true when my friend Ebony took me to a salon in Staten Island so we could get weaves sewn-in. Ebony went first, and I curiously watched as her hair was washed and dried. But to be honest, what stood out to me was her friendship, which offered me the safety to be there, because I was so nervous. 

The external friendliness translated internally into lovingkindness—the quality of mind that is gentle and tender and one of the brahma-viharas (the four immeasurables or divine abodes). 

Lovingkindness (metta): Tender, gentle, unconditional love

Compassion (karuna): Unconditional caring

Appreciative joy (mudita): Gladdened heart, impartial appreciation

Equanimity (uppekha): Mental equipoise, unconditional acceptance 

Steven Smith, one of my teachers, says that the brahma-viharas are inseparable, like close sisters. When I practice any one of four, I’m practicing the other three at the same time. By keeping metta close to my heart, the other three are there, too.

The stylist tightly braided my hair to my scalp and sewed in the extensions. Even the prickly unpleasantness was associated with the joy of experiencing a speck of my lost childhood dream. Strand by strand, my hair got longer, and the knot in my stomach grew bigger and bigger. This was a big day for me; that I had anxiety and doubt is an understatement. 

Just as I had throughout that day, I just kept softly noting with light awareness in the six sense doors. Seeing, seeing, hearing, hearing, tension, thinking, unpleasantness, desire, doubt, in, out . . .

The braiding and sewing took two hours, and when my hair was done, I felt something familiar. I conjured up a smile, thanking the stylist while playing with my long hair in front of the mirror. But my head felt heavy, the knot in my stomach turning to restlessness. I stood still, quietly observing my internal landscape. Ebony must have sensed something, because she asked me to walk with her outside to get some fresh air. 

We walked down a quiet street in silence. I remembered what was so familiar to me. It was the way I felt in the body when I was suicidal. Narrow, oppressive, closed, heavy, shaky . . . simply put, I felt self-hatred. The familiar sensation of panic took over my body. My head was dense and I felt moisture on my cheeks. I tried to convince myself that all the hurt was in the past when I didn’t have supportive adults, yet I felt this pain as vividly as before. This time, however, I had a friend beside me—comforting and crying along with me. I felt the warmth of her hand holding tightly to mine. She told me that she was proud of me and that I looked beautiful. Tenderness, appreciation, gentleness. I’m forever grateful for her friendship. 

I had finally gotten my long hair, but I kept seeing myself through an internalized transphobic lens. I had run to my Broadway show after the salon, no time to process all this because I had to work. I took an Uber, and felt ugly when I looked at myself in the camera on my phone. I thought everyone in the world would think I was ugly, too. 

When I got out of the car in front of the theater, I heard:

Miss, can I have a dollar? 

. . .

Oh, sir.

The hair worked. Though it’s binary and stupid, I felt good in that moment. I told the houseless person “sorry” and went through the backstage door, wishing I had some cash on me. 

My attention was so close to myself that it felt out of body as I climbed the stairs to the dressing room on the sixth floor. My mind felt concentrated like a microscope, but everything felt too close for me to comprehend what was being perceived. I tried to call on compassion, feeling the overwhelm and panic in my body. Connecting gently with the pain of resistance simply by attending and caring. I still don’t know if it came. 

I put on the same costume that I had worn hundreds of times and styled my hair so that I could dance. I found myself accepting others more on stage, a sense of calm in the chaos of performing in an emotionally intense show. I felt open and did not know which was my emotion and which was the emotion of the song as I performed it. I cried in the shadows offstage and openly on stage when the scene allowed throughout the performance. It felt as if I was doing something I was not allowed to do. Having long hair for me meant womanhood. I was never given the space to recognize my womanhood. Here I was in front of an audience of over a thousand and nothing bad happened; I was safe. Being in the intense mixture reminds me of what another one of my teachers, Michele McDonald, says: that the Buddha taught the proximate cause for compassion was accepting the overwhelm and helplessness in the face of suffering. Maybe it was that, or I was just feeling the vibration of the base and drum. 

After a couple days, I came to the conclusion that it was all too catastrophic for me to keep the weave in. Ebony came over to take it out, and we turned it into a celebration. My husband wore the extensions like a wig as we sipped red wine in our small one-bedroom apartment. I felt light, and free of the trauma surrounding long hair. I had long hair and I was safe. Now I’m back to my awkward fades, my barely ponytail. But it’s different than before, because I chose this. No one told me to do this. I did. This autonomy is crucial for me after I didn’t have that choice as a child, not to mention that I did not choose to be transgender. I was born a woman no matter who had assigned me as male.

I hope someone can see that I carried on with cultivating my own worthiness with the decision to have my hair long—and then to remove it. Seeing myself as I am, not the way society or someone else wants me to be. I was able to direct my attention to the intention of my actions through the hybrid of Vipassana and brahma-vihara practice that my teachers taught me. Of course I appreciate the colorful nails and physical changes with Hormone Replacement Therapy, but also I make sure to check in with what’s behind the action, turning to the friendliness of loving-kindness and caring of compassion to the oppressed identity as a woman. 

Piece by piece, I am ready to slowly put down the self-hatred that might have previously been my only protection for survival. 

♦

Read more about Kei Tsuruharatani here in this spotlight from Tricycle magazine’s Summer 2022 issue.

The post Hair Hair  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The San Luis Valley in south central Colorado is the size of the state of Connecticut and remarkably wide. It is flanked by the San Juan mountains to the west and the Sangre de Cristos to the east, and contains the headwaters of the Rio Grande. The valley is also amazingly flat. Looking west from the Baca Grande in the foothills of Kit Carson Mountain, everything seems laid out before you. It is as though an infinite vastness were knowable, though you cannot see most of the roads, or the herds of elk drifting across the valley floor. 

For decades, spiritual seekers have come to the Baca foothills outside the town of Crestone, which is home to various retreat centers, hermitages, and temples of Eastern and Western and New Age religions. Bejeweled shrines sit unprotected beside creek beds; massive stupas perch on outcroppings. Tibetans in particular are drawn here, having found the scenery powerfully reminiscent of the land from which they’ve been exiled since the late 1940s. Multicolored prayer flags, shredded by wind, festoon the Baca. 

I have come here to do a twelve-day solo retreat in a cabin hidden among the pygmy pines. It is early February, and the cabin has a good wood stove. It has a bucket for a bathroom, a propane burner, two water coolers, and a faucet a quarter mile down the mountain. It is, in spiritual parlance, a very protected space, especially the upstairs loft, where I will practice ten hours a day before a window looking over the tops of the pinyons and junipers, and across the San Luis Valley. 

I came to the cabin to accomplish Guru Yoga, the fourth and final ngöndro practice Tibetan Buddhists must complete in order to receive the abhisheka blessing and progress to the high Tantric teachings and empowerments. To begin a session of Guru Yoga you need to briefly go through the three other ngöndros. This includes Vajrasattva mantra, a seated practice where you repeat a hundred-syllable Sanskrit chant while visualizing Vajrasattva (which means “indestructible being”) in the form of an adolescent male seated cross-legged and floating above your head. As you say the mantra, Vajrasattva pours amrita, or nectar (literally “anti-death potion”), out the bottom of his body. The amrita enters you through the top of your head, flushes out your defilements, and washes down into the earth. 

It’s not an easy practice to get right, partly because there’s never an experience of rightness. The goal is to be in a nondual state, where there’s no right or wrong, and no “you” to evaluate anything. Once it gets going, the visualization does what it wants. I’ve seen amrita come down as water, or vodka. At times it is sparkly, or silver like mercury. Once Vajrasattva poured a stream of live rats into me. It’s a colorful religion. 

But on day one of the retreat I felt completely stuck, even though I’d done the practice hundreds of times. I sat chanting the mantra, gazing inwardly upward at Vajrasattva, but he had nothing for me—no amrita, no vodka, no mercury, sewer rats, blood, pus, molasses, motor oil, nothing. Often you run into a wall several days in, after you’ve settled. That’s when you find out what’s really going on with you, at which point you might scream, or sing, or get violently ill, or lie curled up devastated for a few hours. But here was the wall, and my retreat had barely begun. 

My mind went to Vajratopa, who is Vajrasattva’s consort, and who often goes missing in the iconography. But she’s there in the longer liturgical text, and in some of the illustrations, straddling Vajrasattva in yab-yum, or “primordial union,” her haunches in his lap, her feet hooked at the ankles behind his waist. She is holding a knife in one hand and a skull cup in the other. I kept chanting, picturing them up there above my head. I hoped the nectar would pour from their union, enter my body and harmonize my masculine and feminine aspects, which seemed to be in a lifelong tug-of-war. 

In the months before the retreat I’d been attending a “trans feminine spectrum” support group at my local LGBT center. On the first Wednesday of each month, forty or so people crammed into a small room to commit this act of support. We tried arranging our chairs in a circle, but there were too many of us. The circle spread to the walls and then spiraled inward. We went around introducing ourselves and our pronouns, which varied from “she/ her” to “he/him” to “either” to “I don’t know” to “I don’t care.” (It would be another couple years before “they/them” would come on the scene.)

The discussions were free-for-alls. There were so many people, so little time. The important thing for me was the space itself, which was brimming with energy, and the sense of change. It was 2013. Trans fashion models were beginning to come out. Laura Jane Grace was fronting the punk band Against Me!, Laverne Cox would soon appear on the cover of Time. Amanda Simpson, a trans woman, was working in the Commerce Department for the Obama Administration. Ordinary trans people—quietly, one by one—were beginning to come out at their jobs and at colleges.

Yet the people in that room, including the facilitators, were in bad shape. There was a lot of PTSD, depression, addiction, eating disorders, suicidality. Many had far more pressing issues than gender. Then again, having your gender identity in a constant state of upheaval magnifies every issue. “How come we only meet once a month?” was a question repeated monthly.

I wasn’t doing so well myself. I hadn’t worked a regular job since I’d returned from being a poet-in-residence at a college in Oklahoma, and my unemployment insurance had run out. I did some freelance editing, taught workshops in my living room and at conferences, and published poems in good journals for little money. Being underemployed in New York is scary. This is how people go homeless, I told myself. I was spending savings on rent. I didn’t eat out or go to the movies.

I would later learn the terrifying word “decompensation,” which sounded like a financial term until I looked it up: “a breakdown in an individual’s coping mechanisms resulting in progressive loss of functioning.” Was six years of intense Buddhist practice, which encouraged me to renounce all hope and striving, making me decompensate? Each day, when I contemplated the Four Reminders—meant to turn the mind to meditation practice—the one about my “precious human birth” set me on edge, while the death reminder didn’t faze me a bit.

I had a brief relationship with a young woman named Liz, who managed a Starbucks in Philadelphia. Liz wanted to be a poet, and had talent, but was too depressed to do anything about it. We’d met at a writing conference held at a big hotel. She was tracking me, staring at me from the backs of rooms. She was tall, pretty, and lost. She was bisexual, and liked that I crossdressed. I liked her humor and directness. “I was going to give you a call last night,” she once explained, “but then I didn’t.” We tried being boyfriend and girlfriend, but I sensed, after a disastrous road trip, it wasn’t going to work. There was a huge age gap, and you could say our depressions didn’t get along.

Still, we were very fond of each other, and remained friends. We liked to dress up and go out together, both in Philly and New York. The first time we did this we shared an unusual moment. After finishing my makeup I stepped into a skirt. 

“What just happened?” she said, looking over at me. 

“What?”

“You changed.”

“Yeah, I put on a skirt.” 

“No.” She narrowed her eyes and peered at me. “You changed.” There was a dumbfounded smirk on her face. “You’re like . . . female.” 

“I would come out,” I said to her later, “but I don’t know what I’d come out as.” 

“Who cares,” she said, “as long as you come out to yourself.” 

There are myriad ways in which trans people come out to themselves. Cracking your egg, it’s called, or just cracking. First you’re an egg, an unhatched, proto-trans person. You don’t quite realize you’re in a shell, or you may have a vague sense of a shell—of “shellness”—but you don’t quite know what it is. Others may see your shell more than you do, though they can’t see who, or what, is inside. Not until you crack. 

I’ve known trans people who were cracked by something they saw in a book or magazine, a movie or TV show. Others are cracked by meeting someone trans, or the experience of performing in drag. Sometimes it’s a sexual experience. Sometimes it’s a near-death encounter, or the death of someone you’re close to, making you stop and say, What the hell am I waiting for? Social media and the internet, with sites like Reddit and YouTube, may have hatched more of us than everything else combined. 

When I think of trans people from past generations, I never cease to marvel at them. With so much danger, and so few things in their world to crack their egg, how had these Houdinis come out? I, on the other hand, was a reverse Houdini. I’d kept a woman’s wardrobe my entire adult life, fed myself trans-related media, attended a trans support group (hello), and somehow still managed not to crack. In the end, I needed fifty years of sadness, a remote cabin, and an outrageous religion to do it. 

I didn’t even do it. Vajratopa did. 

Sitting in the loft of the cabin, chanting the hundred-syllable mantra, I was hoping Vajrasattva and Vajratopa could bring my masculine and feminine energies into balance. Instead, Vajratopa took over, pouring her skull cup of feminine nectar into the top of my head and down my spine. I felt myself shift into a female form—I don’t know how else to say it—and energy coursed through me like never before. 

A little later, Guru Yoga finished the job. In Guru Yoga practice, it is a teacher (guru) who sits above your head as you chant the simple mantra, Hear my call. You’re calling the guru from afar. You say it a million times—hear my call, hear my call—like some lost child on a mountain. A black-and-white photograph of the guru, my teacher’s teacher, sat on the shrine. I’d never seen this picture of him. He was dressed in a military uniform. His face was in three-quarter profile, looking to the side—though, as often happens in photos, he seemed to look everywhere. But I couldn’t get him to look at me. Then I called to him as a woman, and our eyes met. It’s no problem, his eyes said, to be a woman. I collapsed weeping. You should be a woman, he said. 

I closed my morning practice and came downstairs for lunch, engaging in the ordinary activities of cooking, eating, washing, and one other thing: freaking out over what the hell went on in that loft. A key meditation instruction is “look again.” Don’t come to conclusions, just come back and look again. That’s what I did later that afternoon, again that evening, and the next morning. Each time I went upstairs and reentered practice, I was female. Each time I came downstairs to check on the fire or do chores or urinate, I was in shock. 

At night, unable to sleep, I pictured living as a woman. I saw myself at a social gathering in a lush garden, standing near a tree in a print dress, holding court, smiling ear to ear as people came up to introduce themselves. A question arose from within: You mean I actually get to be me? The words were euphoric, and terrifying.

Towards the end of the retreat I grew nervous and sleepless. Was I really going to do this? Could I? I feared the responses of others, the raised eyebrows of women who’d known me for years, men scratching their heads, former students typing question marks to one another. These fears soon gave way to deeper concerns: What will I look like? How will I make a living? Will hormones make me impotent? Will they kill my creativity? Who will ever love me? 

But each morning upstairs, when I opened the day with bodhicitta practice, my heart broke open, and it was a woman’s heart. As the sun rose over the mountains behind me, pulling in the shadows and flooding the valley with light, I was overwhelmed with compassion for the world’s suffering. I wept for all the people I hadn’t helped because I’d been so stuck in my own problems all my life. 

A question arose from within: You mean I actually get to be me? The words were euphoric, and terrifying.

On a final evening walk I looked up at the mountain, determined to state out loud: “I want to be a woman.” My heart was in my throat, I could barely speak above a whisper. “I want to be a woman,” I finally said, and the mountain said, “Fine by me.” A tree said, “OK.” “Like I care?” a chipmunk weighed in. 

What visions do you trust? When you’re alone in a cabin for twelve days and something shows up in your stillest moment, is it real, or is it in need of a reality check? Is reality, as the guru suggested, a fantastic rumor? Isn’t depression, my most constant companion all these years, the result of being out of sync with reality? Could decades of thinking of myself as male be a grand illusion? Who would believe that? Did I believe it? 

A last vision came to me while packing up to leave: a small girl, very thin, with bright, deep-set eyes, her orbital bones beginning to show. She was being held hostage. I only glimpsed her through a crack in a padlocked shack. She handed me a note on a scrap of paper. The note said, “Don’t forget me.” She was unsure I’d come back for her, yet I was her only hope, and she had no choice but to trust me. But did I trust her? Nothing in my life had worked out, and now here was this girl I’d never seen, pleading. Do I let go of everything, and base my life on her?

After a retreat there is reentry, a return to the world of daily life. Reentries are precarious and seldom uneventful. I think of the Apollo 11 astronauts returning to earth, and how, if the angle of reentry was slightly off, the command module would skip like a stone off the atmosphere, or else burn up like a meteor. I had a lot of time—most of the retreat—to contemplate returning to my life, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine it. 

Just down the mountain was a friend. Liz had arrived in Crestone for a five-day program at the retreat center. In the residence hall, after we hugged, Liz stepped back and said, “What’s going on?” I don’t know what she saw. All I’d seen in the mirror—the first mirror I’d seen in a while— was a thousand-yard stare and someone who needed a shave. 

“I want to show you something,” I said.

I walked her up the mountain to the Cabin of the Crazy One. We went up to the shrine room, now cleared and swept bare. The sun had just set, but there was still plenty of light in the valley. We stood at the window gazing out for a while. Then we sat on the floor facing each other with our legs outstretched. 

“This is where it happened,” I said.

“What happened?”

“I’m going to live as a woman.”

“OK,” she said. Then she narrowed her eyes, and tilted her head to the side. 

“What?” 

“You’re not a Tina.”

“No, I’m not.”

She thought for a moment, cocked her head the other way, and held up a finger. “You’re more of a Diana.” 

It should be mentioned that the Vajrayana Buddhist protocols I’ve described are considered restricted. Vajrayana itself is known as the “ear-whispered” lineage, and students are instructed to keep its methods and revelations secret. We even recite protector chants daily to remind us that wrathful beings stand ready to seize and devour “those who profess the tantras to all.” It would seem, then, that I have sinned by divulging the details of my practice, so if I get struck by lightning between now and the time you read this, you’ll know why. 

Personally I’m not worried, due to another Vajrayana teaching, which tells us that the highest spiritual truths are “self-secret.” Even if such things were made explicit, it would still be impossible for someone of “degraded awareness” to see them. I ought to know: nothing could have been more self-secret than my own gender. Over the years, much of what I’ve detailed in this book was told to several therapists, none of whom so much as suggested I might be trans. But even if they had, it wouldn’t have made a difference. 

There is simply no knowing a thing if it is self-secret, perhaps because that thing refuses to know itself in your presence. It is like a valley, spread out before you, hiding in plain sight. 

⧫

Adapted from This Body I Wore by Diana Goetsch(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 24, 2022). Copyright © 2022 by Diana Goetsch

The post In the Cabin of the Crazy One  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Buddhists have been switching genders for hundreds of years, either temporarily, permanently, or in dreams and visions. They do it for many reasons—to teach wisdom, or ethics, or just to provide a means for comforting a friend. 

Stories of fluid sexual identities abound in Buddhist literature. In medical treatises, scripture, and biographies, one can read detailed descriptions of individuals who have transitioned from one sex to another and a wide range of theories as to why and how this happens. Stories that depict the fluidity of sex (physical characteristics), gender (how one presents), and sexuality (the object of desire relative to the sex of the individual) generally tend toward the fantastical, using supernatural events to teach nonduality, as in the Vimalakirti Sutra, or toward the didactic, in which the transformations are punishment for sin or rewards for meritorious deeds.   

In Tibetan biographical literature, one occasionally comes across individuals who changed from male to female or from female to male, usually without much explanation. For example, Rasey Konchok Gyatso’s recent survey of historical Tibetan women includes a fifteenth-century woman named Jetsun Khacho Wangmo, a disciple of Tsongkhapa Lobzang Drakpa, who was born a boy but became a girl, after which she entered a nunnery and became an influential teacher. There’s a Bon master named Lishu Takring who was born a girl and intentionally transformed herself into a man through rituals she herself developed, going on to become a Dzogchen master. And some recent masters such as Adzom Drukpa (1842–1924) were also said to have worn clothing customarily gendered as female in order to accord with a prophecy. 

There are also the stories in the biographies of individuals for whom, at least in their dreams, sex and gender fluidity is presented neither as as biological fact nor pedagogical tool, but rather as an expression of intimacy with another person. The autobiography of Tibetan master Jamgon Kongtrul (1813-1899) provides a moving example of this, in a passage following the death of his mother. 

***

Jamgon Kongtrul is well known for his great compendiums such as the Treasury of Revelation and the Treasury of Knowledge, as well as rimé, his nonsectarian approach to the teachings of the Buddha. His collaborations with teacher and scholar Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo (1829-1892) and with the treasure revealer Chokgyur Lingpa (1892-1870) are also famous, largely due to the astonishing amount of textual resources the three produced together. Yet those relationships extended beyond the professional—Kongtrul and Khyentse, in particular, were dear friends who met on a personal, emotional level, albeit in a friendship that was entirely conducted in religious contexts. 

For example, in 1848, when Khyentse was broken-hearted over the death of his elder brother, and Kongtrul was newly returned from a two-year trip to the Gyarong region, Khyentse wrote to Kongtrul:

Now that you have come back, I am glad almost to the point of forgetting my grief. I need to come now and receive the complete empowerments for the tantras of the Jonang tradition.

For two lamas whose sole language for arranging visits—and expressing affection—was religious, Khyentse’s request for an empowerment was his way of asking to spend quality time with a dear friend in a moment of grief. If they had both been professional soccer players, Khyentse would have likely proposed a scrimmage. Had they been musicians, they would have gotten together to jam. As religious masters, being together meant doing religion. 

Twenty years later, religious imagery would be the framework of a dream in which Khyentse consoled Kongtrul in his grief. After Kongtrul’s beloved mother died in the spring of 1867, he turned to Khyentse in his grief. That summer, Khyentse responded to that loss by relating to Kongtrul an extensive dream. 

The dream began with Khyentse in the form of a woman named Dorje Tso, the wife of an unnamed householder in Lhodrak, in central Tibet. One evening Dorje Tso’s husband announced that a lama would be coming for a visit, and that she should prepare the house, which she did, cleaning and arranging a place for the lama to sit and sleep. A short, corpulent lama soon arrived; he was Dorje Lingpa, a famous fourteenth-century treasure revealer, wearing his thick hair in a topknot and wearing a yellow monk’s shirt. At Dorje Tso’s request he blessed her by laying his hands on her head. 

Dorje Tso served him a meal, and late that evening, she went to him and the two spent the night making love. In the thick of their passion, the lama’s identity shifted between Dorje Lingpa and Taranatha, the great seventeenth-century Jonang lama who was a personal hero of Kongtrul’s. At dawn Dorje Tso served the lama a meal and watched as he mounted his horse and departed, several servants walking alongside his horse. 

After the lama had gone, Dorje Tso noticed that he had left a small box on his seat, covered with silk and humming like a hive of bees. She chased after him to return the box. The lama declined to take it however, telling her that it was a casket of treasure substances—physical relics of revelations that he had unearthed—and that his leaving it at her house was auspicious, auguring that he would someday return to her to retrieve it. Dorje Tso was alarmed, and she begged him to not burden her with such a responsibility. Nevertheless, the lama opened it and removed a yellow scroll—the paper on which revelatory scriptures, or treasures, are written—and read an inventory of texts that he, Dorje Lingpa, had already or would one day reveal. He handed it back to Dorje Tso and informed her that his future incarnation would return for it. Worrying that at her age she would not likely be able to give birth to the young lama’s reincarnation, she asked when this would happen, to which he replied, “Not for about five hundred years.”

Dorje Tso then turned for home, but before going far she thought, “This lama is surely Padmasambhava, and I should ask him where Kongtrul’s mother has been reborn.” Note how Khyentse Wangpo appears to have been self aware as the episode unfolded, with the presence of mind to ask a question that was entirely unrelated to the time and place in which the characters lived. The lama reported that Kongtrul’s mother had been reborn in a “watery place,” the thought of which distressed Dorje Tso/Khyentse Wangpo, who assumed Dorje Lingpa meant that Kongtrul’s mother was now a fish. But the lama assured them that with some Akshobhya practice—Akshobhya being one of the five Wisdom Buddhas—she would end up in a marvelous pure land, at which point the dream ended. 

The gender swap, combined with some clever past-life assertions, allowed the two friends to envision a situation in which they could be physically intimate at a time when Kongtrul was experiencing considerable grief. 

Kongtrul received this dream with evident gratitude—he recorded it in detail in his diary, which he published later in life, and he repeated it again in his biography of Khyentse Wangpo, which he wrote a few years after his friend passed away. 

Information on the rebirth of a loved one is a valuable thing in Buddhist societies, and the dream would have been comforting to Kongtrul for the knowledge that his mother was safe and that he could do something to ensure her happiness. But there is perhaps another layer of meaning that would also have given him comfort: a manifestation of Khyentse’s affection in the form of physical intimacy. That it was in a dream in no way would have lessened its reality—Kongtrul’s diary is filled with dreams in which some of his most significant experiences occurred. 

Khyentse explained to Kongtrul that the episode was as much a memory as it was a dream—he had actually once been the woman named Dorje Tso who had, in actuality, encountered Dorje Lingpa as described; this was the reason he, Khyentse, was able to rediscover Dorje Lingpa’s treasures in his current life. Which is to say, Khyentse affirmed that the visit and the lovemaking were actual historical events. And as Khyentse really was Dorje Tso, because Kongtrul considered himself to be a reincarnation of Taranatha, when Dorje Lingpa transformed during the lovemaking into Taranatha, a previous incarnation of Khyentse was making love with a previous incarnation of Kongtrul. The gender swap, combined with some clever past-life assertions, allowed the two friends to envision a situation in which they could be physically intimate at a time when Kongtrul was experiencing considerable grief. 

***

The dream stands in contrast to most other presentations of sex and gender fluidity in Buddhist literature. 

The first time the Buddha said, “Come, monk” and thereby ordained the initial members of the monastic community, the issue of who was eligible to ordain was defined against who could not; men could ordain, and people who were not men could not, and those categories had to remain fixed. In a culture in which strict adherence to rules was necessary for the maintenance of the sangha as a field of merit worthy of veneration and material support, the community had to remain “pure.” Only men could be monks, only women could be nuns. Thus, the commentaries on the monastic codes go to considerable lengths to define eligibility. This meant defining who counted as a “man” and who counted as a “woman” in the face of the recognition that these categories were fluid. Sex, gender, and sexuality were for this reason all pressing topics of discussion in Buddhist literature, although with such variation as to present no singular classical definition of any of them. 

Buddhist texts recognized the existence of what they termed hermaphrodites—people who possessed pronounced elements of both primary sex characteristics—and they asserted a real possibility of sex changes. Neither hermaphrodites nor certain categories of sexamorphs could ordain. The texts are far from uniform in defining the first of these categories, the dual-sex individual—not unlike contemporary medical science, one might note. The lack of definitive sexual identity was seen as a result of one’s own negative karma or of the misbehavior of one’s parents. They were to be excluded because allowing hermaphrodites into the monastic community would open it to accusations of sexual nonconformity, to the suspicion that not all monks were actual men, or not all nuns were actual women. The exclusion was enabled by casting the hermaphrodite as being pervaded with sin, and texts propose all manner of moral failings that resulted in the condition. 

The possibility of changing one’s sex, which is more salient to our understanding of Khyentse Wangpo’s dream, is less clear cut. Neither of the accounts of the Tibetan individuals named earlier suggest they faced any obstacles from their transition.

The fluidity in Khyentse’s dream was in the service of love, not a punishment for it.

Scriptures on Buddhist doctrine present a different approach to sex and gender fluidity, however. The Vimalakirti Sutra, particularly chapter six, in which a female buddha teaches to the assembled audience, has long been held up by modern Buddhists as a positive depiction of gender, but I wonder if that’s necessarily the case. Here Shariputra, the Buddha’s closest disciple, plays his standard role in Mahayana sutras as a fool, a representative of the allegedly lesser teachings of the Hinayana. Not understanding the goddess and feeling put out, Sariputra sulkily asks her why, if she’s so enlightened, does she remain in a female body. The goddess then transforms herself into a male deity, and transforms Sariputra into a woman, making the point that the duality of male and female is just an illusion. But Sariputra’s sex change is played for laughs, a ploy to mock him and his small-vehicle understanding. He’s the butt of a joke, an intellectually-challenged man in a dress who is to be laughed at. Contemporary Buddhists appreciate the fact that the goddess is a strong female character who does not need to shed her gender to be a buddha, but the episode is not otherwise a very positive depiction of gender fluidity. Yes, sex and gender are illusory, but for a man to become a woman is still something to play for laughs.

Outside of the teachings on nonduality, classical Buddhist literature is concerned with sex changes as a matter of morality. The so-called fortnightly pandaka, whose sex changes every two weeks, are a common example of what happens when one’s sexuality vacillates—one’s body changes to conform to the requirements of heterosexuality. The category would seem to point to what we would consider bisexuality. A well-known story from a fifth-century Pali commentary on the Dhammapada helps explain the issues.

In this story, a man named Soreyya, a married father of two children, one day passes by a monk, and, struck with his physical beauty, fantasized about making love to him. He instantly becomes a woman, who, now with the feminine form of the name, Sorreya, leaves her home in shame and goes to another city. There she marries a man and gives birth to two children. Years later she encounters the monk again and begs his forgiveness, at which point she becomes a man again. 

The story documents the punishment for homosexual desire. The interesting ending to the story of Sorreya is not that he goes on to attain liberation—most sins can be overcome in Buddhism—but that Sorreya’s husband proposes that they stay together for the sake of their children. A story that punishes homosexual impulses somehow manages to preserve the possibility of a homosexual relationship, with children to boot! The story ends there. Presumably, however, had the restored Sorreya agreed to remain with Sorreya’s husband, and they had sexual relations, the passive partner would have been punished again; two men could not remain together as men. Clearly, Buddhist theorists who sought to warn against homosexual desire struggled to explain it, and one, the great Theravada scholar Buddhaghosa, seems to have been unable to even accept its existence. Where earlier commentators explained that sex changes occurred as a result of a homosexual impulse, as with Sorreya, Buddhagosa had it that the sex change had to occur in order for the desire to exist—a man had to become a woman before desire for another man could arise.  

***

This finally brings us back to Khyentse Wangpo’s dream. Was his being a woman a result of his sexual desire for Kongtrul? Was he, as Buddhagosa would have it, in the form of a woman in order to entertain the possibility of having a physical relationship with his friend? Or did he already have those feelings, and so, in his dream, become a woman in order to pursue them? There is nothing else, anywhere in their writing or any other sources, to suggest that either Khyentse or Kongtrul ever entertained the desire for physical intimacy with each other, so it is impossible to know. But however we read this, there is no judgment here, no attempt to conceal anything. The lovemaking is presented as a clear expression of love, and that’s the key. 

On the surface the dream accords with traditional Buddhist scriptural depiction of sex, gender, and sexual fluidity: all patriarchal and heterosexual norms are maintained. What I think is different is that the transformation is neither an abstract pedagogical presentation on nonduality nor an ethical tale of punishment for sin. The fluidity in Khyentse’s dream was in the service of love, not a punishment for it. Khyentse’s sex change and the sexual activity it permitted are narrated without shame or moralizing. Despite the enduring heterosexist paradigm, it remains a positive example of sex and gender fluidity. It is not offered to condemn it, or relegate it to the abstract, but to show how it can be used by real people in the service of kindness and friendship.

♦

Further Reading:

Cabezón, José Ignacio. Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2017.

Gardner, Alexander. The Life of Jamgon Kongtrul the Great. Boulder: Shambhala, 2019.

Gyatso, Janet. Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

The post Sex and Gender Fluidity in Tibetan Buddhism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Kodo Nishimura is far from your typical Buddhist monk. He is also a makeup artist, LGBTQ activist, and, as of 2021, one of TIME’s Next Generation Leaders. Since being interviewed by Tricycle in 2017, Nishimura has been featured in many media outlets in Japan and abroad, including on Queer Eye: We’re in Japan! I recently translated his 2020 Japanese memoir into English as This Monk Wears Heels: Be Who You Are, to be published this February by Watkins Media in the UK and Penguin Random House in the US.

When I interviewed Nishimura on Zoom from his Tokyo home to discuss his memoir, he spoke frankly and poignantly, with the same powerful conviction I could sense while translating his writing. Central to his work is the belief that in Buddhism, as he puts it, “anybody and everybody can be equally liberated,” irrespective of sex, gender, race, or ability. Yet, he also told me how difficult his path to self-acceptance was. He has struggled to reconcile his authentic self—someone who identifies as neither male nor female—with the traditional expectations of how a Japanese monk should dress and act.

“It’s hard to be who I am,” he told me.

During his childhood in socially conservative Japan, Nishimura found refuge from homophobia and ostracization through studying English and connecting online with peers who were also exploring their gender identity and sexuality. While still attending high school, and despite initial opposition from his parents, he decided to leave Japan for the US. There, he studied English, art, and then makeup. And with the help of mentors and friends who were completely open about their gender identities and sexuality, he found the freedom to express who he truly was.

At the age of 24, Nishimura made another fateful decision—to return to Japan and train as a Buddhist monk like his father before him. As Nishimura recounts in his book, up to that point he had never intended to become a monk. He had even “fiercely disliked” Buddhism at one point in time, an attitude he describes as originating from “ignorance and prejudice.” “I needed to face my own Buddhist roots. . . something I had avoided for so long,” he writes. 

Upon his return, Nishimura completed the arduous training to become a monk of the Pure Land school and stayed in Japan to help run his family’s temple in Tokyo. Today, in addition to writing and appearing frequently in media, he is active at the forefront of Japanese Buddhism’s diversity initiatives and gives many talks in Japan and overseas. 

When you wrote your Japanese memoir, did you imagine English speakers also reading it? I know you added extra text to the English version, such as explanations of Buddhist teachings. I always intended my book to be for a global audience. However, the intentions for the Japanese audience versus the international audience are a little different. I don’t have to introduce Buddhism to a Japanese audience, but in Japan I feel that people are pressured to conform to societal expectations—that women have to behave in this way, or that men doing [certain things] is not manly enough. That is something that I want to break in Japan.

[For English readers,] I really want to introduce Buddhism and how accepting it is. Many people are suffering with religious values that are limiting toward their sexual identity or sexual preferences. So, if they know more about other religions in the world, I think I can liberate them a little bit. I want to tell them that those beliefs are not the only way and there are other teachings too.             

How can Buddhist teachings help someone who is struggling with their sexuality or gender identity? Actually, Buddhist teachings don’t specify LGBTQ people at all. They just say that anybody and everybody can be equally liberated. . . and not only in the LGBTQ community, but people who struggle with racial discrimination, different disabilities, or status. I don’t want to only talk about LGBTQ issues because Buddhism really is for everybody.

That being said, in 2019, the Pure Land School hosted their first LGBTQ symposium and I was a guest speaker. A master [at the training temple], Kojun Hayashida, was invited to speak. He talked about the story from one of the main sutras we read, called Amida Sutra. There is a pond of lotus flowers in the pristine Pure Land pond. . . and there are many colorful lotus flowers and these flowers shine in their own colors of blue, yellow, red, and white. He said that diversity is to be celebrated and that we should be shining in our own color.

In order to spread the Buddhist message of equality, I designed a rainbow sticker with praying hands in the middle. The Japan Buddhist Federation of 23 Japanese Buddhist schools agreed to issue this rainbow sticker that I designed. These are for anyone who wants to display them, at temple gates, bulletin boards or by anybody, even if they don’t belong to any Buddhist group.

Is the idea that people might see them and enter the temple for advice and support? Yes. [For example,] when Japanese people die, monks give the spirit a different name. But these names are gendered. . . different names for men and women. When people identify with a different gender to their sex assigned at birth it’s unpleasant because [the posthumous name] is not actually how they want to be named. We should create an area where people can open up and talk about how they want to be named once they pass away. That kind of communication is something that I want to encourage.

In your memoir’s title, you say “Be Who You Are.” What does that mean to you personally? It’s hard to be who I am. I am a Buddhist monk and there is a certain expectation and image tied with being a monk. [It means] to be free of desire, quiet, wise, humble, minimalist. . .  those kinds of images. I felt that people started viewing me as this serene, pristine, perfect being, and that is not who I am. I tried to kind of perform, to look like a Buddhist monk and uphold that image for them, but that wasn’t making me happy.

I didn’t want to talk about my sexual desire. I didn’t want to be honest and complain. I didn’t want to be funny. And because I was not really myself, I wasn’t connecting with people. I couldn’t empathize with or help people in the best way possible.

That was not a sustainable way for me to continue helping people, even if I wanted to. The answer was not to try harder but to have the courage to reveal my true self. That way I could truly be friends with people. Unless people felt they could safely open up to me, I couldn’t help them. I feel that people are too ashamed to talk about their vulnerabilities to monks because they think that monks are these perfect people who must be respected, so they don’t really get to the point of what needs to be discussed. 

Your book includes a moving account of how, while training as a monk, you approached a senior teacher with questions about what you could wear. Can you tell me more about how that conversation went? Since I was young, I’ve been a person who likes to dance and sing and put on something sparkly. I like to wear skirts and pink clothes. But I started hiding myself because people were humiliating me. In the US, I met many people who are very expressive and wear colorful clothing, which was eye-opening to me. I didn’t know that there was an environment where it was OK for me to be myself. I didn’t want to give that up. I was always concerned, If I become a monk, would I have to give up being who I am?

Kojun Hayashida, the master monk in my training temple, was very respected, knowledgeable, and open-minded, so I asked him [about wearing beautiful things such as accessories]. He told me, “Well, in Japan, Buddhism has been evolving. . . Monks can get married now. . . Monks can have children now. Monks have multiple jobs. . . because that was necessary for Buddhism to survive in Japan. Some monks are wearing scrubs if they are also doctors. So, if you wear something shiny, so long as you are able to deliver the message of Buddhism, which is that everybody can be equally liberated, I don’t think it is a problem.”

He cleared the clouds above my head and he gave me validation to stay as who I am, and to be a proud monk.

You also write about the bodhisattva Kannon (Guanyin in Chinese). Does this deity have a special significance for you? [In Pure Land Buddhist temples] there are usually three Buddhist statues: Amida in the middle, Kannon on the left, and Seishi on the right. After my master told me that it is OK to dress in beautiful clothes, my father [who is a Buddhist priest] asked me, “Oh, do you remember Guanyin? Do you know why he is wearing dazzling accessories and embellishments?” He said that Buddhism has been evolving. In the beginning, neither humble monks nor bodhisattvas wore anything lavish because they didn’t own anything, they didn’t have money. But The Flower Garland Sutra says, “In order to inspire people, in order to gain respect from people, you have to look beautiful, because sublime virtue requires sublime appearance. Also, you have to be excellent in knowledge, and surround yourself with majestic people. For the first time, then, you can gain respect and help people. So, if you want to be a bodhisattva like me, you should dress up and look pristine.”

After learning this, I thought, “Wow, that’s so true. We worship Kannon so why can’t I try to be like him or her?” I feel like I empathize with Kannon so much because Kannon was considered a male bodhisattva of bravery in India but was later depicted as a mother-like figure with very soft features and considered a bodhisattva of mercy. He is considered a male, but I don’t know if Kannon considers himself a man or a woman. It is the same with me. I know my body is male, but am I a man or a woman? I don’t even know myself.

Your father is also a priest. How does he view your unusual path as a Buddhist monk? My father is an emeritus professor at a Buddhist university and knows much about Buddhism. He lives in a rather conservative way and doesn’t wear anything lavish or colorful. He has always known that I was a homosexual, [but] he was very afraid that I would be targeted and humiliated within the Buddhist community when I publicly came out. But actually, there have never been negative comments from the community. 

He has become comfortable with me expressing my sexuality because he has seen many people supporting me. He has received compliments from his professor and monk peers, and also letters and words of gratitude from the followers of our temple. Recently, he has given me suggestions on my fashion too, about which heels to wear!

My father is not really trying to change the overall situation. He likes to keep things in the comfortable way as they are now. However, he thinks the Japan Buddhist Federation should eliminate discriminatory lines from the sutras. For example, when women are reborn in the Pure Land, it says they will be reborn as male. Or, in a sutra from the Pure Land school nuns and novices are listed as “ignorant.” I [also] think these lines are so outdated. I get offended, so during the monk training, I would secretly skip these lines.

Do you want to say anything else? Well, a lot of people think that I am not a real monk. I know that I am not following the traditional image, but I believe that the essence of being a monk is to help people. So, I have no hesitation in tackling the problems people face today while utilizing my uniqueness.

Furthermore, I want to inspire other religious leaders of the world to re-examine their conceptions and teachings against LGBTQ people so that all of us can feel safe to be ourselves and shine in our own color. If I can contribute to that, what people think of me does not matter at all.

♦

The post  ‘This Monk Wears Heels’: An Interview with Kodo Nishimura appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Buddhist studies scholars since the 19th century have paid noticeably less attention to Buddhist laywomen than to other practitioners. Most scholarship has been concerned with men, but even the studies that do discuss Buddhist women have focused largely on nuns or female renunciants, with laywomen—wives, mothers, and caregivers in their communities—receiving scant attention. The implicit assumption is that women’s most authentic spiritual selves must exist independently of their families.

But Jessica Starling, an associate professor of religious studies and Asian studies at Lewis & Clark College, is addressing this dearth of scholarship with her research on Japanese Shin Buddhist temple wives.

There is no strong tradition of ordination for women in the Jodo Shinshu (“True Pure Land school”) tradition, and since Buddhist monks can and do marry in Japan, the closest thing to a nun is the resident priest’s wife, known as bomori, or “temple guardian.” Starling’s book, Guardians of the Buddha’s Home: Domestic Religion in Contemporary Jodo Shinshu, chronicles her interactions with bomori and shows how they navigate culturally and religiously mandated domesticity. Bomori are expected to stay at home and tend to the temple—and to bring up multiple children, one of whom (probably the oldest son) will one day be the next resident priest (jushoku).

Starling’s close examination of Pure Land households, however, revealed an unforeseen gender dynamic. Feminist thinkers have long debated the role that domestic labor plays in inequality: first-wave feminists championed waged work as the key to escaping culturally mandated domesticity, while second-wave feminists argued that we ought to uplift the dignity of the labor traditionally relegated to women. Bomori complicate this picture: by staying at home, they actually gain status as ecclesiastic figures.

“The very gender ideology that divides labor along gender lines and ‘confines’ women to staying at home in fact renders temple wives de facto religious professionals,” Starling writes. When the resident priest leaves the temple to perform ceremonies or visit the laity, bomori become the highest authority. They use their knowledge of Buddhist doctrine as well as their skills as housewives (serving tea, chatting with visitors) to both welcome laypeople and educate them in the dharma.

Tricycle spoke to Starling about what bomori do, how having a family can be a way of spreading the dharma, and why it’s important for scholars to decenter the role of male priests.

Who are bomori? Officially, the term refers to the spouse of the resident priest of a Jodo Shinshu temple. Because resident priests are overwhelmingly male, bomori basically means the wife. How someone performs the role is very individualized: there’s no strict prescription from the Jodo Shinshu higher-ups. Bomori do a lot of the behind-the-scenes work of running the temple, maintaining the community, and making sure parishioners feel invited. They keep the atmosphere, making the temple a warm, friendly, and hospitable place to be, and they organize events such as the meals that follow services. Many also clean and decorate the altar.

The boundary between the religious and domestic spheres of a Jodo Shinshu temple is far more permeable than one might think. A bomori’s work extends from the “private,” domestic realm into the space for Buddhist worship; it’s impossible to draw a hard line between the two.

What does her day typically look like? The structure of the bomori’s day will depend on whether her husband is a full-time priest who’s busy visiting parishioners’ houses and doing ritual services, such as funerals, traveling to give dharma talks, or hosting events at the temple. Some temples aren’t that busy, so the husband might take an office job or become a teacher at a local high school or something like that.

But most bomori tend to the temple all day long. The temple is essentially a public institution, and most temples want to keep the main hall open all the time. She needs to be around to receive visitors to the temple, answer their questions, and serve them tea if they want to talk for a little bit. There’s also clerical work to do, phone calls to place for scheduling services, and deliveries to be received. So the bomori is just kind of there. She holds down the fort. And that’s where her name comes from—bomori, meaning “guardian or protector of the temple.”

Your book highlights the role of family as the connective tissue of Pure Land Buddhist communities. But speaking generally, a non-Asian practitioner or scholar steeped in Buddhist modernist ideals might not recognize a mom with a kid squirming in her arms as a “true Buddhist practitioner,” at least not at first. Yes. I certainly have been questioned by both Western and Japanese scholars about how “Buddhist” my research material actually is. There continues to be a sense that authentic Buddhism is grounded in texts. For most of its existence, the field of Buddhist studies has tended to define its object of study in relation to the Buddhist doctrine that’s been written down. This has been changing, at least in the past two decades or so, but it’s been a big challenge for scholars to bring women fully into the picture. This is partially because of the dearth of doctrinal texts written by Buddhist women. And Buddhist texts are relatively ambivalent about women and women’s bodies, if not overtly misogynistic.

“The chanting happening in the main hall is not separate from the cooking going on in the kitchen—the scriptures are not self-contained.”

Japanese Buddhist texts include some sutras and some of the writings of the founders of the various schools of Buddhism, such as Shinran (1173–1262), the founder of Jodo Shinshu; Nichiren (1222–1282); and Eihei Dogen (1200–1253). Unfortunately, virtually no important Buddhist texts have been written by women, so scholars have had to look elsewhere to make sense of women’s religious activity.

I knew I had to look closely at what happens in the domestic sphere and the importance of interpersonal relationships—which is such a crucial part of women’s role at the temple—in sustaining the Buddhist tradition.

Domestic labor is not really considered “work,” let alone anything spiritual. How does your book make the bomori’s work legible as religious activity? What I felt I needed to do with this book was help my audience—who I imagined would be mainly Western scholars—take more seriously these practices, which get overlooked because of their place in the domestic world. I wanted the reader to see that the meaning of the chanting happening in the main hall is not separate from the cooking going on in the kitchen—that the scriptures are not self-contained. Meaning emerges in social contexts, so within a family-run temple particular kinds of meanings are made.

For a few decades now, academics have pushed for the study of “lived religion,” arguing that the classic spirit-matter divide has continued to inform our views of religion and that these views were shaped by a Protestant bias concerning what constitutes religion’s authentic sphere of activity—namely, the disembodied, nonmaterial realm.

Many people who are less familiar with Japanese Buddhism may be surprised to learn not only that priests marry and have families but that the temple system itself largely depends on an inheritance system in which a priest passes his temple down to his son. This has been the case for all established Buddhist traditions or sects since the Meiji period (1868–1912), even if they were historically more monastic. In most parish temples in Japan today the family temple system is used, whereby the jushoku, resident priest, is expected to be succeeded by one of his children, usually his oldest son. (They often call the eldest son “young successor” or “junior jushoku.”) While the temple is like a public institution and the center of a religious community to some extent, it’s also his home. There isn’t a clear demarcation between the priest’s family affairs and the affairs of the temple, and his wife helps with all of them.

Other Buddhist schools had to readjust to the practice of priests marrying, but in the Jodo Shinshu this family system has been around for much longer. Shinran had already set a new standard for the religious professional in this tradition. He, like other Buddhist reformers in medieval Japan, subscribed to the idea of mappo, or the degenerate age of the dharma. Under mappo, he thought, practitioners were no longer spiritually capable of mastering the difficult path to enlightenment. It was in your interest to give yourself entirely to the working of Amida Buddha. He was articulating a path away from what is called jiriki, or “self-power,” toward tariki, or “other power.”

Shinran embraced his own inability to live a truly pure, celibate life, and he was open about having a wife and kids. He basically said, “I’m not a monk or a layperson, I’m just a devotee of Amida.” And so the movement that followed him didn’t have any expectation that the priest had to be celibate. During the Tokugawa period (1603–1867), Jodo Shinshu was the one Buddhist tradition that was given an exemption by the government so that the head of a temple could be married and still have the status of priest.

You note that other recently published academic texts focusing on contemporary Japanese temple Buddhism have mostly looked at the men. Most of these studies concentrate on the priest’s official activities—taking ordination, giving sermons, performing rituals. But you write, “I wanted to go even further by asking what Buddhism looks like if we do not put male priests at the center of our story at all.” How did you come to that question? At the time of my first trip to Japan, I was maybe 21 years old. I had a job teaching English in a little fishing village. A coworker in the school board office found out that I had studied religion in college and took me to a Buddhist temple. When we got there, the priest came in, and he had just slipped on his robes, one of my first indicators that this place was his home. He lit some incense and tried to explain what Amida was. He invited us to sit down in a room to the side. Then this woman came in, brought us tea and some delicious sweet, and just left. She wasn’t dressed in robes or anything, and no one introduced her. I know now that she was the bomori.

Before that encounter I had assumed that a Buddhist priest would be celibate and living alone. That clearly wasn’t the case, so I started to question everything I had learned about Buddhism up to that point. Years later, I went back to that temple and interviewed the priest and the bomori for my book. They told me their son was slated to become the successor, but he was off working a regular job while his parents were still able to run the temple. In this case, it’s obvious that family relationships are the connective tissue of the tradition: they’re what are sustaining the temples.

Scholars often stop at that first introduction to the temple, where the priest presents Buddhism to the outsider, sort of like my first encounter: “This is what we do here.” But there’s this backstage thing happening, and I thought that was equally important. With my research, I had an advantage: my daughter was 9 months old when I started doing my fieldwork, and she would come with me. So the women I was interviewing would play with her and feed her, and it usually felt very natural and casual. Being a mother myself, I was able to access that other realm of the temple in a way that other scholars perhaps hadn’t even seen.

Can a temple wife become a resident priest? It is possible for a woman to become the head priest of her family’s temple. In that case, the temple either doesn’t have a bomori or she asks her husband or mother-in-law to be the bomori. Often a bomori has the same religious credentials as her husband, even if she’s not technically the head priest. That means from an institutional perspective, she’s just as qualified as her husband to do rituals and hold services. There is a group of Jodo Shinshu women, now mostly in their seventies, who were part of second-wave feminism in Japan. They spent the 1990s working for institutional recognition and created a kind of feminist movement within the Jodo Shinshu. Temple wives were already very organized—the history of fujinkai, or women’s associations, dates back to the early 20th century, and there are bomori associations especially for temple wives—and they used these networks to raise institutional consciousness about the fact that their tradition was so behind on gender equality.

Many women at the time got their kyoshi degree, or teaching degree, which takes one or two years at an accredited Jodo Shinshu university and makes one eligible to become jushoku of a temple. One of the reasons their generation did this was to make a point—they wanted, in principle, to be equal to their husbands. However, the percentage of female jushokus who currently occupy the main administrative and social role at a temple remains quite small. More frequently a woman receives ordination just in case a male member of her family cannot fulfill the role of priest. And when a woman does become a jushoku, it’s often seen as a temporary fix until a male priest can take over the line.

“Some bomori think it’s too exhausting to try to break the glass ceiling. Others see it as their mission.”

But there’s a longer history of the Jodo Shinshu opening up these kinds of channels for women. In 1909, the Hongwanji-ha, a major Pure Land subsect, amended its bylaws to make it possible for women who had taken kikyoshiki (lay ordination) to become certified as female lay instructors. It was not clear what function these new titles were expected to serve, although allowing women to do these things encouraged doctrinal study among Buddhist women’s groups and offered an official position for lay leaders, both male and female. Around this time, the bomori’s role was becoming increasingly codified, and there was a lot written about the importance of an education in Buddhist doctrine so that the bomori could not only support her husband but also educate her son—the future jushoku—as well as the temple’s parishioners.

How are these ideas put to work in a bomori’s life today? Most of the acculturation to roles at the temple happens within the family. Many bomori learn from their mothers-in-law what is expected of them, and those informal internships are how ideals for the role get passed down across generations. Interestingly, most bomori are apologetic about how they fail to live up to whatever ideal they have in their minds for the role. They would often show me how they did things in practice, while claiming that “really” (honto wa) it should be done some other way, but that they unfortunately couldn’t achieve that ideal themselves.

Ideas about the gendered division of labor within temple families have certainly been shaped by the dominant gender norms of the 20th century. But the role of the temple wife is also unique in some ways. Her home is also a religious institution, so nothing she does is strictly confined to the private realm in terms of its religious significance.

I think bomori “feel their gender” the most when they step out of their sanctioned role as housewives. The response from laypeople is often dismissive, so there’s some discomfort and dissonance. Say a parishioner comes by and asks for a ritual, but the jushoku is away, so the bomori offers to do it in his stead. The layperson, feeling uncomfortable with a woman doing the jushoku’s role, might be like, “Oh, you don’t need to do all that; I can just wait until your husband’s available.” There’s still resistance to having the wife fulfill the ritual role or having the husband do things like serve tea.

Some bomori think it’s too exhausting to try to break through that glass ceiling. They are more comfortable inhabiting the slightly less visible and more expected role as bomori, one that doesn’t involve those awkward confrontations. Others, however, want to do it—they see it as their mission to keep practicing with and despite those pressures and help their congregations become more accustomed to seeing a woman take the lead at the temple. And others aren’t choosing to become a priest for feminist reasons at all: it’s because of some family situation such as illness that causes them to take on that extra responsibility as jushoku, because no male successor is available.

It’s fascinating that the division of labor that confines women to the home turns these temple wives into the religious professionals of the temple, because when their husbands aren’t there they often end up stepping into the role of jushoku. Interestingly, if you ask one, “Are you a professional?” she’ll likely say, “No, no, I don’t know what I’m doing.” But it’s clearly the case that everyone perceives her as being an expert in what she does and having a special identity and status for the position she occupies. In the wider community, when people see one out and about, they say, “Oh, there’s the bomori” or sometimes just “Otera-san” (“Temple person”). That’s a status and an identity, whether she likes it or not. She is the temple, to some extent.

It’s disappointing that in scholarship about religion, women’s domestic activities are often held up as an example about how oppressed or contingent a woman’s position is. The sense is that if she’s not acting fully independently of her family, then her religious activities aren’t significant. What happens when we really look at what the women are doing? Part of what makes a bomori so fully identified with the temple is that she’s always there; she’s the face that greets you. She’s a center and coordinator of community and an important point of contact for the laity. Presumably if the person who took me to the temple during that first visit when I was 21 hadn’t called ahead and told the priest, “I’m bringing this American, get your robes on”—if I had just wandered in—the bomori would have been there, and she would have made the tea and tried to answer my questions, even while demurring that she was not a real priest. Most of them are very reluctant to claim any special authority. But they have all kinds of expertise in running a Buddhist temple. The bomori is an essential worker who is keeping Buddhism alive in Japan.

The post Temple Wives appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“Form is emptiness, emptiness also is form; emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness.” 

This phrase is from the Heart Sutra, the heart of the Mahayana teachings, the pith of the Prajnaparamita Sutras. The Buddha really punctured concepts with these lines! This was the first time my mind stopped. The Heart Sutra was the first piece of buddhadharma that I devoured; I even memorized it so I wouldn’t be without it, because it was both frightening and freeing. To think, all this, all this experience and solidity that we place as we move through this world, all of it is both solid and evanescent. It was the first piece of dharma I encountered that spoke to the nature of my fluid being. I just happened to be born of this female body and it is not fixed. I felt, once again, the dharma gave me the practice opportunity to view how my form emerges and dissolves in every moment. And as frightening as that was initially, I gradually practiced to remember that it wasn’t a dissolve into nothing, but an emptiness so vast it accommodates everything. 

This was tested on two very important periods in my life. For most of my life, I hated who I saw in the mirror: plastered in scars, acne, and a disfigured body that was perpetually prepubescent. As I approached any mirror, echoes of abusive taunts would ripple at me, so I hung mirrors below the neck or didn’t look at them at all. During a month-long silent meditation program, a dathun, I decided to spend time with my reflection and realized my worst fears erupted in taunting thoughts, then dissipated. Another wave, of different insults and content, arose and dissipated. I actually didn’t know who that reflection was. So I got curious. I asked it. I began to notice the faces of several family members and of no one at all. This shifted something for me. Perhaps I wasn’t who I thought I was. 

Later, my mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s and I returned home to care for her. Over the next year and a half, I moved from “only daughter” to whomever she decided I was in the moment. Initially, I was not only sad but irritated that she would forget my name, of all people. In that moment, the clutch onto my existence and identity became personal. I felt my “I” disappearing. I would constantly correct her, quiz her, show photographic evidence, all for her to remember. After a few times of losing my patience, praying to the dralas [or in Tibetan Buddhism, something that “cuts through one’s habitual chain of thoughts,”] for clarity did note the impact of my righteousness. My mother would grow more irritable or worse, sad, as she momentarily realized I was correct and, even more stunning, that she’d forgotten and would continue to forget. When I took in her pain, when I felt how out of control it must feel to, for any given amount of time, have no reference point, I was grateful for the ingenuity of mind to pull some memory and place it in the present. 

It was then these teachings became more salient. I began to be less uptight about my identity and more focused on the energy of the interaction. I was able to feel all the love my mother had for me, all the while calling me her sister, or friend, or mother. There was a knowing, an is-ness that was beyond any conceptual picture of who I thought I was, who I knew myself to be, who I thought I was to her. That is-ness was made of goodness and love. It eased her nerves, and more play was invited because there was space. 

One of the last sentences I heard my mother speak was, “I love how you make me feel.” It was then I saw the dharma in action, that the energy of our being is what is felt by others. So, even regarding my gender, I found tremendous freedom to manifest as whoever emerged in that moment. For me, this is the invitation of being nonbinary: the concepts of either male or female are not fixed ways of being but rather a flow, free to rise spontaneously and then subside.

♦

Adapted from Afrikan Wisdom: New Voices Talk Black Liberation, Buddhism, and Beyond edited by Valerie Mason-John, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2021. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

The post Letting Go to Find Yourself  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Before Kevin Manders created the anthology Transcending: Trans Buddhist Voices (edited also by Elizabeth Marston and published by North Atlantic Books in October 2019), he often worried that he was the only trans Buddhist practitioner in the world. As he compiled this collection of writings by trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary Buddhists, however, he quickly learned how many other people were out there—and how isolated they were feeling. 

The anthology, which ranges in genre from academic papers to poetry, creates a sort of community of its own, with many contributors expressing similar experiences of exclusion as well as joy, all in their own voices. Some writers no longer belong to any religious institutions, Buddhist or otherwise, having been pushed out by oppression or alienation. Others find that Buddhism permits them a unique fluidity of self—and that being trans, genderqueer, or nonbinary helps them connect with teachings that they otherwise may struggle to embody. 

In the following interview, Kevin Manders discusses his inspiration for this anthology, how he hopes it will be used by sanghas, and the ways it has created a community where there was once isolation.

What first gave you the idea to compile this anthology of trans and genderqueer Buddhist voices? It’s the book I’ve wanted to read for 12 or 13 years, since I started my practice. For the first eight years, I did not know any trans, genderqueer, or nonbinary Buddhists. But I figured I couldn’t be the only one. I spent a lot of time back then doing research and finding nothing, and I realized that if I wanted to hear from other trans Buddhists, then other people did as well. That’s how it got started.

 Why is it important to hear more from these voices, and why do you think it has taken so long? I think it’s important for trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary people to hear each other’s voices, because I think many of us—speaking for myself and contributors to the book—have been feeling at tiny bit lost in parts of our practice. Particularly because of the teaching of anatta [non-self, a teaching that challenges our fixed or static ways of thinking of the self, but that often has been misconstrued to imply that a person’s experience of identity is not real]. I met a lot of trans Buddhists during the call for submissions who shared similar stories about teachers not being supportive when they came out as trans because of the teaching of non-self.

I think sometimes it can be hard for trans people to come out, especially in places that are spiritual or religious. And because of the teaching of anatta, I know a number of trans people who kept their trans identity hidden or who came out to unsupportive teachers and then went right back into the closet and shoved it down. One of the reasons I think it’s taken so long is that many trans people have felt alone and like they’re the only ones. Some of the contributors have also felt that every other Buddhist in the world was cisgender. Since this book has come out, a lot of people have been saying that it’s helped lessen their isolation.

How has connecting with other trans Buddhists been important to your personal practice and your life? I eventually left my first sangha after 12 years because of transphobia, and this book has helped heal my heart from that experience. Being able to share my story and hear other people’s stories has made me feel more connected. It’s almost like we have an extended trans Buddhist community around the world now. Anytime I’m feeling bad I just open this book, and I can always find one thing that helps me and my practice at any given moment.

Do you see Transcending more as a resource for trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary Buddhists or for people outside those specific communities, or both? In the end, I think it’s a resource for both. The original intention was to help heal the hearts of trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary Buddhists—to help them feel less isolated and less lonely and to know that there are other trans Buddhist practitioners practicing, maybe in their own living rooms, maybe not. But over time we realized that [cis] Buddhists and sanghas can also learn from the book, that it could be an educational tool. We’re getting loads of good feedback from [cis] Buddhists about how much they’re learning.

Say you’re speaking to a cisgender, heterosexual practitioner who isn’t necessarily homophobic, but isn’t particularly interested in issues related to gender or sexual identity, either. How would you respond if they asked how gender or sexuality are relevant to their dharma practice? I would first thank the person for being honest and trusting enough to ask the question. I would honor that first. Then I would share that understanding our own gender and sexuality is a part of dharma. The relative truth of our identities are important on a day-to-day basis. I would encourage the person to try to get curious about their gender and sexuality and see what may come up and sit with that. They may be surprised.

Also, the intersectionality of our identities makes a big difference to our lives and in our sanghas. Some people deal with oppression, discrimination, and harassment due to gender or sexuality, and others to do not. I would let them know that reflecting on their gender and sexuality would help not just them but the greater sangha. The more comfortable we are with ourselves, the more comfortable we are with others. We need to know ourselves fully and authentically, which requires work, before we can start to understand the absolute truth of non-self. 

You are presumably pretty open minded, but did you nonetheless learn anything about diversity of views and experiences that surprised you when putting this together? I think one of the bonuses of the book is just how diverse our stories are. There are some common threads like transphobia because of anatta and sanghas, but there’s a lot of diversity in the book in terms of gender identity and the different Buddhist lineages. I know that for a lot of us, one of the most exciting things has not just been being able to learn from and be motivated by other trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary Buddhists, but to be able to learn from people who are in different lineages of Buddhism. 

Why did you decide to include multiple genres of writing? How do you feel that enhances the book? For one, I didn’t want any trans voices to be silenced, so the idea for this book was that no voice would get turned away. That means we have professional writers, editors, and academics in this book right alongside people who have never published a piece in their life. Everything from poetry, to art, to comics—any way that people wanted to express themselves was welcomed. And that was really important to my heart. Not everyone expresses themselves in the same way, so we wanted to give multiple options. 

What does it feel like for you to see all of these stories in one place? The call for submissions came out four years ago. This has been a long time coming, and I was overwhelmed when I first saw the book in print. To bear witness to all these stories and this wisdom has been a blessing. I am truly grateful that all of these contributors shared their stories because I’ve always believed that trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary Buddhists have much to share with each other, their sanghas, and the world. I hope this book will be of service. 

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