cypress atlas, from gender and emptiness, from transcending: trans buddhist voices, edited by kevin manders and elizabeth marston, 2019
[Image Description The most personally validating passage of any holy text, for this nonbinary androgynous pansexual queer writer, is the seventh chapter of what is sometimes called the Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra or even The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti. The chapter deals mainly with the idea of non-self. A large part of it is a dialogue between a character called Reverend Sariputra and another simply referred to as the Goddess. The section of dialogue that is most relevant to the discussion of trans identity is as follows, translated by Robert Thurman:
Sariputra: Goddess, what prevents you from transforming yourself out of your female state?
Goddess: Although I have sought my “female state” for these twelve years, I have not yet found it. Reverend Sariputra, if a magician were to incarnate a woman by magic, would you ask her, “What prevents you from transforming yourself out of your female state?”
Sariputra: No! Such a woman would not really exist, so what would there be to transform?
Goddess: Just so, reverend Sariputra, all things do not really exist. Now, would you think, “What prevents one whose nature is that of a magical incarnation from transforming herself out of her female state?”
The Goddess then goes on to transform herself into Reverend Sariputra’s form and him into hers. She then echoes his question back to him, in his newly found feminine form: “Reverend Sariputra, what prevents you from transforming yourself out of your female state?”
Sariputra is shocked at his transformation, and the Goddess goes on to explain the nature of this sort of dualistic gender idea to him as such:
All women appear in the form of women in just the same way as the elder appears in the form of a woman. While they are not women in reality, they appear in the form of women. With this in mind, the Buddha said, “In all things, there is neither male nor female.”
The Goddess transforms both of their bodies back into their original forms and asks Sariputra what he has done with his female form, and the dialogue continues:
Sariputra: I neither made it nor did I change it.
Goddess: Just so, all things are neither made nor changed, and that they are not made and not changed, that is the teaching of the Buddha.
There is a basic teaching in Buddhism, and particularly in Zen Buddhism, of emptiness, or sunyata. It is a rather difficult concept to think about or define because “it is not a concept, for there is no conceptualization in true Zen; and there is no Zen thought, for there is no thought in true Zen. Rather, nothing is something that is experienced and not merely conceptualized. Yet nothing is no ‘thing’ at all, for there is no ‘thing’ to be experienced in Zen: the experienced and the experiencer and the experiencing are all one and the same.”
The experience of being nonbinary is an experience of emptiness. It is an assertion and a recognition of the inherent “nothing” that is beneath the concept of gender in and of itself. Gender is simply a concept and, like all concepts, it lacks any kind of inherent existence. End ID]
