• chapter two •
“First we will discuss the five obstructions. The first is that women are not able to become the great Brahma lord because that position is accomplished through purity and the body of a woman has a great many impurities. Second, women cannot become Chakra. Upon reaching the heavens their bodies become male because only the males can be lords of the heavens. Although Chakra has some desire remaining, that desire is quite light. Women on the other hand are extremely libidinous. Third, women cannot become demon kings. They cannot attain this position because demons are extremely hard, solid, and firm, while women are extremely soft and weak. As soon as anything unusual comes up, they are at a loss and have to seek help. Wise kings have hearts of great compassion and kindness. They teach people to maintain the Five Precepts and the Ten Good Deeds. Whenever women see something good occur to others they become jealous and this keeps them from having great compassion. Fifth, they cannot become Buddhas. Buddhas have ten thousand virtues; women have many evils. They are jealous and obstructive and their hearts are about the size of a sesame seed.”
This is part of a twentieth-century commentary by a Chinese Tripitaka Master, one Hsuan Hua (1918–1995). As Sallie Tisdale comments, in quoting this stentorian voice of authority, “there’s a lot more where this came from.” If this kind of discourse about women were not so persistent and commonplace in traditional Buddhism, it could be safely laughed off the stage of history as the pernicious absurdity it is.
How can it possibly be reconciled with insight into the emptiness of self? You must turn yourself inside out even to make the attempt. When you try to argue that you are so vastly right, you’re already vastly wrong. And when you disavow the humanity of women—or of any gendered category of “otherness”—you disavow your own.
As the Diamond Sutra says, “If there is even a bit of difference, it is the distance between heaven and earth.” Mind in its complete state finds “male” and “female” exactly and equally empty. At the essential level, not even a bit of difference.
Within Buddhism, masculine rights and preeminence for spiritual realization have been as vigorously held to be unquestionable as in most of the world’s “great religions” arising in the Axial Age and enduring (and being endured) all the way down to now. Buddhism may lack the particular burden imposed by a claim that the one God is male, but that has not even slightly hampered its virile rejection of women from any standing in religious life, in a way that flies fiercely in the face of its own direct religious experience (not dogma) of no self, no “other”—of reality undivided.
Laughing It Off the Stage
A friend traveled to Myanmar on a cultural and religious pilgrimage to several of the great temples and ruins of Theravadan Buddhism. The party was composed largely of women, led by a much-loved, robed monastic—naturally, a man. Everyone came filled with gentle fervor and gratitude and felt rewarded and astonished, especially by the huge ruined temple complexes of Bagan.
She returned with some exquisite photographs. Lone graceful boats poled across water mirroring a golden sunset sky. A gaggle of young boys, ten, eleven, or twelve, faces radiant with expectation, bedecked with flowers as they lined up for symbolic initiation for one week as a monk. No young girls in that photo. No photo could capture the sharp fact that even the oldest and most venerable female practitioners were obliged to offer full obeisance to these febrile children because they were male, yield priority to them in every circumstance, and simply serve them. Meanwhile they were never to pollute food by handing it directly to a monk, and never expect to be admitted to the inner domains of temples.
When staying on the grounds of the monastery, the women guests were to use only the special low-slung washing line strictly reserved for women’s clothing and to carefully wash and hang out male clothing only on the special high-slung line. Yes, it comes to this.
My friend returned to Australia laughing at the absurdity—venerating an even more ancient tradition than Buddhism that women reserve for themselves in order to manage the continuing flow of insult to their sex, while helping to constantly disavow or cover up its secret injury. Laughter that gives up all hope of a better past and just barely keeps open a vision of a different possible future. Clear-eyed laughter, but seldom permitted to reach male ears lest it unveil and threaten to expose the vulnerability that such relentless overstatement of male importance makes so plain.
Indelibly Red
It is only very recently in its long unfolding that traditional Buddhism has been seriously challenged for its derogatory teachings on women. At the monastic level, restrictions on women are still legion. South Asian Theravadan Buddhism still largely thwarts or openly withholds from women the right to ordain as nuns and remains firm on the impossibility of fully realizing Buddhist teachings in a shameful female body. Future rebirth as a male is still proffered quite seriously as the sole hope for a woman to realize her self-nature.
In other words, in this desiccated view, “her self-nature” is a phrase that simply defies all sense.
The vermilion silken underwear allocated to “scarlet women”—prostitutes, courtesans—was the first connotation to leap from the image of the red thread. Immediately, the “bind” of carnal passion, lust, sex, sexual obsession, rejection, betrayal, and of course the burden of children, household duties, and filial ties of the heart that may be the result of sexual passion would spring to mind. The necessity to cut yourself free from all such bondage in a deeper quest of liberation was taken to be self-evident. “Home-leaving,” as monastic ordination was called, quite forcefully meant abandoning and stepping free from all that maintained ordinary life as a householder, leaving family, children, women behind, just as the Buddha did, ceasing love of all “worldly things” that might hold you back from a goal of final transcendence of the humiliating fleshly cycle of birth and death.
In this light you might be tempted to mistake the koan for a rueful sigh about the impossibility of cutting free completely from the pull of sexual feelings and all their egregious consequences, so as to fully awaken, finally unencumbered. That would reduce it to a wry “joke,” rehearsing yet again the pernicious wish of women to undermine the will of men who would make an assault upon the spiritual heights. Heights of realizing self-nature that must be comprehensively ruled out to all women by virtue of a degraded and infinitely suspect female nature.
For this to survive even the briefest scrutiny, a glaring exception to the otherwise absolute and undivided nature of non-dual reality must be brutally forced. In the name of “purity,” the prosecution of male privilege and female subordination must be firmly kept sacrosanct while remaining comfortably untroubled by insight. That we find no hint of deviation from this querulous insistence also in conservative Christianity, Judaism, or Islam hardly needs saying.
This is precisely what the koan turns on its ridiculous head. It shakes off every rank prejudice and preference, obvious or hidden, that clings tenaciously to gender difference—a difference vividly and immediately stigmatized by the telling stain of red. Turn all stigma upside down, the red thread koan demands!
Suddenly, all that has been so violently elbowed away and pushed down at last has to be faced as a dharma gate!
“Gender” fully intends to be a gender-neutral word but quickly reveals itself as a code or weasel word for all that is being socially constructed as nonnormative—that which is not heterosexual and male. Women “have gender” while men are simply human, and the maleness that automatically inheres to the status of “human being” is so deeply assumed it becomes difficult to notice. Meanwhile femaleness, by definition, is burdened with a clearly problematic possession of gender, as is any other category of social or biological gender identity that “deviates” from the heterosexual male norm, which alone enjoys a status untroubled by the word gender. There is mankind, which is essentially male, and then there is homosexual, bisexual, transsexual . . . and that persistent majority of human beings we call female.
“Gender” begins to be revealed as the hurt and harm that everyone must endure when one gender is secretly or quite openly restricted, derogated, despised, and even persecuted. This old, dangerous, and too easily violent uneasiness is often attributed to the difficulty of being certain, as a male, that the child you support is your own genetic offspring and not that of another male—a need biologically based but deeply ramified in property law. But when you start to look there seem almost infinite shapes and layers to the all-pervasive fear that underpins the patriarchy.
Is This Two?
Whatever may be the roots of male privilege and female subordination to that socialized “fact,” it is undeniable that this mental split point-blank refuses the heart of the teaching that form is emptiness and emptiness form. Wisdom begins where dualistic mind goes dark with not-knowing, generous with no-preferences. Compassion and all other insight flows from that merciful dark.
The burden of religiously couched misogyny that women have traditionally been told to bear and the degree to which it has handicapped their ability to walk the path would be hard to overstate. The effects are not just obvious but subtle. As bell hooks has pointed out, it is difficult enough to arrive at the transformative point of yielding ego and “self,” but consider how you are placed if nothing in the social order has ever implied that you even possess a sovereign self to yield.
Then comes the demanding balancing act, of acknowledging you have been exploited and victimized, in a way that does not renounce your own agency and simply confirm and deepen the exploitation. Discovering what hooks names as the sense that we can never be completely dehumanized by “others” is critical to taking into your own hands the matter of collectively redeeming a profound social injustice.
We all enter this life from a woman’s body, and not just life but death is born with each of us. Everything that bears some association with this fact seems tainted with abject social fear, embarrassment, or disgust—such as menstrual blood, birth itself, sometimes even lactation, even the corpse that life will finally deliver into the world for every one of us. These things must be hidden, veiled, buried, made taboo, called unclean; their uncanny power to render meaning ambiguous must be carefully segregated from the “cleansed” domain of social order and power.
Which tends to remove or restrict women quite literally from the social order right along with the blood, mortality, and sexual allure their bodies signal, as a kind of ambit claim to relieve male tension a little more thoroughly. And with that removal, women lose their subjecthood, are assigned a status approaching objecthood, become reduced to a body with powers that must be heavily circumscribed and put to very particular productive but limited use (or the social order crumbles).
The doctrinal perversions created to enforce this exclusion of women could hardly be more tortuous or perverse. A fundamental distortion of the dharma has oppressed and restricted the spiritual expression of countless women for centuries. And yet in some of the rare surviving accounts of talented women of the Way we can find an especially penetrating and playful wisdom, one that may be discoverable only when all doors are shut in your “gendered” face.
We could call it the structural outsider’s view: a particularly robust, resilient, sharp, and agile intelligence that is forged in social exclusion. The “outside” position paradoxically also affords an enticing whiff of freedom. The dominant group, race, class, or gender itself is riddled with unacknowledged anxiety about positioning within the privileged group, with an undertow of nagging fear and shame for the injustice dealt to those excluded. The structural outsider is by definition not only free from the anxieties of power and position but also placed in the ringside seat to observe it. Along with the penalties and vulnerabilities of exclusion comes a perspective not available to anyone tightly geared to the system of privilege and reward—offering a chance for thought beyond the frame, and a sense of exactly the spanners that need to be thrown into the works.
The shared pain of subordination and exclusion can grow solidarity and generate considerable creative energy: The many arts of living well with little are practiced out there, beyond the pale. The outsider also has an excruciatingly detailed view of the lack of clothes on the emperor. Stigma is designed to cause suffering, but frank laughter can swiftly render it undone. Finally, in every site of oppression on earth, who better to see through to the emptiness of any arbitrary discrimination than the class of human beings asked to pay its bills?
Such discrimination has rendered “Women in Buddhism” a kind of painfully elaborated non-story, though valuable scholarly efforts in recent years have begun to recognize, call out, and actively recover the “lost” or carefully erased actual story, such as Rita Gross’s Buddhism After Patriarchy, Sallie Tisdale’s Women of the Way, and Grace Schireson’s Zen Women. More recently, Florence Caplow and Susan Moon’s The Hidden Lamp retrieved one hundred koans from dharma exchanges centered on women and invited brief commentary from one hundred Zen female teachers and writers.
As a result we finally get to meet the mind of at least some of the exceptional women who have always been part of the course of Buddhism despite its deep antagonism toward them—people who had to be unusually motivated and gifted to surmount the many barriers denying them access to the teaching and the right to practice.
We must mourn the fact that we’ve lost all access to the minds of numerous other women ancestors who have been carefully wiped from the records. But we can be confident that those whose traces somehow survive the hostile indifference of traditional Buddhism toward women were people who had to be fearless in insisting on awakening, with great strength of will and qualities of endurance and forbearance.
And so a long-hidden treasury of exceptional female ancestors, both nuns and laywomen, begins to reappear, and long-silenced female voices start to carry forward the red thread of a refreshed, robust, and resilient dharma—one that sees not just past but all the way through “gender difference.”
What Kind of Place Is This?
Wuzhou (meaning “No Attachment”) was the dharma name Zen Master Dahui (1089–1163) gave to a rare female student—a married laywoman, Miaozong (1063–1135), who later went on to become a nun. Even more rare was the permission he granted her to reside on the grounds of the temple in one of his guest rooms. Perhaps less rare than is usually acknowledged, some key figures of the time such as Yuanwu, compiler of The Blue Cliff Record, were known openly to have lovers—a significant breach of monastic vows. Dahui’s “breach,” in the eyes of his head monk, Wanan, was a breach instead of monastic rules. Perhaps it was murmurings at the time about Yuanwu’s behavior that made Wanan so easily nettled by Dahui’s apparent regard for Wuzhou. Or perhaps he was quite simply jealous or sexually stirred.
He complained loudly, but all his disapproving noises failed to excite Dahui. “Even though she is a woman,” Dahui said, “she has strengths.” Meanwhile this woman with unwanted strengths was lodging in Dahui’s guest quarters! Wanan wanted Dahui’s scandalous permissiveness rooted out before everyone came to grief! So Dahui suggested mildly that he could always go and interview the scarlet woman for himself. Wanan reluctantly agreed.
He took his attendants with him, but when she saw him coming, Wuzhou’s first query was, “Is this a dharma interview or a worldly one?” When Wanan replied, “A dharma interview,” Wuzhou told him to send the attendants away, and went back into her chamber for a moment. Then she called out, “Please come in.”
What followed is one of the more unusual dharma interviews in the records of Zen. When Wanan stepped past the curtain he found Wuzhou lying naked on the bed with her legs apart, while looking straight at him unflinchingly. He pointed between her legs and said, “What kind of place is this?”
What kind of man is this? In another context, “What kind of place is this?” might be a neutral opening to a dharma encounter, in which one person tests or confirms the clarity of insight of the other. But in a context so heavily loaded with the presumed “wrongness” of a woman in the place of the dharma, and with her well-known devilish sexual nature completely exposed to view, Wanan’s words sound mangled by some fear. Sounding more like What the hell are you trying to do (to me)?
But Wuzhou calmly offered him a teaching right in the place of her scandalous display. “All the Buddhas of the three worlds and the six patriarchs and great monks everywhere—they all come out of this,” she said.
“Would you let me enter, or not?’ asked Wanan. Is he flirting with her, scorning her, pushing her, testing her response, uncertain where the dharma interview is going now, or how securely he stands in it? Probably all of the above; in any case he is certainly not on the front foot.
“It allows horses to cross; it does not allow donkeys to cross,” she informed him, and then turned her back to him. The interview is concluded, with Wanan left to wonder exactly who interviewed whom.
Wuzhou very deliberately echoes the words of Zhaozhou in Case 54 of The Blue Cliff Record. When an importunate fellow told Zhaozhou, “For a long time I’ve heard about the stone bridge of Zhaozhou. But I’ve come and found just a simple log bridge,” Zhaozhou replied, “You see only the simple log bridge, and you don’t see the stone bridge.” When the monk then asked him, “What is the stone bridge?” he was really asking “What is Zhaozhou?”—for Zhaozhou, the town of Zhaozhou where his temple stood, and the great stone bridge for which the town was famous, all bore one name.
“Donkeys cross, horses cross,” was Zhaozhou’s characteristically generous and yet piercing reply, that left that monk in a place where he was likely to examine himself far more carefully. All are waved over, all beings cross over in the sense of nature sharing one vast Buddha-nature. But if you are a bit of a donkey you might approach Zhaozhou with your self so loudly in the foreground that you are bound to fail to see, in the little old man and his happily shabby temple, a monumental opportunity to meet with clarity.
Wanan faltered, embarrassed, and left the room. Later Dahui heard what happened. “It is certainly not the case that the old beast does not have any insight,” he remarked about Wuzhou. It is good to find it mentioned that “Wanan was ashamed.” Perhaps not a complete donkey, then, after this finely judged encounter with exactly what kind of place this is, and how thoroughly the red thread leads straight to the heart of the matter.
Male bodies and female bodies abound, but still there is no place to put my complete body!
But of course Wuzhou is perfectly aware that in the social realm, the conformation of a baby’s genitals is the foremost distinction, determining status effectively from birth, the “little bit of difference” that in so many cultures assigns women a place far short of full humanity. The many millennia in which women have been classed as mere chattels for exchange between men has bruised and crushed thousands of generations of lives.
Buddhism occupies an interesting position as the last “great world religion” to collide with the West and its (relative) emancipation of women from legal and customary subordination. Only very recently in its long unfolding has traditional Buddhism been seriously challenged in its frequently astonishing teachings on women, and at the monastic level the old restrictions largely prevail, including staunch denial of the right of women to ordain as nuns.
The shabby pretext defending this has been that only women can ordain women, and the old female monastic orders died out centuries ago, burdened by the low status of women and starved of support. That this leaves women stranded indefinitely in what is literally no-man’s-land does not need its self-serving quality pointed out. Rebirth as a man is still seriously proffered as the avenue for a woman seeking to practice.
But as Buddhism comes west, the arbitrary nature of its shameful gender-based discrimination suddenly becomes too visible to deny. A moment of such disruption can create a rich surge of fresh energy, discovery, and charge for the dharma. The word compassion suffers overuse in Buddhist circles. But if we translate compassion into words like We’re fully discovered and revealed only in each other—surely that extends to the most basic “other” in the social arrangements of humankind: the other sex.
Shameless
You need to proceed against the grain of customary thought to see how a deeply valued tradition can function with such a dazzlingly conscious blind spot. And how easily we go quietly along with that, overlooking its failing. Yet at a very early point—in the Vimalakirti Sutra—its functional blindness was skillfully exposed and critiqued with the cleansing force of laughter, in a scene between Shariputra and an unnamed goddess. Nameless, yet again . . . Perhaps the only safe way a female can be present if she is to conduct such a forensic scrutiny of gendered power relations.
Shariputra sometimes seems the eternal straw man among the disciples of Shakyamuni—designated to ask the obvious question we need answered—as in the Heart Sutra, where he’s there to learn the wisdom of diamond-cutting clarity, known as Prajnaparamita. In that moment, the Buddha sits listening and looking on, while the embodiment of compassion—Avalokitesvara—sits deeply in the state of Prajnaparamita to deliver the famous healing words of emptiness: “[He] clearly saw that all skandhas are empty, transforming anguish and distress . . . Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form. Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form . . .”
It’s noteworthy that the ideal of compassion began as a male figure, Avalokitesvara, in India, but slowly gender-shifted as he/she moved east, growing suggestively feminine as the Chinese incarnation Guanyin. Whether lithe and graceful or stocky and matronly, Guanyin is not a lissome girl but always fully mature in feel. To actualize compassion is a fully adult matter. But whether male, female, or happily sitting somewhere in between, it is compassion that articulates the heart or core of wisdom, the Buddha respectfully listening. Meanwhile, Prajnaparamita, meaning the “perfection of wisdom” incarnate, is depicted as female in form. And finally, the root meaning of the Sanskrit word shunyata, emptiness itself, is “womb”—evoking the great fertile dark unknown from which we all come bodily forth, and to which we all fold back in.
The layman Vimalakirti dwells in a small and humble room with the remarkable capacity to house the many thousands of wise ones who come to be with him—each venerable seated on their own generously proportioned lion throne! It is here, before a cast of thousands, that Shariputra encounters the goddess charged with the task of freeing him from attachment to the perceived difference to which discrimination most unconsciously clings.
The goddess immediately challenges him. “You’re afraid. You are bound by all sorts of habitual thoughts and desires.” In response he offers an immediate counter-challenge that implicitly questions her right to challenge at all. “Well, why don’t you change your female form?”
Surely she knows her female form is the intractable impediment that binds her to habitual thoughts and unruly desires. Who, or more importantly, what does she think she is? Sallie Tisdale comments that right here is the very problem that Shariputra is structurally unable to see as a male: Gender for him is form, solidly so; the emptiness of such form whizzes straight past his privileged perspective.
The goddess answers calmly, “I have been here for twelve years and have looked for the innate characteristics of femaleness. I have not been able to find them. How can I change them?”
Just as a fixed self becomes harder to define, the more deeply you search for it, so, too, something called “gender” cannot be found—even though the entire social order has been set to rest on its supposed innate difference. To put it another way, gendered identity, too, is empty. Vimalakirti’s canny goddess offers a lovely upturning of the doctrine of innate maleness and femaleness, and with it the pendant doctrine of the innate inferiority of femaleness. Shariputra is suddenly free to see right through it—transparent at last. If he can.
However, when Shariputra makes it clear he staunchly believes gender is form—fixed and solid, far from empty—she is forced to take drastic measures. She turns the startled Shariputra into a woman, and herself into Shariputra. Canny move. Let him experience the free interchange of forms that is emptiness. Then she asks the now female Shariputra, “So, why don’t you change your female sex and turn yourself into a man?” After all, this is the way a woman is able to experience awakening, under the rules. And someone who a moment ago was a man should have no trouble being completely free of the limitations of being a woman!
“I can’t,” he says, suddenly deeply wishing he could see that gender was actually empty after all. “I don’t know how I got this form,” he confesses. There it is, I don’t know: the gate of freedom from such tyranny.
Well, who knows? Who knows even where this “I” who calls himself or herself Shariputra came from in the first place? Shariputra plaintively begins to experience the painfully arbitrary nature of carving up humanity by gender and the trap it sets for all of us.
To bring the point all the way home, the goddess proposes that if Shariputra could again change out of the female state, then all women are also unlimited by their female states. That all women appear in the form of women is just as categorically empty as the way Shariputra now 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,’” she reminds him.
Finally the goddess relents and ends the play, returning to her original form, which also returns Shariputra to his. She teases, “Reverend Shariputra, what have you done with your female form!” He confesses, “I neither made it nor did I change it.” Form is empty; self-nature is neither made nor changed. He now begins to see where it is that he really dwells.
And while Shariputra adjusts to his newly stretched mind, Vimalakirti quietly praises the unnamed goddess who so skillfully taught the categorical emptiness of gender discrimination through free exchange, back and forth, of so-called fixed sexual identity.
This classic Buddhist sutra steps us right through the way gender discrimination erects and enacts a staunchly dualistic mind with painstaking thoroughness; however, Buddhism itself remained unscathed and staunchly able to maintain its harshly dualistic mind, when it came to women.
Do You Still Have That in You?
A nun asked the old Master Zhaozhou—who’d have been somewhere between 80 and 120 years old at the time—“What is the deeply secret mind?” Zhaozhou just reached across and squeezed her hand.
How interesting. Lying between these two is a world of apparent religious and gender inequality—so what might reaching across and offering this squeeze signify? To read it as a sexual advance is a snare for the unwary and would be like responding to the red thread with a wry, somewhat sexist smirk. This old man is very old, and the teaching literally touching, very gentle. The deeply secret mind of Zhaozhou is right on show and hides no unspoken overture. But still it lets her check to discover if she is clear enough to know his mind at that moment or not.
Perhaps not. “Do you still have that in you?” she asks. This feels a little like Wanan’s cross-examination, from the other side of the divide this time, and with a more respectful tone, but the terms nudge the same matter. Is she stuck in “You’re a man, I’m a woman”? Or is there perhaps a more tender and genuine undertone of inquiry here—“You’re a very old man, and a deeply enlightened one. The unbreakable red thread, how does it sit with you now?”
In a very different encounter, a nun living in solitude in in a wild hermitage was rudely confronted by a monk who saw her and demanded, “Do you have any followers!” “Yes,” she said. When asked where they are, given that she seemed to be completely alone (and vulnerable), she replied, “The mountains, the rivers, the whole earth, the plants and trees, are all my followers.” He couldn’t believe his ears. “Aren’t you a nun?” he asked, adding rudely that he saw her as only a layperson. “You can’t be a monk!” she replied. Furious, he told her, “Stop mixing up Buddhism!” “I am not mixing up Buddhism,” she calmly replied, and when he insisted she must be, she sorted him out this way: “You’re a man. I’m a woman. Where has there ever been any mix-up?”
That wily nun left the man to explore his own small desert island of strictly gendered identity, round and round, until he could stumble upon the ocean of essential nature, in which not only are all forms empty, but emptiness is brilliantly, tenderly, poignantly, and minutely coming forth in endless varied form.
So how will Zhaozhou’s nun find herself in the place where everything is already swimming, free? Well, Zhaozhou points her in its direction. “It is you who have it,” he said.
Will she cling to a residue of having and not having, of “me in here, you out there,” of “you’re a man, I’m a woman”? Or see that she has possessed in completely equal measure all that she seeks with the words your deeply secret mind from the very beginning. It lies open and free in all directions and it is indeed you who have it.
Gestating the Spiritual Embryo
Let’s look in on another conversation about the deeply secret mind, how it is nourished and grows fruitful. Qiyuan (1597–1654) was a Chinese nun, student of seventeenth-century Zen Master Shiche Tongsheng (1593–1638), and their exchange is interesting for the beautifully equitable balance we see between master and student, as they reflect together upon her deep and fully confirmed realization.
Shiche walks Qiyuan back through every stage of the process, starting with “Buddha Nature is not illusory. What was it like when you were nourishing the spiritual embryo?”
Qiyuan replied, “It felt congealed, deep and solitary.”
He then asked her, “When you gave birth to the embryo, what was it like?”
Qiyuan said, “It was like being completely stripped bare.”
“When you met with the Buddha, what was it like?”
“I took advantage of the opportunity to meet him face-to-face.”
Shiche said, “Good, good. You will be a model for those in the future.”
If you’ve encountered Wumen’s commentary on Mu, the first case of The Gateless Gate, you will have heard about swallowing a red-hot iron ball of great doubt—you can’t digest it, can’t spit it out. All you can do is endure with it, until Mu radiantly breaks open.
Shiche offers a very different way of holding radical uncertainty—though a heavily pregnant woman may well feel she is carrying a very large, red-hot iron ball in her belly at certain moments! Completely at ease with each other and untroubled by “man” and “woman,” Shiche simply inquires, “What was it like when you were nourishing the spiritual embryo?”—an unapologetically female and embodied way of understanding the universal process of giving birth to the unborn dimension of mind.
While this unborn quality is inseparable from who we are, to have a serious practice is to nourish faith in that and bring it to conscious birth in direct experience. The pregnant body is a beautifully natural image for the non-dual mind that has no you opposed to me and is not one, is not two.
Qiyuan reports that the process “felt congealed, deep and solitary.” At this point, it’s not unlike what Wumen says, “You’re like a mute person who has had a great dream. You know it for yourself but you cannot say a word”; you are productively mute or tongue-tied at this stage. Pregnancy is itself a strangely deep and solitary dream state in its way—of having a living being moving within you yet whose face you cannot know. You can say nothing about them yet you know them so intimately they finger your own ribs.
“Congealed” is also interesting. In a chrysalis, the worm who spins the deep and solitary cocoon about itself becomes a formless soup that congeals in its own time, to emerge abruptly as a fully winged being with fantastical eyes, shimmering in texture and color. Unimaginable from the perspective of the long and deeply secret pupal dream.
In response to the next question, “When you gave birth to the embryo, what was it like?” Qiyuan says, “It was like being completely stripped bare.” It is pellucidly clear, very simple, unadorned, plain, and has always been in full sight, bright, in front of us all the time. Stripped as bare as that. Suddenly, it’s the judging mind with all its obfuscations, its onerous picking and choosing, its having versus not having, that appears unfathomable, the truly strange dream.
Finally Shiche asks, “When you met the Buddha, what was that like?” “I took advantage of the opportunity to meet him face-to-face,” she replies. To work with Mu is to take advantage of the opportunity to know the mind of Zhaozhou when he said “Mu.” Her forthrightness and simplicity is entirely to the point, and her teacher simply says, “Good, good, you will be a model for those in the future.” This is not vitiating admiration. He is saying this sets the course for your life, the riverbed for your life to flow in from now on. Take care with it.
Fearless
The power of a river can lie very quiet—just the coiled muscle of current, moving vast volumes of water with no great sign of “doing” anything at all. But the kind of women drawn to study with the vigorously reforming eighteenth-century Japanese Master Hakuin, who was known not to turn women students away, could easily be a sharp spring wind moving briskly through his space, rustling his calligraphy paper on the way.
Satsujo was a mere sixteen-year-old when her devout layman father began taking her with him whenever he went to visit Master Hakuin. Her parents urged her to pray to Kannon, bodhisattva of compassion, that she may one day find a husband. It’s not recorded whether this was because they doubted her beauty or worried her spiritedness might be a possible obstacle, but in any case she took the practice up day and night in all her activities and one day experienced an awakening. Her father looked in on her and found her sitting happily on a copy of the Lotus Sutra. “What are you doing, sitting on this precious sutra!” he demanded.
“How is this precious sutra different from my ass?” she asked.
Hakuin must have heard about her precocity and gave her a koan. “How do you understand this?” he asked her.
“Would you please go over it again?” she asked. But the moment he opened his mouth to speak, she put her hands to the floor and made formal obeisance, saying, “Thank you for your trouble.” She then walked out, leaving Hakuin with his mouth half open.
“Oh dear,” he said in delight, “I’ve been trounced by this terrible little woman!’
And when Asan of Shinano broke through Hakuin’s koan, the sound of the single hand, coming to him saying, “Even better than realizing Hakuin’s sound of one hand, clap both hands and do business!” Hakuin immediately took up his brush and swiftly drew a bamboo broom, handing it to her as a gift. Asan immediately snatched his brush from him and added, “Sweeping away all the bad Zen teachers in Japan—starting with Hakuin!” Hakuin smiled in approval.
How can you not love the fearlessness, joy, and freedom of the dharma that effortlessly comes forth, when the dead weight of gender constraints are lifted from women of the way! And there’s that saving laughter again.
Girls are clearly blameless in being born female, boys blameless in being born male. Men are as deeply bruised and limited as women are, though in different ways, by the relentless gender bias all humanity is asked to suffer; the privilege awarded to males is a loss of humanity in different form, one less easy to recognize—leaving it a deeply mixed blessing.
One final story of the way reality shatters this arbitrary social inequality comes in the backstory to the career of Master Zhuzhi—the practitioner of One-Finger Zen, in Case 3 of The Gateless Barrier.
The story erupts when a nun with the dharma name “True World” simply walks in unannounced through the door of the hermit hut where Zhuzhi is meditating. True World is wearing a sedge hat—one of those big woven hats that keep out sun and rain, while almost completely hiding the face. In she barges without even the courtesy of taking off her sedge hat—a further upturning of protocol—to where obviously highly important practice is underway.
Hat left on, and a woman—all that is worldly, uncouth, and out of place—storms right into the place of intended realization. But we know it is true world that’s walking in, wearing the hat.
What she does next is highly ritualized: She circumambulates Zhuzhi as if he were a stupa, circling him three times, which is a ceremony usually followed by three bows to the floor and a few other flourishes. But in this case, all that is dispensed with. At the end of her third circumambulation she simply stands before him and says, “If you can say an appropriate word, I will take off my hat.” To remove your hat, of course, signals recognition of being in a wholly shared social space. It may even mean a little more. That this nun will share his hut with him in other ways as well—an interesting challenge. So can Zhuzhi meet her there or not?
Zhuzhi can’t say even a single word. True World patiently and forthrightly does it all again: walks around him three more times, furnishes the same invitation, and once again finds him struck dumb. She does it all once more—after all, every folk story demands the offer of three chances, three wishes—but Zhuzhi remains dumbstruck, a boulder of indecision. So True World simply turns on her heel and walks out. How clean and direct. After all, True World has nothing to offer a monk who can only sit there.
The moment she leaves, Zhuzhi at last stirs, thinking, “Gee, maybe I missed something really important.” He goes to the door and calls after her, “Look it’s going to be dark soon, why don’t you stay the night?” A bedfellow might be comforting on a cold night—there’s that too. True World turns and faces him, saying, “If you can say an appropriate word, I will stay the night.” (In fact, one true word and true world would be with him forever, and never come or go away.) She’s asking him for what is genuine, without a single self-saving thought coating it. He has no such a word, and so she leaves.
In his commentary on the case, Robert Aitken (1917–2010) says, “[Zhuzhi] was downcast. He felt he had been defeated by True World and thought, ‘I am going around this matter of realization the wrong way. I need a good teacher.’” Zhuzhi packed up his gear to leave but then, because it really had grown dark, sat nodding over his pack waiting for the dawn. Suddenly the deity of the mountain came to him—no doubt in a dream—saying, “Don’t leave. A great Zen Master will be coming here soon and you can consult with him.” So he unpacked his gear and stayed on, and within a couple of days a really interesting teacher who became his master, Tianlong (748–807), did in fact turn up.
But hadn’t a great Zen teacher already turned up? I’m interested that Robert Aitken makes no comment about that. And as we see, “true world” stands on no ceremony, and its offers and challenges are always worth accepting, because even in this generous life of ours, they are not issued indefinitely.
Great women Zen teachers appeared all over the map of the way. Some left indelible traces that could not be expunged from the records; some appear with teaching brilliant and sudden as lightning but their names were either not sought or left unrecorded; some arrived in great teaching dream stories, like the one just visited; some names are well-known but recorded only in the context and under the patrimony of a male (such as Lingzhao, the crystal clear and luminous daughter of the somewhat more laboring Layman Pang). Unknown, untold others can reach us now only in dream, but that is the vivid vermilion-tinged dream of a dharma as profoundly feminine as it is masculine, and as profoundly clear of all such little bits of difference.
Instead of confirming ancient prejudice, the red thread has the welcome audacity to insist that the entire generative and imaginative power and mystery of desire, sex, fertility, and birth cannot possibly be held separate from realized mind. These are gates to awaken even important monks and sages from a defiling dream of purity and separateness—and as they constitute the last bastion of unearned privilege and secret fear of life, they are especially potent gates. There are endless latent discoveries lying waiting in this deeply tender and often painful fact. We can only welcome the fact that it is no longer quite so possible to pretend otherwise.
That saving redness of the thread—its plainly carnal, passionate, female, bodily, and all-too-human connotations—can be embraced and seen all the way through to where it empties into plain, all-embracing equality. Its offer is a profound depth of seeing that many until now have never felt the need to reach for, secure in their societal male bias, nor glimpsed the possibility of doing so, locked in their deeply unequal circumstances.
But the dharma, red right through from the start, has no color to be claimed or wielded discriminatively anywhere at all. Leaving no one missing from the record at all.