The Bodhisattvas of In-Between

My mother wanted me to be a girl.  I’m told by those who were around at the time that my birth as a boy was a disappointment to her, even though in those days no one ever knew a baby’s gender until it was born. But Mom didn’t miss a beat, and she set out to make up for her loss by discouraging me from boyish activities, encouraging me in perceived feminine behaviors, and teaching me stuff about cooking, sewing, and other womanly arts. Such instruction was always done a bit secretly, as though she knew on some level she shouldn’t be doing it—and, indeed, she shouldn’t have in that culture of the 1950s, especially in working-class Central Valley California.  She would always preface her instructions with something like,  “well, boys should know how to do these things too,”  though that statement implied I was also doing the boy stuff that she kept me from as well as she could.  Even now, at the age of sixty-three, every time I go to press a shirt I flash back to her careful lesson on how to do it the right way (yoke first, then collar…), and it’s like I’m right back there at the ironing board, her hands guiding mine, some game show blaring from the black-and-white TV.

            I ultimately resisted this early conditioning in response to the ridicule I got for my behavior from just about everyone but her, but it took some serious effort on my part.  And today, though I’m anything but macho in my behavior, I doubt anyone would guess me to have been such a sissy (as it was called) when I was a child. This was likely helped by the fact that I took after the men of my mother’s family in body type—we tend to be big guys. But from my teens on, I’ve pretty much liked being male. A lot. Maybe it’s because there's some satisfaction in taking refuge in that gender after the attempt at hijacking, but I have to think that at least part of the reason is that I am as intrinsically as male as my genitalia indicates.  It feels right. And though it would be a lie to say I don’t maintain some resentment for my strange upbringing, I also find there to be some gratitude for the perspective I was granted: I was able to get  a feel for the advantages of the other sex in terms of things they got to do and ways they got to behave that weren’t available to boys  back then in  a world where gender roles and behaviors were even more strictly defined than they are now, and in which violation of them resulted in ridicule at best, and at worst, well, something much worse.

            My aim in bringing this up isn’t to over-share, but to reflect on gender, its essential emptiness, and the implications of that.  It’s a notion that’s come up for me lately when I think of my early feminized years and of how my own maleness arose as an inescapable reality in the context of that. It also arises in reaction to confrontation with the folks who these days identify as transgendered and who are as certain of that reality about themselves as I was about mine.  And this in turn inclines me, as I’ll explain, to reflect on the Buddhist figures known as bodhisattvas--one of them in particular.

            A bodhisattva, for those unfamiliar, is an enlightenment being, a figure who embodies  compassion in its extremest form.  The concept comes from the Buddhist movement called Mahayana that arose in the early years of the Common Era, and it refers to someone who makes a vow to postpone his or her own awakening until he or she has brought all other beings along to awakening too; who thus puts others’ welfare ahead of his or her own in a radical way. It’s an impossible vow, of course, which is why it’s radical, but when you get a glimpse of the nature of reality, such a vow turns out to be the only logical response. Anyone who practices Zen ends up reciting the bodhisattva’s vow frequently, as do practitioners in a lot of the other Buddhist schools:

Sentient beings are numberless. We vow to save them all.

Delusions are endless. We vow to cut through them all.

The teachings are infinite.  We vow to learn them all.

The Buddha way is inconceivable. We vow to attain it.*

            Though this is a vow that real, imperfect people like me have taken for a couple millennia in order set their direction, certain bodhisattvas also emerged as symbolic figures in Buddhism as objects of emulation or devotion. These then sometimes morphed in folk religion into something like deities who, in addition to serving as role models, might also be entreated for favors.  They have names, attributes, and iconography, these enlightenment beings, like Samantabahdra, who personifies wise action, or Manjushri, the bodhisattva of great wisdom who uses his sword to cut through the veils of illusion and reveal the essential oneness of all.

            The bodhisattva with the largest fan base might be Avalokitesvara, who personifies compassion.  Devotion to Avalokitesvara is found throughout Asia, with this figure's name and appearance changing a lot from region to region: Chenrezig in Tibet, Guanyin in China, Kwanseum Bosal in Korea, Kannon in Japan. But what’s most intriguing to me is that, unlike the other bodhisattvas who are generally male, this one has a  gender that is  somewhat ambiguous.  The Indo-Tibetan figure Avalokitesvara is pretty clearly male. In China, Guanyin is often taken to be female but not always. In Japan and Korea, she’s generally female.

            I’ve encountered folks who insist that the bodhisattva of compassion is a woman, but that belief doesn’t match the historical facts.  I suspect this insistence is way of  trying hard to find positive female images in Buddhism. It’s a nice try, but even if you can figure out a way to ignore the male versions of Avalokitesvara, the female bodhisattvas are still outnumbered by the male ones, in the same way male figures dominated every religion since the Iron Age.  There’s no easy equity available, at least in terms of deities. What I’m struck by lately with Avalokitesvara/Chenrezig/Guanyin/Kwanseum/Kannon is not so much that feminine images of her sometimes occur but that his/her gender has some fluidity like that.  You don’t see that too much in religious iconography. Why did the fluidity happen with this bodhisattva rather the others?

             The Chinese Guanyins are especially ambiguous. There’s a particularly beautiful statue of him/her from the twelfth century in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where I live that I like to sit with for a while whenever I go there.  It was out for restoration for a couple years, so I was happy when it came back, and I went for a visit. It was like seeing an old friend. 
             But this old friend seemed to have returned from vacation with a message for me: This time, as I regarded the newly refurbished enlightenment being, it somehow nudged me back to the memory of my own small experience of gender fluidity from so long ago.  And it suddenly became apparent  to me  that my experience of being a kind of gender in-between, even though it was in my case fairly artificial,  had formed who I am in a way for which I can’t be anything other than grateful.  It's not just that the experience made me more sensitive for being ridiculed a lot, but that the adventure of being in between the sexes had inadvertently taught me in a powerful way about the fuzzy borders between gender identities. And from that, it was only a small step to understanding the lack of boundaries between any other identities.  The world looks different after you understand this, and I’m pretty confident this way of seeing things is at least one of the factors that led to my early and abiding interest in what might be called “ultimate things.”  And though I can’t call myself a terribly compassionate person, I also saw that whenever I’m inclined in a compassionate direction even slightly, it’s also related to that early seeing-through.

            It began to make perfect sense to me that me that the bodhisattva who personifies compassion would be the one whose gender is hard to pin down.  Compassion arises naturally, without even trying, as soon as you recognize that you and the other are essentially one (even even as you’re also two)—whether the identities are male and female or any of the other countless ones. Whether you imagine the bodhisattva of compassion to be a “real” entity or not, it’s easy to think of him/her winking and smiling as she/he plays this little teaching trick on us.

            These days a small number of people are beginning to publicly register a conviction that they don’t fit the standard models of gender that work for the majority. Their number includes those who’ve come up against the fact that they can’t identify with the gender they seemed to be born with (whether there’s physical ambiguity or not) as well as those who recognize they can’t be accurately described as either male or female. It would be far-fetched to imagine that such folks haven’t been around throughout the history of the human race (and there are examples of cultures here and there that have recognized and honored them), but in our own time, in response to various conditions that have arisen, such folks are beginning to be able to look at their situation honestly and, in some places, to bear witness to it openly.  These people, are like all of us, imperfect human beings, still in the process of working things out. They’re mixed bags of good intention, selfishness, kindness, intelligence and stupidity, like me. In some cases their kindness and intelligence makes them attractive, in other cases not.  The cultural opening that allows for their truth-telling is something still new and fragile, and the honesty that compels them to bear witness doesn’t make it easy.

            I began to see these modern transgender pioneers in the model of Avalokitesvara:  by gender fluidity teaching all of us that identities, true as they are, have inherently indistinct boundaries as soon as you look closely.   Not that male and female don’t exist, or aren’t important, or aren’t beautiful, or don’t in themselves express something important about humanity, but that male and female become false when clung to too hard like any identity does, and once you understand that truth, applying it to every other identity becomes as natural a thing as the impulse to compassion that arises from it

            It’s not like they’re necessarily great saints, or fully realized bodhisattvas—but then, none of us real human beings who recite the bodhisattva’s vow are either. Like the rest of us, our transgendered siblings are mixed bags of intentions and qualities.  But in making themselves known to us they exhibit another quality I’d attribute to bodhisattvas: radical honesty.  Such an honesty that disturbs the status quo can be difficult to express and to stay true to, but the thing about bodhisattvas is that when they clearly perceive the way things are they don’t really have another choice.  So they dive in, teaching honesty to the rest of us and bringing us along with them in the process.

            As I stood before the MFA Guanyin, I found great gratitude arising in me for my transgender siblings. And with that gratitude came a personal vow to support and protect them as needed, to listen to what they have to say, and to do what I can to promote a culture where they slip ordinarily into life and become a regular feature of it, no more noticeable among humankind than any of the rest of us.  But before, during, and after their disappearance into ordinariness, may they teach us about the elusive nature of boundaries and of the kindness and honesty that can come from that understanding.



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*There are a range of English translations of the Bodhisattva vow, some of which emphasize different aspects of it. This is the one used by the Kwan Um school of Zen in which I practiced for some years. I’m also fond of the version used in the Boundless Way school: Beings are numberless; I vow to free them.  /  Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them.  /  Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them.  /  The Buddha Way is unsurpassable; I vow to embody it.