If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don't hate anything. Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession.

Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with , which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad; what is bad is that most people misuse this learning and squander it and apply it as a stimulant on the tired places of their lives and as a distraction rather than as a way of gathering themselves for their highest moments. People have even made eating into something else: necessity on the one hand, excess on the other; have muddied the clarity of this need, and all the deep, simple needs in which life renews itself have become just as muddy. But the individual can make them clear for himself and live them clearly (not the individual who is dependent, but the solitary man). He can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery which the world is filled with, even in its smallest Things, could bear it, endure it, more solemnly, feel how terribly heavy it is, instead of taking it lightly. If only they could be more reverent to ward their own fruitfulness, which is essentially one, whether it is manifested as mental or physical; for mental creation too arises from the physical, is of one nature with it and only like a softer, more enraptured and more eternal repetition of bodily delight. "The thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping" is nothing without its continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world, nothing without the thousand-fold assent from Things and animals - and our enjoyment of it is so indescribably beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions. In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exaltation. And those who come together in the nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet, who will appear in order to say ecstasies that are unsayable. And they call forth the future; and even if they have made a mistake and embrace blindly, the future comes anyway, a new human being arises, and on the foundation of the accident that seems to be accomplished here, there awakens the law by which a strong, determined seed forces its way through to the egg cell that openly advances to meet it. Don't be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. And those who live the mystery falsely and badly (and they are very many) lose it only for themselves and nevertheless pass it on like a sealed letter, without knowing it. And don't be puzzled by how many names there are and how complex each life seems. Perhaps above them all there is a great motherhood, in the form of a communal yearning. The beauty of the girl, a being who (as you so beautifully say) "has not yet achieved anything," is motherhood that has a presentiment of itself and begins to prepare, becomes anxious, yearns. And the mother's beauty is motherhood that serves, and in the old woman there is a great remembering. And in the man too there is motherhood, it seems to me, physical and mental; his engendering is also a kind of birthing, and it is birthing when he creates out of his innermost fullness. And perhaps the sexes are more akin than people think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in one phenomenon: that man and woman, freed from all mistaken feelings and aversions, will seek each other not a opposites but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to bear in common, simply, earnestly, and patiently, the heavy sex that has been laid upon them. But everything that may someday be possible for many people, the solitary man can now, already, prepare and build with his own hands, which make fewer mistakes. Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust. Avoid providing material for the drama, that is always stretched tight between parent and children; it uses up much of the children's strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn't comprehend Don't ask for any advice from them and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

The Vimalakirtinirdesha Sutra tells the tale of the great layman Vimalakirti who lives in a home that offers shelter to a seemingly endless parade of beings. One of the beings who has taken up residence in his home is a goddess. One day, the Buddha’s great disciple, Shariputra, comes to call on Vimalakirti and encounters the goddess. Not one to mince words, or perhaps shocked to see a female in the great Vimalakirti’s home, Shariputra asks the goddess, “Why don’t you change your female sex?”

The goddess answers, “I have been living here twelve years looking for the innate characteristics of  the female sex and haven’t been able to find any, so how can I change what I can’t find? If someone asks, ‘Why don’t you change your female sex?’ what is he really asking?”

The goddess then uses her supernatural power to change Shariputra into a likeness of herself and change herself into a likeness of Shariputra, saying, “All things are without any determinate, innate characteristics, so how can you ask, ‘Why don’t you change your female sex?’ Why don’t YOU now change your female sex?”

Shariputra, in the form of a goddess, answers, “I do not know how I changed into a female form so how can I change back to a male form?”

The goddess responds, “Shariputra, just as you are not really a woman but appear to be female in form, all women also only appear to be female in form but are not really women. That is why the Buddha said that we are not really men or women.”

Then the goddess, using her supernatural power, changed Shariputra back into his own form.

In contrast to this teaching on non-duality given by Vimalakirti’s goddess, the home I grew up in harbored a clear distinction between feminine and masculine. I stayed in the kitchen and washed the dishes with my mom while my brothers went up on the roof to make repairs with my dad. I took ballet lessons but my brother was forbidden to dance; he took piano lessons and I, being female, learned violin. My brother was expected to do something great in the world, I was expected to marry someone who did something great in the world. When my father died the family inheritance went to the favored son. This sort of traditional perspective on male and female roles permeates cultures throughout the world. It is the insistence that women wear burkas in the Middle East, it is the baby daughters left to die in China, it is the young girls married off in India, it is the single mothers who can’t make enough money to feed their hungry children in America.

Like many other westerners I came to Buddhism out of some mysterious calling and to ease deep psychic pain. Buddhism was foreign and exotic. The faces of the Buddha statues looked so calm, in contrast to the faces I saw all around me, and there were beautiful words like jasmine and divine abode and kusala. So I projected onto Buddhism everything I wanted to see in a religion. On retreat, and in the midst of daily practice, this vision sprung to life. A nameless world between thoughts where no duality existed appeared. Off the cushion, since a good portion of my psychic pain seemed to stem from being born a woman, I explored the female aspect of being a Buddhist. Much to my chagrin I discovered that in Buddhism being born a woman carried the same onus I was trying to escape.

At first I was shocked and outraged. I fought with my pen, demanding equality for female practitioners. After awhile, growing weary of the fight, I sank into what felt like a bottomless sorrow. Was Buddhism to become yet another home where the fullness of who I am was not welcome? Still, I continued to meditate and began koan inquiry. The closer I came to the vastness during meditation and inquiry the less important the distinction between “feminine” and “masculine” became. There, in the silence, was my true original nature, an unbounded nature that was neither feminine nor masculine. I was beginning to experience what I now believe the Buddha was really pointing to.

Still, there is something about feminine and masculine that needs to be observed, honored and worked with in this human realm. Ultimately there is no masculine and feminine, only the undivided, luminescent, unconditional love that is the texture of the vastness. But to get to the place of awakening to this reality we travel through a world filled with apparent dualities. Finding balance between perceived opposites seems to be one of the essential aspects of the path.

There is no duality in the ultimate vastness, in what Bankei called the “Unborn Buddha Mind.” Yet, to authentically inhabit our original non-dual nature we walk the road of kindness by respecting all apparent dualities as different but equal. Then, while on our travels if we stumble upon the home where Vimalakirti, the goddess and Shariputra reside, we can move into our true home with one foot on the Earth.

This article originally appeared on Buddhist Door International on March 15, 2013.

 

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IZ

as the first clouds of the coming storm

ride up and over the mountains, catching

 

and casting the gold of the late day sun,

while in the valleys arrayed to the east

 

deep cloud-shadows slide up and over

and around, caressing the long curves

 

of her hills, then fall away, smoothly

like the silk of her dress might slide

 

from the skin of a lover’s shoulder.

how can we not love her?

 

this earth. how can we not want

to lay ourselves across the soft rise

 

of her hills, want to lose ourselves

in the gathering shadows of her valleys,

 

imbed ourselves in the moist warmth

of her hollows? how can we not surrender

 

to the cries of her thunder, to the white

heat of her lightning, how

 

can we not abandon ourselves completely

to the dark and passionate embrace

 

of her terrible gathering storms?

 

© Old Bones, New Snow/  J.A. Fink   2013