The Vimalakirti Sutra: Seeing into Identity and Connection
By Dr. Annabella Pitkin
Dr Annabella Pitkin is teaching a 12-week online course on the Vimalakirti Sutra beginning Wednesday, January 27th, 2021 through April 21st, 2021. Click here for more info and registration.
It can be startling when an ancient text speaks to us in direct, personal terms. But when I read the Vimalakirti Sutra, an Indian Mahayana Buddhist work that is some two thousand years old, it opens up themes that feel urgent and relevant today.
In one of my favorite chapters, a goddess (apparently a female Buddha in disguise) teaches the liberating Mahayana concept of emptiness to a male monk. She uses humor, and a kind of magical performance art.
The sutra presents the monk as a person trapped by rigid misunderstandings of himself and the world around him, uncomfortable in his own skin. He struggles with distorted views of others. He looks down on the goddess because she’s in a female body, assuming she can’t be a serious Buddhist (much less the enlightened being that she turns out to be!)
Yet the goddess finds a way to reach him. The breakthrough happens when the monk asks the goddess why she hasn’t gotten rid of her female body, if she is so enlightened? She responds with a body-swap, changing each of them into the other: he becomes her, she becomes him. With this, she calls into question everything the monk thinks he knows. What are you attached to, she seems to ask? Who are you looking down on? Who do you think you are? We might all be challenged by these questions.
When I read this chapter, I always notice something else too: Even though the sutra tells us she’s transcended all conventional categories of gender, the goddess returns to her female form at the story’s end.
I read this as a further teaching, one about her loving and compassionate embrace of her own identity. She doesn’t erase the uniqueness, or the pain, of her particular body, with all its specifics, which might include gender and sex, race and culture, age, language, experience. Rather, she joyfully insists on inhabiting her particular body as a vehicle for enlightenment, the same enlightenment that, according to her teaching here, also transcends all categories of bodies, genders, identities. As Zenju Earthlyn Manuel says, “[W]e need this particular body, with its unique color, shape and sex, for liberation to unfold. There is no experience of emptiness without interrelationship.”[1]
[1] –Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality and Gender. 2015: 26.
Join Dr Annabella Pitkin for an upcoming 12-week online course on the Vimalakirti Sutra beginning Wednesday, January 27th, 2021 through April 21st, 2021. Click here for more info and registration.
Dr. Annabella Pitkin is Assistant Professor of Buddhism and East Asian Religions at Lehigh University. She researches and writes about Tibetan, East Asian, and transnational Buddhism, exploring themes of modernity, community, power, renunciation, and yogic display. Her teaching includes courses on Buddhism and Asian religions; environmental ethics; race, sexuality and gender; life-story writing; and new technologies.
