Everyone I know enjoys the story from the Dona Sutta where the expression on the Buddha’s face makes a passing Brahmin stop to look. The Buddha simply radiates energy: “confident,” in the sutta’s words, and “inspiring confidence, his senses calmed, his mind at rest.”
“Are you a god?” the Brahmin Dona asks, amazed.
“No, I’m not,” the Buddha answers him.
“Then are you a human being?”
“No,” the Buddha says, unassuming as before.
Finally, Dona throws up his hands. “If you’re neither human nor a god, then what can you possibly be?”
“Remember me,” the Buddha tells him, “as awakened.”
This brief story is so well-loved that we might never stop to take a second look to reflect on the point it’s making. The last line packs an unexpected punch because the dialogue up to then hasn’t been about awakening at all. When Dona asks the Buddha, “Are you a god?” the Brahmin doesn’t care what enlightenment involves. Instead, he wants to know what identifying term best describes the person facing him: a god, a human, or something else. The Brahmin asks about his identity, but the Buddha refuses to play the game. Although he often referred to himself using terms like “the Buddha” and “Tathagata,” here he does something unexpected. “Awake” is not an identity, and that’s precisely the point. The Buddha reveals to the Brahmin—and to us—a condition beyond all identities, even the identity of “Buddha.”
Many of us would wholeheartedly agree that our culture’s off-the-shelf identities shouldn’t predetermine who we are, but Buddhist tradition has often pushed in the very opposite direction. Since the self is empty, the reasoning goes, we should accept any role we’re asked to play as our route to buddhahood. This is the advice I once received from a senior monk at Eiheiji, Japan’s leading Soto Zen monastery, and since then, I’ve heard it said many times.
But after our exchange, when I thought more carefully about caste in India, enslavement and forced assimilation in the US, and the oppression of women everywhere, I simply couldn’t get on board. For many years, though, I wasn’t sure how I should have answered him. My practice on the cushion took me to a place where the “I” often disappeared, and when I left the zendo and went about my day, I tried to be helpful to everyone I met by behaving in conventional ways—with my students at the college where I taught, with the postal clerk who handed me a fresh sheet of stamps, and with the woman at the register in the local grocery store. When I simply brought to each of them a spirit of loving-kindness, I felt certain that both of us brightened for a moment. And so, I supposed, the old monk must have been right. Awakening doesn’t free us from our identities but it frees us in them.
But a dozen years later my thinking changed again when I wandered unexpectedly into an enormous New York City march protesting the invasion of Iraq. As the growing crowd filed past, I couldn’t turn my eyes away from a Japanese monk and nun, each with a little daiko drum in hand and chanting Namu myoho renge kyo. Remembering the master at Eiheiji, I wondered what he would say about this. He might have criticized the monk and nun for not staying in their lane, letting worldly affairs interfere with their proper duties and concerns as renunciants. But I also remembered that more than once, the Buddha himself had tried to stop war from breaking out in northeastern India. Maybe identities, it occurred to me, aren’t as solid and well-defined as the Eiheiji monk assumed. There’s always a kind of fluidity to things, including our identities, despite our best efforts to keep change in check, and perhaps that’s what Buddha meant when he responded to the Brahmin.
There’s always a kind of fluidity to things, including our identities, despite our best efforts to keep change in check.
Of course, the Buddha many times identified as a member of the Shakya tribe or clan. And he continued to recognize other forms of identity as well, segregating his monastics along gender lines and using terms like “Brahmin,” as we’ve seen, to specify the castes of the people he met. The Buddha appears to have accepted as a fact the normative distinctions of the day, yet there’s an important exception: He deconstructed caste inside his community—all “home-leavers” becoming, he declared, like streams that flowed into the same great sea (Udana 5-5). Most of us probably approve of this, but why he stripped caste of its salience is worth further reflection.
The forms of equality we regard as fair and just might not have been a part of the Buddha’s mental world in the 6th century BCE, but if he’d thought like the priest at Eiheiji, he might very well have sanctioned caste in the ranks of monks and nuns. That he didn’t might offer us some clue as to the way he viewed all our arrangements in the mundane world, the sahāloka. If the self is only conventional and fundamentally empty at the core, then the same goes for our social roles. The streams of identity change over time; they deepen, dry up, or carve out a different path, but in the ocean of emptiness, none of those distinctions exist. That might be why home-leavers should not defer to caste, and it also goes some way toward explaining how the dharma flourished beyond the temple walls.
It can scarcely be an accident that Buddhism’s emergence coincides with the moment in Indian history when the old rural culture was giving way to a more complex and mobile milieu strikingly like our own. In their Sociology of Early Buddhism, Greg Bailey and Ian Mabbett describe new cities that differed in almost every way from the simple villages of Vedic times. Quoting from the early jataka tales, they marvel at the vibrancy:
Here, [is]… “a city furnished with solid foundations and with many gateways and walls… behold the drinking shops and taverns, the slaughterhouses and cooks’ shops, and the harlots and wantons… the garland-weavers, the washermen, the astrologers, the cloth merchants, the gold workers, the jewelers…” Other evidence suggests the likelihood that every city had its quarters for the carrying on of specific crafts, such as the street of ivory carvers in Kasi; beyond the walls were dedicated craft villages serving the city’s needs, such as communities of carpenters, potters, and smiths making axes, hatchets, ploughshares, spikes and so forth.
Bailey and Mabbett reaffirm what others have also discovered: The dharma’s strongest supporters were on the move—merchants, craftspersons, and people in the trades. For them, the story of the Buddha’s leaving home, rejecting the identity imposed on him at birth, and finally achieving enlightenment had a special resonance even if they weren’t inclined to pursue the rigorous monastic path. The Buddha’s teaching of “no self” gave them permission to let go of their former identities, and his attention to impermanence helped them see that no past or future role could completely define them.
As for the monastic renunciants, we might suppose that they retreated from the commerce and commotion, quietly ensconced in their private huts or in dark meditation halls. But monasteries weren’t always tucked away in remote forest venues. Instead, like temple complexes today throughout Buddhist Asia, they were often sited at the beating heart of the social activity. And their very visible location sent a powerful message to the householders who supported them: “The empty self isn’t far away.” None of us can do without identities, not even renunciants, but we always have the ability to inhabit them in a more liberating way. And the best word for how we should is “fluidly.”
Once you notice this fluidity, you begin to see it everywhere, including in the serial rebirths filling the pages of the jataka tales, the Divyavadana, and, of course, the sutras. Commentaries on the Dhammapada even include the “Story of Soreyya,” which recounts a married man’s magical transitioning into a woman and then back into man. Whether or not readers centuries ago accepted these narratives as gospel truth, the stories help us now to understand that our identities can lock us into social scripts written long before we arrived on the scene. Remember how hard you found it as a kid to master the roles your parents wanted you to play; remember how eager you were to please because you aspired to your hour on the stage. And remember when some role became completely “you”—athlete, brainiac, comedian, mama’s little helper, or daddy’s girl—until, years later, you realized that you’d become a stranger to yourself. Entranced by the performance, warmed by the applause, and stung and undone by the bad reviews, all of us lose track of the empty space underneath the costumes and face paint.
But something else adds to the confusion. The more accomplished an actor you become, the harder it is to tell the truth about how problematic your roles might be, not only the “bad guy” and “mean girl” parts, but also the ones we all feel good about. Roles like “parent” or “partner” are so hard to perform because they bring along with them conflicting stage directions on every page. These parts are so cherished and respected that the actors often blame themselves when they freeze up or fluff a line, but maybe they should ask instead how the script ever came to look this way. Not only “mom” and “dad” but “President,” “New Jersey Top Doctor,” and “CEO”—all roles have a mixed karmic legacy shaped by the best and the worst in ourselves, by our wisdom and our compassion as well as by our greed, anger, and delusion. And once we recognize, as the Buddha did, that our saha “reality” is like a play that we ourselves have conjured up, we shouldn’t get attached to any role. But there’s another rule of thumb we can’t set aside. Precisely because the dark is mixed up with the light, we need to keep revising everything: the scripts, the cast of characters, and the performers that we are.
Undoubtedly, the most famous Buddhist of all time involved in this revolutionary enterprise was Vimalakirti of Vaishali, the probably fictitious merchant and leading man in the sutra that bears his name. While manifestly not a renunciant, neither does he fit the part of the typical “householder.” “Though he dresses in the white robes of a layman,” we learn, “he observes the rules of pure conduct” for monks and nuns, and while he has a family, owns a home, and presides over a business concern, he “feels no attachment to the threefold world” (trans. Burton Watson). And so, even now, nineteen centuries later, the Vimalakirti Sutra might still overturn the way that you’ve understood identity.
The sutra could strike you on your first read as a two-fisted polemic aimed at monasticism of every kind, but an even bigger target appears to be the mainstream Buddhists who were opposed to the nonconformist movement that came to be known as the “Mahayana.” Rudely disparaged as shravakas—mere “hearers” of the dharma—the mainstream Buddhists get pilloried as quite unacquainted with true awakening. The attacks on them are right there in the text—shrill, uninformed, and gratuitous. I reject them, and I hope that you will too. But toward monastic life the stance is more complex. It might surprise you, as it surprised me, that the sutra became one of the most revered by Chinese Zen monks and nuns, who didn’t leave the temple and race back into lay life. Instead, the sutra helped them to see their path in a different light. If all of us are monks and nuns beneath our clothes—and that’s one message of the sutra—then taking formal vows is just the way monastics come out of the closet.
Since monks and nuns are called “home-leavers,” we might mistakenly assume that they’ve left the world as well. Not only that, but we might think they’ve left because this world is fundamentally inhospitable to awakening. In the sutra, this view gets expressed by no less an authority than the monk Shariputra, whom mainstream tradition holds to be the most advanced of all the Buddha’s followers. But the sutra wants us to question everything, including Buddhist conventionality, and one way it does so is by setting up Shariputra as the fall guy or foil who gets everything completely wrong and has to be corrected again and again. For example, when he asks why the Buddha has appeared in a world so filled with “impurities,” this is the exchange that follows:
The Buddha, knowing his thoughts, said to him, “What do you think? Are the sun and moon impure? Is that why [a] blind man fails to see them?”
Shariputra replied, “No, World Honored One. That is the fault of the blind man. The sun and moon are not to blame.”
“Shariputra, it is [similarly] the failing of living beings that prevents them from seeing the marvelous purity of the land of the Buddha, the Thus Come One. The Thus Come One is not to blame. This land of mine is pure, but you fail to see it.”
“Impurity,” the Buddha patiently explains, isn’t a quality of phenomenal things like the sun and moon. If the word “impure” describes anything, it simply gives a name to the way you feel when you misperceive reality. But when you pay attention to what you see, hear, touch, smell, or taste, your awareness will take you to the same emptiness you’ll encounter when you look into your own mind. Not only our minds, then, but everything turns out to be empty, and once you understand that this is so, the world you might have rejected as “inhospitable”—and that includes the deepest hell—will offer everything you need to wake up.
The Buddha’s declaration seems to contradict many of our solidest certainties. Surely there’s a qualitative difference between the serenity of a weeklong retreat and the hectic pace of a morning commute into Midtown Manhattan. Surely a monk who has spent fifty years seated on his meditation mat must be more accomplished than an English teacher in Paramus Public Schools or the plumber who unclogs your kitchen sink. But thinking this way shows only that we haven’t yet awakened to fluidity.
True, there’s always a script of some kind, whether we’re talking about how to do our jobs, engage in safe sex, or run a government. But even a script ten thousand pages long won’t prevent unforeseeable events from intruding into the performance. You can’t do Hamlet without studying your lines, practicing for hours, and sweating through the cycle of rehearsals. But even at those moments when you enter on your mark and deliver your aside without mumbling a single word, you still have to improvise constantly. This is why John Gielgud’s Hamlet looks nothing like the Hamlet of Mark Rylance—each actor inhabiting the role’s emptiness as no one has ever done before. Because Shariputra still imagines emptiness as a space behind his eyes rather than a quality of everything, he continues to mouth his lines without daring to improvise, but Vimalakirti moves fluidly, becoming anyone and anything he needs to be in order to help others wake up.
The Vimalakirti Sutra wants us to embrace our fluidity as a real-life superpower, not an existential danger we should dread.
Of course, in the 1st or 2nd century CE, some readers of the sutra might have been unnerved by Vimalakirti’s willingness to ad lib whenever he likes and step out of character unpredictably, not least of all by preaching the dharma in Vaishali’s bordellos. And that’s not the only thing that might have worried them. It doesn’t seem to me he’s preaching there because he considers prostitution in itself to be an immoral act but because the “prostitute” identity can become an obstacle for women and men who mistakenly believe that it defines what they really are. What they are, the sutra eventually reveals, is the “solitary light” that will present itself to each of us if we simply remain long enough with the intrinsic emptiness of everything. And once the prostitutes have understood this, they can help others realize the Way, including their own customers.
The Vimalakirti Sutra wants us to embrace our fluidity as a real-life superpower, not an existential danger we should dread. And what looks in the sutra like moral laxity actually expresses a commitment to the most demanding ethical imperative: using your role, whatever it might be, for liberation of all sentient beings. But that project can’t get under way until those like Shariputra, slow to take it in, learn one final lesson.
At a crucial moment in the exchange between Shariputra and the layman, an actual goddess suddenly descends. We might be delighted by a miracle like this, but that’s not how Shariputra reacts. Instead, he asks the goddess why, with the ability to take any form she likes, she has chosen as her avatar a “lowly” woman instead of a man. To this question, the goddess replies by magically transporting him into a woman’s body. When Shariputra whiningly protests, the goddess gets right in his face:
“Shariputra, if you can change out of this female body, then all women can change likewise. Shariputra, who is not a woman, appears in a woman’s body. And the same is true for all women—though they appear in women’s bodies, they are not women. Therefore, the Buddha teaches that all phenomena are neither male nor female.”
Then the goddess withdrew her supernatural powers and Shariputra returned to his original form. The goddess said to Shariputra, “Where now is the form and shape of your female body?” (trans. Burton Watson)
The point of this scene isn’t just that emptiness makes the “male” and “female” roles arbitrary and interchangeable or that gender-based inequality is a destructive illusion. Both points are true, but there’s an even larger one, so large a goddess has to make it.
If we regard the roles we play as who or what we really are, then it’s likely we might also scorn Vaishali’s prostitutes as dirty and defiled, whereas we could see the city’s monks and nuns as virtuous and clean. But surely everybody can appreciate that at least a couple of renunciants somewhere on this planet
haven’t managed yet to free themselves from their illusions, just as there must indeed be prostitutes endowed with the proverbial heart of gold. No public-facing role can be counted on to reveal the inner state of the actor playing the part. Courtesans might be enlightened while lifelong monks can be steeped in sin. But because Shariputra is represented here as a thoroughly conventional thinker, the goddess has to place him in a woman’s shoes, and even in a woman’s feet, to get that message through to him. Causes and conditions decide on our roles in ways we can’t always choose or control: At birth we’re already called “girls” or “boys,” regardless of how we’ll later feel. I was born “white,” and you were born “brown.” You’re called “Canadian,” I’m called “American.” Causes and conditions send one kid to Yale while another one winds up on the street, where she’ll need to do whatever her survival requires.
The roles that we’re assigned hold us down and lock us in—no one can deny it. But Vimalakirti wants the monks to understand that while causes and conditions make us this or that, we’re always on a secret mission too: a barista by day, a floor manager, an Amazon driver, or a librarian, yet also what Shakespeare calls “god’s spies,” doing the work of the universe in our small but indispensable ways. When Vimalakirti stops to describe what the job of “bodhisattva” requires, he seems to be referring to a sage or saint whose achievements lie impossibly far from an ordinary person’s reach:
It means purposely entering the realm of birth and death with no fear; facing all types of honor and disgrace without thought of sadness or joy…. It means arousing correct thoughts in those sunk in earthly desires, [and] seeing those who violate the precepts and rousing thoughts of how to save them…. It means never breaking the rules of proper demeanor, yet being able to accommodate to worldly ways; calling up transcendental powers and wisdom and using them to guide living beings…. [and] using the Great Vehicle teachings to create a community of bodhisattvas.
Yet, in truth, here he’s describing us, since each of us already entered years ago “the realm of birth and death”; all of us are “facing honor and disgrace,” and “meeting those sunk in earthly desires.” We’re already standing on the stage with an audience facing us, and so the only question now is how we’ll play our parts, plodding through our lines like automatons or signaling between the words we’re obliged to say that a better world is always possible. The script, after all, makes up only half the play, while the empty spaces between the lines open up a universe of possibilities. You can shout “Hark!” or “Halt!” a million different ways, and how you intone that single word might change the tenor of the scene or, who knows, the entire play, turning Macbeth into Love’s Labor’s Lost. Best of all, whenever people dare such things, often in spite of overwhelming odds, they’ve already started to transform this suffocating saha world, where your smallest movements have been choreographed, into a Buddha-field without walls, the sutra’s “bodhisattva community.”
Ordinarily, communities depend on the identities their members share—as Buddhists, Baptists, Mexican Americans, pipe fitters, and professors of math. But another kind of community isn’t based on commonalities or differences, since these belong to the world we have now, whereas another world, still on the way, will be large enough for everyone. The place where that new world is coming from we shall never have the words to describe, since it, too, exists between the lines. But as we move from emptiness to form and back, we help reveal, one moment at a time, what Vimalakirti calls the “Pure Land.” Although we might associate that phrase “Pure Land” with a particular Buddhist school, his point, I think, transcends the boundaries of the dharma’s many variations. Fluidity is not just our saving grace but our common ground as well, and only by embracing it can we create a way of life that expands beyond self and other. There and then, Vimalakirti promises, everything that made us so different in the past will enlarge the life we share.