Quote from Buddhism Beyond Gender

Buddhism Beyond Gender: Liberation from Attachment to Identity

by Rita M. Gross, with an introduction by Judith Simmer-Brown 

Shambhala Publications, Boulder, Colorado, 2018          172 pages

The great Japanese teacher Dogen Zenji wrote that to study the Buddha way is to study the self, and that to study the self is to forget the self. These inspiring words accurately describe what is the problem with clinging to gender identity or any other form of identity and how to overcome that problem. Buddhism is a spiritual discipline for studying the self so that it can be forgotten. It might sound as if forgetting the self along with any problematic aspects of one's identity is the solution, but how can we forget the self? Only by studying it. Thus, to understand how clinging to gender identity subverts enlightenment, it will be necessary to study gender both as it has been discussed in Buddhist discourse and practice and as worldly conventions have constructed it.

I was being introduced at a Vipassana center to give a talk I had titled How Clinging to Gender Identity Subverts Enlightenment. This is a talk I give frequently. The voice and facial expression of the center's highly regarded guiding teacher communicated confusion and dismay as he told the audience that I would be talking about how gender subverts enlightenment. I had to interrupt him: No, it's how clinging to gender identity subverts enlightenment. The operative word is clinging not gender.

On another occasion, I gave the same talk at the Rigpa Center in Amsterdam. After I finished the talk, one of the men in the audience approached me. He said he had found my talk challenging, but it had not challenged him at all as a man (a male human); the challenge had been to his Buddhist understanding and realization. He realized that his understanding of the core Buddhist teachings on egolessness, the lack of a permanent, enduring, unitary identity, was still weak. It was weak because he still identified quite strongly with contingent, ephemeral dimensions of his experience as if they were substantial and real. He also realized that it was irrelevant that those ephemeral elements of his identity happened to be connected with his masculinity. The same would apply to women and their clinging to conventional notions of what it means to be female. It also applies to any other identity, sexual, national, cultural, or religious, which people take to be of overriding importance, clinging to it as if it mattered ultimately or as if it were a reality, rather than an appearance. (pp. 1-2)

-- quote submitted by Jennifer Knight

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