MomoのKokoro

"...Gender, like bodies, comes and goes, conditioned by many things. At the same time, as with other physical characteristics like skin color, it is a kind of destiny.

Form or emptiness? Both."

- p16

"...in the space of a moment, she turned her body into that of a man with the thirty-two marks and eighty properties of a buddha. We think that such a thing must be very hard to do, but it isn't. There are beings like this everywhere we turn, their marks hidden under the skin, under clothes or hair, behind language and custom. Most eyes can't see through these things - appearance, difference, otherness. That's where the magic lies. Nothing special in assuming the form of a man with the thirty-two marks and eighty properties of a buddha - but wonderously supernatural to see one. What magic is greater than the one that opens our eyes? What spell is more powerful than the one that casts off the prejudice and hope, the fears and desires that blind us? The Naga princess could see a buddha in Sariputra; perhaps, in time, he could learn to see a buddha in her.

In this beautiful form, she carried out all the practices of a bodhisattva, proceeded to the Pure Land, sat on the jeweled lotus, and attained correct, perfect, complete enlightenment. She lectured on the Wonderful Law to all beings in all directions - to women and men, devils and gods, animals and dragons, to boys and girls, to bodhisattvas, buddhas, bullies, and blind louts equally. She did this in the space of an instant, in the silence between words. And in that space, that instant, Sariputra understood the profound subtlety of the Law of the Universal Nature of Buddhahood appearing in all beings, in all forms."

- p48

Posted in: poetry on Sunday, June 14, 2009 at