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contemporary Buddhist practice, such chauvinism against the female
body remains common, so much so that Karma Lekshe Tsomo—
a professor of Buddhism at the University of San Diego, a Buddhist
nun, and an activist for women within the tradition—laments that
women are systematically maligned within the tradition and, as a
result, “The desire to be reborn a man is pervasive among women”
(Buddhist Women Across Cultures).
And yet, despite a history of interpretation that reads the story of
the daughter of the dragon king as an abjuration of the female body,
in the most influential of all commentaries to the Lotus Sutra, Zhiyi
(538–597), the sixth-century Chinese monk and founding patriarch
of the Tiantai tradition of East Asian Mahayana Buddhism, says
without hesitation that “Mara, Brahma, Indra, and women, all of
them do not have to cast off their bodies and receive bodies. Each
of them can attain buddhahood in their manifest bodies.” And of
the sexual transformation of the daughter of the dragon king he
says:
When her karmic ties to this world were weakening, only then did
the dragon girl teach and convert [beings] with this power of mighty
expediency: she achieved one body, all bodies, and the universal
samadhi of the physical body [of the Buddha].So, Zhiyi is clear: the act of sexual transformation is not a requisite,
but instead a skillful means of converting beings—beings who, like
Shariputra, remain unenlightened as to the fundamental emptiness
of physical forms and who, as a result, cling to gendered notions
of buddhahood. Zhiyi’s clear interpretation of the Lotus Sutra is
surprising given not only that the story itself is ambiguous but also
that the tradition had long read it as a rejection of the female form,
a pronouncement of its unsuitability for the highest of religious
attainments.