62 BUDDHADHARMA: THE PRACTITIONER'S QUARTERLY
And yet, if we look to other sutra material that was circulating
in Zhiyi’s time, there is ample support for his thesis that a woman
can become a buddha in her very body, as well as ample support
for his corollary that the act of sexual transformation in Mahayana
texts is a method of teaching the Buddha’s law and not a condition
of buddhahood. There exists a significant corpus of early medieval
sutras preserved in Chinese that put forth this view. One of the most
illuminating is The Sutra of the Girl Marvelous Wisdom.
Marvelous Wisdom is the eight-year-old daughter of an elder
from Rajagrha, a city famous for housing one of the earliest Indian
Buddhist monasteries. Marvelous Wisdom is a pleasure to behold;
with beauty and comportment, she is unlike other eight-year-old
children when she comes to pay her respects to the Buddha and ask
him about how to practice the path of the bodhisattva and gain
unsurpassed, correct enlightenment. The Buddha responds to her
request by enumerating the four actions of the attainments of the
bodhisattva by which they “receive a true body.” The true body of
the Buddha, here, can be assumed to be the body endowed with the
thirty-two major and eighty minor marks of the great man—a body
that is not only male but also superhuman, majestic, and enjoys
strong associations with royalty.
Upon hearing this, Marvelous Wisdom champions herself by
insisting that she has indeed done all of these things and that in
her future life she will become a buddha like Shakyamuni. Because
of her female body, she is not believed by those in the assembly. In
defense of her attainments, she makes two impassioned pronounce-
ments: first, if she has completed all of these practices then the earth
shall shake, and it will rain flowers (which it does); and second, her
readiness for buddhahood is due to the fact that, in the world she
comes from, there are no evil destinies and nothing called “woman.”
If this is true, she says, then all in the assembly shall turn gold, and
she will change her sex. (They all then turn gold, and she changes
her sex.) As a result, the Buddha, very pleased, confirms her proph-
ecy of buddhahood, saying that “this young girl gave rise to the
heart of bodhi some thirty kalpas ago” and that she would soon give
rise to unsurpassed, correct enlightenment and become a buddha
in her own right, “The Tathagata Treasurehouse of Extraordinary
Merit.” (OPPO
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Lotus Sutra frontispiece; Japan, circa 1667