64 BUDDHADHARMA: THE PRACTITIONER'S QUARTERLY
The story of Marvelous Wisdom brings us into contact with
spectacular miracles undertaken by a bewildering little girl, and
in so doing functions to turn the reader into Shariputra—amazed,
doubting, waiting for what might happen next. We are suspended
between realities, never sure what to make of things and newly sus-
picious of our own understanding of the Buddha’s teachings. The
story of Marvelous Wisdom—as well as the many others in this
genre from sixth-century China—plays on the question of reality. In
such texts, reality oscillates between the buddha-land inhabited by
Shakyamuni and his assembly, where the text is being preached, and
the buddha-lands of other buddhas imaged through the existences,
backstories, and future predictions of the young and infant girls who
appear in Shakyamuni’s assembly, argue about sex and gender, and
then shed their female forms. This interplay of realities is an impor-
tant aspect of these texts, for it positions Shakyamuni’s assembly as
a gate to the unknown, where space and time are relative, where
miracles can occur in any given instant, and where dharmas—in the
sense of both law and phenomena—work differently. Similarly, the
interchanging space/time realities that pivot around Shakyamuni’s
assembly serve to educate us on the possibilities of Buddhist practice
in this universe and to, thereby, narratively justify the existence of
the young and baby girls in the texts who are ready for buddhahood
despite being unlikely candidates for such an attainment. But the
question remains: if you are a highly attained being from another
buddha-land, why choose to stop by Shakyamuni’s land in the guise
of a little girl?
In the story of Marvelous Wisdom and the others like it, the
young female protagonists claim they have stopped by Shakya-
muni’s world to learn the practices of the bodhisattva, practices that
will help them to convert and save beings. And yet, Shakyamuni’s
own enumeration of these practices is decidedly unhelpful. Plati-
tudinal and vague, Shakyamuni’s teachings pale in comparison to
the teachings on bodies, bodhi, and buddhahood that the little girls