STEPHANIE BALKWILL 67
And yet, despite making such an impassioned declaration regarding
the genderlessness of her own forthcoming buddha-land, Marvelous
Wisdom does indeed transform her female form and take on a male
body. Why does she do it? The answer to this problem lies not in
her body but in her audience. In the buddha-land of Shakyamuni,
her female body is a problem. Shakyamuni’s buddha-land—the land
in which we all live and practice—is a defiled land, a land full of
defects. Such defects affect an individual’s ability to practice the Bud-
dha’s teaching. In this particular case, such defects work to uphold
traditional notions of gender and sexualized bodies that prevent the
advanced male disciples in Shakyamuni’s assembly from recognizing
that the young girl, Marvelous Wisdom, is a highly advanced being on
the path to buddhahood. She changes her sex, then, not as a condition
of her impending buddhahood but as a means of teaching those in the
assembly about the ultimately empty nature of physical forms. She
changes her sex because, as a highly attained being, she can, but also
because the act stands as a proof of the veracity of her claim to bud-
dhahood to an assembly that cannot escape their own limited percep-
tion, which sees a female body as lesser than a male one.
The Sutra of the Girl Marvelous Wisdom thus provides context
for how we should read the much more famous story of the daughter
of the dragon king from the Lotus Sutra. Importantly, the context it
provides is in complete agreement with the famous patriarch Zhiyi’s
commentary: that all beings can become buddhas—no matter what
sort of body they are currently manifesting—and that the act of sexual
transformation in Buddhist texts is a pedagogical tool, an expedient
and skillful means. Read as such, what these textual voices from
sixth-century China are arguing is quite progressive: the female body
is not a problem; only the limited perspective of the audience causes it
to be one. Some 1,500 years later, this remains an insightful analysis
of how sexed bodies exist in patriarchal social and religious contexts.
So, what does the story of the daughter of the dragon king really
mean? That depends on whether you are Shariputra or Marvelous
Wisdom.