Gender fluid clothing

I have an older male friend in the US who has recently begun to dress as a woman. He says that when he first discovered that he felt more comfortable in feminine clothing, “‘non binary’ wasn’t a known choice, not even to the experts. I had to wait until the language and the culture brought to my attention that there is actually a non-binary spectrum of gender identities.” Personal expression when it comes to “non-conforming expressions of sexuality” is tied up with language and culture. 

Times are changing.

Garment: Bloni ; Model: Rohan

I just had a conversation with an Indian friend who is a clothing designer. In the latest Paris fashion week, the Indian brand he works for introduced a whole collection of garments that are “gender neutral” or “non-binary.” What the public hears is that they can be worn comfortably by both men and women; there’s a refusal of any obligation for the women models to wear skirts and men to wear pants, but it goes deeper--the whole cut, the “look” attempts to be gender neutral. It was very interesting, and there were some really great outfits. It was extremely well received. After Paris they showed at the Lakme fashion week, won an award, and were sponsored by NEXA. I don’t think that we’re going to see them on the rack at Nordstrom’s yet, but the head designer has been interviewed on India TV. In English. I don’t think that the exclusively Hindi-speaking audience would be very receptive, and that’s where I’m going.

In Indian culture sexual roles and behavior seem very defined. The exception proves the rule. The class or caste known as Hijra is now legally recognized as an official third sex. They are men who live and dress as women. They include gay men, straight cross-dressers, and trans-sexuals. They tend to live in distinct communities and are restricted in terms of where and how they interact with strict gender based culture. They are called on for some ritual observances in the Temples, even weddings--I don’t know much about that, but Hijra are still discriminated against. Now that there is a legal definition of a third sex, they are afforded some protection against physical violence and exploitation. That has not always been so, and in the general society, any expression of gender fluidity can still be dangerous.

Last night we had another friend from the design college over for dinner. On the scale of gender fluidity, he tends towards what is culturally defined as feminine, but he identifies as a man. With no fanfare, he is just who he is, and he is making a career for himself in an industry which is perhaps more tolerant of sexual diversity than most in Indian society. I really like him. He makes no apology. His clothing and makeup choices fit him perfectly. He comes from a single parent household, and his mother is very accepting. 

But there are problems with his personal safety. The design college (and my home) are in a conservative rural community. He has to drive himself all the time because cab drivers have demanded sex, shopkeepers, guys he runs into on the street, same unwanted demands for sex. This is an obvious problem. Here, if he reported a problem to the police, I’m sure they would side with the assailant. 

Our friend left early to go back to pack. He just finished his exams. It’s his last semester in college, and he is moving. In Delhi there are hip areas where he doesn’t have to hide or be afraid. It's not the Castro of the early 70's, but there are some of that vibe.

Despite all the problems with the assault on same sex relationships now in the US, there are certain advantages to living in a more liberal society with legal protections. 

Blue Cliff Record Case 22

 This is the case of the portion of the commentary that I used for my piece 

A Weed Wacking Roshi goes to Mass

The Case (Sato)

Xuefeng, instructing the assembly, said, “There's a turtle-nosed snake on the South Mountain.[1]

All of you should look at it carefully!”[2]

Changqing said, “Today in the Zen hall there are many people who have lost their body and life.”[3]

A monk told this to Xuansha,[4]

who said, “Only my Elder Brother Changqing could say something like that.[5]

However, I wouldn't talk like that.”[6]

The monk asked, “What then would you say, Master”?[7]

Xuansha replied, “Why does it have to be 'the South Mountain'?”[8]

Yunmen threw his staff in front of Xuefeng and acted frightened.[9]

[1] "Turtle-nosed": i.e., poisonous. The “South Mountain” [Nanzan] was the place where Xuefeng resided.

[2] Or: "You should have a good look at it" (Sekida); "you people must watch out for it" (Cleary); "All of you had better look out!" (Wick)

[3] Or: “Today in the Zen hall there is a great person who has lost his body and life” (Sato note); "Today, in this temple, there is obviously one man who has lost his life" (Sekida).

[6] Or: "even though he's right, I do not concur" (Cleary); "as for me, I am different" (Sekida).

[9] Or: "made a gesture of fright" (Cleary); "gave the appearance of being afraid" (Wick).

The portions of the text of Yuanwu’s Commentary (Cleary) that I used for my own commentary:

[Hsueh] Feng went on. “Later when I got to Te Shan I asked. ‘Do I have a part in the affair of the most ancient sect, or not?’ Shan struck me a blow of his staff and said,’What are you saying?’At that time it was like the bottom of the bucket dropping out for me.” Thereupon Yen T’ou shouted and said, “Haven’t you heard it said that what comes in through the gate is not the family jewels?” Feng said, “Then what should I do?” T’ou said, “In the future, if you want to propagate the great teaching, let each point flow out from your own breast, to come out and cover heaven and earth for me.” 

(He was greatly enlightened etc.Feng goes back and lives at Elephant Bone Mountain, and writes a poem that comes down to us. At this point I will return to the commentary)

Usually Hsueh Feng would go up into the hall and teach the assembly by saying, “In every respect cover heaven and earth.” He talked no more of mystery and marvel, not did he speak of mind and nature. He appeared strikingly alone, like a great fiery mass. . . . “

(Skipping ahead through several bouts of drinking tea and getting whacked, we move onto what Hsueh Tou’s disciple has to say about the matter going back to their root teacher Yun Men.)

You must be a master snake handler.

“How many lose their bodies and their lives?” This praises Ch’ang Ch’ing’s saying, “In the hall today there certainly are people who lose their bodies and lives.” To get here, first you must be thoroughly versed in snake handling.

Hsueh Tou is descended from Yun Men, so he brushes the others away at once and just keeps one, Yun Men: Hsueh Tou says “Shao Yang knows, again he searches the weeds.” Since Yun Men knew the meaning of Hsueh Feng’s saying, “On South Mountain there’s a turtle-nosed snake,” therefore “Again he searches through the weeds.”

After Hsueh Tou has taken his verse this far, he still has more marvels. He says, “South, north, east, west, no place to search.” You tell me where the snake is. “Suddenly he trusts his staff.” 

From the beginning the snake has been right here. But you must not then go to the staff for sustenance. Yun Men took his staff and threw it down in front of Hsueh Feng, making a gesture of fright. Thus Yun Men used his staff as the turtle-nosed snake. Once, though, he said, “The staff changed into a dragon and has swallowed the universe; where are the mountains, rivers and the great earth to be found?” Just this one staff--sometimes it’s a dragon, sometimes it’s a snake. 

(Then some detailed snake handling instructions.)

Since ancient times, how many people have picked up the snake and played with it?

A Weed Wacking Roshi goes to Mass

 Blue Cliff Record 22.1

My friend James Ford recently wrote a heartfelt piece about attending a service in Boston's Kings Chapel. I’ve been looking for a response. I had several questions about his almost lyrical reflection on the juxtaposition of hearing mass using a truncated version of the English Catholic Reformation's arcane liturgy in a handsomely endowed Unitarian church.

I emailed him to say as long as it has some singing and dancing, I suppose I could hum along, but I confess, I was initially put off by a koan master’s flirtation with 15th century ritual. The practice of Zen, at least in my experience, has tended to strip away some of the mystery surrounding these observances.

But further examination exposed a new level of entanglement and possibility.

Seekers and Quakers, Ranters, Diggers and Collegiants

James is a well trained, thoroughly modern koan master. He is also an ordained Unitarian Minister, so he has set aside some Church orthodoxy and its insistence on creedal formulations of the mysterious. All well and good. He, I and the Boston Unitarians are on the same page.

I also know from our conversations that he is trying to look at the tumultuous spiritual landscape of right now from a Zen perspective. His interests include traditional Christian denominations, evangelical churches, fringe spiritual movements, and the relatively small but growing number of western Buddhist practitioners from various Asian schools. After some digging, I discovered that King Henry’s abrogating the authority of Rome unleashed a tidal wave of non-conforming religious expression that was similar and even more stormy than our own, but most of the ramifications lay hidden beneath the doctrinal garb of our inherited religions.

I stumbled upon a YouTube series of lectures by Alec Ryrie, Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London. He’s a committed Christian, and he’s also brilliant. Of course I had studied the history of what we call the early Reformation, at least enough to satisfy my Jesuit examiners, but my training was focused through the narrow lens of the Counter Reformation which my order spearheaded.

I had carefully examined Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists and, I suppose by extension I can include Jansenists to get ecumenical, but there were also many many smaller splinter sects; historians call them the radical reformation. Who were they? They included the first radical Quakers, but also Seekers, Ranters, Diggers, and Collegiants. They questioned the very foundations of the Christian enterprise.

The events of these few decades were momentous. So much transpired that continues to shape our spiritual lives; the language of prayer; the separation of religious belief from philosophical discourse (I didn’t know for example that Baruch Spinoza had been a member of the Dutch version of the Quakers); the far reaching economic impact of King Henry VIII’s confiscation of Church assets led to secularization and the end of the total domination of the church-state.

Alec Ryrie says that battles are rarely determined by the pacifists. Who can dispute that? However I am loath to give up my cherished position as a Skeptic.

John Earle. (c. 1601 – 17 November 1665) whom I regard as an English Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) and his contemporary, also felt that one has to take sides. But he is far less rarefied than Blaise. Earle presents the famous philosophical wager as a conundrum with a nihilist resolution: “Whilst he fears to believe a miss, he believes nothing.”

Can I believe anything and do I really have to?

An Age of Atrocity

If I were an actual actor in the real drama of the early Reformation, I might have been forced to take a stance about my beliefs. I remember a conversation I had with my friend Avery Dulles (not sure if this was before or after he was elevated to the rank of Cardinal) but he was serving on some high level ecumenical commission. He told me that he'd worked long hours on some presentation papers. Then came the meeting. It began with a prayer petitioning the God of the doctrinal points they knew they could agree upon. Then Avery stated and explained the Roman Catholic position. He was thanked and applauded. Then the other side’s theologians presented a similar paper outlining their position. They sat down and were politely applauded. Then together they worked out the closing statement: we can agree on X for Y reason and we continue to disagree on the following points for Z reason. We were happy to have this exchange, and pray for our continued growth in the Spirit.

During the Reformation, one of those parties might have been burned at the stake. In those bloody times, the untimely deaths of the heretics or martyrs, depending on your side, could be made into myths, to warn succeeding generations, to train them in some self sacrificial virtue or remind them that some truths could never be compromised. The Inquisitions made decisions about who needed to be celebrated, who needed to be blamed and what lessons the survivors needed to draw.

Thousands were tortured and executed. The authorities of the newly reformed English Church did it as well as the Catholics. In the Spanish Inquisition it was a  matter of life and death for the Jews, conversos, and dissenters who were murdered. 

A lot has changed in the course of a few centuries, but I don’t think that I can erase that part of history that is an affront to the sensibilities that are the product of my own time and religious culture. The Jesuit Saint Robert Bellarmine may have saved Galileo from the stake but I am deeply troubled by his role in the execution of Giordano Bruno and Friar Fulgenzio Manfredi. The temptation for revisionists is to write out the parts of your history that don’t conform with your myth.

Koan Practice for Tudor England

We are already living in the 21st century. Before I introduce some koan practice, I would like to introduce perhaps a consideration, or a caution. Following Foucault, “. . . you cannot find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people.” (Michel Foucault, quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow,“ On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 229. In this context the other people were the ancient Greeks.)

By chance, I started working with this elliptical koan that I unfolded from Yuanwu’s Commentary for Case 22 of the Blue Cliff Record.* I tried to apply Foucault's question about understanding bridging history. I began using a Buddhist technique to cut away the weeds. It dates from medieval China about contemporaneous with William the Conqueror. Can the record of an ancient Zen master help me decipher the experience of an arcane ritual dating 5 centuries after 1066, during the reign of King Edward VI?

Theology and science fiction love time travel. Let’s see if religious studies linked up with Zen practice can be equally anachronistic. Paraphrasing Yuanwu, can a 21st century Westerner have an authentic Zen experience? At least this might be fun.

A koan: The Family Jewels

When [Hsueh] Feng got to Te Shan he asked. “Do I have a part in the affair of the most ancient sect, or not?” Shan struck me a blow of his staff and said, “What are you saying?” At that time it was like the bottom of the bucket dropping out for me.”

(Allow me to decode some of the language: in 9th Century China "enlightenment" in Zen practice--according to the ancient sect is possible. Feng reports that he experienced it, but apparently that doesn’t settle the matter. Can I might include a modern Zen Roshi using the ancient prayer of the Church of England?)

Yen T’ou shouted and said, “Haven’t you heard it said that what comes in through the gate is not the family jewels?” Feng said, “Then what should I do?” T’ou said, “In the future, if you want to propagate the great teaching, let each point flow out from your own breast, to come out and cover heaven and earth for me.”

(The part of propagating the great teaching is not coded. We get the part about flowing from your own heart. Skipping ahead through several bouts of drinking tea and getting whacked, we move onto what Hsueh Tou’s disciple has to say about tracing the matter back to their root teacher Yun Men and mastering the art of snake handling. What is he talking about?)

“How many lose their bodies and their lives?” This praises Ch’ang Ch’ing’s saying, “In the hall today there certainly are people who lose their bodies and lives.” To get here, first you must be thoroughly versed in snake handling. 

Hsueh Tou is descended from Yun Men, so he brushes the others away at once and just keeps one, Yun Men: Hsueh Tou says “Shao Yang knows, again he searches the weeds.” Since Yun Men knew the meaning of Hsueh Feng’s saying, “On South Mountain there’s a turtle-nosed snake,” therefore “Again he searches through the weeds.”

After Hsueh Tou has taken his verse this far, he still has more marvels. He says, “South, north, east, west, no place to search.” You tell me where the snake is. “Suddenly he trusts his staff.” From the beginning the snake has been right here. But you must not then go to the staff for sustenance.

Yun Men took his staff and threw it down in front of Hsueh Feng, making a gesture of fright.

Thus Yun Men used his staff as the turtle-nosed snake. Once, though, he said, “The staff changed into a dragon and has swallowed the universe; where are the mountains, rivers and the great earth to be found?” Just this one staff--sometimes it’s a dragon, sometimes it’s a snake.

(Then after some detailed snake handling instructions, Yuanwu tries to encourage us by asking one of those pesky Zen Master questions.) Since ancient times, how many people have picked up the snake and played with it?

I personally prefer opera

James Ford attended a truncated Book of Common Prayer service in a revered Unitarian Church. I hope that at least part of the motivation was aesthetic. And that’s perfect. He’s a Unitarian. I am what’s politely called a lapsed Catholic and an ex-Jesuit to boot. I find that after years of meditation, my love for the ritual of the mass has waned, but I won't rule out the power of the experience. Actually I prefer opera, but then I am also gay so it might be genetic.

But after doing some introspection, I am left seeing the similarity with my own situation as well as wondering about the huge waves that lie just beneath any attempt to deal with the numinous ocean that supports our lives. I am a skeptic as much as I am a Buddhist. There is a war inside about what to believe, what is worthy of belief and what beliefs are pointers and which ones might simply be a smoke screen. I would like to remain neutral, but also realize that I don't want to set myself up, in the words of John Earle, as “a hapless peacemaker trying to intervene in a duel getting shot by both sides.”

The contribution of the Zen practice here might be to clear the weeds from the battlefield and perhaps reveal the turtle nosed snake. I can carry a staff, at least in my imagination. “The staff changed into a dragon and has swallowed the universe; where are the mountains, rivers and the great earth to be found?”

For my verse, I’ll echo James with the two stanzas from from Leonard Cohen’s “Treaty” that he uses to close his meditation:

I've seen you change the water into wine
I've seen you change it back to water, too
I sit at your table every night
I try but I just don't get high with you

I heard the snake was baffled by his sin
He shed his scales to find the snake within
But born again is born without a skin
The poison enters into everything


* Here is Case 22 and the portion of the commentary that I used.

Split up California--Six Senators

I hate getting such poor representation. Not in the quality of the people that California sends to DC but in the diluted impact that my participation has in our highly fractured democracy. By my calculation one third of me is represented by a US Senator, Is it my head, my belly or my kneecaps?

The population of California is 39.24 million. The population of the other 49 states is 292.66 (total US population is 331.9). California is about 11.5 % of the entire US population. We have 2 senators. The other 292.66 has 48. 

Not even considering the very small states that have two senators (let’s leave that out of the calculation--we can haggle later) using gross averages 48 senators represent about 6 million people each. In California, each senator represents almost 20 million. 

There are 435 voting members of the House of Representatives. California has 53 members, almost 12%. There are 42 Democrats and 11 Republicans. 

Ok so we don’t have proportional representation because the Founding Fathers had something else in mind, but with anything closer to proportional representation, we should have at least 6 senators. 

Given the highly partisan politics in the country and the obscene amount of gerrymandering, let’s get four more senators. Make California into 3 states. Two would be easy and has been often talked about. Given the huge urban vs rural/agricultural population split, there is a high chance of at least a few of the new senators from the Three-State-Split-Up California being Republicans. 

In 1787 three-fifths of each state's slave population was counted toward that state's total population for the purpose of apportioning the House of Representatives. Today every Californian is counted as about 33% worthy of senatorial representation.

It's time to revisit the 2018 Cal 3 Proposal. Get us more senators.