Queer Seeking Mind
from a talk originally prepared for and given to SFZC Queer Dharma on September 7, 2024.
I shared a personal reflection about the relationship between my transition and Dharma practice in Tricycle magazine’s online edition about a year ago.
In that article, I mentioned something a friend of mine, Florence Ashley, wrote in one of their early papers on transition care for young people. They wrote that “gender and transition are not acts of unearthing a preconstituted image of the self, but instead a project of “actively creating ourselves” in a process they call “creative transfiguration” which must occur in relationship with others.”
For me, both Dharma practice and transition are relational and creative activities. The more I relax around these identities, the more I notice how much I carry others in how I express them - the more I see the imaginative and creative play available to me. For example, when I hear recordings of informal talks I’ve done at Mountain Rain, I sometimes hear the voice of my teachers coming right out of my mouth, down to little vocal inflections. When I bow, sometimes it’s like my teachers and mentors bow in my body.
I lift my okesa when I do my prostrations during service, the way Brian Clark did so gracefully during my first practice period. I settle my okesa neatly on my lap the way Chikudo Catherine Spaeth did when she was my neighbour on the tan at Tassajara. When I read the Flower Ornament Sutra - the theme of Mountain Rain’s upcoming Practice Period - I think with delight about my friend Andrew who stayed up long past firewatch reading it in the dining hall. He was never late to morning zazen the next day, so I’m not sure when he slept. I do think he finished it by the end of the practice period. It’s my favourite sutra, and in some ways, it’s become for me, the Andrew Sutra.
In the same way, the first time I took estrogen by injection, one of my best friends, took his T with me. He showed me how to draw the plunger back just a touch, to save the small amount of medicine in the drawing needle. He teased me gently for being perhaps overzealous with my alcohol swabs and gave me a big hug as I trembled nervously after my first shot. I think of him every time I take hormones.
When I apply eye makeup - an activity that embodies for me the spirit of play and joy available in gender exploration - I think about an ex-girlfriend who first showed me how to do eyeliner and told me I looked beautiful - even though the tops of my eyelids were as clumpy as a freshly tilled field. Sometimes, even now, it feels like her fingers gently tugging that line across my eyelid. What could be more intimate than that? More playful and creative?
In the comments section of my Tricycle article - unusually sweet and positive for the internet, by the way - someone asked me to say more about Florence’s quote because it gave them pause. They wrote:
“In order to even conceive of oneself as queer, doesn’t there need to be something preconstituted to spark that conception? If I hadn’t felt a nudge from the woman-self inside me, how would I have known to even consider the path I’m on today?”
In formulating an answer for them, their mention of a ‘spark’ immediately brought to mind the Buddhist idea of Bodai Shin - “Way Seeking Mind.”
I thought, ‘hmm, yes, there is a spark isn’t there?’ - for both gender exploration and Bodai Shin.
More recently San Francisco Zen’s Queer Dharma group invited me to offer a short talk. Tova Green, the organizer, suggested that I could give either a ‘Way Seeking Mind’ talk or a ‘Queer Seeking Mind’ talk - I thought, Oh - I’d like to share something about that common spark between these two minds, which are maybe just one mind. I think my experience with each has helped to illuminate the other, so that my Way Seeking Mind is inevitably Queer, and my Queer Seeking Mind is inevitably Buddhist.
Like the Way Seeking Mind, I do not think there is one cause, internal or external, that brings one to question gender and depart the solid earth of one’s assigned identity and out into the uncertain stars of exploration. Some of those causes are innate, intimate, and individual. Others are relational, ancient, shared, and mysterious.
“There is no objective, pure internal self that exists [...] we are relational, and our genders are relational too.” - “Am I Trans Enough?” by Alo Johnston
There are sometimes thought experiments (of varying utility) that are offered to help people who are wondering if they are ‘transgender enough’. There’s a wonderful Book titled “Am I Trans Enough?” by Alo Johnston. Alo is a Latino trans man and licensed marriage and family therapist in LA.
First of all, although the book is 223 pages long and worth reading, the answer to anyone who feels called to that question is “Undoubtedly yes.”
In this book, Alo brings up the “Desert Island Thought Experiment” - would you transition if you found yourself on a deserted island - to go through all those awkward stages or the slow progression, far from the eyes of other people? According to Alo, although some people have shared a desire for that kind of transition, few actually like it. Alo writes,
“early pandemic was an opportunity for lots of people to have all the isolation they did or did not want. We were all stuck inside with puzzles and streaming services and not a lot else. As I talked to many trans people at various stages of transition, most of them said that they felt like there was something huge missing. They felt like they had absolutely no social feedback around their gender. They did not have any information about how people were reading them or relating to them.”
He concludes:
“it is impossible to remove other human beings from the equation. We want to be seen, and known, and understood. We want to connect with other people as ourselves [...] integration of all the parts of yourself is then for yourself and for others, not either/or. More specifically it is so that you can be yourself around others. This does not have to involve any physical or medical transition, but it can.”
Alo connects this idea to the myth of ‘self-reliance’ and ‘independence’ that is so pervasive in Western culture, and that we know in our practice of Zen to be a total fabrication. He writes, “The fantasy of complete self-reliance assumes there is a “true gender” deep down, past the reach of our interactions and relationships” He concludes, that “There is no objective, pure internal self that exists [...] we are relational, and our genders are relational too.”
I feel like I could say that for practice as well. I am relational, and my practice is relational too.
All the important moments of my transition and my practice - especially the awkward, silly parts - have been grounded squarely in my relationships with others.
There’s a passage in Shobogenzo “Shinjin Gakudo” (Body and Mind Study of the Way) that I love:
Dogen writes, “At the very moment when the Way Seeking Mind is aroused, the entire world of phenomena arouses the Way Seekling Mind. Although the Way Seeking Mind seems to create conditions, it actually does not encounter conditions. The Way Seeking Mind and conditions together hold out a single hand—a single hand held out freely, a single hand held out in the midst of all being.Thus, this mind is aroused even in the realms of hell, hungry ghosts, animals, and fighting spirits.”
My Way Seeking Mind, this spark, is neither ancient nor new, neither internal nor external. It is not pre-consituted, nor is it merely arising now.
The Way Seeking Mind is my hand interlinked intimately with the hand of all existence, stretching out through space and time, through grief, loneliness, fear, and despair. One hand together reaching through hell.
How could it be anything but mysterious? How could it be anything but relational?
There’s a short dialogue between a student and the Chinese Tiantai patriarch Zhiyi that summarizes this so plainly for me:
The student asks: Do practitioners bring forth the mind by themselves, or are they caused to bring forth the mind by another?
Zhiyi says: It cannot happen apart from self and other together. Only when feeling and response interact can we speak of bringing forth the mind.
In accepting this hand, this spark, this mind whether it is the request of practice or the necessity for me to explore gender – the path was and is not set neatly or linearly, so much as a vast winding mountain with countless trails, diversions, wonders, and mysteries.
That’s the other side of this, both the Way Seeking Mind and the Queer Seeking Mind, are for me, a step out into a vast and limitless expanse of possibility. When I think about practice or gender, both feel to me like gazing up at the night sky at Tassajara or the brilliant blue of the Salish Sea here at home. There’s no end to it, no boundaries.
To quote author Julien Green, "The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the person who descends to the depth of her heart.” Isn’t that how zazen is?
So even for those of us who find ourselves settling - for a moment or a lifetime - on the solid earth of some understanding, whether in practice or transition, there seems to me to be an awareness that the possibilities of gender, embodiment, and existence are infinite.
Like Dogen, writes, “When Dharma fills your body and mind, you feel that something is missing.”
In that same way, both transition and zen practice have gradually eroded my sense of myself as a concrete, independent and self-reliant individual.
One way I like to think of this in my own practice is to consider the operation of rebirth not just on the familiar scale of my own life, but the birth and death happening every moment in my cells and tissues, the neural connections of my brain, the thoughts, visions and dreams leaping to life in my mind almost as quickly and vibrantly as they disappear. This is not necessarily a non-traditional view. In our school of Buddhism, there are two kinds of life that get talked about. The first is Ichigo-shoji (the idea of a span of life between birth and death). Ichigo-shoji was what was written on the death certificates I handed to grieving families when I was an apprentice to a funeral director. But there’s also setsuna-shoji (moment by moment life and death).
A white Buffalo gazed sympathetically at me through the temple window and clambered up Paige Street and into the night.
Dogen, the founder of our school of zen, put it beautifully when he wrote in Shobogenzo Shukke Kudoku (Virtue of Leaving Home) that “life arises and perishes instantaneously from moment to moment and does not abide at all [...] pity those who are altogether unaware of their own births and deaths!”
Norman Fischer, Mountain Rain’s Founding teacher, wrote about Rebirth in What is Zen:
“For Zen the question of rebirth presents no problem. Zen handles the question in the way it handles everything—by deconstruction, by paradox.
The classical Zen story is of Kuei-shan Ling-yu, who tells his disciples that when he dies he will be reborn as a water buffalo on the side of the hill. The disciples will know it’s him, he says, because the buffalo will have emblazoned on its side the Chinese characters for “Kuei-shan.” He then poses a question for them. “If you say it is a water buffalo, you will be wrong. But if you say it is Kuei-shan, you will also be wrong. What is it?” This story isn’t a joke. Kuei-shan is pointing out that life, death, and rebirth are ineffable realities not subject to our facile black-andwhite conceptual framework.”
An example of the ineffable reality of Setsuna-shoji in my practice came about three months after I started hormone therapy.
Without any kind of planning on my part, my decision to begin medically transitioning came at the perfect time for me to spend a practice period residing at City Centre. I feel so fortunate that these two aspects of my life collided, allowing me to observe through the lens of disciplined practice, the changes taking place in every cell of my body.
For many years, I had sat zazen and watched the desire to end my own life arise, acknowledged it with resigned compassion, and returned to my vow to be present and aware - to live. A month into that practice period, I noticed I hadn’t thought of ending my life in many days. I felt, for the first time, comfortable in my skin. My mind and emotions were beginning to change, as though my entire teenage and adult life a radio had been spewing out bad music - something awful like post-grunge of ska - and suddenly someone had turned it off.
One night, I stood sleepily in the small kitchen after a dharma talk, waiting for my ginger tea to steep. I looked down at my blue rakusu, I’d received from my teachers in 2018. I looked at the irregular stitches, the spot of oatmeal from the breakfast after my first full night sitting during Rohatsu. The faded spots where fingers slick with sunscreen had handled it during a sweaty, joyful summer retreat. I suddenly realized, “Someone else sewed this. Someone with a different name. Someone who woke up some nights in tears and didn’t know why. Someone courageous enough to do the scariest thing ever. I felt a deep gratitude for this person - this person who was me. But wasn’t me. A white Buffalo gazed sympathetically at me through the temple window and clambered up Paige Street and into the night.
I don’t think my experience is unique - I think I was just lucky enough to notice something happening to everyone all the time. For a second, Dogen didn’t have to pity me, as I became aware of one of my countless births and deaths.
But what strikes me, when I remember this experience, is that the spark of Queer Seeking Mind was also a spark of inclusive self-compassion - feeling the blurred margins of my self at that moment, understanding my experience as an individual at that moment to be temporary, transitory, didn’t erase the particularities of that experience - instead, it gave me the spaciousness to feel real gratitude and care for this past self to step back and love present myself from a perspective of equanimity.
For those of us who have had our identities challenged, denigrated, denied. I think there’s a fear of the softening, and enlarging of the self that can happen with practice. at least, that’s something I’ve heard from a few Queer folks in my zen community, and an experience that I have struggled with - This idea that the request of practice is a denial of identities and lived experiences.
Personally, there was a time in my practice when I made use of Zen as a way to avoid exploring gender, and sometimes even as a way to criticize myself for the suffering and joy that arose from that exploration.
To feel dysphoria, to wish for my body and mind and feelings to feel different, to feel euphoria, to delight in feelings and experiences that confirmed my womanhood - these felt to me like a failure of my practice.
I’m so glad I’m over that.
I’ve come to feel that impermanence, the changeability and insubstantiality of self, is not about dissolution of self - but about fully embracing life as a whole and complete person.
Kosho Uchiyama Roshi said it beautifully in Opening the Hand of Thought - zazen is “living out your own life through all the circumstances you may encounter.” and “when we do zazen, we personally experience this clearly; we become nothing other than ourselves! Though we become nothing other than ourselves alone, the whole world is contained within that self.”
I’m at a place now where I wonder if the impermanence, insubstantial, changeable way of things is the gravity that carries me forward on my twin journeys of practice and transition - the medium through which that hand reaches out, together with my own, towards a life of joy, compassion, and identity with all beings.