(no subject)

[feotakahari]

I once read a Buddhist gender bender fic. It ended with the protagonist realizing that gender doesn’t matter because our bodies are nothing but prisons for our genderless spiritual essence, and essentially philosophizing their way out of dysphoria. That fic is at LEAST #3 in my toplist of reasons Buddhist philosophy is garbage.

Comments

[entanglingbriars]

There are at least two instances of gender bending in Buddhist scripture. One of them is in the Lotus Sutra, where the dragon's daughter proves that even women can become Buddhas by... achieving enlightenment and transforming into a man and a Buddha (since only men can be Buddhas). The other is this weird story where a woman cuts off her breasts to feed the hungry and the breasts are first miraculously restored and then, to make her reward for her compassion even greater... she is turned into a man.

[feotakahari]

I suppose if you think people reincarnate in tiers, such that really bad people become animals in their next life, it's not out of the question to divide humans into inherent tiers as well.

[entanglingbriars]

IIRC, the Pali canon explicitly says that being born male is a more fortunate birth than being born female. The Mahayana scriptures are more diverse, so idk about them.