There is a particular scene in the Vimilakirti Sutta which is quite interesting, which I'd like to share. In this sutta, Sariptura encounters a goddess in the layperson Vimilakirti's room where he is staying. The goddess showers these flowers over both disciples and bodhisattvas. While the flowers tend to stay off the latter, they stick to the former. Sariputra wants to know why, and the goddess answers that the flowers cling to the Buddha's disciples (presumably arhats?) precisely because they are afraid of the phenomena of the flowers as real. On the other hand, the bodhisattvas have gotten past the notion that flowers are either 'real' or 'not real', so they are no longer afraid of the flowers. Thus, the flowers don't cling to them. I believe that these 'flowers' that the sutta talks about might be analogous to thoughts.
Why are the disciples described in the Sutta so afraid of flowers? I believe that it's because the early teachings of the Buddha must have emphasized divorcing oneself from the sensory world in order to avoid its apparent temptations. "Be islands unto yourselves" is what the Buddha exhorts the early monastics to do, and part of this also includes not associating with laypeople or being attracted to the appearances of others, or even of the natural world. In many spiritual traditions and even philosophies around the world, we often hear this kind of refrain to avoid the indulgences of the senses and seek 'higher' realms which are often either very refined in form, or have no forms at all.
What the goddess is exhorting Sariputra to do is not to cling to this preliminary teaching to avoid the sensory things, but to perceive that even sensory objects are empty in nature. Bodhisattavas, so Vimilakirti mentions to Manjushri in this text, are to view sentient beings as one would view a mirage or some other mirror-like appearances: that is, freely and spontaneously interacting but not taking things or beings as having these separate, enduring realities. Once a bodhisattva has reached that stage of realization, there is no longer a separation of 'form' and 'formless', and thus there is no need to even fear forms anymore, let alone 'discipline' oneself to avoid them altogether. It would be like meditating in front of a mirror and trying to prevent the mirror from reflecting anything. There is simply no need and not even any possibility to do this.
This is where the freakier part of the sutta comes into play. When Sariputra asks the goddess if she will ever transform into a male, the goddess asks why it's necessary to do so. She compares male and female to forms in a dream, or 'indeterminate forms', and goes on to suggest that there is no need to switch something in a dream since it is already indeterminate. Why change a dream into another dream? Then she evokes the Buddha's notion that there is no ultimate male or female dharmas. She then turns Sariputra briefly into a female form to demonstrate this principle: if Sariputra appears as female, does this make him in essence female? Sariputra, in briefly being transformed into a female form, is lead to wonder what gender really is, and whether he has been fooled after all that gender is something that is fixed into a person's nature or identity. He gets a very direct teaching, in that moment, on how erroneous the discriminating mind can be in separating natures into different (and fairly impermanent) categories.
This sutta seems to presage a lot of postmodern theories about gender and performativity, including the ideas of Judith Butler. Butler strongly maintains that gender is more 'performed' than inherited, and thus doesn't have a substantive essence beyond a series of actions and behaviors that are inscribed in a person's habitus. It can be very liberating indeed to recognize in oneself both supposedly 'male' and 'female' elements, as well as to realize that a lot of what we consider as 'gender' are projections of these qualities which everyone can perform or enact in themselves. Even more so, being able to transform into another gender (as Sariputra did) or to imagine such a transformation, is an interesting exercise in shaking off entrenched notions of what constitutes one's 'core essence'. I believe that it's also a way of mitigating the confusion and frustration that come from thinking that one is born as one thing but is then strongly attracted toward something that is 'other' than this self-proclaimed identity.
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