Hi all!
I do apologise for bumping this old thread... and coming from a brand new user, I suppose that it's a bad way to start! But please bear with me for a moment...
When browsing Susan's website for information, I've noticed that "Buddhism" didn't deserve a section of its own. So I came to this thread, trying to understand why not. However, what apparently seems to be the case here is that the discussion is more of a religious/philosophical note, and not how Buddhist techniques can be put into practice to deal with the urges, anxiety, and frustration of crossdressing and/or ->-bleeped-<-.
My own teachers tell me that there is little point in discussing/arguing philosophy; Buddhist methods are to be put into
practice — that's truly all that matters. Of course, it's important to find a qualified teacher who is able to figure out what method works best for a particular student.
Cynthia Lee raises a good point, which is often baffling to followers of a specific religion/philosophy/self-help method. With all of those you're supposed to have a one-size-fits-all method to achieve whatever vision is proclaimed to be the "truth", and you either have faith and follow that method, or you give up trying.
Buddhism looks at things from a more realistic angle. We all are different human beings — we just share some fundamental aspects (i.e. we have a body, we have a mind, we look for happiness, we try to avoid unhappiness), but each of us reacts in different ways to different things. That's just how things are. So it's a bit naive to claim that "My method is best, so it should work for you". It might work, if that person has similar ideas, similar feelings, similar ways of looking at life. But with 7 billion humans on this planet, it's more than obvious that there will be far more differences than similarities!
So Siddhartha is claimed to have explained a lot of different methods, for completely different people — from beggars to kings. These methods are often (externally) opposite to each other! Again, this makes it all be much more confusing. To make matters even worse, what Siddhartha taught was not a "revelation written in stone" — i.e. "only what Siddhartha says is valid, all else is invented". Even Siddhartha himself proclaimed, quite clearly, "Don't take my advice just because the people say I'm Buddha" (i.e. enlightened). However, the methods he taught allowed others to follow them and get some results. Once they reached those, they often adapted some methods for their own students: after all, those students would be different from Siddhartha's own students, and, as such, might not be able to use the same methods. This goes on to this very day; attaining Siddhartha's vision is not "a thing of the past", hidden by mysticism, fantasy and folklore in an age where written communication was shaky at best. Instead, it happens every day; people attain that vision on this very century, and although we cannot read people's minds, we can see some physical manifestations. And these days we have cameras and medical instruments to record those manifestations, so we know it's possible
Let me take an example of differing methods. Buddhism started to spread in nothern India, which has a mild-to-hot climate. Monks thus just required a simple cloth to wear. When Buddhism crossed the Himalaya into a much harsher climate, it was obvious that wearing just a linen cloth would mean that most serious practitioners would freeze to death. So the rules were changed to allow monks to wear something warmer. Purists might claim that this is perverting the "rules", but it's not: methods applied to a specific society and country might require a few changes. Another example: India is mostly a vegetarian country, so naturally monks would be encouraged to be vegetarian (meat being reserved as a "luxury dish" for most of the population). The same happened throughout China, Korea, or Japan, for pretty much the same reason. In Thailand, however, meat was more widespread — so monks begging for food are required to eat whatever they're given. By contrast, the highlands of Tibet are too bare for vegetables to be grown efficiently, and almost all the population has to survive on a meat diet. While these days, thanks to more efficient agriculture, and a contamination of thoughts from other Buddhist groups, many Tibetans moved to a vegetarian diet, not all did so. The Dalai Lama, due to health issues, cannot be a pure vegetarian — he attempted that twice, but became terribly ill — so he still occasionally consumes some meat. One would certainly not question the Dalai Lama's seriousness in terms of Buddhist practice
While these are very external issues, they illustrate my point well: the methods are not the same for everyone.
If this still seems to be confusing, or somehow tends to make people think that those methods were all made up, consider our Western example: Western medicine is also not a one-size-fits-all science, specially in areas like psychology and psychiatry. We recognize that there are no universal methods that will work for everyone. It takes a doctor to do a correct diagnosis and prescribe the appropriate treatment, and they are certainly aware that not everybody will respond to the same treatments. In psychology, for example, there are completely different schools of thought, often opposing each other, and some give better results than others, depending on the patient being treated. But, again, it takes a qualified psychologist to know which method is best.
Buddhism is sometimes described as a "science of the mind" (even if it's simultaneously more than that and less than that; there is a purpose in studying how the mind works — namely, to use it to our advantage) because it encourages critical thinking and precise methods to attain certain results, which are reproductible. There are no dogmas in Buddhism (even saying "there are no dogmas" is subject to questioning
). But for certain kinds of people there are methods which will work better than others, and a qualified teacher will know which one to apply for a particular student. It's also not unusual for students to learn more than one method or technique — because we also change over time, we get moody, we have "good and bad days", and sometimes it's useful to have different methods to suit our mood. And, of course, if we're in the position to help someone, it's good to know a few different methods to point them into the right direction.
Saying that, it's important to explain that all these methods and techniques can be traced back to Siddhartha himself, even if sometimes it seems hard to "believe" that. However, Siddhartha left us a relatively simple method to validate if a certain method or technique is "Buddhism" or not — it's known as the
Four Seals of Buddhadharma. They're not easy to understand, but whatever method/technique includes those Four Seals is "Buddhism", even if they don't use that name. Anyway, "Buddhism", as a name, is a Western invention, when "Buddhism" was classified mostly as a religion or a philosophy derived from Siddhartha, also known as the Buddha. Siddhartha had no intention to create a religion; the name that Buddhist practitioners call themselves is simply "Dharma practitioners", or, in some cases, "people getting familiar with their own minds". So you can see that the focus is really on the practice itself and not on what Western thought has made of all the writings.
And because of that focus on practice, I thought that it might be more helpful to explain a bit how Buddhist methods in getting familiar with one's mind can help us crossdressers to deal with our urges, frustrations, anxiety, and so forth. Unlike Hinduism, or techniques mostly influenced by Hinduist philosophy, it's
not about "suppressing" anything (a suppressed emotion or thought, as any Western psychologist will say, will just re-surface again). Unlike "positive thinking", popularized first in the West by many New Age followers, and which also trickled down to psychology, Buddhist methods are also
not about fabricating anything — we already create our own masks, we don't need a fancy method to pretend we're something we're not. Because these two extremes are so popular (not only in the West!) — i.e. either suppressing things, or fabricating something in our minds to change our mindset somehow — Buddhism is hard to categorize, since it rejects both methods, pointing out the shortcomings of either approach, and explaining why they don't work.
I'm not a qualified teacher — in fact, I'm not a teacher at all. Nevertheless, even though
there are a few transgender Buddhist groups, they are sadly not here discussing these issues with you — so I wrote an article giving some highlights on how Buddhist methods can be employed by crossdressers and other transgendered persons to deal with some of their issues. Anyone familiar with Buddhist methods of getting familiarized with one's mind should recognize them, but I tried to avoid technical or classical terms. This is hard to do without "watering down" the method, or somehow corrupting it beyond recognition. Taking that into account, my only motivation in writing it was to give potential interested people a taste of what it is like and encourage them to find a qualified teacher who can explain the method to anyone interested in learning it.
This is the link to it:
http://feminina.info/2012/12/07/crossdressing-techniques-to-deal-with-urges-anxiety-and-disappointment/Read it with a critical mind, but keep it also open enough to at least experiment the techniques. You don't need to "convert" to anything to apply those methods to your own life
And if something isn't clear enough, it's all my fault, not the method's fault — you just need to find a qualified teacher to explain it clearly and unambiguously to you.
May the article be helpful to some of you.
Cheers,
- Sandra
