I had the privilege of meeting him in Tōkyō, where he was making a
brief stay on his way to India;—and we took a long walk together, and
talked of Eastern religions, about which he knew incomparably more than
I. Whatever I could tell him concerning local beliefs, he would comment
upon in the most startling manner,—citing weird correspondences in some
living cult of India, Burmah, or Ceylon. Then, all of a sudden, he
turned the conversation into a totally unexpected direction.
“I have been thinking,” he said, “about the constancy of the relative
proportion of the sexes, and wondering whether Buddhist doctrine
furnishes an explanation. For it seems to me that, under ordinary
conditions of karma, human rebirth would necessarily proceed by a
regular alternation.”
“Do you mean,” I asked, “that a man would be reborn as a woman, and a
woman as a man?”
“Yes,” he replied, “because desire is creative, and the desire of
either sex is towards the other.”
“And how many men,” I said, “would want to be reborn as women?”
“Probably very few,” he answered. “But the doctrine that desire is
creative does not imply that the individual longing creates its own
satisfaction,—quite the contrary. The true teaching is that the result
of every selfish wish is in the nature of a penalty, and that what the
wish creates must prove—to higher knowledge at least—the folly of
wishing.”
“There you are right,” I said; “but I do not yet understand your
theory.”
“Well,” he continued, “if the physical conditions of human rebirth are
all determined by the karma of the will relating to physical
conditions, then sex would be determined by the will in relation to
sex. Now the will of either sex is towards the other. Above all things
else, excepting life, man desires woman, and woman man. Each
individual, moreover, independently of any personal relation, feels
perpetually, you say, the influence of some inborn feminine or
masculine ideal, which you call ‘a ghostly reflex of countless
attachments in countless past lives.’ And the insatiable desire
represented by this ideal would of itself suffice to create the
masculine or the feminine body of the next existence.”
“But most women,” I observed, “would like to be reborn as men; and the
accomplishment of that wish would scarcely be in the nature of a
penalty.”
“Why not?” he returned. “The happiness or unhappiness of the new
existence would not be decided by sex alone: it would of necessity
depend upon many conditions in combination.”
“Your theory is interesting,” I said;—“but I do not know how far it
could be made to accord with accepted doctrine…. And what of the person
able, through knowledge and practice of the higher law, to remain
superior to all weaknesses of sex?”
“Such a one,” he replied, “would be reborn neither as man nor as
woman,—providing there were no pre-existent karma powerful enough to
check or to weaken the results of the self-conquest.”
“Reborn in some one of the heavens?” I queried,—“by the
Apparitional Birth?”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “Such a one might be reborn in a world of
desire,—like this,—but neither as man only, nor as woman only.”
“Reborn, then, in what form?” I asked.
“In that of a perfect being,” he responded. “A man or a woman is
scarcely more than half-a-being,—because in our present imperfect state
either sex can be evolved only at the cost of the other. In the mental
and the physical composition of every man, there is undeveloped woman;
and in the composition of every woman there is undeveloped man. But a
being complete would be both perfect man and perfect woman, possessing
the highest faculties of both sexes, with the weaknesses of neither.
Some humanity higher than our own,—in other worlds,—might be thus
evolved.”
“But you know,” I observed, “that there are Buddhist texts,—in the
_Saddharma Pundarîka_, for example, and in the _Vinayas_,—which
forbid….”
“Those texts,” he interrupted, “refer to imperfect beings—less than man
and less than woman: they could not refer to the condition that I have
been supposing…. But, remember, I am not preaching a doctrine;—I am
only hazarding a theory.”
“May I put your theory some day into print?” I asked.
“Why, yes,” he made answer,—“if you believe it worth thinking about.”
And long afterwards I wrote it down thus, as fairly as I was able, from
memory.