A contemporary reader meeting the Chan (禪 / Zen) term 男女相 (*nán nǚ xiāng*, literally "the mark/form of male and female") for the first time is liable to do one of two things: to mistake it for a teaching about sex, desire, or feminism, or to mistake it for a kind of gender-denial, a metaphysical claim that "men and women don't really exist." Neither is right. The term is something stranger and more interesting. It is a refusal — a refusal to let a person be pinned down by any form-based identifier, and especially by the one we modern people have made the loudest identifier of all. To understand it we have to sit with the actual words the 景德傳燈錄 (*Jǐngdé Chuándēng Lù*, "Records of the Transmission of the Lamp," the foundational Chan lineage record compiled around the early Song) recorded, because the term was never given an abstract definition. It only ever appears *in use* — in a charged moment of dialogue or verse — and that fact is itself the first clue to what it is doing.
What this concept is actually saying
The 燈錄 preserves 男女相 in two distinct textual forms, and we have to keep them distinct, because each one is doing something slightly different work.
Form 1: the negative formula 非男女相 ("not the form of male and female")
This appears twice, in two short exchanges, and the wording is identical in both — which signals that it is the canonical Chan formula for the gesture. Let us look at each, because the *context* changes what is being refused.
Exchange A: Mo-shan Liaoran (末山尼了然, "Nun Liaoran of Mo-shan"). A monk named Guanxi Xian (灌溪閑) comes to the mountain and asks, "What is the Mo-shan master?" (如何是末山主) — meaning, in plain Chan language, "Who are you, really? What is the essential person here?" Liaoran is a woman, an abbess of a nunnery. She answers: 非男女相 — "Not the form of male and female." Guanxi presses: "Then why don't you change out of it?" (何不變去) — a deeply suggestive question. Is he asking her to "change" her gender, to reveal her "true" form? Is he implying that her outward female form must be hiding something more essential, perhaps a more authoritative, perhaps a more masculine, perhaps a non-human form? Her answer is one of the most pointed in the 燈錄: 不是神,不是鬼,變箇什麼 — "Not a god, not a ghost — what would there be to change into?" The exchange moves from "female form" to "transformation" to "non-human categories" in a single breath, refusing all three.
Exchange B: the Second Huanglong of Meizhou (眉州黃龍第二世). A monk asks, "What about the person inside the sealed chamber?" (密室中人何如). The sealed chamber is "that which cannot be chopped open" (斫不開) — the inner sanctum, the innermost self that no analytical axe can split apart. The master's answer is the same one-word refusal: 非男女相.
Both masters use the identical formula. Both are asked, in effect, *who is the true person, behind the surface form?* Both refuse to answer in terms of gender. And crucially, neither says "there is no gender" or "gender is an illusion." The negation is not ontological — it is a refusal to let the form do the work of identification. The person you are asking about cannot be reached through that channel.
Form 2: the paired verse 男子身 / 女子身 ("male body / female body")
This comes from a gatha (偈頌, a Chan verse) associated with the 華嚴六相義 (Huayan six-character-meaning, the doctrinal framework of the 華嚴經 / *Avataṃsaka Sūtra*, which describes how the one-and-the-many interpenetrate). The verse does not contain the exact phrase 男女相; instead it sets male and female bodies in parallel, and then pivots:
男子身中入定時,女子身中不留意。 不留意,絕名字,萬象明明無理事。 "When a male body enters samādhi (入定, deep meditative absorption), a female body does not attend to it (不留意). Not attending — names are cut off (絕名字) — the ten thousand dharmas (萬象, all phenomena) are clearly manifest, neither phenomenon nor principle."
The logic here is a little different from the dialogues. It is not so much refusing an answer as describing a *state*: when a male body settles into samādhi, a female body does not attend to / dwell on / fixate on it (留意 is a strong word: to apply the mind to, to note and keep on noting). This "not dwelling" is then explicitly linked to "cutting off names" — severing the layer of conceptual designations that overlay bare experience. Once the names are cut, "the ten thousand dharmas are clearly manifest, neither phenomenon nor principle" (萬象明明無理事) — the whole field of reality is just there, unmarked, undivided into "this is male" / "that is female" / "this is a thing" / "that is a principle."
So the two textual forms are doing complementary work:
- 非男女相 (in the dialogues) is a *refusal* in the moment of interrogation: don't try to identify the true person through gender-form. - 男子身 / 女子身 (in the verse) is a *description* of a contemplative state: when you stop dwelling on the mark of gender, names themselves fall away, and reality shows itself as it is.
Neither is an abstract theory. Both are *operative* — one interrupts a question, the other describes an experience.
What the concept is refusing to do (and what it is not saying)
To place 男女相 correctly in the landscape of Buddhist thought, it helps to see what it is *not* saying. It is not:
- A denial that bodies exist. Bodies obviously exist; the 燈錄 is not Gnostic. - A denial that gender exists. Liaoran is a woman. The verse explicitly says 男子身 and 女子身. - A statement that men and women are metaphysically identical. The verse pairs them as two different bodies, deliberately. - A modern "gender is socially constructed" claim, though it is in the neighborhood of that insight. - Primarily about sexuality. Sexuality in Chan texts has its own vocabulary (婬欲, 情欲, etc.); this is not it.
What it *is* saying is closer to a structural point: the gender-mark is the wrong instrument for identifying the essential person. It belongs to the same family of Chan negations as 不可以色見我 (you cannot see the true one through form) — a phrase that has its most famous classical expression in the 金剛經 (*Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra*, the Diamond Sūtra): 「凡所有相,皆是虛妄。若見諸相非相,則見如來。」("All conditioned forms are illusory; if you see all forms as non-form, you see the Tathāgata.") The 男女相 negation is a sharp, specific instance of that universal Chan gesture: pick any form you like — male, female, god, ghost, mountain, master — and it will not deliver the essential person. The gesture cuts in a particular direction here, because gender is one of the forms we have most confidently used to sort, rank, authorize, and dismiss each other.
There is a long, older conversation in Buddhism on this question, and 男女相 is a Chan-era distillation of it. The 維摩詰所說經 (*Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra*, the Vimalakīrti Sūtra) famously stages the encounter in which a goddess (天女) scatters flowers that stick to the elder Śāriputra but not to her; when he protests, she dismantles his concept of a fixed "woman's body" and "man's body" by, in some recensions, transforming him into her form and herself into his. The Chan masters who used 非男女相 were drawing on this deep well. Where the Vimalakīrti Sūtra performs the dismantling through a long doctrinal exchange, the 燈錄 distills it to two characters of refusal.
There is also a smaller, more delicate layer. Liaoran's exchange adds a second negation — not 神, not 鬼. The point of including these is to show that 非男女相 is not just "I am a woman but my essence is not female." It is "I am not locatable in *any* categorical form, not even the ones we use to dodge gender — I am not a deity in disguise, I am not a hungry ghost playing at being a woman, I am not a male spirit in a female body. The question 'what would you change into' is itself built on a wrong assumption." This is what makes Liaoran's answer one of the great Chan one-liners: she does not just refuse the gender reading, she refuses the whole project of trying to get behind the form to a "real" form that would explain it.
A walk-through in life
Let us take these classical moments and walk them through scenes a contemporary reader will recognize. The point is not to "modernize" the teaching, but to show that the *structure* of what is being refused is exactly the structure we are still trying to do, in slightly different costumes.
Walk 1: The job interview and the email signature
You apply for a role. The hiring manager looks at your name, your pronouns (maybe in your email signature, maybe inferred), and within the first thirty seconds a small set of expectations has already assembled in their mind: how you will lead, how you will defer, what tone of voice you will use, what salary range they will offer, whether you "fit" the team. You have not yet opened your mouth and you have already been *identified by form*. If you are read as female, certain words become jokes. If you are read as male, certain requests are heard as directives. The form is doing a huge amount of silent work.
The Chan formula 非男女相, applied here, is not a denial that the form is being read. The form is being read. The negation is rather: *the essential person in front of you is not reachable through this form, and any decision you make on the basis of this form alone will be a decision about the form, not the person.* It is the same move as Liaoran's: don't try to identify the master through 男女相. The master is right there, but you will miss her if you keep sorting on that axis.
The error of the moment is the assumption that we can sort-and-then-summarize. We can. We do it constantly. The Chan point is that we will be wrong about the essential person every time we do.
Walk 2: The dating app
You swipe through profiles. Each profile is a curated stack of photos and a few lines. Your thumb is making judgments in roughly 0.3 seconds, and the heaviest-weighted variable in the judgment is the visible gender presentation of the person in the photo. The form is the entire data set. You have not met anyone yet, and you have already run 非男女相 in reverse: you have assumed the person *is* the form, until further evidence forces you to update.
Now flip the camera. You are also a profile. You have spent forty minutes on three photos. You have chosen the angle of your jaw, the cut of your shirt, the lighting on your skin, precisely because you know the form is being read. You are, in effect, curating the form so that the other person's thumb will not delete you. This is the deeper and more uncomfortable place to apply 非男女相 — not just "don't reduce *them* to their form," but "I am also not the form I am offering as bait."
The verse-form — 男子身中入定時,女子身中不留意 — fits this moment almost too neatly. One body (yours) is producing a form; the other body (theirs) is "entering samādhi" on it, dwelling on it, attending to it. Then the verse says: not attending, names are cut. Which is to say: at some point in a real relationship, you both stop attending to the form and start being with the person. That moment, when the form becomes transparent and the actual human shows through, is the moment the verse is pointing at.
Walk 3: Commuting, the body in the train carriage
On a packed train you become, for thirty minutes, a body in a row of bodies. People read you — height, weight, age range, gender, dress, ethnicity, mood. You read them. Neither of you is, in that moment, anything other than the form. This is fine, mostly. It is what the body is *for*, in a crowded public space.
But the Chan negation has a small sting even here. The body on the train is not *only* the body on the train. Each of those forms is also a person with a name, a job, a heartbreak, a meditation practice, a parent in a hospital bed. The form is one layer. It is the only layer you can see. 非男女相 is not asking you to ignore it — you have to read the form to navigate the carriage without stepping on toes — but it is asking you to know, in the back of your mind, that the form is the surface, and that the essential person is not on that surface. Liaoran's point, brought onto the train: when the form is the only thing you can read, do not assume it is the only thing that is there.
Walk 4: The partner at home
You have been with someone for years. The form has long since become background. You no longer notice the gender-form in the way you once did. And yet — and this is where the verse's 不留意 cuts — you have probably built a whole shadow taxonomy of expectations that the form quietly authorizes. He "should" be like this; she "should" do that. These are not rules anyone wrote down. They are inherited 男女相 expectations that the household is running on, almost invisibly.
The verse says: 不留意, 絕名字. "Not attending — names are cut." When you stop attending to the gender-script in the household, when you stop applying it automatically, the *names* attached to it — "the man is the protector," "the woman is the one who notices feelings" — start to loosen. And then: 萬象明明無理事. The whole pattern of your shared life, which had been running on the script, becomes visible to you in a new way. Neither good nor bad, just visible. The verse is not prescribing any new arrangement. It is describing what happens when the old identifying names stop doing their work in the background.
Walk 5: Parenting a child
A child is born, and within minutes the world is already sorting: pink or blue, soft or rough, doll or truck, "what a sweet girl" or "what a strong boy." The child has not yet had a single thought, and a complete gender-world has already been laid down around them. The parents' task, if they are awake, is to notice this — to see how the form is being assigned and then being treated as the child's identity, by relatives, by strangers, by advertising, by the child themselves within a few years.
非男女相 here is not "raise the child without gender." It is the older, harder practice: notice when you, the parent, are *attending* to the gender-form as the source of what the child is, and notice when the child is starting to do the same. The negation is an ongoing act of loosening, not a single decision. And the verse's 絕名字 is exactly the long project of giving the child fewer inherited names, and letting their own actual nature have more room to be its own.
Walk 6: The new question — are you human?
Liaoran's "not god, not ghost" was not a throwaway. Today's near-equivalent is becoming a live question: are you a human, or a bot, or an AI, or an avatar? Sorting by form has been the bedrock of online trust, and that bedrock is now visibly cracking. Non男女相, adapted to this moment, would say: do not identify the essential person (or non-person) on the other side of the screen by the surface form alone — neither the profile pic, nor the prose voice, nor the speed of reply, nor the grammatical smoothness that may or may not indicate a large language model. The form has become unreliable as an identifier in a new domain. The Chan discipline of "do not trust the form to deliver the essential" is exactly the right muscle for this moment, even though the masters of the 燈錄 would not have predicted the specific form that is now failing us.
Why contemporary people need this concept
Several converging pressures make 非男女相 a live teaching rather than a museum piece.
1. We have made gender-form the loudest sorting signal in public life. The form is doing enormous work — in hiring, in dating, in advertising, in legislation, in how strangers on the street size you up. The Chan refusal to let the form identify the essential person is not a quaint historical gesture. It is a direct, sharp piece of advice for a culture drowning in form-based sorting.
2. The form is now also unreliable. The AI moment is the obvious one. But there are subtler versions: curated social-media profiles that no longer reliably point to a real person; gender presentations that no longer reliably point to a single biological sex; institutional affiliations that no longer reliably point to a coherent self. The world is full of forms that no longer carry the identifying work we used to rely on them for. The Chan gesture — refuse to let the form do the identifying — is the right gesture for this unreliability.
3. We are exhausted by being sorted. On the other side of the same coin: being read by the form all day is tiring. The 男女相 teaching is not just about not sorting others. It is about the inner experience of the person being sorted, of being constantly translated into a category. The path it opens up — 絕名字, the cutting off of names — is, experientially, a relief. You do not have to be the form you are being taken to be. The names can be cut. The 万象 (ten thousand dharmas) are still there, clearly manifest, even when no name is on them.
4. It targets the most seductive form of all. The 男女相 teaching is *not* a generic "all forms are illusory" — though it sits inside that larger teaching. It is a specific, pointed swing at the form we are most attached to, and most reluctant to see as a form. Most of us, if asked "is the gender-form a real, deep, constitutive feature of a person?" will say yes, more readily than we would say the same about, say, the form of a car or a meal. 男女相 insists: this too is a form. It is not the deepest layer. Do not let it do the work of identification.
Common misreadings, and how to clear them
Misreading 1: "男女相 is about sex or sexual desire." No. Sexual desire in Chinese Buddhist texts is 婬欲, 欲愛, 情欲 — a whole different vocabulary, with its own doctrinal treatment. 男女相 is about the *mark or form* of being male or female, not about erotic or sexual activity. Conflating them produces a reading of the term as a kind of ascetic anti-sex statement, which is not at all what is happening in the 燈錄.
Misreading 2: "男女相 is a feminist or gender-egalitarian statement." It is not making a sociopolitical claim. Liaoran is not arguing that women should be treated as equals to men (though she is also not arguing that they shouldn't). She is refusing to be *identified* through the gender-form at all, in a much more radical move. Reading the term as proto-feminism flattens it into a position on a contemporary spectrum and loses its actual content.
Misreading 3: "男女相 says men and women don't really exist or aren't really different." The text itself places 男子身 and 女子身 in parallel and treats them as real bodies in real samādhi. The negation is not ontological (they do not exist) but identifical (the form does not deliver the essential person). This distinction matters; otherwise the teaching collapses into a kind of weird metaphysical denial of bodily reality, which is not what Chan is doing.
Misreading 4: "男女相 means we should ignore gender entirely and treat everyone as if it weren't there." This is the symmetric overcorrection. The form is real. It will be read. Pretending it is not there is its own form of delusion. The Chan move is to see the form clearly, not to be fooled by it into thinking it is the person, and not to be fooled by yourself into thinking you have abolished it by looking away.
Misreading 5: "This is just Chan being weirdly obscure." It is obscure *to a question that is itself malformed*. The question "what is the essential person, can you name them by their gender?" is malformed — it asks a form to do work that forms cannot do. 非男女相 is the cleanest possible answer to a malformed question, which is why it has the kind of edge that makes it feel like a slap. A slap is exactly the right response to a malformed question, because it wakes the asker up to the fact that the question is the problem.
Misreading 6: "It only applies to gender." It does, in this specific Chan use. But the *structure* of the move — refuse to let any single form deliver the essential person — is everywhere in Chan, and in the deeper Buddhist tradition it sits inside. Once you see 非男女相, you can see 非神鬼相, 非名相, 非我相, and the rest of the family. The gender-form is the specific case; the principle is general.
A final image, to leave with. Liaoran was asked who she was, and she said: not the form of male or female. Pressed further — well then, what is the real form underneath? — she said: not a god, not a ghost; there is no "underneath." The teaching is not that there is a deep self hidden behind the form. It is that the search for the deep self behind the form is itself the wrong search, and the form you have been looking through is the wrong instrument. When the form falls away as an identifier — not as a thing that exists, but as a thing that can *tell you who someone is* — then the person is there, all along, not because they were hidden, but because they were never the kind of thing the form could have revealed.
This is what 非男女相 is doing. It is a small phrase, three characters of refusal, sitting in a much larger stream of Buddhist insight about form and emptiness. And it is, perhaps unexpectedly, a more useful thing to carry into a contemporary argument about gender than almost any of the louder things one could say — because it does not take a side in the culture war, and it does not claim to have solved the metaphysics. It only insists, gently and with great finality, that the gender-form cannot do the work we keep asking it to do.