Who Gets to Have a Soul Without Having a Body 

by Dishita 

If gender is ultimately incidental to the Self, why have we made it so consequential in the world?

A riddle, to begin; What is washed and dressed, disciplined and displayed? What ages despite all the suncream, bleeds, hungers, softens, spoils? Our lives are spent oiling it, and yet we are told, it is not really us. The body.

And now a question: Is your soul a he, she or a they?

“Open it,” says the teacher. “What do you see there?” “Some very small seeds, sir.” “Open one of those small seeds. What do you see there?” “Nothing at all, sir.” “Truly from what you cannot see, the whole fig tree grows. That is Reality, from where you are spun. That is Atman. That art Thou.”

That Art Thou. You are that. Perhaps we’ve been on the wrong pronoun roulette. The rishis will envision a trunk, branches, split fruit sticky on the tongue, leaves, all the shade a tree will one day cast. Nothing visible, and yet they know everything is already there.

After spending the day expelling, drawing it all out in numbing philosophy, it all arrived like a rebirth: pure and subdued and fresh, like finding answers under a tree, much like the Buddha or Newton.

This tree, you see, can never be cut, burnt, wetted, or withered. The Gita says, of the soul that having been, it will never cease to be, and that it is not slain when the body is slain. The body can be burnt, buried, handed back to the soil, and the self does not go with it. Tedious riddles, but if they hold, then gender belongs to the body alone, to the fleshy, perishable, sweating part, and not to whatever lies underneath.

In Advaita Vedanta, the innermost Self is Brahman itself. It is not a small bright coin lodged somewhere behind the ribs but the ground of existence, the floor beneath all floors. The body, meanwhile, sweats, sickens, scars. It acquires a particular nose, a particular timbre of voice, a particular arrangement of bones. It is handed a name, a family, a place at the table. And the very first thing a newborn hears, slick with her mother’s blood, eyes still sealed against the light, is her gender. Congratulations, it’s a girl! I suppose the doctor does not wish to wade into metaphysics at that hour.

“Just as a person changes garments, the soul takes on different bodies lifetime after lifetime”. Gender is a characteristic of the garment, not the wearer. A soul may be in a female body in one life and a male body in another. –Bhagavad Gita 2.22, commentary

One wonders whether the soul has a preference for cotton.

But if the garment changes, what happens to the person beneath it?. If the Self is untouched by the body, then surely, it is untouched by the sex of the body too.

The pattern travels. Paul writes that, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” —Galatians3:28.

Churches that quote him have argued for centuries over who may stand at the altar.

Two plus two= four. If not broadly for all religions, if the soul is equal, and gender is only the garment, why do we perform inequality so devotedly?

In a good deal of popular belief, a female birth is not an accident but the residue of earlier lives, something to be worked off, a rung on the way to a better womb.

“O son of Pritha, those who take shelter in Me, though they be of lower birth— women, vaishyas [merchants] and shudras [workers]—can attain the supreme destination.” –Bhagavad Gita 9.32

Even the Gita verse that welcomes women among those who may reach the highest goal lists them beside people “of sinful birth” ( pāpayonayaḥ, a phrase translators dispute). The soul, we are told, is untouched by the body, and yet the body is treated as proof of what the soul once did to deserve it. The Manusmriti (5.148) (a law code, a Dharmashastra, not an Upanishad) hands her a keeper for every season of her life: a father in childhood, a husband in youth, sons in old age. It is a ban on her ever being a whole person. The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act of 2005 gave daughters equal rights in joint family property by birth. The soul had been equal for millennia. The claim to the land is about twenty years old.

Even devotion is routed through somebody else’s body. In much of North India, the wife fasts for her husband’s long life. She waits, parched and lightheaded, for the moon. She looks at it through a sieve, then at him, and only then does he lift the glass to her lips. Many keep the fast gladly, with real love. And when he dies anyway, the colour leaves her clothes as though the failure were hers to wear.

The body is worthless when a man seeks liberation and the first thing examined when a woman does. And here is the cleverest part: a rule enforced by a policeman needs a policeman. A rule enforced by shame needs only a girl who believes the rule is the shape of her own goodness. She lowers her voice before anyone asks. She flinches at her own blood. She polices her daughter in turn, out of love, with the same tenderness once used on her.

None of this means religion invented the hierarchy. Kinship, property, caste, inheritance and labour have their own long histories, and the traditions themselves are far from agreed. But religion has so often supplied the language that makes them feel ordained: purity, duty, honour, the proper order of things. A rule becomes a ritual, a ritual becomes a tradition, and a tradition, given enough time, begins to introduce itself as nature, the way a handprint pressed into wet clay hardens until it looks like the shape of the pot. What people built starts to look universally ordained, as if one day the world decided the Burj Khalifa had been lowered from heaven.

Think of how much of a life is spent facing the end of it. We fast until our heads swim. We wade into rivers cold enough to ache. We press ash to the forehead, chant svaha and throw jau and til in the havan, wake before dawn, count the beads, feed the poor, perhaps even go vegan, all in the hope of a sweeter, purer place after the body is gone. The promise of what comes after is the most consequential thing many people will ever pursue. And so the institutions that hold that promise hold the person in the meantime. They hand the world a shovel, and mostly the shovel has been used to bury women.

So really, who gets to have a soul without having a body? It is not only asking who is eligible for salvation. It is asking who gets to be understood beyond the circumstances of their birth, and who is made to live an entire life defined by them. The two claims cannot share a room for long. The defender would argue that at the highest level the Self has no gender; at the level where we cook and marry and inherit, there are roles. Two truths, two floors of one house. But look at who was assigned the lower floor, and who kept the key to the stairs. Shankara’s own commentary on the Brahma Sutras closes the door of Vedic study to Shudras on the grounds of birth, and the same bolt was drawn across women.

So here's the answer: It is he who may be pure witness because someone else has agreed to be the flesh.

When I was a little girl, I was preoccupied with morbid things like death and the images of Francesca Woodman, her blurred figures dirtying its outlines and fusing with its surroundings. Body and the other becoming one, a slow return, everything surrendering to the

same earth. I saw it like the slow bleaching of posters left out in the sun, missing posters of people becoming white.

“Death is referred to as Mahaprasthana (great journey). A soul is an immortal body of light that continues to reincarnate until its Karmas are settled.” “We cannot perceive the Soul, because it has got mingled up with nature, with the mind, with the body”

Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as 'I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world ’.

So you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. Schrödinger, a physicist and not a rishi, said you are as firmly established as she is, indeed a thousand times firmer. As surely she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering and not someday but now, today, thousands upon thousands of times, the way a field takes the seed and returns the stalk. There is only ever the one now, the same now, and the present is the only thing that has no end.

Feel the cold of it come through your shirt, the grit pressed into your palms, the whole slow weight of the planet holding you exactly as you are. She does not ask whether you arrived with breasts or with a beard. She takes the sweeper and the widow, the nurse and the engineer, and turns them over, gently, into the root from which the next fig tree will grow.