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What would the Buddha think of a modern-day monk who loves makeup?
Well, no one knows for sure. But Kodo Nishimura, a Japanese Buddhist monk who also works as a makeup artist and is an LGBTQ activist, believes that a love of beauty and devotion to Buddhism are not mutually exclusive. ”I think in Buddhism the core message is to feel happiness, feel balanced within our hearts and to share the happiness,” he tells the South China Morning Post. Feeling beautiful influences that happiness, making people “more generous, more attentive to helping others,” according to Nishimura.
Nishimura grew up in a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Tokyo. As a child, he would secretly play with his mother’s makeup. “I would open my mum’s Chanel eyeshadow palette and I would try to put it on my face. But I looked crazy, I looked like a clown,” he tells the paper.
Still, there were other ways for him to learn about beauty, perhaps more in line with traditional approaches to aesthetic appreciation. Nishimura began studying ikebana, Japanese flower arrangement, when he was eight, and proved a gifted student. “That’s where I built my foundation and visual eye,” he told Accent magazine last year, in an issue where he posed as the cover model. “You find beauty in the flow and the balance.”
In his late teens, Nishimura moved to New York to study at Parsons School of Design. When his interest in beauty and makeup really blossomed, he worried that his parents might reject him. But they did not. His father told him he could do whatever he wanted. Soon he was interning, then working, as a makeup artist.
But Nishimura found he could not abandon the traditions that surrounded him in youth. At 24, he returned to Japan to train as Buddhist monk. He thought at first that he would have to choose between his heart’s two desires—beauty and spirituality—only to discover, again, that he could be himself.
During his spiritual training, Nishimura asked a senior monk whether his other gig—doing makeup for pop stars and beauty pageants—or his sexual orientation were somehow problematic from the perspective of Buddhism. The monk told Nishimura that having another job in no way impeded his spiritual training, and that how he dressed, or who he loved, didn’t affect his ability to be a monk. “That was like a liberation for me,” Nishimura says. “That’s when I felt: ‘now I can be myself and be a monk as well.’”
KodoNishimura.com
Now Nishimura pursues both callings, sharing his happiness on two continents. He splits his time between Japan, where he participates in traditional ceremonies at the Buddhist temple his father runs—a job he may someday take on full-time himself—and the US.
In 2017, the monk worked for the Miss USA competition, where he helped to prepare contestants and judges alike for appearances. On his blog, Nishimura described the experience: “It is extremely exciting since there are performances by artists like Pit Bull and Cirque de Soleil!” And he posted photos of himself, blush brush in hand—looking very happy indeed—with a number of pageant contestants.
The monk, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the Buddhist emphasis on non-attachment, has a very fluid worldview. He doesn’t identify as any one thing, but as all the things. For example, he writes on his blog that he considers himself “gender-gifted” and is unrestricted by traditional constraints surrounding femininity or masculinity. Nishimura explains, “My body is physically male, yet my mind is neither male or female. I would like to consider my gender as a gift because I can be both male and female in many ways. I feel that I have qualities that can be commonly associated with each gender.”
While Nishimura is an LGBTQ advocate, he doesn’t identify as gay or transgendered. “I came to a conclusion that I cannot be categorized myself…I am simply Kodo.” And he points out that others need not restrict themselves. “I am not the only gender-gifted person. Free yourself, I would like people to question and be even more confident to be unique,” Nishimura writes.
The Buddhist monk is not the only person to wrestle with the role of makeup in the life of the spiritually minded. A 2105 issue of the quarterly e-zine American Buddhist Women also considers the question of beauty’s role in Buddhism. Lulu Cook, who studies Buddhism and leads meditation groups, shares thoughts on lipstick and enlightenment.
“I now see beauty as enhanced by living a life that is in alignment with my ethics, including the contemplation practices that occasionally grant me insight into ultimate reality,” Cook writes. “Sometimes I even experience moments of being utterly freed from concern over how I look and how others perceive me…even so, I also understand that wearing a terrific shade of lipstick is not going to bar me from awakening!”
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